Before the Window Closes: Automated Target Custody for Timely Effects

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Eliahu H. Niewood, SC.D.:

Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. When I got up here to the podium, there was a script up here, and I thought, “Oh, maybe someone figured out exactly what I’m supposed to say.” But it started with, “I am Brigadier General Josh Williams.” So I realized that wasn’t mine. I am Eliahu Niewood. I’m here today to moderate the panel Before the Window Closes: Automated Target Custody for Timely Effects. Really excited to be here today and have these panelists here. I think you have here a group of people who are pretty passionate about the topic we are going to talk about today.

And again, Before the Window Closes, really, how do we find, fix the things we are looking for? How do we understand what is out there? I don’t know how many of you got to hear all the sessions yesterday, but actually, General Niemi was participating in a session where General Schneider mentioned his biggest challenge, I’ve heard him talk about this before, command and control. And by that, he doesn’t just mean the actual what to do. But part of it is he mentioned there, how does he understand the theater he is operating in and know what is going on and know what that air picture looks like?

Same time, Secretary Meink talked about emergence of news sensors, particularly on the space side. And so, I think we both have an incredible challenge and incredible opportunity to leverage some of the technology, some of the systems, and capabilities that are here and that are coming again to get after what General Schneider talked about as such a critical problem for him, that automated target custody for timely effects. And with that, before we get into some of the questions and really go across the panel, did want to ask General Niemi just to say a couple of words about the operational problem that we are really here to address and get after. Over to you.

Lt. Gen. Christopher Niemi:

Thanks, Dr. Niewood. I am very passionate about this topic, so I appreciate all of you joining us today. I wanted to start by just sort of laying out for those of you that maybe haven’t had as much experience with long-range kill chains, why they matter so much.

So historically, when military forces have employed lethal weapons, they relied on sensors starting with eyeballs and then eventually transition to radar and IR pods and things like that in order to find a target, designate a target, and then hold that target at risk and destroy it. What long-range kill chains allow you to do for the first time is to decouple the platform that’s launching the weapon from the sensor that’s tracking the object. So, anytime that you have to have a line-of-sight sensor to the target, you’re limited by the curvature of the Earth.

So if you’re talking about an airplane shooting something on the surface, or something on the surface shooting an airplane, that’s about 250 miles, depending on the altitude. If you’re talking about two airplanes flying in the atmosphere, it’s about 400 miles. For the first time, when you have a long-range kill chain and you have the ability to maintain custody of an object with sufficient latency and uncertainty that you can pair it with a weapon, you can now shoot weapons over the curvature of the Earth.

And this is going to be the most decisive military capability, I believe, in the next 10 years of warfare, because if I can hold targets at risk from five, six, 700 miles away and they can’t physically see me because I’m behind the curvature of the Earth, that is a game-changing military capability. So this panel today is about how do we create the capabilities and what needs to be done to actually turn that idea into operational capability.

Eliahu H. Niewood, SC.D.:

Great. Thanks. That’s a great introduction to what we are really here to talk about. And I think one of the key pieces of how we are going to do that is really bringing the intelligence community and the Department of War community and their capabilities together. And so we are fortunate to have a panel today with people with experience on both of those sides.

So, as we have that need to fuse data from the IC and DOW, particularly on the sensor side, to support those tactical operations and drive sensor tasking, I guess I want to ask the panel, do you think we are doing that well today? If not, what barriers have you have seen? What challenges are you seeing?

And what steps do you think we can take to transition to more effective ways to do that, particularly from human-in-the-loop to the machine? So with that, let me start with General Povak. Again, has a chance to see some of that from some pretty interesting sides.

Maj. Gen. Christopher S. Povak:

Thanks, Eliahu. First, thanks, AFA, for having us this really important discussion. Thanks for you in attendance here today for coming out and listening to this really august panel here. My name’s Chris Povak. I work for the National Reconnaissance Office and the NRO, for those of you who aren’t familiar, is responsible for leading the nation in the design, acquisition, building, testing, and operations of our nation’s fleet of space-based intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities. So we build the satellites in orbit. We build the ground systems that control them, the processing systems, and the dissemination systems.

