Stress-Testing Assumptions: Building Resilience for the Future Fight

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Mike Stefanelli:

All right. Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to today’s “Stress-Testing Assumptions: Building Resilience for the Future Fight” panel. So I think we all recognize that every military plan is built on assumptions. We assume communications will be available. We assume logistics will reach the fight. We assume access to data, coalition support, industrial capacity, decision advantage, I could go on. However, we also know history tells us that many of those assumptions won’t survive first contact. Rather than asking whether we can perfectly predict and plan for the next conflict, today’s conversation asks a more enduring question that we’re going to explore, how do we build a joint force that continues to fight effectively when the assumptions behind today’s plans begin to fail? We know that resilience is more than just redundancy. It’s the ability to adapt, to continue making sound decisions, sustain operations, and accomplish the mission when conditions are uncertain, contested, or even just constantly changing. Building that resilience requires operational experience, digital innovation, long-term strategic thinking, and the lessons of a force tested by experience. And we’re fortunate today to have panelists that bring each of those perspectives to the discussion.

So without further ado, let me introduce each of our panelists that are joining us today. First to my left is General Steven Nordhaus, who serves as the chief of the National Guard Bureau and a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He brings the perspective of a force whose resilience is tested by real crises at home and not just tabletop exercises. To his left is Major General Sean Choquette, who serves as the vice director for operations J3 on the joint staff. He brings the operational perspective of how the joint forces fight, adapt, and sustain missions in contested environments. To his left is Ms. Susan Davenport, who serves as the Department of the Air Force Chief’s Data and Artificial Intelligence Officer. She brings the perspective on how data and AI can strengthen decision making when conditions are uncertain. And last but not least, we have Mr. Mark Gunzinger. He is the director of future concepts and capability assessments at AFA. He’s also the former deputy assistant secretary of defense for force transformation and resources. And he brings the perspective on designing a force that is resilient across a range of future conflicts. And then I’m Mike Stefanelli, partner at McKinsey & Company, and I’ll be your moderator for today’s discussion.

So thank you all for joining us today. Why don’t we dive in? All right, so I’d first like to discuss assumptions. And maybe General Nordhaus, I’ll start with you on this one. Every generation prepares for the next conflict based on in part the last one. What’s one assumption about future warfare that you believe the department should pay especially close attention to?

Gen. Steven S. Nordhaus:

Thanks, Mike. And welcome to my teammates as well, Sean, Susan, and Mark. And to all the Airmen and defense industrial base folks here today, it’s just great to get together. As we think about assumptions, the national defense strategy talks about number one, homeland defense is the number one priority, how we deter China through strength, how we build partnerships, and then also defense industrial base supercharging that. And so as we look at assumptions, we have to assume that the next war is not going to be like what we’ve seen before. And today you can watch different things happening on in the globe and the speed and pace that things are moving at. So as we all saw Secretary Meink talk about how we need to find cost-effective combat power, we look at different capabilities across the force. And so just real quick on the National Guard, we’re 435,000 strong.

And so when you think about 330,000 in the Army National Guard and 106,000 in the Air National Guard, we have to integrate not only across the National Guard, but now down to local partnerships where we have 2,500 communities across the 50 states, three territories in the District of Colombia. And then how do you connect that all together with a joint force? You have to do that through a common operating picture, you have to do that through tools that we’ll talk about today. And then you have to be able to do all-domain awareness, you have to be able to do C2 in the common operating picture, and then you have to have decision superiority. And how do we do that with the tools that are rapidly growing that we have today? And then you have to take decisions that you’re going to either affect, whether it’s a kinetic effect or a non-kinetic effector, to be able to get after the threats at our time and choosing and not someone else’s.

So we can’t assume the previous things are going to happen, but we have to take those warfare things that we see on TV that we’re understanding as we’re doing Operation Epic Fury, we’re following what’s going on in Ukraine, we’re taking those lessons learned and making sure that we’re across the joint force being integrated for the next fight.

Mike Stefanelli:

Great.

