Building the Arsenal: Speed, Scale, and Affordability

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Brig. Gen. Robert Lyons III:

Well, good afternoon. I’m Brigadier General Bob Lyons, Portfolio Acquisition Executive for Weapons and Armory Director at Eglin Air Force Base. It’s my privilege to serve as your moderator for today’s panel titled Building the Arsenal: Speed, Scale, and Affordability.

In my current role, I’m responsible for the planning and execution of weapons from nine millimeter bullets up to hypersonic weapons. This panel, when talking about the arsenal, will span beyond munitions to other things that are inside of the joint force. We have an outstanding group of leaders with us today who bring a range of operational, industry, technology, and production perspectives to this important discussion. Thank you for being here. Now let me introduce each of them to you.

We have Lukas Czinger is the CEO and co-founder of Divergent Technologies, where he leads development of an end-to-end digital manufacturing platform, combining AI enabled design, additive manufacturing, and robotic assembly for defense aerospace and automotive customers. Welcome.

We have Mr. Paul Ferraro, Vice President and General Manager of Defense Engines and Systems at GE Aerospace. He leads the team responsible for producing, testing, delivering, and servicing advanced propulsion systems for military customers worldwide. He brings more than 30 years of aerospace and defense leadership experience.

We have with us Randy Fields, Chief Technology Officer of Ultra Intelligence and Communications, where he leads technology strategy across mission software, AI enabled tools, communications, and defense innovation. A US Navy veteran cryptologist, he brings more than two decades of experience across ISR, defense software communications and intelligence programs.

We also have with us Admiral Jon A. Hill, Vice President and General Manager of Air Dominance and Strike Weapons for Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control. A retired US Navy Vice Admiral and former Director of Missile Defense Agency, he brings extensive acquisition, engineering, missile defense and complex weapons systems experience.

And finally, Jon Norman, Vice President of Requirements and Capabilities for Air and Space Defense Systems at Raytheon. A retired Air Force major general and fighter pilot, he’s served more than 32 years in uniform, bringing extensive operational requirements and senior leadership experience.

Gentlemen, thank you for joining us. Round of applause.

And I want to thank the audience for being here, and thank the AFA.

So here’s the opener. The strategic environment demands that we deliver capability differently than we have in the past. It’s no longer enough to develop the most capable weapon or system. We must be able to produce it at speed and scale and at a cost that allows us to build and sustain the capacity we need. That means looking across the entire enterprise: how we design, manufacture, test, acquire, produce, and sustain our systems. It also means strengthening the partnership between government and industry and finding ways to remove barriers that keep us from moving quickly. We have a great group of leaders here today who bring perspectives across that enterprise, and I’m looking forward to the discussion. With that, let’s get into it.

So question one has to do with the speed, scale and affordability, are often discussed as competing priorities. From your perspective, what has to change in government, industry or both to improve all three speed, scale and affordability? Mr. Czinger?

Lukas Czinger:

First, thank you general for leading this panel. Thank you to the audience for your attention. It’s an honor to be here representing Divergent.

When we think about those three together, I really think about two things that really enable them. One is a durable demand signal, long-term demand signal. And the second, from my view, is the strength of your production system. And the measure I would use there is the cost productivity of your production system. And that’s where Divergent, of course, I can say, is helping meet both the scale, the timing, and the affordability by supporting primes like the great gentleman on stage with me today in their production.

And how do we do that? Well, we build our designs together in partnership to be manufacturable at low cost. So it needs to start early in the process. The earlier we can get involved in a program, is what I tell our customers, likely the lower the cost and likely the more units per day we can make, likely the lower the cycle time of the manufacturing. So we need to compress our hours per unit; we need to lower that; we need a design for manufacturability. That will reduce our cost. And then we need to match that with a long-term demand signal, say years of output, so that we can scale the factory CapEx, the factory infrastructure, to ultimately meet the scale demand.

So I think about those principles together: durable demand signal, cost productivity, and then looking at the details of what is a production system that can enable low cost and scale from a first-principle standpoint.

Brig. Gen. Robert Lyons III:

Thank you. Mr. Ferraro?

Paul Ferraro:

Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. The demand signal and the assurity of that demand signal is critical to guide our investments, to know where it is the demand is going for the long term, not just for us as primes, but to send that clear signal to our suppliers so that they can properly invest, they can develop the technology and the capability to produce that rate, and they can provide assurity of materials necessary to support our production.