Now that includes engines that allow us to fuse data sets at scale. Now those data sets can come from multiple intelligence disciplines, signals intelligence, electro-optical, radar, collection systems, different parts of the government, IC and DOW, and also different modalities, space, air. So that idea of fusing data sets of a common object over time allows us to have higher confidence in an object that we might choose to exert long-range fire actions against. Now we’ve been doing this for a long time in the National Reconnaissance Office. We have engines like THRESHER, where we have thousands of customers who are using this tool all around the world.

And this THRESHER tool allows us to do just exactly what I explained, take data sets from our NRO-collected data, combine them with data from other intelligence resources, whether they’re aerial platforms or maritime platforms, merge radar tracks with signals intelligence tracks, all for that to take these thousands of independent data observations over time and create a curated track of that object. Now that’s cool. Over time is an important part of that calculation. So we’re also fielding next-generation architectures of satellites that are going from single digits to dozens and, in the future, hundreds, which allows us increased persistence.

And on our more exquisite sensors, we’re vastly increasing the throughput of data through those architectures. All that means is we’re creating a vastly more complex architecture, which means that the human curation of the tasking and then the determination of where that data needs to go when, to be effective in long-range fires, has to be automated. And we are driving now in many ways of how we can automate that. Two of those… Two examples are through activity-based intelligence strategies, meaning that we bring requirements owners, information owners, and their proper authorities together before an operation and create a series of rule sets that determines a whole bunch of different if then statements. If we see this in the environment, then do this.

For example, if we see a signal active over an area of interest, automatically tip an imaging system to take a picture of that same area. We’re also working through algorithms that allow for object-based orchestration. And what that means is allowing a user to find a priority and a set of conditions on a specific object, whether it’s the specific features of the object, the emissions coming off that object, and that object determines the prioritization of collect, and that prioritization then informs the prioritization of your constellation, meaning that you can… a user can define the priority of a specific object or area. And then an imaging collector will take a picture of that, a signals intelligence asset will collect the signals off that and string that together over time.

So we have come a long way in our ability to automate a lot of the processes involved with task and collection, processing, exploitation, dissemination. We still have some ways to go and how we scale that, bring more data resources in, improve the engines, and work with the proper authorities to ensure that we’re automating the rule sets that allows us to do all these things within the parameters of defined, and then to get the reps and sets on these architectures through exercises in partnership with the Department of the Air Force and others. General Pearson.

Eliahu H. Niewood, SC.D.:

Yeah. General Pearson, over to you, I mean because you’ve gotten to see some of that sort of firsthand, how the two communities are working together.

Lt. Gen. Max E. Pearson:

Yeah. Thanks, Dr. Niewood. I’ll echo what General Povak said. Honored to be here. Thanks to AFA. Honored to be on a panel with these amazing, amazing folks. The first answer to your question, Dr. Niewood, which many in this room know, we are today doing very much of that. We are fusing data from multiple DAF, other military services, as well as IC sensors. And we’re doing that at Air Force Intelligence Centers, IC Intelligence Centers populated by Airmen.

We’re not doing it in all of the perfect ways in all the… with all the automation and AI that we would like, but we’re certainly doing it, and we’re frankly leveraging a lot of the tools that NRO has developed and fielded, as well as C3BM and others. So there’s a good effort underway, a good base. You asked about automation and what we’re doing to get after it. Very much concur with General Povak.

We need automation to move us forward as we add just remarkable amounts of sensors to the battlespace. And so, within the DAF, we have started a series of experiments called Project Ringleader. And in this series of experiments, we are taking different systems, bringing them together, connecting them to sensors to see how well automation can work. And we’re focused on three core technologies as a part of Ringleader.