Maj. Gen. Sean M. Choquette:

Mike, if I could jump on, thanks. And thanks for having us here today. Again, to my fellow panelists and to the team, after 15 months on the joint staff, I have become entirely purple. So to now sit in a sea of blue around Airmen and Guardians is a rare treat for me. So excited to do that. I would look specifically at one assumption that I think that we’ve made that is going to be questioned, and that is our ability to have time and sanctuary and security as we build up to or as we start to execute combat operations. I think the sanctity of the homeland is something that’s going to be questioned and contested as we look at events around the world. I think when you look at the multi-domain aspects of the fact that access to cyberspace is ubiquitous, and the cost of entry there is very, very low. The cost of entry to space is even getting lower, and the capability of our adversaries with long-range weapon systems, and really innovative long-range weapons systems that we’re seeing now with drone warfare and others, they have a capability to reach out and touch us from the minute that we leave the gate. So I think we need to think about that.

And the other aspect of that is not just at home, but also forward. We still work very often from what I would call giant stationary battleships on the earth, bases that have been there for a long time, that the enemy has menstruated coordinates on and knows that we’re there. And we need to start thinking about being more mobile and more expeditionary. And expeditionary is a word that we throw around and we’re working towards that, but we’ve still got a lot of work to do to make ourselves a harder target to put doubt in the enemy’s mind on the battlefield as we move around.

Susan Davenport:

Yeah. So Mike, thanks again for the. I know everybody’s thanked you already, and thank you to the panel and all the Airmen and Guardians that are out here today to listen to us. But one of the things that I would challenge is our ability to be connected. So in a continuing data and AI-focused force, we need to make sure that we are able to operate through anything that comes our way. And so I would challenge the fact that we will be connected. And so I think what we need to focus on is capability and data at the edge. We need to focus on creating capability and creating our new systems to be resilient and to be able to operate through any kind of degraded ops. And we also need decision authority at the place of action, we need Airmen and Guardians that are able to make decisions. We talk about decision authority. We need to be able to place that decision authority where it needs to be in case we’re not connected to the larger enterprise.

Mark Gunzinger:

So I’ll tell you one thing an adversary might exploit is the fact that we’re sizing and shaping our forces for a single major conflict with a peer adversary. I remember the Bottom-Up Review in 1993. Yes, I was in it, and all the subsequent QDRs, it set a template for sizing and shaping our forces that failed to anticipate 9/11, it failed to anticipate the rise in China. And in 2018, our national defense strategy adopted a force-sizing construct to size and shape a military for a single conflict and defend the US homeland and deter nuclear threats. And the fact of the matter is an adversary could take advantage of the fact that we now have too small a military to conduct an act of opportunistic aggression in a second theater. And that’s why I’ve been recommending for years now, return to a two-war force-sizing construct to be able to deter opportunistic aggression.

Mike Stefanelli:

Great. Thank you, Mark. So I think we talked about a lot of assumptions in a few different domains and topic areas. Maybe let’s focus a little bit more on how do we think about building the right resilient force and moving forward here? So maybe, Major General Choquette, I’ll start with you. From a commander’s perspective, what’s the difference between a force that is optimized and one that is resilient?

Maj. Gen. Sean M. Choquette:

I think first I’ll start with, I don’t think those things have to be in opposition to each other, but I’ll come back to that. I think when you talk about an optimized force, a lot of things have to come together, and an optimized force is a force that meets the needs that you have based on what are a lot of assumptions that you create as you build them out. And what I mean by that is we look at creating a force where we utilize our force design and our force generation model to create the force that we think will best deter or defeat our adversaries based on really exquisite intel and the information that we have, we try to align that with our national defense strategy. And to your point, Mark, the force presentation that the national command authority decides is appropriate, we optimize to that, and we organize, train, and equip so that across the joint team we have sensors and shooters that connect, that put effects on target in the best sequence and order, and quite frankly to optimize the amount of money that we are spending as a nation to do that.