Over the last three years, GE Aerospace, for instance, has been able to invest upwards of $300 million. I’m sorry, $600 million over the last three years, 275 million of which is in this past year alone. That is only made possible by the assurity of demand signal and the clarity that we have on what it is we need to provide our war fighters. Partnering with companies like Divergent, allowing us to explore different additive manufacturing capabilities as well as digital design techniques, both in the early phases of next generation capability as well as upgrades to existing and legacy capability is going to be critical to eliminating bottlenecks in our supply base and allowing us to build that rate and perhaps even more importantly, allowing us to surge when the demand calls for it.

Brig. Gen. Robert Lyons III:

Any other thoughts?

Randy Fields:

Just one. It’s interesting that we’re in a point where we spent so much time prior to probably the last four or five years focusing on global supply chain. And so how many of our businesses have been focusing on where’s the global supply chain? What are we doing to invest in that global supply chain? And now, due to the major emphasis on US-made manufacturing and our ability to do that, it’s a complete game-changer. It’s a complete shift.

And so I can’t foot stomp enough how important it is for that steady demand signal because that enables us to work with our suppliers and find where the weaknesses in the supply chain and find out can we make it in America, or can we find someone who can, or is it an investment that we need to go help stand up a small business to go get? We don’t have a global supply chain that’s stable right now and there’s a shift to buy America and made in America that it’s just something that our systems cannot withstand that shift fast enough, and we are going to have to make more investments into simplifying our systems to find out what can we get from a stable supply chain and from what the supply chain can provide based on what we have.

Brig. Gen. Robert Lyons III:

Yeah, thank you. I want to shift here. Speed cannot simply just be using the same processes and just doing them faster. Do you have any thoughts about processes or regulations or anything like that that are just from a previous era that we should just eliminate? Yeah, go ahead.

Jon A. Hill:

Yeah, I’ll go ahead and grab this one. Thanks by the way for this panel and appreciate being up here with everybody else.

As I’ve been listening to the conversation so far, it kind of reminds me of this book called Freedom’s Forge, and I’m sure many of you have read that. Arthur Herman, I think, was the author. And it really starts first, and the framework is all about partnership between the government and industry. And I think over the last few decades, or at least when I was in uniform, there was a clear divide, and we’re hitting that point now. We’re hitting stability on requirements. We’re putting those demand signals out there. That demand signal leads to investment by industry is what we want so that we can address the factory flow now. We can identify those choke points.

And one of the areas that we’re really kind of diving into when it comes to how do you really get speed is down to the human level. How can we push decisions as far down that chain as we can? And it feels a little risky for those who come from micromanagement organizations. I was in one of those for a long time. But being able to empower your folks to do that, and then not just focus on innovating the technology, but innovate your processes. There’s a lot of change. A lot of those things were put in place many years ago, and questioning and challenging every one of those will lead to speed. Thank you.

Jon Norman:

Yeah. I think the Air Forces and the other services have taken great strides in building that partnership. For the longest time, it was, “Here’s your contract. We’re going to evaluate how well you did against that contract.” The threat has changed that entire dynamic. We’ve got to be a team, both across industry and with our government partners. That starts at the requirement stage. So establishing a requirement that says, “Here’s the end that we want to get to, but I’m not going to tell you how to build that castle.” Let industry unleash their innovation, come back with different ways of doing this, and then the government selects from that.

I’ll hit the elephant in the room. Certainly, having stable requirements and demand is very important. I would say more important than anything is having that funding. And so that’s where I think service is working very closely with our partners on Capitol Hill to establish that requirement, the demand, and then getting the funding for that so that we have that level of stability, both for the primes that are up here, as well as all of our suppliers and all the new entrants into this challenge.

Lukas Czinger:

From a manufacturing process standpoint, I would just add, I really think about resilience for achieving this. And how is resilience really manifested in manufacturing? It’s largely through flexibility. So we actually started out manufacturing in auto, and what we saw in auto was low prices per unit. So you can think of the chassis of a car, the suspension system, the metal parts, they’re really low cost per unit, yet some of the biggest automakers in the world, they’ve struggled as businesses. It’s very public. They’ve struggled to return. Why? Because it’s so CapEx intense, it’s so investment intense, and your investment is going towards one vehicle. So if you miss time in the market, if you don’t have demand against that vehicle, you’re making hundreds of thousands per year, you’ve invested in your factories, well, you’re going to be in a lot of trouble because you can’t amortize off your hard tooling, your soft tooling, your entire production facility, which makes just that one vehicle.

