Counter-Drone Defenses

Watch the Video

---

Read the Transcript

---

Col. Alfred J. Rosales:

I can’t help myself. I always have to blow on the mic. I apologize. Thank you for everybody being here. There is some more open spaces for those on the walls in the middle here, if you’d like to sit. I won’t force you to, but there’s a lot of seats in the middle here, as we get started. We have 40 minutes and we’re about to kick off. I’m going to call it an opportunity to think through what it looks like, what you heard from both Secretary Meink, General Wilsbach this morning, General Chilton as he moderated the event with the Golden Dome operations. We’re going to build upon that network, talking about counter-drone operations, whether it be overseas, your head space is probably going in that space, but that’s not where we’re going. We’re going to talk about counter-drone operations in the United States and what that looks like.

General Wilsbach said something very interesting this morning. He said the sanctuary was lost and the Air Force Association’s Mitchell Institute, they built upon that idea and they made a podcast by Ms. Heather Penney. She’s the director of research and studies for the Mitchell Institute with both Air Combat Command as well as General Cantwell on this subject. If you would like to see further information on that, the goal is to build upon that thing. It was August 29th of this last month was when that was published.

So what does that mean? We are not going to start with the basics. We’re not going to talk about what microwave energy weapons look like. We’re not going to talk about directed energy weapons and exactly what they do at the technical level details. We’re going to talk about the goal is when you walk out of this room. That you are talking amongst yourself about the policies that need to be discussed, the rigorous policy discussion that needs to be discussed, not just in the Department of War or in the Air Force, but across our local county populations, our state populations, and our federal government.

I’m Slick Rosales. I am an active duty Air Force wing commander at the moment. If you looked at my bio, you could see, “Oh, he is working in the space of global hawk operations, class five high altitude intelligence surveillance reconnaissance. He’s working in the command and control architecture with the E11 battlefield airborne communication node across the entire fleet for the global enterprise. He is working comm infrastructure that we’re working with a high frequency global communication systems around the globe and how we support not only the United States Air Force, but strategic command, in terms of layering multiple communications resiliency below the satellite architecture.” And you’re thinking, “Why did they pick him to be up here for this counter-drone?”

And what I’ll tell you is that back in November of this last year, Air Combat Command’s General Spain asked every wing, all 35 wings in the Air Combat Command, “We need one of your wings to take on this counter-drone effort, to accelerate what we’re already doing to maintain tactical air superiority, and we’re going to take it and I need you to do it. But it comes with no money and it comes with no people.”

No, no, no. The laughing, I laughed too. That was my… But to hear those other 34 wing commanders raise their hand to say on how it could be done at their wing and how they can help us win was so motivating. And in that rigorous process and the criteria was looked at, Grand Forks was just one of the many that could have done this mission. But when we were selected, we were selected for some very important reasons, something that is not the personality of Slick Rosales, the wing commander. It had to do with the counter-drone ecosystem that currently lives at Grand Forks and in North Dakota and the architecture and the relationships we have built that has been 20 years in the making. 20 years ago, the state of North Dakota poured in multiple millions of dollars to figure out what it looks like to do beyond visual line of sight operations for class one, two, and three drones that was really just very nascent stage just a decade ago.

And 10 years ago, they figured out that they can do this. They could do this at Grand Forks Air Force Base. Right across from our runway on the active duty side is a place called Grand Sky. It is an innovation research park for all counter and drone operations. It is one of the largest in the United States. They rent the space on our base. It’s legitimately federal property that they lease the research park. There is 25 different organizations working tirelessly the last decade, figuring out how we work alongside each other, how we work and integrate. And so that is one of the reasons why I’m here, but not the only reason.

I’m here because I also lead this counter-drone effort for Air Combat Command that involves TFI. For those Air National Guard and reservists in the audience, and I know there’s many, the Air National Guard, the 184th Wing down in Kansas, Colonel Joe Deeds and his team have built a relationship with us in such a way that we are sharing and showcasing and accelerating what General Wilsbach talked about, about scaling what it looks like to maintain tactical air superiority in the granular technical level, but that is not why it’s working. The last seven months, we have gone from strapping on vendor equipment on our base, strapping on vendor equipment to the base and asking our Airmen. An Airman of various Air Force specialty codes, just like at the 184th, come up, figure out how this equipment works with the vendors and then let’s stress test and fight it with what we see. We’ll build tactics and techniques from that.