We’re focused on automated target recognition and track fusion, as well as predictive sensor queuing and stringing those three together. So we’re working hard on Ringleader, and I’ll just put a real quick pitch in. We have time dedicated this afternoon at 13:00 in Chesapeake Six to talk with our industry partners about Ringleader because we certainly believe experimentation on automation is key to our future.

Eliahu H. Niewood, SC.D.:

Great. Let me follow up a little bit on that orchestration piece that you talked about. In particular, I think as we talk about the air side of this problem, General Povak, you talked about the mass and the amount of data, but there’s a timeliness and a latency again, I think that particularly when we get to that air side, becomes important. We talk about timely effects.

I think we’re really talking about getting down to seconds or less. How do those traditional relationships, authorities, how does all that have to change as we get to bringing national and tactical data really dynamically orchestrate that? And General Niemi, I know you’ve thought a lot about that problem. Can you talk a little bit about what you see as some of the challenges and next steps there?

Lt. Gen. Christopher Niemi:

Right. From an operator perspective, I think it’s important to sort of take a step back and understand what are we trying to accomplish at sort of a basic level. So JADC2 has been around for many years. And to be candid, in some of the early years, I’m talking 5, 6, 7 years ago, there was a lot more, what I would say, kind of PowerPoint deep work and not like the really deep analysis.

So what are we actually trying to do? What we’re trying to do is produce dynamic tracks on a map, both blue and red, with the sufficient fidelity so that I can battle-manage. I can figure out where my blue forces are optimally positioned to maneuver, to mitigate risk, to prosecute opportunities, but then also queue long range fires.

Those are the two tasks that we need to do, and you cannot do that if you don’t have dynamic tracks for the most important objects, both blue and red. If we are able to do that, I believe we will have fulfilled the vision of JADC2 that we’ve been talking about for a while, but has taken us longer than we would like.

Eliahu H. Niewood, SC.D.:

Okay. General Povak, and I think you’ve gotten to see some of that sort of firsthand, how that’s matured and come together. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Maj. Gen. Christopher S. Povak:

Yeah, sure. So, in the past, the NRO, in partnership with other elements across the IC and the Department of War have been managing really small numbers of satellite constellations. And each one of those individual satellites is pretty exquisite. And to manage how you task that satellite, we had a small team of experts that are a combination of engineers and functional manager authorities for SIGINT, for NSA, and for GEO and NGA.

And for every step of the process, from an intelligent need that’s defined by an analyst somewhere in the enterprise or someone on the AOC floor or at a DGS, that analyst or operator has to think through and decompose what’s the elements of their question that they’re trying to ask, what’s the signals a portion of it, and then get it up through NSA to get approval to task and likewise through NGA, the GEOINT…

And the functional manager authority is inherently important. We just have to rethink how we’re allowing our agencies to do that authority in a more timely and more automated fashion. So an information need would lead to what a collection requirement would lead to a task, which would lead for a 24-hour schedule of every single one of those satellites independently, which would be executed, processed, disseminated. And that process, although we’ve made a whole heck of a lot of improvements in the timeliness and integration of that, still takes time.

And to General Niemi’s point is that we need to ensure that there is a few barriers between who is responsible for tracking and prosecuting a target to who is responsible for authorizing collection to feed that target solution. I think there are ways that we can leverage automation to do predefined parameters and limits of how and when we collect, and then let the machines, at machine speed, execute those rule sets. And I think that’s where the community really needs to go to and working through the leadership of Under Secretary of War (I&S), there is a lot of progresses being made in bringing the defense agencies together to do just that.

Eliahu H. Niewood, SC.D.:

Yeah. I think in the NRO you have made more progress towards that maybe than across the rest of DOW, and because you’ve been faced with some of these challenges, almost forced to, but I think things are changing, right. We will be managing large constellations. Cannot do that maybe in the ways we have been used to in the past.