So what we set out for in Divergent was how can we have digitally enabled design and flexible manufacturing, but flexible manufacturing while hitting low unit cost? That’s where we brought additive manufacturing, automated milling, post-processing, coatings, all together so that our factory today goes from making a part for an auto customer to making a part for a defense customer. So the best thing we can do process wise, in our opinion, is low unit cost, but with flexibility, then we can add resilience, and that resilience allows us to also endure lapse in funding, different vehicles winning, changes in the market. And yes, I would agree, funding and demand signal is absolutely the best thing we can do, but resilience is some of the accountability we can take also to try and have a better process that can better adapt and survive.

Brig. Gen. Robert Lyons III:

Good points about demand signal. So what does that look like? What’s a good demand signal that comes from the government? How does that manifest?

Jon A. Hill:

General, I’ll try one real quick. So I mentioned Freedom’s Forge, and I really do believe that the template in that book that starts with that partnership is exactly what you are doing today. So we’re making agreements at the highest level in the government and at the highest level in the corporations, and we’re laying down the framework that will bound the contract, then you have real definition there. And then yes, we’ve got to work the funding because I translate that as the demand. The demand is when the funding to those contracts comes. But agreements made at the highest levels that flow down with the framework and contracting ought to go faster in that framework, and we’re seeing that today. And I think that’s where there’s a lot of speed that can be garnered there and the relationships that come from that are amazing. When you question requirement, it’s not a quick no. You’ve got time now to sit down and say, “Let’s tease through this.”

Paul Ferraro:

Yeah, Jon, I might add to that. That, in terms of setting a consistent demand signal, multi-year in particular, is properly leveraging our international customers as well. So we have a domestic demand that may ebb and flow depending on what funding requirements are and what competing priorities we have. But if we can augment that with our international demand and provide that steady and consistent demand signal overall to the industrial base, in particular as it applies to our second and third-tier suppliers, that goes a long way at justifying and encouraging their investment and capacity or developing multiple sources of supply when we have a single source of failure, which certainly we cannot live with when that single source of failure manifests itself in a production inconsistency or disruption.

Lukas Czinger:

Yeah. From my side, it’s a team effort. We sit below the primes, we’re a tier one, so we’re really looking to team with these teams and see if they can flow down as much of that multi-year demand to us as possible. That allows us to pull forward our investment and better secure their supply chain. So we work very collaboratively and form good partnerships with the primes to do so.

Jon Norman:

I think a lot of times we focus on that end product. How are we building this widget faster as we’re working towards a future that can address a constantly evolving, constantly changing threat? Starting with that effect first, what is it that we’re trying to achieve and then teaming closely with the Air Force or with the Navy, and then quite frankly across industry, certainly within the company to take advantage of here are the best practices for manufacturing, here are the lessons learned that we’ve seen as we’ve gone through the munitions acceleration after $10 billion worth of investment into it. And then here’s how we can share that across industry so that we, the US defense industrial base, can go faster to meet the demands of our war fighters.

Brig. Gen. Robert Lyons III:

And in terms of demand and capacity, the United States has had a pretty important and significant year with respect to that. We have the Department of War brokering arrangements with the big companies to put in the mechanics of how you do something over a long term. Talk about the importance of multi-year procurement, being able to see the dollars in the US budget. And I thought that was also a really good point about how you hedge with complimenting the US budget with the partners. So can you talk a bit about those other things in the demand signal?

Jon Norman:

Paul hit on it before. I think the multi-year, it’s challenging for the service because it locks your budget. What’s beneficial to both the service because you get more quantity, faster, at a more reasonable price, it’s incredibly helpful for the defense industrial base because it adds a level of stability for the people that we hire because if you hire them for a one-year production run at max rate, and then you have to go down to a low sustainment rate, you’ll never keep those employees because they’ll leave. It’s a waste of capital investment if you can’t transition to another program. So having a multi-year allows certainly for the primes or the lead contract awardee help. It helps even more with the supply base because it allows them to make that investment into the material or into the factory. It allows them to hire the workers that they’ll need to produce at that rate and sustain that over time.