And in that process, that brings me to you. That brings me to you to trigger the policy stuff that has been at the forefront of our minds at the tactical level to encourage us to think through how do we want directed energy weapons to be used inside the United States in FAA controlled airspace, not in the restricted ranges of our Air Force Materiel Command bases as an example, or the national training center bases of restricted airspace. How can we do that in FAA airspace?

I’ll tell you, as of two weeks ago, we did it and we did it with the brilliance of a variety of folks at leadership echelons above the wing level and in the FAA and in the FCC. So that’s what brings us here today with this panel. We have industry leaders that I’m going to introduce you to that are in the space and we’re going to talk back and forth and we’re going to go through the rigor of what it takes to go through this adventure together, translating technology into trust to allow us to win in the future, both in the Department of War and the Air Force as well as in our industry. So as we partner with that.

As we do this, I’m going to say the normal disclaimer since I’m active duty, these amazing industry leaders, the United States Air Force does not, with me up here, somehow endorse any of their companies or any of the products they say and I do not speak on behalf of the United States Air Force or Air Combat Command. I speak on behalf as a reconnaissance wing commander.

Okay, so with that starting here, we have Dr. Ben Van Roo. He is a industry leader working through the ideas of artificial intelligence and how we can get our edge devices, fancy words for the equipment we need at the tactical level to be able to think, help us provide decision-making space without being connected to the cloud the entire time. That is where his expertise is.

We have here, we have Mr. Adam Mohammed. He works in the space of autonomous robotics, figuring out how we can layer both base defense architecture with our air domain experts. What does it look like for base defense operations, air defense operations? He is in that space of autonomous robotics. Sir, thank you for being on this panel.

We have Mr. Colton Wood right next to him, working in the spaces of multisensor integration. How do we use artificial intelligence to get the picture of the common operating pictures we so desperately desire, which was discussed earlier today with General Chilton and the Golden Dome panel. General Guetlein talked about it at length. The integration piece is what’s going to help us win. Mr. Colton Wood comes from that expertise.

And at the very end we have Mr. Mike Hiatt. He is working in the space of microwave energy weapons. In the essence of kill chain dynamics, it would be the very end, that piece. He comes with some skill sets and how we’re going to integrate and work in that space.

Gentlemen, I appreciate you all being here and with that we’ll get started. We’re going to jump right in the middle, as if we all know what all these things are, so hang on. If you give me these crazy looks that you’re lost, don’t worry. I’ll see them and I will pivot. Okay? Okay. First up, Adam, I’m going to have you kick it off. We were talking through earlier about there’s no silver bullet in the world of point defense. There is this counter-drone effort that uses autonomous robotics. We talked about unmanned weapon systems. We’re talking sensors that can find and fix things. I’d love you to just explore this space with all of us and talk about, in terms of the United States in counter-drone, what are the challenges, whether it be electromagnetic spectrum interference, whether it be you name it, let’s discuss it. Sir, you have the floor.

Adam Mohamed:

All right, you guys can hear me? Great. So you nailed on the head. The US is a unique environment. We don’t have complete spectrum control. We don’t have complete power control. We don’t have… It’s a lot of additional layers that we have to consider as we engage potential threats in our space. And I just want to highlight everything left of the decision to execute has to be sorted out and visually verified and figure out the rules of engagement that are very different from what we do today in theater and in our active conflicts around the world.

So I’ll dive deep for a second here where we actually are looking at having a blue persistent surveillance, having the ability to visually verify our targets before we engage them, having the right level of autonomy in human interaction before we start going down the path of actually engaging with the threat, if it is indeed a threat, at all and identifying that. So you have to take into account that in today’s world, you have to get a spectrum and you got to sit there for, this is your 20 megahertz spectrum. That doesn’t hold true anymore. We have counter guys dropping on a different set of spectrum and oh, by the way, all your blue aircraft are now offline. Having that synergy, understanding and building from the ground up a complex environment of blue forces along with end effectors, detectors and whatnot have to really be dialed in and thought through at a systemic level and not as a patch job. So I’ll stop there.