Maj. Gen. Christopher S. Povak:

Yeah, Dr. Niewood, it is… but it is definitely a partnership between the NRO, the DAF, other services, and the defense agencies. And we are now all committed to working together on how we do this at a more relevant scale to the problems that the General Niemi outlined.

Eliahu H. Niewood, SC.D.:

General Pearson, do you want to add something to that?

Lt. Gen. Max E. Pearson:

Yeah, Dr. Niewood, can I just add one thing, fully concur with General Povak’s comments and perspective. I think, how I would describe this for years within the collection management world, we worked to be as efficient as possible with the sensors. We made plans to get every possible sensing operation out of the sensors because we had a scarcity.

We didn’t have enough sensors to satisfy all the requirements. The pessimist in me believe, realist in me believes that collection managers will generate enough requirements so that we’ll never have enough sensors for them to obscure… to absurdity. But I think in many ways we have to transition from a paradigm of focusing on efficiency with use of our sensors to accepting that we can be inefficient at times, where we have a lot of sensor capacity in order to be effective.

And if I think if we are going to use these sensors to be very tactically relevant, I think we’re going to have to make some of those shifts. And so we talk about that, and I think it’s a great position to be in, where we have sensing capacity to be able to focus on effectiveness at the cost of efficiency.

Eliahu H. Niewood, SC.D.:

Yeah. General Niemi mentioned JADC2, and we’ve been talking about in general target custody and the picture. But it is somewhat different when we talk about the air domain, when we talk about the space domain, when we talk about the maritime domain.

General Hague, if I could start with you, can you talk a little bit about handing off across those different domains what some of the differences between the domains are? How do we both account for those differences while, at the same time, learning from one to the other? What are some of those differences? How do we ensure resilient handoffs between them and across them?

Brig. Gen Nick Hague:

Yeah. Sure, sir. I think it’s important to understand that the space-based sensor network that we’re trying to field is a complementary sensor to the sensors that are already out there. So it is a multi-domain effort to be able to track our targets with some sense of custody. And so we provide from space you get that with these pLEO constellations that we’re fielding.

I get the resilience that I need to go after, so it’s not just a few things that the enemy can target, but I also get the persistence that’s necessary globally in order to start to look at patterns of life, to be able to get to the point where General Pearson’s talking about where I can have surety of tasking to collect on a target in a relevant timeframe. And when we’re talking relevant timeframes, latency on the order of seconds is all I can tolerate.

And so we’ve got to figure out how to run the system faster. So how do you do that? It’s a lot of machine-to-machine. It’s a lot of automation, but I’ll highlight something that we really haven’t talked about, which is the people part of this. And so how is the Space Force organizing to make this happen? We’ve stood up the 77th Surveillance Squadron.

That is our first-generation squadron that is going to produce the combat squadron that’s going to maintain the oversight of this space-based constellation of sensors that are doing the MTI mission. That’s the constellation health. In order to do that seamless transition, it’s not people making that seamless transition happening. It’s people overseeing that seamless transition. And the key aspect of that is making sure that we’re actually integrated into the joint force.

And so, that surveillance squadron is also providing regional elements that are going to be side by side with airmen and sailors and Marines and soldiers, able to make sure that they’re being efficient in their tasking of the system, because ultimately what it boils down to is battle management. The sensors underpin and provide that foundation of information so that we can engage those targets. But it’s the joint force doing the battle management that’s actually moving on that information.

Eliahu H. Niewood, SC.D.:

Great. General Pearson, anything you wanted to add to that, particularly things you’ve seen from Ringleaders so far? As you look at ringleader for other domains, how does that come together?

Lt. Gen. Max E. Pearson:

Yeah, sir. I think there are things that there’s definite differences across the domains. There’s the number of dimensions and the speed of target moves and the volume of target density, clutter density and the technology that we use to try to filter through that from a sensing perspective and processing. But very much agree with General Hague.

What is constant across the domains is the need to leverage sensors we control and sensors we influence. So there, I’m talking about DOW sensors that we control, IC sensors that we influence, the need to fuse that, and the need to clearly communicate across the different domains. I think we have experience doing that in looking at aircraft and moving from the ground to the air domain, but we certainly have got a ways to go as we move forward.