And I think all of us are looking for what’s next? What can we do for that test equipment investment? What can we do with that factory space and our employees so that as demand ebbs and flows, we can use those facilities and those personnel to develop multiple programs? I think having that long-term investment by the government in a five or seven year, that gives us the flexibility to do that strategic thought and that strategic investment.

Paul Ferraro:

Yeah. Jon, I think you make a great point. Think of the entirety of the supply base as a singular ecosystem. So it starts with whoever the contract awardee is, be it a tier one or whoever the prime contractor is, but really the long-term demand signal allows the second, third, fourth tier suppliers to know when to invest, where to invest, be it in people and tools and facilities and in technology, but it also allows us as primes to invest in the partnerships with the suppliers and partners of the tier one, tier two.

And one way that we have benefited tremendously is partnering with our supply base using what we call Flight Deck. That’s our proprietary lean operating system, and embedding subject-matter expertise in the supply base to teach them how to operate in a lean environment, how to improve their efficiency and effectiveness, and really deliver at rate, at scale to the demand signal that we have at the prime level. So that mutual investment both at the sub-tier level as well as the prime level is critically important and is only enabled through that consistent demand signal.

Brig. Gen. Robert Lyons III:

So we’ve talked here about enablers. Now I want to shift back to barriers. If there was one thing that you would recommend or do today to allow the United States’ allies and partners to get more capability faster, what would be your answer? Start in the middle.

Jon Norman:

So there’s not a silver bullet, and I think you appreciate that more than anybody else. Certainly the stable requirement and stable funding I think helps us most, but it’s the entire ecosystem. It’s how do we test both within the factory where we’re doing the production, how do we test operationally to make sure that what we’re delivering to the war fighter is operationally suitable? So that goes from the combining developmental tests with operational tests, so that there’s the opportunity to adjust and refine the way that end product is going to be delivered to the war fighter. It’s the test ranges. Can we do this through modeling and simulation or do we have to do live fire? And so it’s changing some of the policies that have traditionally been just live fly or live fire to say something is qualified when we can do that in a 3D environment.

And then, I think, it’s with the supplier base. So giving them that consistent demand signal so that they do that investment, and it’s also allowing industry to go out and qualify second and third source suppliers that are qualified so that we can ramp when we need to, and we’re not breaking that supply base when we’re not at that ramp.

And then finally, it’s the policy changes. So if we’re selling a product, and it’s FMS, we’re constrained to what is under contract from any given service. If the policy changes, it allows industry to go out and sell more of that, that can drive more investment from industry, and it helps the US because it has production and delivery at a higher rate so that when the US has a higher demand, that can be pulled back into US-only, and it helps industry because it gives us the capacity demand so we can make that right investment.

Brig. Gen. Robert Lyons III:

Randy?

Randy Fields:

Sir, thank you. I think that’s a fantastic question. And this will sound over simple, but I think we need to focus on simplicity, and I know that sounds simple in itself. In some of our most advanced new aircraft that are coming online, they’re learning from the automotive industry, and they’re focusing on hand tools. And so I kind of take a mantra from my team on hand tools. If we can’t build it with hand tools, then maybe we’re focusing on it being too exquisite. And so what I would challenge ourselves is as we pull from your government reference architecture, sir, those are great reference architectures, and we need to focus on taking our exquisite mindset and trying to simplify that, so that way we can take advantage of manufacturing at scale within the US.

So when you think about in World War II, what made us incredible was our ability to produce across the globe, across the US, using very simple tools to do that. Our adversaries are using cardboard, and they’re using little motors and grenades, and they’re attacking us and making damage. They’re focusing on simplicity. I think we have to take the same where we still need to have accuracy; we need to have precision, but we need to focus on simplicity so we can do it with hand tools. Something like that, or else we’re going to be in trouble, and we’re going to keep pushing a lot of money into things that are going to just enable our adversaries to attack with something a fraction of the cost.

Brig. Gen. Robert Lyons III:

Admiral?

Jon A. Hill:

Yeah, I think we’re in the middle of the movie. One of the things that was said to me early on by someone on your staff, which was really intriguing to me, was, “Hey look, we don’t really want to buy factories. We want to buy weapons.” And that, to me, was the foundational statement that leads to a commercial model over time. And so what I would like to see is more trust across the interfaces in terms of technical authority. One of the questions that was brought up, or a comment was made about qualifying other sources, I think we’re well positioned to qualify certain sources without a lot of overhead associated with that.