I would offer that a resilient force is a force that when all those assumptions fall through and all those things that we think we knew about the adversary and we knew about our weapon systems don’t happen, that’s when you have a resilient force, if you’re able to react to those things and still be effective on the field of battle. I think there are a few ways that we can be that resilient force or there’s a few different methodologies that you can use. Number one is technology, and I know that our forces are working that now. And by that I mean multi-use systems, a lot of unmanned and autonomous-type systems that we’ve got now that are multi-role where we can hang different sensors and shooters and systems off of them. I think another piece of that is just the mindset and the human beings and the warriors that we have out there being resilient, and in the words of my boss, the chairman, thinking like an entrepreneur, actually coming up with innovative ideas to get after the enemy once we have lost the advantage on the battlefield, that’s really, really important.

And then the other way is just simply mass, having redundancy, having multiples of things on the battlefield so that when we lose some, we have some behind that that we can utilize. I think all three of those things are things that we need to do. Where I would join resilient force and optimized forces, I think we actually have to optimize for resiliency in the modern battlefield. We’ve got to create a force that is able to react because the only thing that we know is we usually don’t get it exactly right when we’re trying to figure out what the adversary is that we’re up against and how to meet our objectives. So we’ve got to create a resilient force, which probably means a little bit of extra investment as well.

Mike Stefanelli:

Yeah. And it’s a cross-cutting number of things and I think it’s a clear cultural tie-through too and being able to focus on each of those pieces of what you laid out. An important piece of that is the technology that underlies it. So maybe Susan, I’ll turn to you here. We all know that AI can promise faster, better-informed decisions. How do we ensure that those systems remain trustworthy when data or communication is degraded, delayed, incomplete, or even intentionally manipulated?

Susan Davenport:

Yeah, thank you for that question. So I would say that trustworthy AI doesn’t necessarily mean that the AI is always right or the outcome that it provides to you is always right. I would say that trustworthy AI means we know why and when to trust the outcome and the system itself knows the bounds of its own limitation. And in order to have trustworthy AI, we need data providence. We need to know where the data came from, who touched it, is it still fit for the purpose at hand? And we also need the system itself to alert the user when that data doesn’t show up like it thinks it should. So if we have data providence and the people who produce that data have put that SLA into the system, and when that system recognizes that that data doesn’t look like it’s supposed to, then the user is alerted. We also need the user to be able to get confidence from that, whatever that product is. So if the AI is producing them some sort of decision or some sort of product, that they are able to be alerted and notice when that is degraded.

So I think trustworthy AI really means that the user gets a product from it and it understands the confidence from that tool. We also need the ability to be able to evaluate those AI systems. So as we are in degraded operations, as we’re building these capabilities to operate through some sort of data issue, that we have test and evaluated for those types of scenarios. And I think that’s really an operational or an organizational opportunity that we can get right. And I think the test and evaluation folks in the Department of the Air Force, I think the data folks in the Department of the Air Force, and then of course the user will all be working together to figure out how to do the test and evaluation piece of this because again, Chris Wilcox and Major Brad Worley of SAF T&E, they’re working on this problem set right now, so how do we test and evaluate those systems so that when the data is degraded or it’s not what we expected to show up, that the user understands how to make sure that they’re taking the recommendation appropriately.

Mike Stefanelli:

You just mentioned a few really important things, understanding some of these challenges when we’re building these systems, users understanding how to actually use it and how to interpret the data. Across all those, what part is harder? Is the technology part harder as you build those? Or is it the organizational side of the OT that you’re talking about?

Susan Davenport:

Right. So it’s exactly what I just said. So the technology to do exactly what I said already exists. We already know how to do that. It’s really to be able to do that at speed and scale that we need, who is responsible for making sure organizationally that that happens, that that AI is tested in a degraded operation or before it goes into operations. So it’s really an organizational opportunity that we are right now planning to get right.

Mike Stefanelli:

All right. General Nordhaus, I’d love to turn back to you. The guard is usually the first force called when assumptions fail at home. A hurricane takes down communications, a cyber attack hits state grid, a wildfire outpaces plan. What has that experience taught the guard about resilience where there may be learnings for the rest of the joint force?