Eliahu H. Niewood, SC.D.:

Yeah. I think it’s interesting, General Hague. I think on the space domain awareness side, you’ve long confronted the fact that what I would say is global access does not mean global coverage, right. You can see almost anything. It doesn’t mean you can see everything all the time.

I think on the air domain side, we are somewhat coming to grips with that. We’re excited about the fact that we will have global access, but it does not mean we have global coverage. That puts pressure really to understand how you effectively use those resources that are now becoming available to you.

Brig. Gen Nick Hague:

Yeah. Absolutely. And I think we’re learning lessons as we go. So we talked about Ringleader. We are leveraging the nascent capabilities of fractions of full constellations that we currently have on orbit now in order to fully understand what you just described, which is how do we do this?

We’re leaning far forward. We don’t have an operational capability yet, but we’re already trying to figure out how do we leverage that capability and really understand what are the limitations? It is not all seeing, all knowing. So how do we leverage that as part of the sensor architecture in order to ensure that the joint force gets what it needs?

Eliahu H. Niewood, SC.D.:

Yeah. In this vein of, I think it’s a different model than what we maybe are used to in the past, how we do command and control, how we couple battle management to command and control, right. We have a sort of component-centric construct for BMC2 today.

General Niemi, you talked about long-range kill chains. We’ve talked about some of the differences here. Does that model work with these emerging sensor capabilities? What is going to limit us there? What might new models look like? If you could start and talk a little bit about that.

Lt. Gen. Christopher Niemi:

I think one of the reasons it’s been so difficult for us to make progress in this area is because we are very platform-centric and we’re very service-centric in our approach to solving problems. And this is an inherently cross-platform network problem, and it’s an inherently cross-domain opportunity. And because of that, we’re just not built that way.

So I’ll give you an example. One of the things that you need to do if you’re going to make long-range kill chains work is you have to be able to connect all the platforms and all the weapons to beyond-line-of-sight information. If I go and I talk to the program manager that’s responsible for the F-22, a beyond-line-of-sight radio may not stack very high in their priority list because they’re looking specifically at the F-22 and what that can do as a standalone platform. And so part of our challenge is to get people to see what the opportunity is if we look beyond that.

And that’s, in fact, one of the roles that the organization I lead is sort of leaning into is what are those gaps and seams that make up the network that are vital to realize this vision, but won’t happen sort of from the ground up at the grassroots level because, individually in each one of the platforms, it doesn’t get above the cut line when you have finite resources. And so, bringing them together and the recognition that the network and the connections are more important than any specific platform, any specific weapon, I think, is a key aspect of realizing this capability.

Eliahu H. Niewood, SC.D.:

General Pearson, from an A2 perspective, I mean, you also… your organization’s played a key role in some of that. How do you see that evolving as we move into the future?

Lt. Gen. Max E. Pearson:

I think I’ll simply say that as we talk about resources that are globally capable, if our approach to using those involves imposing geographic boundaries associated with organizations that we risk sub-optimizing the capability of the sensor. If anything worries me about the growth of space-based sensing, it’s how we will… It’s not the technology. It’s what we will do with it.

And I’m really convinced that we need automation and AI to help us guide how we use those globally capable sensors, which I recognize can’t collect everywhere on the globe at all times. But I think we’re going to need AI to help us optimize that because if it is left to our devices, I think we risk sub-optimizing based off of parochialism, disagreements, miscommunication, errors of omission, et cetera.

Eliahu H. Niewood, SC.D.:

Yeah. Go ahead.

Lt. Gen. Christopher Niemi:

Yeah. I think this is an area where we’re a little bit of a victim of our own past experience and success. And so our processes are built to manage a finite resource like a U-2. So the PACOM commander says, “I need a U-2 because that allows me to see some things, and I want you to chop that asset to me so I can do what I want with it.”