So that’s just one example of that as we work our way towards this more and more commercial model, because I think what it provides you in the endgame is much more capacity and many, many more weapons because that’s where we need to be and building above rate. If industry’s willing to do that above the demand signal, then I think we’ve got replenishment and surge solved.

Lukas Czinger:

I would just add two things. One; fully agree with all the points made. The first is award timing, especially for tier ones, tier twos, tier threes, and maybe thinking more about capacity in an agnostic way, even detached from a specific program. So if you know you need X pounds of aluminum or X number of parts from a certain vendor, maybe you can give them that signal earlier and help them secure their supply for you. So think about it detached from the program a bit. In auto, for example, we get our awards about five years ahead of SOP. We don’t have that luxury in defense at all, but maybe we can decouple here and think about our overall capacity, our overall supply.

And then the second from an innovation standpoint is how do we handle risk in the most effective way, and how do we incentivize those that are responsible just for keeping the systems as safe as possible also to think about productivity and throughput? And we can distribute risk better. I think we can introduce new technologies that ultimately will help solve these challenges as well. We talk about hand tools. Well, what if 10 parts can be one part, and you don’t actually need any of the complexity on the manufacturing side? That’s how innovation can help there as well.

Paul Ferraro:

Yeah. Lukas, I think you raise a great point as well relative to understanding exactly where the bottlenecks are within this ecosystem, the supply base. Oftentimes, we focus on the end item, be it at a weapon system or propulsion system, saying, “That’s what I need, and that’s what I need to be able to surge for.” But really the limitation in our ability to surge is often rooted in basic materials, specialty skills, or specialty subsystems that if we invest in alleviating those bottlenecks, then we inherently have the ability to surge with the balance of the components or systems necessary to build the end item.

And I think it’s that detailed knowledge, sharing that information across industry and across government and making sure that we understand where those weak spots are, where those single points of failures are, and mitigating those risk items goes a long way into allowing us not only to meet today’s demand, but having that inherent surge ability.

Brig. Gen. Robert Lyons III:

Yeah, a few of you brought up technologies. A lot of those technologies are resident today in a way at scale that in human history we haven’t seen before. I’m thinking of digital engineering, additive manufacturing, automation, artificial intelligence, and the application of those types of tools in the defense industrial base. And there’s a hope, too, that it’s going to drive down cost.

So the question I have for you is where are these technologies actually reducing cost? Where are these technologies actually shortening production timelines, and actually changing the amount of time it takes to iterate on a design?

Paul Ferraro:

Well, I can start, and I’ll start with manufacturing before we even get into design. Certainly, there’s a tremendous amount of technology that can be applied to our designs and furthering the capabilities of our weapon systems, our propulsion systems, and the like. One area that we’ve been successful in using AI is getting a much better understanding of our supply base. And not just the initial tier of our supply base, but reaching further into that supply base and across a much longer timeline, to know where we’re going to stumble across a weak spot in a supply base, where there’s that single source of failure, identifying it early so we can mitigate it before that risk area manifests itself and truly impacts our production.

So using AI to bring together various disparate data sets, integrating that data and sharing it across industry, I think is an incredible opportunity and something that we didn’t have available to us as recently as a year ago, but it certainly is with us now and we’re using it extensively.

Jon Norman:

I would say when we look at what your team has been driving with the WOSA MOSA, working the composable weapons, our fastest way to deliver improved capability to the field is with PQ dye, whether that’s changing a front end because something newer and better is available, changing propulsion or changing the warhead in that. Internally, we’ve invested a lot in IRAD to give us more range because that’s what the threat has driven. And we can do that very fast using that GRA and using digital models to change out the propulsion, partnering with innovative partners like Divergent to look at a different outer bold line, which gives us a composable weapon system that you can change out the effect, whether it’s a EA type effect, whether it’s a kinetic effect or just as a truck. And that gives a lot of capability.

As we do this, I think all of us focus most importantly on that system has to be reliable, and it has to work. It does no good for any of the war fighters to expose themselves and have a weapon go a thousand miles and do nothing. It has to achieve the end effect. And I think that’s where us partnered with your team as we’re working on PQ dye, of existing franchise programs, as we’re looking to develop the next generation of weapon, that’s where we’ll get the most return for our investment.

