F-35 in Combat: Penetrating Modern Defense Systems

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Gen. Jeffrey L. Harrigian, USAF (Ret.):

All right. Good afternoon, everybody. I’m Jeff Harrigian, and it’s my great honor to spend a little time with some outstanding leaders from our Air Force. I’d like to take a quick minute here to welcome Major General Laidlaw, who’s the Director of Ops for Air Combat Command, Major General Epperson, who’s commanding the Air Warfare Center, and Colonel Fallon, who’s over at the 388th Fighter Wing out at Hill. Give them a warm welcome here. Thank you all.

We’re going to spend the next 40 minutes or so talking about the F-35 and really some of the lessons learned and activities that have occurred over the last year in combat, particularly when it comes to some of these specific operations that have occurred over the last year. So real good opportunity for us to kind of look at it from the Air Combat command level up at the strategic level, then down operationally, particularly from the Air Warfare Center and what’s happening out at Nellis and all the different operating locations that General Epperson’s responsible for ,and then finally down in the trenches, Colonel Fallon and the team at the 388th have really been on the journey back to 2014, ’15, all the way out through ’26 with significant lessons as a wing tactically on what they’ve been able to execute with the F-35.

I’d like to start with General Laidlaw and really reflecting on in your role at Air Combat Command, get some of your perspectives over the past year, particularly as you’ve looked at the combat operations, gotten feedback from the field, feedback from headquarters Air Force and even the joint staff, looked at some of the exercises and training opportunities that you all have facilitated, and then reflecting upon that, talk a little bit to key successes and key areas that you’d like the team to focus on going forward. Over to you.

Maj. Gen. Brian Laidlaw:

Yeah, thank you, General Harrigian. It’s an honor to be on the panel here, certainly a privilege to sit alongside my good friend and longtime colleague Fuge Epperson and an air warrior like Vice Fallon. Just having a seat up here with this group of folks is a privilege. I wanted to say thank you.

As I reflect on your question, I think back to where we were about a year or so ago, and in forums like this, we would talk a lot about readiness, and a question that would often come up, and I asked it myself was, ready for what? I think as we reflect on the accomplishments over the course of the last year, what we start to see is a picture of what we were getting ourselves ready for and the test that was coming down the pike for our troopers.

So your question is about some of the successes. I think first on that list of successes, and most would agree, and I would certainly welcome my colleagues here to piggyback on this one, is when properly resourced, we showed without a doubt how well this airplane can perform in combat. The Secretary actually talked about it this morning when he was talking about WSS and working with Congress to ensure we get the appropriate amount of funding for our spare parts for this platform.

For those who don’t know, when we send our aircraft into harm’s way and they go down range, they enjoy a higher priority for spare parts and all the things that the logistics trail can give to them, and what we saw is how remarkably well the F-35 airplane withstood and maintained really high mission capable rates over a long period of time in the toughest of combat situations. I think that the value of fully funding the WSS and seeing the impact that that can have in combat has to be the number one thing I would think about as far as successes.

I think also near the top of successes, as you look across and you see a little bit of it in the room here today, is the value that the allies and partners have played in this program and how that translates into our ability to project a lot of power, and not just US power. A couple of numbers. As of this year, Lockheed has kicked out about 1,200 or so F-35s out into the world, and of those 1,200, nearly 500 of those airplanes have gone to our allies and our partners both in Europe and over in Asia. You say, “Well, what’s the so-what there, Swinger? Why does that matter?” Well, for those who don’t know, this year, ACC welcomed under the tent the F-16 and the F-35 FTUs. As part of that change directed by CSAF, I had a chance to go out and visit. I saw Ajax just walked in. He was the win commander at the time out at Luke and we went out to Ebbing Field.

And if it didn’t matter, what I would’ve seen would’ve just been a bunch of students, foreign students. We train them how to fly, we push them out the door, we give them some airplanes. But that’s not what I saw at all when you go around and you actually walk the line at Luke and you walk the line at Ebbing. These nations are sending not only students, they’re also sending their instructors and they’re also sending their iron, their airplanes on the ramp contributing to this training. These nations are all in on being integrated with us.