Gen. Steven S. Nordhaus:

Hey, thanks Mike. And great answers here by Sean and Susan, as we talk about the homeland’s not a sanctuary and we think about resiliency and data, that we have to have, I say a lot of ease in our pace plans to be able to move data back and forth. And if somebody takes something away, quickly we can get the data that we need and it’s almost like you don’t even know that you’re missing it. As you talk about resiliency in the homeland, last night, 10 o’clock, I get a phone call, and it’s a wildfire down in Arkansas. And so right away, immediately I’m talking to the TAG, we’re talking with the department, we’re talking with interagency, I’m talking with General Guillot and jumping on that thing to make sure that we can put out the fire and minimize that.

And so what we’ve learned over the years from Hurricane Katrina and on is multiple things. And I like to say two Ts. And so we need our people to be trained, because if they’re trained for the war fight and they’re trained for response, they’re trained for anything. And then it’s trust and partnerships. That’s the second T. You have to have trust, because when you have trust, you can move at the speed of relevance and you can’t surge it. And so when we look at from local communities, being able to what they can do in response, and knowing that you have an army guard or an air guard or another active component that has those relationships when something breaks out, even at the local level, then state and then the federal level, you can be able to respond with the right amount of people in the right place at the right location so you’re not losing readiness, but you’re also getting the fire put out or the situation resolved as quickly as you can.

And then I call it the three Cs, which is C2. You have to have the right C2. It’s got to be simple, it’s got to be all the way down to the lowest level, and it’s got to be clean. So from the local, state, and federal level, we use the dual-status commander. General Guillot helps train our dual-status commanders across all the 54, but then you have that right C2. The second C there is really the common operating picture. And if you have eight of them, that’s really not common. And so General Guillot, I call him Gui, he calls me Spock. He goes, “Hey, if we have five of these things, we’re not all seeing the same picture, but as we’re moving into the future, we’re seeing that we’re going to be all on one common operating picture.”

And then the last thing, like Susan talked about, is the comms. And we have to be able to work from all classifications, really from subsea all the way to space, making sure that we can have that common operating picture. We can communicate who’s doing what to who at the right time so that we have the right forces in the right location, trained and ready to go, and they’re resilient.

Maj. Gen. Sean M. Choquette:

Mike, if I could just add to that one, when you’re talking resiliency at the national level, the resiliency of our nation to react to things, and as a part of the joint staff, J3 had plenty of interactions with NORTHCOM, sir, and with your staff, I don’t call you Spock and Gui, I call you General Guillot and General Nordhaus. But when I deal with your threes, I become a real fan of the National Guard because the National Guard is a huge part of our national resiliency plan, not only a strategic, but an operational reserve and a capability to get things under different titles and quickly move out, and sometimes move out as quickly or quicker than active forces to get onto the X. And I think as we delve into an era where homeland defense is one of the clear tenets for our nation, and when we talked earlier about homeland is no longer a sanctuary, so we’re going to have to defend the homeland, I think the National Guard role is just going to continue to increase. And that resilient force that we’re building, you and the reserves are going to be an integral piece of that.

Gen. Steven S. Nordhaus:

Hey, thanks, Sean. The one thing I didn’t talk about there where we talk about resiliency in the homeland, but homeland defense really starts in our forward combatant commands, and that starts with our partners. And so as we look at the National Guard, I just came from the PACOM CHOD conference with Admiral Paparo, where the National Guard has 18 partnered nations out there. And so as we work back and forth, we learn from our partner nations, they learn from us, but we build resiliency across the board. I’ll stick with Arkansas. I recently went to CYBERCOM, our Cyber Shield, where we had 1,000 participants, 44 states, 23 partnered nations participated in that Cyber Shield. Guatemala’s partnered with Arkansas. The next week I went down to Arkansas and the CHOD from Guatemala is standing up a cyber school there. And so this resiliency that we talk about on the data networks, on the cyber is really important. And so all the partnerships across the services, the integration is going to be key going forward.