Lukas Czinger:

I’ll add from our system and its adoption, and you’ve been a big leader here General, we’ve seen a real change in the last 18 months. We’re now on about 30 active programs with 15 primes. And where we’ve seen initial results has really been in more of the affordable mass arena. So making one-way tickets in the affordable class. We’re now out of our first factory, exiting about three airframes per day, tip to tail, additively manufactured, lug-mounted to host aircraft. So these are real results. These are in production today. We’re now seeing that on legacy programs, this tech actually has a home as well. And the primes are pushing us to see how can we integrate there, how can we reduce cost, how can we increase the scalability of those systems as well? And we’re seeing adoption into those big legacy programs.

I think your question also asked: Where are we not seeing adoption? Where are we struggling? Well, affordable cruise missile classes, exquisite systems in the munitions arena. I think we’re seeing a really good arc there. We haven’t cracked it yet on sustainment and maintenance, and I would like to see us do that. Those are much higher part numbers in terms of individual parts, but much lower in terms of contract size and number of units required. So we need to think there more broadly about how do we certify and how do we not introduce cost on something that might just be five specific parts where introducing cost will actually ruin the business case for it. So, sustainment, I think is the next challenge for us as well.

Brig. Gen. Robert Lyons III:

Randy, you have artificial intelligence in play. Your thoughts about this tech that we have available now in human history, and where you see it driving down cost or improving the speed of delivering capability.

Randy Fields:

Thank you, General. So I’m an AI researcher and I hope to start my PhD next year because I just think it’s so fascinating with where we are right now. A couple of years ago I was on an AFA panel and I told everybody, until we get something like AI, just forecasting where we are today, all of our MBSE hopes and dreams, we’re always going to fall behind, and we’re just not going to be able to achieve that. With where AI is now, and as panelists have said, AI and MBSE is really helping us. Just rapidly be able to see those modular components, we can integrate faster, we can test them, and we can start to drive down cost because we can see, you know what? I’ve got the supply chain. These two components over here, I can connect them with this and I can make a weapon. So what’s happening with the WOSA architecture? With government reference architectures, we can now start to employ AI to look across our supply chains, test those interfaces and start to deliver something that can deliver the effects that we need to fast.

It’s an incredible time, and I’m really excited to say that I was completely wrong, and I’m smart enough to be able to learn from that. And now I want to go put more time into finding out how can we employ AI to supplement all of us in industry and the government to give us recommendations so we can make decisions faster.

Paul Ferraro:

Yeah, I think another opportunity we have in particular when we’re leveraging reference architectures or WOSA MOSA and certainly through MBSE is leveraging qualified elements, be it subsystems components or even larger integrated subsystems that are currently qualified in my case on the commercial side and the FAA and having the Department of War leverage that body of information that went into qualifying in FAA and receiving a qualification or approval to operate on the defense side as well. I think there’s leverage to be made there, leverage to be had, and information to be shared across agencies and across government entities that will streamline the approval process and leverage existing information that’s available to us.

Randy Fields:

Absolutely.

Jon A. Hill:

Yeah, I think there’s such a potential in the factories. When I think about the urgent need of these weapons to put in the hands of the war fighter, the first thing I go to is what’s the chokehold, or what’s choking me up in final assembly, as an example? And what we find is it’s really not the workers in the factory. It happens to be, oh well, supply chain because maybe we didn’t have all the parts on hand that we needed. We have a just-in-time philosophy on having parts there. So you can power through a lot of that with the AI and some of the tools that we’re using now, to where we can go to multiple sources, we can start to look for interchangeability across the factories.

One of the things that our folks have done recently, they’ve looked at all the little sub-assembly factories and said, “Well, why don’t we just have all the cable harnesses over here? Why are we doing it amongst five factories? Let’s let the folks that are really good at circuit card assemblies go do that and get the harnesses over to this place.” Just those kind of little efficiency pieces, that helps too.

But I think the automation in the factory will come more and more. We go in normally, look at the flow, fix the flow, go fix the human interaction, redline the procedures. And then if it makes sense to put a robot in there, then we’ll go do that, and then AI-driven. So I think potential is huge, and I can start talking about how fast it can speed up the contracting actions, but I’ll stop there.