Okay, why does that matter? Well, it matters in places like Australia, where we just wrapped up a joint exercise in Australia where you had US and Australian counterparts completely integrated throughout a Pitch Black exercise throughout the entire exercise. Look into Europe. As we look at the last two years, more than 40 exercises have been integrated F-35 exercises for the F-35 program. These things matter. It enables us to be lots of places without actually being there when we know that from inception, this program is integrated across our allies and partners. It has to be near the top of our success stories.

As far as the flip side of that coin, things that maybe as we look back in the last year that we could potentially do a little bit better, I think it’s fair to say that we all expected the F-35 to be survivable. Absolutely proved that in combat. I’ll let Vice talk a little bit more about that later, but what we found was the F-35 turned out to be a lot more versatile than we thought, and it had a lot more capability to do more missions, and what that drove on the system was a requirement to very quickly bring new weapons and certify them on the F-35, expand flight envelopes for some of those weapons in order to meet emergent demand.

These are the types of things that would take months or years in peace time to be able to do, but what we learned in combat is the combat scenario has a tendency to thaw the frozen middle. When you are united across the services, the JPO, allies and partners, industry, weapons manufacturers, and they’re all looking at the same goal of trying to rapidly put new weapons on the F-35, we moved at lightning speed.

I think as we reflect, we need to look back and capture those lessons learned, because if we peek around the corner and look forward to the fight that might be next, it would behoove all of us to apply those lessons learned, move with that same sense of purpose and unity of effort to be able to deliver as much lethality as possible on day one to this platform that continues to impress with its capability. Thank you for the question.

Gen. Jeffrey L. Harrigian, USAF (Ret.):

Yeah, good. Anything you guys want to add?

Maj. Gen. David C. Epperson:

Yes, sir. You talked about what successes have we seen over the last year. I’ll take it further back than that. If you look back over the past 10 years, I think at the strategic level, some of the successes that we saw were how we tied everything together. So developmental test, working with operational test, working with AFOTEC, bringing in our joint allies and partners. We have exchange officers that are doing operational tests in the F-35 from both the UK and Australia, setting up that relationship and making sure that that entire infrastructure was there and ready to respond.

To be able to watch tapes the same day that something happened in the AOR and literally have both Americans and ally partners in the operational test community looking at the tapes, coming up with things that we could do better to help those that were fighting in harm’s way down range was truly amazing. And that is not built overnight. Those relationships, and I’ll talk a little bit later perhaps about some of the ways that we leveraged them, but I think that those are truly some of the successes that we’ve seen through this program.

Gen. Jeffrey L. Harrigian, USAF (Ret.):

Yeah. Thanks. Vice, anything you want to add?

Col. Charles A. Fallon:

Yeah, sure. Thanks. I think another way that we can frame that, especially from the tactical level in what we saw is kind of a platform maturation from something that starts off obviously super secret test, flown at Edwards, flown at Nellis, training hypothetical, to now real world. And the F-35 was able to deliver that, deliver that for our warfighters, deliver that for our maintainers, and then deliver it for our joint community. I think in that way, it really ties in with our warrior ethos.

One of the things that was most prevalent to me, and I got to see it firsthand, but also hearing even from now from folks that are down range right now is the F-35 truly is a platform of war, and it’s battle-tested. Our pilots trust it, our pilots trust it to bring it home. Other pilots trust that when an F-35 is in their package that it’ll provide additional essay and additional both lethality and survivability, and then our partners also rely on it. So truly has delivered.

Gen. Jeffrey L. Harrigian, USAF (Ret.):

Yeah, thanks for that. I’d like to just kind of pile on quickly to General Laidlaw comment about the global supply system because I see Colonel Eide and General Brookman here and they have fond memories of the GSS and the challenges associated with it across the entire fleet. So to your point, I think one of the key lessons collectively for all of us as we look at our Air Force writ large, because this is not new, we all are fully invested in supporting those down range. Having been the AFCENT commander, I always got what I wanted. It was easy. Same thing is applied here with respect to the F-35, but you could actually broaden that to other weapon systems.

I think as we look more broadly across the Air Force and the global environment we now operate, you also can make an argument for why the training system, the entire pipeline needs to be looked at holistically and how we fund them and supply them as well, because without that pipeline, you’re not going to be able to endure the way the Chief talked about today. So as we step back and view this, saw great performance because they had parts, they had what they needed, and then you’ve got other locations that aren’t living the good life, if you will. That’s something I think we need to take a step back collectively as a team and see how we manage that going forward, particularly given the global environment we’re working on.