I think what General Pearson’s alluding to, if we take that same approach as we have these global sensors with growing power and we try and chop them up and divide them so everyone gets their little slice of the pie, everyone will get a far sub-optimized solution delivered to them, but that is exactly the path we’re likely to go down because that’s how we have previously divided these resources in the past.

Eliahu H. Niewood, SC.D.:

Who else you want to add? Okay. Again, General Hague, something you’ve mentioned sort of brought it home to me. Again, I would say, on the space side, we have long separated space domain awareness from command and control of effects and other things. How do you see generating target custody, common tactical picture, versus doing battle management, orchestration of fires and effects? Bring those together? Separate them? Is there a model that works? What are pros and cons of those different models?

Brig. Gen Nick Hague:

Yeah, so to kind of sum it up, they must be tightly coupled, but they still need to be functionally distinct. The Space Force is not organizing to provide battle management to the joint force on the ground. We’re posturing to provide the systems and the capabilities that they can depend on in order to maintain the track custody, to get the surety of tasking, to be able to perform their battle management functions.

And that’s where I alluded to before. The way we do force presentation is important. And so the notion from day one that it’s important for Guardians to be sitting next to the rest of the joint force in order to make sure that we’re integrating appropriately. I think the previous question about the geographical boundaries, we have to understand that I may have a global sensor network.

The actions that are taken to fulfill a request on one side of the globe could have an impact on the ability to do actions on another side of the globe. And so we’re connected as a globe. And so a key aspect of what Guardians are going to need to be able to do is communicate those constraints and those limitations to combatant commanders and their staff so that they understand what they have to work with.

Eliahu H. Niewood, SC.D.:

Yeah. General Niemi, if you…

Lt. Gen. Christopher Niemi:

This is an area where, again, if we’re not careful, we’re going to go down the path where we’ve been in the past. So I think the E-3 is a good example of that. The E-3 had both the radar to sense and it had the individuals that use that information to battle-manage as part of a crew of about 22 people that flew on it. I think an essential step toward making progress in this area is to separate the function of building this common picture that we all need to do the battle management and the long-range targeting from the people that are actually using that for the warfighting function.

And that’s not our history. We’ve fused them in the Air Force in the past, and so we’re likely to go down that path, but that’s going to be problematic for a number of reasons. One is because the sensors are inherently global, and so the people that are putting together the picture need to balance those needs with a bunch of different stakeholders that are all around the world. They’re going to be competing.

But the other thing is there’s a political reality with it where, for good reason, the COCOMs and their components are very jealous of other people outside of their commands making warfighting decisions because that is their responsibility. And so if we divide that, that unlocks the potential where now we can deliver this common picture to the warfighter so they can use it however they want, and we can distribute it widely, but we have someone separate and distinct from that warfighter that’s actually producing that key tool that they need to do that job.

Eliahu H. Niewood, SC.D.:

General Povak.

Maj. Gen. Christopher S. Povak:

Yeah, I totally agree with General Niemi. But I guess the way I would look at it is that at any combat and command, any service component, there is going to be a responsibility and authority to take action to maintain custody of a series of targets that are assigned to them, and the authorization to maintain custody and when directed to engage. That element needs to have the best understanding of the environment as exists today.

What is the best understanding of that area of responsibility based on the collection that we have from airborne sensors, maritime sensors, ground-based sensors, overhead sensors? That common operation picture is critical, understanding where red and blue are. Then that same authority needs to be able to put some demand on the system if there are gaps in their knowledge.

That is critical to get to the collection systems that either the National Reconnaissance Office and the IC or the Space Force are managing. And then they need to have the confidence that their request for additional information is going to be met. So there needs to be traceability from request to where the status is, to the delivery of the product that they asked for. And the systems that we have today, although they may be severable, need the traceability and the linkage between them.