Col. Alfred J. Rosales:

I appreciate that segue. It makes me think through what Dr. Ben Van Roo here. We were talking about… Thank you for that. Let’s build upon that. In terms of a contested environment, you have talked about the challenges at deployed locations, which we all are familiar at some level with Ukraine operations, with Operation Spiderweb, as we kind of figure out how to do field testing and accelerate what they’re doing both abroad and in the United States, but doing it in the US. Building upon what Adam’s talking about, can you just explore with that, with this artificial intelligence as an AI agent?

Ben Van Roo:

Yeah, absolutely. And thanks for having me. So we focus a lot on very much what Adam discussed, which is to the left, which is a lot of the decision space, collecting information, trying to put it together. The decision cycle and the OODA loops, we’re in the right place with the Air Force, it’s compressing, obviously in deployed operations in the Ukraine and there’s some really interesting challenges there at how fast tactics are changing, but here there’s just additional complexities, whether they’re not potentially engaging with 100 drones coming towards your base, but it might just be like, how do we sort all this spectrum? How do we decide what to toggle on and to toggle off? The world of agents is going to be a part, and I’m assuming a lot of people have heard about agents and agentic capabilities, but think about it as artificial intelligence that goes beyond basic chat where you can reason, where it can even decide, where it can work its way through its own set of approvals.

We’re really still in the infancy right now of how we think about where we’re going to use agents, what are we going to allow them to decide on, how do they work their way into our TTPs, into our doctrine? And then the other side and the big question that we also think about is, are they even going to be available? If you look at the Ukraine, SpaceX cut off Russia’s access to comms, and so their whole decision space, the way that they were using drones changed instantly. In our world, we might still have access to comms, but even at the Army’s recent PCC Six, their big capstone convergence effort, our own comms and our own desert went down.

And so the way that we want to use artificial intelligence is going to be one, it’s still got to be sorted out. What are we going to allow these things to decide to do? Where are they going to work into everything from the kill chain to just basic intelligence gathering? And then how are we going to make them more resilient? And these are the next layers of challenges that are really ahead of us from the OSW level all the way down to people that are going to be out in a tent or in a JOC somewhere.

Col. Alfred J. Rosales:

I love it. I appreciate those comments. When you talk about the agent, he’s talking about providing an additional thinking application to help us build and increase what General Wilsbach talked about and increase the timing and the human speed, if you will, the human in the loop. Let’s just build upon that. We’ll talk about it.

Mr. Wood, sir, if you can just build upon that, your world of multi-sensor integration, the world of taking artificial intelligence, thinking through what that would look like to… Let’s just keep it at human in the loop at the moment. Maybe we can explore the space of human outside the loop.

Colton Wood:

Yeah. I think the human in the loop concept where we’re controlling every aspect, you’re just talking left of the decision to basically engage. On the right side, when we get that decision is made, the execution of these tasks have to be as autonomous as we’re comfortable with, right? Talking about human in the loop is, “Okay, I got a target. I need to go through the process of actually engaging and affecting that target.” As we see the threat evolving, that is going to be an incredibly difficult thing to do is if I have multiple threats, multiple targets, multiple different engagement systems, I won’t be able to make those decisions quick enough and actually shepherd the process.

So we’ve been trying to socialize this human before the loop concept. I’ve set all the rules of engagement, I’ve set the governance on the systems, and then I have a strong decision supported by tools in front of me. But once I’ve made that decision, I need to be able to engage the systems and the machines need to be able to engage the threats almost autonomously. And a lot of that is comfort with the technology, but also understanding that this threat is going to operate at a speed that’s beyond what we can really reason to defeat. And so I think a lot of simulations, understanding how these systems operate, where the left and right limits are, and then allowing these systems to be as effective as they can be without us having to shepherd the process is a very thing that we have to think about very near future here.

Col. Alfred J. Rosales:

I love that, Mr. Wood. Yeah, I’m going to highlight… I love this kind of thought that maybe you all can help us with. He said human before the loop. There is some opportunity in play in terms of policies, both at the state and the federal level in terms of how we think through what those decision space should look like. And so working upon that, we talk about sensing to an opportunity to potentially engage in a kinetic environment maybe. So let’s do that.

Mr. Hiatt, sir, with your expertise in microwave energy weapons, with the idea of taking the sensors, the human before the loop or in the loop discussions to the engagement piece in the United States, as you walk through that, can you just give us some thoughts in terms of how that would work or how can we explore that space even further than we already are?