I think the other piece, and I’m going to call them out because we do have the Norwegian air chief here who is here today with us in the room, and to all of your point, one of the huge benefits that I think, for those of us that have been around the F-35 program for a really long time, is the benefit that the allies and partners bring to this community. I would argue it’s not just inside the F-35, but it actually impacts the broader joint fight and how we show up, speak the same language, same TTPs, and to all your points, we’ve figured out how to do information-sharing at speed, which makes us all better at the end of the day.

So I would encourage whatever functional area you work at, you grab onto that because that’s the way we’re going to go get it done. We see this, as you guys have highlighted, a great success story that we can’t lose the momentum that have really been garnered over the course of the last couple years. So I appreciate all your comments and just a little food for thought there, and if those guys are up here, they may have comments on how they saw that specific global supply system as well.

If I can transition a little down to the operational side and take this question over to General Epperson, coming from the Warfare Center. For those of you that may not live and breathe it, but really it’s the center of the universe for us as an Air Force and arguably greater impact across not only our entire Air Force, but things that happen in the joint world with respect to the tactics, techniques, procedures that are generated, how they’re documented, how those are fed into the joint arena, responsible for the flags that many of you are familiar with and many of the high-end training activities, and then supporting that also via test as you highlighted through the 53rd wing and the 422 and those types of activities.

As you’ve been fed some of these lessons, FuGe, and your team has kind of captured those and looked at it, we’ll move a little bit beyond some of the, without getting into the tactical details because clearly we want to be cognizant of that, but again, where are you seeing the biggest steps that have been taken? Then as you look forward, envisioning the next year, two, three to five-year horizon that you want the team to work on.

Maj. Gen. David C. Epperson:

Absolutely. Thanks, sir. Appreciate the question. When you think about it, when you think about fifth gen, a lot of people think about the stealth platform and the ability to penetrate. Really, in my mind, the secret sauce to that is the electromagnetic spectrum and what it does to power fusion and build the situational awareness of the pilot that they’re able to pass out to the rest of the force that’s out there. I think one of the biggest things where we’ve seen success is the standup of the 350th Spectrum Warfare Wing. It’s one of the newest wings in the Air Force and it falls underneath the Warfare Center, but what they do is they look at that electromagnetic spectrum. They crowdsource data from all the different platforms out there, not just F-35, but really all of our platforms. They take that information and they go through it, comb through it for anomalies and things like that so that they can reprogram and provide that out at the leading edge of the battlefield. And they have adopted AI techniques to be able to do that rapidly.

You go back 10, even five years ago, all of that was done manually. If you think about when you’re looking for anomalies, the larger data set that you have, the easier it is to find those, but only if you have somebody that can go through it quickly and find those for you in a time period that matters. That’s what AI has been doing for them. The 350th has really worked out. How do you get all that information back from the leading edge of the battlefield, run it through their programs, detect the anomalies, reprogram, and by the next go, have it out there for those aircraft to use on the next go? I think that’s one of the huge success stories that we’ve had and look forward to that continuing to grow and to evolve, and really thinking about it, not just as a silo of F-35, but when you talk about EA37, F-22, all of these different platforms that are out there, that’s where you can really truly gain that special sauce and stay ahead of the adversary in what they’re doing and how they’re adapting to us over time.

I think another thing that we saw is our exercises, there’s been a lot of focus on the Pacific, but a number of things that are important in the Pacific we find are just as important when we turn to any other area of responsibility. Specifically, we have to be able to work with distributed operations where we’re going to form the fighting force together in the air. General Cunningham, two predecessors ago of mine, started an exercise called Bamboo Eagle that now we’re transitioning into the baseline of Red Flag because it really sets you up for, how do I do major combat operations no matter where I’m at in the world? It makes sure that I’m ready for each and every one of those AORs and gives me that fine-tuning that we need.

The final thing that I’ll kind of talk about here is just the… We’ve also looked at how do we quick-turn aircraft? You think about an F-35 and those weapons bay doors are pretty low to the ground, right? And if you are trying to quick-turn, you’re at a contested area where you’re under attack, you don’t want to be out on the flight line for a long period of time and you need to be able to get those aircraft back in the air. So it’s been nice to see how our weapons troops have designed capabilities to rapidly reload and turn those aircraft to get them back in the air and make sure that we project the combat power forward to the right locations and then put those tactics, techniques, procedures together to ship out. That’s the A9 that falls underneath the Warfare Center. We’re in charge of the 3-1 tactics training and procedures manuals and the publication of those.