Eliahu H. Niewood, SC.D.:

Yeah. General Pearson, did you want…

Lt. Gen. Max E. Pearson:

I think, Dr. Niewood, your question, you talked about sensors and capabilities serving multiple functions, serving an intel function, serving a U2… a C2 function. I think as we mature automation in our sensor orchestration and custody maintenance, we are going to finish with a capability that needs the same capability, will serve multiple functions.

It will be on a quiet day in a theater, helping us do broad area surveillance and broad target custody across the theater. Things that are often done by J2C shops that combatant commands. When the day gets hotter, those same capabilities will serve fires and C2. And as General Niemi pointed out, that’s not how we’ve always operated in the past. Technology is not what worries me.

Eliahu H. Niewood, SC.D.:

Yeah.

Lt. Gen. Max E. Pearson:

It’s us.

Eliahu H. Niewood, SC.D.:

Yeah. We brought together a bunch of 40, 50 people, I’ll say, at the AO level to discuss how are we going to work through some of these things. And they didn’t want me there for most of the time because they wanted to be able to do real work. But I came at the beginning and said, “We have a bunch of ABMers here. We have a bunch of folks from the IC here.”

I said, “We need you all to bring your knowledge and leave your biases at the door,” which is a hard thing to do, right. We want people who have been immersed in this and understand the problems, but we want them to be able to think outside the box a little bit. How do they apply that knowledge to this problem set in a different way? And I was actually very encouraged at what they were able to do, encouraged and impressed by it, but I think it is a hard problem.

I wanted to come… switch gears a little bit, although really I think one way I believe we can work through all of these challenges that you all have described so well is through experimentation, through working, not just the material pieces, but all of the DOTMLPF that is involved. We frequently have exercises. We have test campaigns, but General Povak, as you started to allude to, we are going to have massive amounts of highly integrated networks across all of these domains and disciplines to get after this problem.

We don’t have those yet today at the scale that we want, and yet we want to be able to understand how we’re going to use them when they show up. Do our current organizations, the architectures, the test capabilities, the experimentation environments, are they what we need to get after this? Are we doing that at the scale and the density we would see? And what else do we need to be successful there? If you could start.

Maj. Gen. Christopher S. Povak:

Kind of.

Eliahu H. Niewood, SC.D.:

Uh-huh.

Maj. Gen. Christopher S. Povak:

No. So I think we’re on a good path, but we still have some work to do. So, Eliahu, to address your previous point, I left my biases in the green room, but let me talk a little bit about the NRO.

Eliahu H. Niewood, SC.D.:

That’s the knowledge piece.

Maj. Gen. Christopher S. Povak:

Yeah.

Eliahu H. Niewood, SC.D.:

Yeah, yeah.

Maj. Gen. Christopher S. Povak:

So there are a couple of things that we’re doing to help out with that experimentation. One is that, as we’re developing and building and fielding next-generation capabilities, we often start with advanced academic or acquisition practices to try and get to speed of delivery.

Part of that is using prototype or Pathfinder systems. Many of you out in the audience have heard Dr. Meink and others talk about… Secretary Meink and others talk about the HCF constellation, high capacity, find, fix, target, track, engage assess architecture. It’s a terrible acronym. I admit that. But it is the proliferated architecture of next-generation radar and electro-optical sensors that are helping us get after that persistence of collect.

Before we even embarked on that, we had a series of Pathfinder systems that not only we fielded to test out the technology, we also integrated with the services and the combatant commands to test out the TTPs and the CONOPS of how we use these different proliferated systems in a different way. More authority and opportunities for the combatant command is the warfighting community to task directly.

Okay, so that’s one area is in speed to deliver through prototype systems. We’re also leveraging exercises, deliberate exercises like Ringleader and also like something called Project Hard Deck. I know this is a Air Force forum, but the Navy is also really interested in long-range fires, and the NRO, working with the Department of Navy had gone through a series of exercises.

They’re leveraging fleets underway to test out the different processes of how we task our systems, how the fleets use overhead capabilities and other sensors to do things like maritime domain awareness, indications and warning, and long-range fights… fire support.