Michael Hiatt:

Sure. Thank you. I think a big piece of what Colton was talking about and moving towards that human before the loop is risk tolerance. And your risk is very different if you have to literally put metal in the air with kinetics or prox burst rounds or whatever the kinetic options are. If you can have an option that has lower collateral effects and no collateral damage, which is what the directed energy weapons offer, you start to be able to change your risk calculation. You start to be able to make decisions where like, okay, I’m a little more comfortable with putting this part of the system on a fully autonomous mode or I’ll call it human, maybe the stepping stone to human before the loop is human on the loop where the decisions are made and presented on a platter to the operator. It says, “Recommended course of action, A or B,” and the operator pushes A or B, and then there’s execution aids that push it forward and automate the result of that.

And so as we sort of turn the knob on scalable autonomy, that’s something that the risk tolerance is always going to be there. If you’re, again, putting kinetics there, there’s going to be a lot of challenge there. That’s true OCONUS as well, but when you talk about CONUS operation, there’s an extra heightened sense of… I’ll say a very different risk posture. What we need to be able to do there is be able to work with local law enforcement. We need to be able to work with the FAA and the FCC and show that we can play nice in those spectrums and still provide robust defense. So that’s leveraging 130i authorities that are in the law now. The law is there, but we haven’t gone through the… We’re just starting to go through the effort with JADF and with the Point Defense Battle Lab to actually show how to exercise those authorities and do so in a safe manner.

So again, as we get more comfortable with how those effects can work in a low collateral and no collateral environment, then that gives us a lot more comfort in turning that scalable autonomy knob up.

Col. Alfred J. Rosales:

Mr. Hiatt, I appreciate you talking about the community connection with both the sheriff’s department, both the local officials. I will tell you that in terms of the 319th reconnaissance wing as the Air Combat Command Point Defense Battle Lab, and you heard me correctly, the Battle Lab is not five to 10 people on the corner end of our base. It is the whole wing approach that General Spain has asked us to do. So the full compliment of our wing, thinking through those various operations, I already told you that we try to do with excellence every single day, this is an additional mission that every one of our squadron commanders and our group commanders and our senior listed leaders are thinking through on any given day. In fact, they put all of their equities… The Airmen that are working in our battle lab are on the behalf of those commanders to figure out how we can accelerate and scale our ability to do so.

That piece, connecting with those folks, we have gone even a step further, figuring out how much of an interaction we need to do with the local population that’s right outside of the base that shares the fence line with the base, thinking through what it looks like with the University of North Dakota as an academic institution that thinks through these kind of policy recommendations. I appreciate you sharing that.

Let’s build on that. Adam, we’re talking microwave directed energy weapons and kinetics. When we talk about autonomous robotics, meshing the both ground and air space, I’m going to call it, can you walk us through some, just your thoughts on all things on how we integrate both, I’m going to call it inside the fence line on our federal installations and outside as Mr. Hiatt was talking through?

Adam Mohamed:

Yeah, great question. Again, we’re going to go back to the silver bullet, go back to graceful degradation, going back to I can’t always have an aircraft in the air in 50 mile an hour winds or in a thunderstorm, but I have a ground unit that can give me 30% more coverage. Let me see not just my fence line, which I can’t see today by the way, perpetually all the time, but actually see the entire fence line in real time, see beyond the fence line enough to give us the time we need to actually engage. The OODA loop and the kill chain to actually take out these threats is shrinking from minutes to seconds. There’s no way around it.

You guys can see that real world, that is today. And with the ability for folks to literally pull up half a mile away and start launching one-way drones at our bases stateside out of the back of a semi-truck is terrifying and understanding that we need to work with our community to start getting folks used to, yes, we are going to surveil beyond the perimeter. Yes, we’re going to have the ability to understand our threat space in the base and beyond the base because everyone’s got a cell phone in their pocket that can see 200 meters away today. That expectation of capability exists already on every single one from here. Now we need to expand that and expand the policy to allow for us to effectively defend our bases in a timeline that actually is effective.

Col. Alfred J. Rosales:

Talking about mission generation, you talk about outside the fence line, you use the word surveillance. I use the word transparency with our community partners, but I will tell you, let’s take that a little step further. Mr. Woods, sir, can you talk to us about your thoughts on how we integrate our sensors across various, I’m going to call it cameras across various radars, across various, you name it, incorporating some of these, what we call autonomous robotics, robo dogs, if you will, as we morph and build that data architecture and then working with transparency with our community partners, what do you think it looks like in terms of policies in the United States as we go through that? I’m going to call it information sharing.