The F-35 community writ large and the partnership between the weapon school and operational test, they saw that over time they’ve been producing these tactics bulletins that go out, and what they’ll find is that it will change this one small part of suppression of enemy air defenses, and then three or four weeks later, they have another change also to suppression of enemy air defenses because the tactics are evolving that fast. So we’re looking at, instead of having all of these tactics bulletins or white papers going out, how do we more rapidly rewrite portions of the 3-1? We rewrite all of the suppression of enemy air defense section holistically and pass those tactics out and get it right back into the warfighter’s hands.

Gen. Jeffrey L. Harrigian, USAF (Ret.):

Good. Thank you for that, General Epperson. General Laidlaw, anything you want to add or comments?

Maj. Gen. Brian Laidlaw:

No, I certainly agree with everything that FuGe said. It is impressive to watch the speed with which that community is moving.

What I would key in on is how rapidly EW is advancing, and more specifically our ability to do something about the EW. What that translates into for us is now a requirement to articulate how we’re going to command and control that capability. So as FuGe and his team, 350th was the example, which I thought was a phenomenal example, as they develop those tactics, we now need to translate that to JFACCs and CFACCs on how they’re going to weave that into their overall C2 plan so that we can take advantage of how quickly FuGe and his team are moving at the speed of relevance. I agree with everything FuGe said.

Gen. Jeffrey L. Harrigian, USAF (Ret.):

Yeah, I think for several of us, I can recall a few stories, so we may have jammed some of the people that we weren’t trying to jam with EW. That’s a thing and it’s become even more complex to your point and moving at speeds that we weren’t used to dealing with that we now need to sort out how to do that. I would guess that’ll be one of the things you’ll be working on out at Nellis as you try to refine the TTPs associated with that. Vice, anything you wanted to add?

Col. Charles A. Fallon:

Yes, sir. I think some of the qualities that before, let’s say two to five years ago in the F-35, the community pilots, maintainers didn’t necessarily fully embrace or understand became very, over the past year especially, especially post Epic Fury, have become very key and essential. One of those from an aircraft maintenance standpoint, contested airfields. Airfields, air bases are no longer a sanctuary. That’s a completely new thing for our joint force. Oh, by the way, that was introduced in Bamboo Eagle and trained to by every unit that was present in Epic Fury. But some of those things out of the platform, if you go to a previous life as an F-16 pilot, in between goes. First set of jets takes off, they land. That couple of hours before the next set of aircraft go up. If you go out on a fourth-gen flight line, you’re going to see hydraulic fluid, oil everywhere, people are cranking down on wrenches, making sure they got the proper torque.

If you go out there on an F-35 flight line in between goes, people are smoking a lucky. There’s nothing going on. That jet’s either broken, it might need some parts, we’ll move it out of the way, or it’s ready to go and fly again, and then it’s ready to go and fly again. That sort of thing then equates down to our Airmen who are taking care of it, the ability to quickly get to a bunker, respond to threats, or this jet’s good to go, all I need to do is throw some gas and hot weapons on it and that thing’s ready to turn in 45 minutes. Those sort of things, when we can start cutting down from hours to minutes, that really matters, and that equals people’s lives.

The other element is, I think it was very easy F-16 versus Eagle to have arguments about. It’s not that dissimilar from what’s your favorite sports car, and you could be a Corvette guy. I like Porsches, they corner better, but a Corvette’s got at flat line speed, and that was very much that argument. The F-35 is just a Tesla. Don’t discount the fact that a Tesla can still go zero to 60 in 2.6 seconds, but it’s not designed to do that. To what General Epperson was mentioning is that that sensor fusion afforded new things for the joint force it afforded new things for our force packaging, and then really what we saw is that made our air crew kind of the premier ideal person to be your airborne mission commanders based on all the situational awareness that they had.

Gen. Jeffrey L. Harrigian, USAF (Ret.):

Yeah, and I’ll say as a early Raptor guy that saw the beginnings of what fusion could bring to the broader fight from a SA perspective, an ability to battle-manage, if you will, from a particular airplane, F-35 I believe has taken it to another level from what I’ve seen, and for a myriad of reasons, but I think it’s on the shoulders of some of the young folks that have been brought up with that mindset and then leveraging the tools available to them, and then having environments for them to train and now realistically in real-world activities, leveraging those lessons to employ and showing the value of it.