Jon Norman:

I think the other piece that we have to focus on; we keep talking about the production. It’s great. We talk about development, and it’s very, very important. We have to look at the end-user as well. So we have got to use AI and our digital engineering to simplify the mission planning for the end-users. We’ve got to snap the chalk line on the development even for composable systems so that we have a level of standardization for the war fight, for the munitions teams that are out there, so that they can build this up consistently, and it’s not a nightmare for managing your munition stockpile so that they’re very usable.

And then, finally, the training. That’s where I think industry can partner very closely with the government to help understand what the training requirements would be from the loader to the aircrew that are going to employ this weapon system so that we can simplify their ability to put effects on target.

Brig. Gen. Robert Lyons III:

That’s right. So in this building, the arsenal, arsenal for the United States’ allies and partners about providing options for combatant commanders and the president. And we’ve talked about some use of tech to do those things faster, talked about supply chain, making things simple. We also talked about some of those human things, like you mentioned the certification timelines to prove the engineering of additively manufactured parts. We talked about testing faster, training faster. I’ve got a good teammate, General Massaro, Air Force Test Center commander. We were a great team down in Eglin to do a lot of things faster in that area, and we continue to get feedback that we need to do those things faster. Still have some work to go in the contracting aspect of this. We talked about capacity and demand signal. A lot of great weighty type subjects to take in.

I want to ask you, as we’re in the closing round here, what does success look like? If you’re back on the stage five years from now, what do you hope that we did as a country, as a department, as a service? Starting at the end?

Jon Norman:

So our munition stockpile is satisfied, and we are fielding equipment that has the growth capacity in it that we can add capability either via software or we can use the composable design of that weapon system to add new capability to it in the future without having to buy a whole new system. And I think your team, as well as Calvin’s team, is driving us towards that end.

Brig. Gen. Robert Lyons III:

Thank you. Admiral?

Jon A. Hill:

Yeah, I think with the approach of shared responsibility and mutual risk and incentives, what I’d like to see when it’s all said and done is that industry writ large is more comfortable making investments so we can get closer to the commercial model so we can build what you need before you even ask for it. And our ability to build out stockpiles and handle surge, waiting for requirements and a few years to go through development, I think that’s just such a killer, and we need to be able to move forward and have things ready on the shelf for you when you need them because unfortunately we’re going to need them.

Brig. Gen. Robert Lyons III:

Thanks. Randy?

Randy Fields:

I think success for me is our ability to evolve our products as fast as mission needs. I think that’s been a major challenge. The thing that I worry about most is the war fighter doesn’t have what they need. They’ve given us requirements, but we’re years away. If we can deliver it as fast as they need and evolve that through software and new intuitive methods, I think that’s what success looks like to me.

Brig. Gen. Robert Lyons III:

Paul?

Paul Ferraro:

Yeah, I think it’s evolved, build and sustain capability at the need of the fleet. I think it’s improved information flow and communication across the entirety of what I described as the ecosystem throughout all of our supply base. We’re sharing where we have single points of failures. We’re taking actions to mitigate those failures, and we have the ability to not only meet the demands of today but the ability to surge when necessary.

Lukas Czinger:

I agree completely. I’d sum it up as delivering to the war fighter at the pace of need, and specifically some of the metrics I would look for are number of new starts per year, number of units per day and number of hours per unit, as in labor hours or manufacturing hours per unit. I think those three metrics would tell us a lot. And on the manufacturing tier one side, I would like to see a truly resilient network of factories that can deliver cross-industry, but also specifically for the defense programs that they need to support, and feel like we truly have resilience there.

Brig. Gen. Robert Lyons III:

Thank you very much. On the panel, what we have represented here are executives from big primes. We have executives and leaders from new entrants. We have people with a lot of experience either flying in combat, being on a ship, being an industry cryptologist. I’m just thinking about five years from now, what this look like, especially with all the acceleration that we’ve been seeing. It’s been a big year for munitions specifically, but we’re seeing that across the department.

I want to thank the audience for being here. You have some role in whatever you do to contribute to that arsenal. And sometimes you might think that your action is a small step, but it could be the step like a ripple through the water that a pebble makes. Change is everything. Stakes remain to be very high.

I just want to again thank the panelists for their time to share with us their thoughts. So thank you again. Round of applause please.