So, testing in real-world situations with real-world capabilities. We’re also participating with the Department of Air Force and things like exercise like Bamboo Eagle, and combatant commands like INDOPACOM and PAC FURY, on testing end-to-end architectures in real-world environments. So it’s not just at the sensor level. It’s at the entire architecture level.

And then lastly, the NRO deploys people… our personnel, our technical experts, out to the combatant commands, to the service components, and to the intelligence agencies so that we can, one, talk about the current capabilities and limitations of our systems, what’s coming down in the next 10 to 12 months, and then work with the community to tune our systems to meet their real-world needs and then provide feedback to our developers to incorporate next-generation enhancements in near real time to our systems.

So all that to say that there’s a lot of things that we’re doing, but we really need more dedicated time for test and exercise of real-world systems to get after the scale of what these gentlemen have talked to moving forward.

Eliahu H. Niewood, SC.D.:

General Hague, if you could comment a little bit? You bring your operational viewpoint. You also need to continue that operations and the experimentation, bring all of that together.

Brig. Gen Nick Hague:

Yeah. There’s a natural friction there. We want the capabilities as quick as we can into the field. The 80% solution is going to be good enough is something you hear continually, but we have to have confidence in that capability, and the way we do that is through test and experimentation. And so I know we’ve only got a couple of minutes left.

The thing I would add on top of General Povak’s comments is that I think we’ve been alluding to it and not directly talking about it, but the need for rapid innovation. We don’t know the answer today, but we know that we need to get out there and test and learn and go through discovery, and figure out how to get to the solution that we need. In the Space Force, that unit of action is an integrated test force. So that is a fusion of acquisitions, operations, and test expertise in one organization aligned to a PAE.

In this case, it’d be the SBST PAE. They provide the access to the operational expertise to be able to, from day one, look at how are we going to apply this capability. What’s the level of confidence I need? And then say, “Okay, this increment of capability is good enough. Let’s get it to the field.” That’s how we’re trying to go at speed because we’re going to have to continually test and evolve our capability.

Eliahu H. Niewood, SC.D.:

Yeah. Do you want to add?

Lt. Gen. Christopher Niemi:

Yeah. I think when you look at the panel today, you have people from the IC, you have people representing operations, you have people from the Space Force, you have people from the Air Force. And when we go out to General Povak’s point, and we test this stuff, that’s hard to do because, for example, it was a big deal when I was a captain to go out to Nellis Air Force Base and fly in red flag and get a chance to work with an AWACS or work with different aircraft that I didn’t fly with when I was at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base because it’s hard to set that up together and that’s just within the Air Force.

And now you’re talking about setting up some kind of an exercise, whether it’s Bamboo Eagle or otherwise, where you’ve got a satellite tracking an object, maybe being fed by additional information from an exquisite cyber effect against a real-time adversary, maybe one of the aggressors that’s flying out of Nellis Air Force Base in one of the funny colored MiGs, and you’re practicing how you’re going to use that information to warfight.

It is really hard to put that together day to day when we’ve all got day jobs, and we’re doing other stuff. But if this capability is as important as we think it is, we have to find ways to do that and preserve that space. Because if we don’t go and practice these things and use the real-world sensors and use the real-world networks and do it in the context of a thinking adversary where things are happening that are nasty surprises and we have to grapple with it, we will not be prepared to do that in times of conflict.

Eliahu H. Niewood, SC.D.:

Yeah. Let me just wrap up, turning back to all of you. Sort of started with, we both have a really hard challenge here, and I think we have an incredible opportunity. We have a great mix of folks here on the panel, but I look out here at AFA, we have industry, we have the operators, we have the acquirers, we have the technologists.

We have that great mix. We need all of you to really come together to get after the challenges the panel has done such a great job of laying out, as well as start down the paths you all have helped lay out for us. So thanks, everyone, for joining us here today, and thanks again to the panel for great discussion.