I guess I do have one question for all you guys. As you’ve contested airfields, we shouldn’t be surprised, we knew it was coming, have some of those lessons coming out of the AOR from Agile Combat employment, has that been fed back in, FuGe, to some of the exercises you guys are new in doing?

Maj. Gen. David C. Epperson:

Absolutely, sir. We’re taking a look at it as we look at the evolution of Red Flag and how do we train to red flag in order to be able to operate in those contested environments. I know also 15th Air Force running Agile Flag, they are incorporating those in and making sure that as these units of action the AEW 2.0 certifies, they’re getting that experience that they need to go down range.

I mean, to Vice’s point, there were two units of action that actually left Bamboo Eagle a couple days early back in January to immediately go out the door and deploy. So we were already incorporating things in. It helped them when they were down range and we’re taking those lessons. All of the wing commanders came back and had a senior leader warfighter forum where they fed us information on how we can improve that. I actually have one of them works directly for me at AFJO. So he’s kind of advising us on things that we can do to better train our forces.

Gen. Jeffrey L. Harrigian, USAF (Ret.):

Yeah. Good. Good to hear that. Okay. Vice, over to you. Hill, the Panther Nation back there has been all in on F-35 since, like I said, 2014, 2015 timeframe. In fact, when I was at the integration office driving the team towards IOC. So tremendous amount of experience from not only the ops level, but the maintainer side, and I even say more broadly as you look at the weapon system writ large. Like I said, over the course of the last, I’ll go back to my USAFE time, the first F-35s that come over to USAFE when the Russians invaded, they were from Hill. They deployed, employed, provided lessons really I think broadly to everybody in the F-35 community.

But I think most importantly, what was happening was, and you said a little bit earlier, the maturity that was happening inside the weapon system. As you’ve taken command, you were at the weapons school, you’ve watched this, what’s the feedback, good and bad, good, bad, ugly kind of stuff, that you’ve gotten from the force relative to F-35 performance, integration into the broader fight, those types of things?

Col. Charles A. Fallon:

Right. I think the first thing that I’d start is, I mentioned it earlier, but that warrior ethos and culture, the culture of a platform. Very much so the F-35 was a potpourri of all the different other fighter MDSs that kind of fell in upon a platform, which is the arguable the best way to stand up a platform. But the problem is you can very quickly get stuck in a, everyone’s opinion matters, let’s listen to everything, let’s not be definitive about things. That lasts about as long until you start getting shot at, and then as soon as you start getting shot at the, “Hey, everyone, you have Burger King jet, choose your own adventure,” that kind of goes away.

There was some element very recently to this culture that very much is developing its own culture and very much experienced what a lot of our Strike Eagles and F-16s experienced in Desert Storm One, which, this is our cauldron, our trial by fire. So that’s one.

The other one that just struck me is taking command just after Midnight Hammer had taken place. Our wing F-35 is in demand, and that demand is only going to increase. No matter how many we make, how many we buy, it’s just going to continue to increase. And that’s a good thing, and it’s good to be a part of it, but I’m just amazed by the resilience of our Airmen and their families in particular.

Right now, for the past two years, more than half the wing has been gone at any time for the past two and a half years, and that’s not going to change anytime soon. I think the Air Force is taking some really good steps at how we, appreciate that, at how we bring our folks back, get them spun up real quick, retrained, reset as human beings, reset as family members so that they can go do the job again because they’re going to be called to do that job again.

Gen. Jeffrey L. Harrigian, USAF (Ret.):

Yeah, thanks. Let me kind of follow on to this. I think General Laidlaw brought it up, or maybe even FuGe, but the focus largely has been on the Pacific. Everybody’s spent enough for that, and rightly so. That is a threat globally we need to be concerned about. But at the same time, having spent a little time in the Middle East myself, it never seems to go away.

So my question to you in the trenches is, is your sense, as you look at the culture, but the actual, from the people to the equipment, to the training and all those things that go into what you deliver as a force, are there fundamentals that the teams learned through this last year that you think are applicable to the China fight?