Colton Wood:

So to start, the threat looks a lot different depending on, or I should say, there’s many different threats. There’s things that have our signatures, there’s things that don’t. So we have to have multiple different types of sensors and as many as that are available to us to have a cohesive and comprehensive coverage of a specific area. But as we do that, we introduce massive amounts of complexity, right? We can’t just put all these different disparate data streams in front of our operator and expect them to understand what’s going on. We need to make… We call it sensor fusion. So bringing all these capabilities together into a cohesive air picture or threat picture so that we can make decisions, going back to the first part of this.

And so in order to do that, that also helps us de-conflict blue versus red, do various different things, and then also have a stronger communication pathway to our kind of partners within this. I know exactly what it is. I’m not just giving them a pile of data and expecting them to know what’s going on. So I think having a cohesive threat picture while I’m adding all these different capabilities, new capabilities as well, as we start to build out new capabilities to address new threats, we need to have a way to make sure that that makes sense and it gets correlated to all the other types of data sets that we’re collecting in real time.

Col. Alfred J. Rosales:

I appreciate your comments. Dr. Van Roo, what are your thoughts on… As Mr. Wood’s talking, I’m thinking through as an installation commander, how I can translate that for operator confidence into community partner confidence so that I could work in the space what Adam was talking about, I’m going to call it outside the fence line. Can you talk to me about what that could possibly look like? Not that we’re going to find the way ahead. This is for all of us in this space to come up with ideas that they’re going to come up with later. Share them with me via email if you want.

Ben Van Roo:

Yes, it’ll be a great email. So as soon as… Talking about the centrifugion, we kind of… Backing that against not that long ago we had acetate to do the planning, and we still do, and then we’ve built these-

Col. Alfred J. Rosales:

Like whiteboards, you’re saying?

Ben Van Roo:

Yeah, or you have the greasy marker and you’re planning on…

Col. Alfred J. Rosales:

Okay. I’m tracking. I’m a pilot.

Ben Van Roo:

We’ve moved into the planning and the operating picture. It’s a common operating picture, a COP. There’s obviously well-known COPs that are out there, the Palantirs, we have different type of AOCs using different common operating pictures. But as soon as you start overlaying more and more sensors and other community feeds and policies, it is a world where artificial intelligence is going to start to play a much larger role to sort out not only what are the policy regulations and what can we go and do, but actually taking steps along the way in that whole process. So you’re not going to necessarily be able to merge everything and dump it into some of the traditional systems of record, the Palantirs and the Oracles of the world, great companies. You’re going to actually have to start to think about how do we traverse all these different data fees that are now fused together and overlay and understand what can we go do? And artificial intelligence will actually be a part of the policy and decision making, navigate what can we do, what are the approval chains, and what can we go and do?

And similarly, in the traditional Air Force, if you think of… You have a lot of legacy applications, a lot of old logistic systems that you might use for maintenance data or for others, where artificial intelligence will have that same type of affect will be you’re going to just start connecting to lots of different systems at the same time, and then the agents that you’re going to construct are going to be given various degrees of policies and rights to go and take action, maybe reorder a part or suggest a manual fix. And so in the counter US world, it’s going to layer from everything that are the TTPs and the doctrine that we decide to what have we determined with our local community outside that board. It will be codified more and more in using artificial intelligence because the threat cycle, the OODA loop that we actually have to work with is going to be in the minutes to seconds.

And so it’ll be a very interesting… This is going to happen right now in front of us before AI and the killer robots take over the world. It will be actually, we have to sort out first what are we connected to and how do we get through this? Because we just won’t have as much time to understand the decision space that was traditionally maybe in a common operating picture or on something we could quickly sketch out on a whiteboard.

Col. Alfred J. Rosales:

I’m going to pull the… Oh, actually, Adam, please.

Adam Mohamed:

Yeah, if you don’t mind, can I just glob onto that ladder on real quick? So there’s two things that come to mind when you say that. It’s like how do we evolve the AI agents so that people will get on board and understand that this is here to help and not here to detract? And then further, acknowledging that our adversaries won’t take the necessary diligence and oversights and things and they’ll go fast and reckless and we have to combat that on our side.

Col. Alfred J. Rosales:

This is great. That’s the question that you are pulling. I’m going to pull at that thread a little bit more. Dr. Van Roo, if you could just kick it off with this. As you talk through, I’m going to call it AI agent modeling, as you’re training this AI agent, is there a requirement for installation commanders as you think through this to train that AI agent for that given tailored environment that that AI agent would be working in? For that particular installation, would that be something that needs to happen at the installation level or is that something as we explore policy recommendations, as we inject different policies, is it more of a headquarters Air Force war gaming kind of rigorous to put it through multiple data points to build transparency in the system? And like Mr. Wood said, sharing that with our partners outside the fence line, I think. What are your thoughts on that?

Ben Van Roo:

Yeah. Well, so I think it was actually last year at this conference, I introduced the concept to a group of people about what are agents. And I think I misspoke and I was like, “It’s kind of like a really good senior enlisted person,” and that worked well with some of the officer community. And then some of the list folks like, “No, no, it’s a junior officer.” But I think I was like, sorry guys, I was just framing. But I think the construct that should be addressed is where are we now? A few years ago, those of us that were in the natural language processing or LLM community, it was very hard to get anyone to talk about this stuff at all. We were just like nerds in the corner. And now we all use ChatGPT or we use genAI.mil on IL5 and it’s great, but it’s a chat surface.

We’ve very rapidly distributed some at least awareness around AI to lots of people. And yet where are we going and what do we really need to contemplate, frankly, are these questions. So how are we going to connect this to the data systems that matter, involve the community, sketch out what an agent is, organize doctrine, et cetera? And does it exist at the OSW level or down at the wing level? And I think the answer is yes. I think spending time with the CDAO, there is an increased push on how we use agents and agentic workflow into everything from fires to our back office activities.

And you’ll see a lot more of that coming this year, but I would challenge those that are the wing commanders down to the scrappy junior officer or enlisted person that’s just really good at thinking about these workflows and saying, how might we shape going from A to B using artificial intelligence? And then what are the gains and what are the drawbacks? Are we getting lazy in our brains because now we’re not doing it as much? Will we have compute available? But these are the questions that I think for good or for bad, artificial intelligence is coming and it’s coming fast. And I would say we’ve barely scratched the surface of how powerful the models are today, forget super intelligence, and can actually impact, the models today can impact our workflows.

And so I think my push to you guys is yes, I think this is something that I would be working very hard down at the officer level, the enlist level, where does this impact our lives and how will this impact what we go do? And then what are the ramifications of subscribing or buying into it? Because there are real compute considerations. Jordan’s AWS center got hit very early in the Iran conflict. And so all these other really interesting things that come out of it. So it’s an important exercise to war game, to talk about, to try to sketch out, and spend some time on nights and weekends, which I’m sure you all want to do, but I do. So otherwise, you can email me about it.

Col. Alfred J. Rosales:

Dr. Van Roo, I think you triggered me as an installation commander to think through. You said, could it be headquarters Air Force war gaming? Could it be at installation? And he said yes. Which for me, I say both. So then I perk up my ears and I say, what should I be doing? And as you talk through that and how we build and build confidence, I’m going to call it trust in our AI agents at the installation level. I hear you saying that we should consider increasing our exercising, that we’ve already maintained our tactical air superiority at a certain level, but we should incorporate some of this, I’m going to call it AI agent injects to figure out how we build trust with it as we exercise more. Any thoughts on that as we transition and talk about kinetic operations?

Mr. Hiatt, you have a tremendous amount of experience in terms of microwave energy weapons, but let’s just talk through that piece, the trust in those systems. Because when you think about, not you, when I think about microwave energy weapons or directed energy weapons, I think through, wow, in the United States, how do I exercise that so my Airman has the confidence to take the recommendation from Mr. Wood’s comments on the common operating picture, to say engage, for them to actually push the button like my Airmen at the security forces gate to push the, we’re going to put the barrier out for today. How do I train them to be of confidence that they should push that button because they have, I’m going to call it proficiency in that. Can you walk me through that, what that would look like from your perspective?