Col. Charles A. Fallon:

Yeah, 100%. That’s a great question. I’m hesitant to make preseason scrimmage type of analogies, but if I were to want to prepare for something in the Pacific, I would say some of the operations over the past two years, nothing better than that. I think we can take key lessons at the tactical level on how the force package, how fourth, fifth gen, and then soon to be in the future sixth gen integration all works and how that ends up maximizing survivability, but also increasing our lethality. I do think those reps and sets, when then also tied into air bases not being a sanctuary and contested generation, are 100% those future characteristics of what a war in the Pacific would look like.

Gen. Jeffrey L. Harrigian, USAF (Ret.):

Yeah. Yeah, that’s really helpful. Hey, I can’t help myself, but for the collective team, for those of us that were part of the ISIS fight back in 2014, ’15, ’16, ’17, ’18 timeframe, this airbase defense thing, in fact, I think FuGe, you were at Spang when we started thinking about it in USAFE, this isn’t new.

So I will throw this out for the collective team to think about, but as you think to the future, what should we be planning for now that’s going to impact us of another type of asymmetric threat in the next five to 10 years that we ought to be setting the seeds in to lay the framework for another, whether it be another functional area, another skillset we believe our Airmen need to have? I think it’s important. I will fully debrief myself because I’ll never forget going to Nellis showing a slide of a ISIS drone over Al Dhafra with the potential to take out a whole bunch of tankers and AWACs. Those signs are out there and I think it’s something for us, and I think you said it, FuGe, I mean, we got to capture these lessons and actually then digest them, think about the future in a way that allows us to be forward-looking and contemplating some of those things beyond technology that’ll help us as we prepare our folks to go out the door to do that.

So to that point, General Laidlaw, as Vice talked a little bit about the force gen and how we package, are there any things going on inside of ACC that you all are looking at from a force generation perspective that the team might be interested in or you’re feeding back up into the joint staff?

Maj. Gen. Brian Laidlaw:

Yeah, absolutely. Great question. As you know, the force generation businesses, that’s right in the middle of the strike zone for what ACC does. As I was listening to Vice and thinking about how does that apply at the ACC level, one of my reflection was how quickly we can get the machine going and how quickly we can go from a standstill to deployed in the theater and fighting. That’s the combat air force, that’s the mobility air forces, that’s the logistics train. That’s all the things that have to do that, when a fight breaks out, and to your point, which I agree with, sir, we’re all looking towards the Pacific, but I think what Vice and his team and really what our Air Force demonstrated over the course of the last year is we can move very, very quickly. So when it comes to force generation, that is something that sets us and our allies apart from other nations and certainly has to have some deterrent value.

Gen. Jeffrey L. Harrigian, USAF (Ret.):

Yeah, thanks. FuGe, let me follow up a little bit with the chief’s comment on integration that he had this morning. I kind of look at what you do as the center of the universe for making that happen as you think about where the F-35 sits in the puzzle of the joint force and what we do to provide the specific capabilities from an air power perspective. How are you taking some of that and ensuring that integration is spread across the different exercise and activities, whether the way you put them together or train to even at the weapon school to generate some of those skill sets required to fully integrate into the joint force and make them better?

Maj. Gen. David C. Epperson:

Yes, sir. I think the way that I think about it, the Warfare Center provides that training ground for really enabling all of that integration, whether it is a Red Flag in the building block approach where we get to mission plan together, brief together, fly together and debrief together at those high levels and start to understand and learn from each other and what each platform’s capabilities bring to the fight. When you go to a Red Flag today, I mean, we have Marine Corps units, we have Navy units, we have US units, and we have allies and partners that participate in those Red Flags. So we’re getting that full integration.

The weapon school integration phase is also another opportunity. That one is not exclusive to the Air Force. We don’t have our allies and partners there, but we do have our joint partners. Both the Navy and the Marine Corps will come and participate in those exercises. That’s where we test them, and we make sure that they know and understand when we push them all the way to the edge, what it takes to integrate the forces together.

The other thing that I would say that we’re working on, and this is where some exciting space is, the joint synthetic environment. At Nellis, we have the JITTC-N, and there, it is a place where we can go into the synthetic environment with simulators and we have all the different platforms that we can tie together. We actually have both US and some partner nations as well as joint community and a plethora of platforms that we can go do that high-end fight, get more sets and reps to add on to what we’re getting in the exercise environment through either Red Flag and WSINT to further refine those tactics, techniques and procedures, codify them, and then get them out to the force to practice.

Gen. Jeffrey L. Harrigian, USAF (Ret.):

Yeah. Go ahead.

Maj. Gen. Brian Laidlaw:

If I could pile onto that, I couldn’t agree more. One of the things COMAC has us looking at in ACC is a more holistic approach, a more sophisticated approach to how we measure and build readiness over time. In days gone by when our air crew would go out to the range and do a training sortie, it was a suitable surrogate for what they could expect to find in conflict. In many ways, we could make it much harder on the range than what we expected them to see in conflict. Those days are gone. They don’t exist anymore. But that doesn’t mean that the flying is any less important. In fact, it’s actually more important, but what it means to us is as we holistically look at readiness, that brings it into the equation, things like modernizing our ranges to increase the threats, actually funding Red Air so that every Blue Air sortie counts. Despite best or even with all those efforts in the air, we have to layer on top of that taking advantage of technology of things like the poster child, which is JSE, the Joint Synthetic Environment, which FuGe just talked about.

Just happenstance-wise, I was at Nellis not too long ago and I happened to be there the same time as one of our CAF units that was rotating through just for a week of training. It was remarkable to me that they were saying the same things I remember saying coming out of a Red Flag. I heard these young pilots say, “Wow, that was really hard.” “Wow, my learning curve here is really steep.” “Wow, this is the best training we can get for high-end threat anywhere.” There’s value to that. So we have to layer what FuGe and his team are doing a miraculous job of making real on top of the investments that we as a MAJCOM and an Air Force need to make to make the flying training even more lethal so that the end result is a more ready force that’s ready for the fight that’s staring at us around the corner.

Gen. Jeffrey L. Harrigian, USAF (Ret.):

Yeah. Great point. Great point. Well, we got about just over two minutes left, so a couple closing comments from each of you. Vice, I’ll hand it over to you for any highlights you want to throw out for the team.

Col. Charles A. Fallon:

Right. Thanks, sir. I think the first one that I mentioned is F-35 is starting to deliver, and it has delivered for our Airmen, delivered for our Air Force, but we can’t take our foot off the gas. I think especially our warriors that are deployed, as this community continues to coalesce, it’s going to come back and it’s going to demand from all of us on stage and higher that we continue to keep our foot on the gas. Talking about fielding future weapons that are operable with the F-35, and then we need to currently bed down TR3 so that we can get to the block forward capability. Those are just imperatives that we have to do. No time to rest on our laurels and we got to continue to keep our foot on the gas.

Gen. Jeffrey L. Harrigian, USAF (Ret.):

Thanks. FuGe?

Maj. Gen. David C. Epperson:

Yes, sir. I mean, to double down on what Vice said, ultimately we got to bring the future forward. That’s what COMAC has been talking about, and that’s one of the main roles that we look at as we partner with developmental test with our operational test side and the weapons school to make sure that we are bringing that forward and putting the capability in the hands of the warfighter as soon as we possibly can.

Gen. Jeffrey L. Harrigian, USAF (Ret.):

Thanks. And Swinger?

Maj. Gen. Brian Laidlaw:

Sir, I’ll just add one thing and I’d like to just echo back for those of you who saw the Chief’s comments today. I think it really resonated with some of us. For the last 40 minutes or so we’ve debriefed, how did we do in the last year? I think by any reasonable standard, the men and women who fly and fix the fight and win with the F-35s have had a phenomenal year. It hasn’t been easy, it’s certainly not over, but by any reasonable standard, they have had a really great year.

Just like the Chief did this morning, I think it’s appropriate at times like this to reflect on who some of those people were and tell them how proud we were of what they’ve done. I’ve got the pleasure right now of sharing the stage with Vice Fallon, and I won’t go into everything he did, but Vice, on behalf of everything you did and the men and women that you led over the course of the last year or so, job well done, and brother, I am really proud of the work that you and your community did over the last 12 months.

Gen. Jeffrey L. Harrigian, USAF (Ret.):

Well, I think that’s a pretty good way to wrap it up. As somebody who spent 37 years in the Air Force, I’ll just pile on and say thanks to all you guys for your leadership and what you do and to the entire Air Force team for all you continue to do for our nation. Nobody does it better. So thank you all for your time this afternoon. We’ll see you around the block. Thank you.