Michael Hiatt:

I think DE weapons have a little bit of a challenge, which is, and I love a good quote from Arthur C. Clark, “That sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” And it’s like cool, we’re leading edge, but that’s actually a challenge in that it becomes hard for folks to know how to incorporate that into doctrine. It becomes a challenge on how do we trust this? How do we put it into our workflow so that we can actually have a…

I keep using the word trust, but it really comes down to that. They have to build the confidence in those systems that they know that if you have a mixed magazine, you have a mixed set of effectors, some of the DE weapons, if they were a magic spell, you would want them to go way further. But the reality is DE weapons aren’t outranging kinetics. And so when you start to say, “All right, I’m going to hold fire on my kinetics. I’m going to let that threat come in closer than I would like because I trust that my DE weapons are going to take it out,” that’s the level of trust that we got to get to because everyone talks about cost asymmetry and there’s op-eds out there on it and how important solving that cost asymmetry problem is.

But for the folks that are on the ground, the battle captain trying to make that assessment, it’s not a cost asymmetry problem, it’s a magazine depth issue because what’s the reload time on my kinetic? What’s the flyout time? What’s my shot doctrine? Do I do a shoot, look, shoot? Do I do a shoot, shoot, look? Those are the things that affect magazine consumption. And when you have a problem like UAS threats, they’re coming en masse. And so you’re quickly going to get overwhelmed. And so again, that’s where it’s so important to put the effort into things like what JIATF 401 is doing with testing, what the Point Defense Battle Lab is doing with testing to build that confidence so you can say, “All right, I know what that threat is. I understand it. I know that my DE weapons are going to be able to take it out and do so in a low collateral way and a very low cost per shot way. And most importantly, in a way that preserves my magazine of my scarce interceptors.” And then they’ll be able to push that button. But that’s the hard part, I guess, is putting that work in and building that trust so it’s not science fiction, it’s physics fact.

Col. Alfred J. Rosales:

Thank you very much for that comment. Do you guys have any additional closing remarks maybe before I wrap it up? I liked where this headed. I can go for another hour, but I’m getting the, “You need to get off the stage in three minutes,” verbals.

Colton Wood:

No, I would just say that it’s a cat mouse game and we’re trying to build a better mousetrap always. And what we’re all thinking about is right in the right vein. And we also need to start thinking about this in layers. There’s certain things on our bases that we just cannot allow things to get to. And so a lot of that human before the loop is saying, “Okay, well in this area, if anything goes in this, I need to defeat it in whatever possible,” leveraging or directed energy weapons or just outright smashing them out of the sky. And so to continue to evolve because the threat is evolving and if we don’t evolve our defenses to basically counter that, we’re just going to always be on our heels. And it only takes one bad event for us to understand what we’re dealing with here.

Col. Alfred J. Rosales:

Thank you, Mr. Wood. Mr. Mohammed.

Adam Mohamed:

Yeah, I think the thing to think through, just, you were resonating on this, which is situational awareness is king because everything else flows from that. And having static situational awareness, mobile situational awareness, being able to understand your battle space is going to take precedence over everything else. The sensor fusion will happen. We’ll have the AI, we’ll have the ability to operate without a cloud, but we need to be able to operate when we start losing our sensors, we start losing our radars, we start losing our shooters. And how do we adapt and how does the system adapt for you because there won’t be time for you to make the change to switch over. So something to think about from that perspective.

Col. Alfred J. Rosales:

I appreciate you, sir. Dr. Van Roo, sir.

Ben Van Roo:

Yeah, maybe take a little bit different. It feels like it’s a very different time and set of challenges that are all kind of colliding around the same time. There are a lot of really interesting companies doing fascinating work. And frankly, there’s a lot of venture capital going into new companies trying to build cool things. Reach out, ask questions. It is the most hungry time for companies trying to go and support. I’ve been an old guy in defense tech for a long time. It’s very different than it was maybe 10 years ago. So ask questions and try to find some great vendors and we are extremely eager to engage. So don’t be afraid to ask.

Col. Alfred J. Rosales:

I appreciate your comments, to everybody on the board. As we, as an Air Force fly and we fix our aircraft and we mission generate in hopes that when we’re called upon, we can win, this space encounter-drones is not a spectator sport. It’s for all of us to think through it, both industry, academia, the United States Air Force. What I hear is that we are beyond asking what these things are, this AI agents as they incorporate into this picture. We’re at the point where we’re figuring out what it could look like in terms of policy that we can then get to the next step in training and exercising with a rigor to ensure that we have the trust to have our Airmen engage when those courses of action are recommended. So with that, I appreciate everybody being in here and engaged. I look forward to our continued conversations. If you can give them all a round of applause.