Mike Stefanelli:

Yeah, I think that’s a great set of examples, just thinking of all the different partners, domestic, the foreign partners, and how that relates to your three Cs and the level of complexity. Mark, love to talk force design. So force design is ultimately about making bets on an uncertain future. How do we preserve optionality rather than optimizing for only one expected fight? And then maybe a follow-up to that is how do you know when preserving optionality becomes an excuse for avoiding difficult decisions?

Mark Gunzinger:

So preserving optionality and increasing the resiliency of force go hand in hand. And I’ll make two quick points. The first one is a longtime 25-year force development plan. Our cardinal sin is overoptimizing our military for a single theater and a single conflict within that theater, a single scenario. The pacing threat to me is not so much China or the conflict in the Pacific, it’s multi-theater conflict. And that includes potential that an opportunistic aggressor take advantage of our forces deployed to Pacific or Europe to cause havoc in another theater. And we need to be able to deter that with credible force and respond to it if necessary. That also includes defending the US homeland and deterring nuclear attacks. Those are additive force-sizing requirements.

My second point is a strategy of denial is not enough. We cannot assume the theory of victory, for example, a peer adversary in the Pacific, if we spoil or prevent them from achieving a fait accompli against Taiwan or elsewhere in the South China Sea, that they would then seek an off-road to peace. What if they don’t? What if they decide to pursue a war fighting strategy to exhaust the United States of America, which is size is forces, assuming that a war with the peer adversary would be relatively short? We need to drive more optionality and more resiliency into our force, be prepared to fight a longer-duration conflict with the peer adversary and respond to threats to the homeland and another theater if necessary.

Mike Stefanelli:

Mark, when I think about that and just the range of missions and the capacity you need for what you’re talking about, I think as we’ve seen, just the importance of capabilities like logistics and trustworthy communications, electronic warfare, it takes a lot of different things, and then what’s required for dispersed operations. In the context of that, maybe Susan, I’d love to maybe take a bit of a look at some of the technology implications for ideas like what Mark’s talking about. What do you think we might still be underestimating when it comes to a lot of the enablers that have to underlie or underpin a lot of our capabilities?

Susan Davenport:

I love this question. So I think what we’re estimating is the amount of work that it takes to make trustworthy data available. I’ll give you an example. During Operation Epic Fury, we had over 100 people across the Department of War work almost 24 hours a day trying to determine what is the critical data, what is the data that we need, where does that data live? Who owns the data? And then what do we need to do to the data to make it available to the decision makers that need access to it? And so guess what, that meeting still happens every Friday. We never stop doing that because it’s such an important endeavor, but it’s been months and months and months and we still haven’t gotten to all the answers. And so that’s a huge challenge, people underestimate how much work it actually goes into making data available. They think it just shows up on their computer and away you go. So we’re fixing this. In the Department of the Air Force, what we’re doing is three things. We’re making data availability a senior leader account. So I’ve created across air and space 15 data domains, and I put a geo or an SES on top of each one of those domains. Those people are responsible for making trustworthy data within their domain available to the enterprise and the decision makers that need it.

The second thing that I’m doing at my level is I’ve created an enterprise data catalog and that data catalog will be ready on 1 October, woo-hoo, as a minimally viable product, but that enterprise data catalog will have a place where any human or machine can go to get access to trustworthy data. We’re not moving the data to that catalog. We’re actually just making a baseball-style card view, and then you can hit an API and actually get access to that data. So that’s going to solve a lot of this, “Oh, I need the data moved into this system. I need it moved into that system.” No, everybody can just go to the enterprise data catalog and get access to the data. But something else is we need to start treating our data like a product. And what that means is those domain principles and the folks that work in their domain are going to start creating data as a product. That means that that product has a service-level agreement so that those machines that are reading that data know about the data providence, because that SLA describes the data and how it should be used and the periodicity of it and how available it is and how trustworthy it is.

And then we’re also creating this customer feedback loop so the users of that data can give the product owners the feedback like, “This is not working for me,” or, “I need this to be changed or updated or in a different periodicity.” So we’re doing a lot of things in the Department of the Air Force to make data available. But again, I think we are underestimating today how easy it is to make data available and how much work is actually involved in that.

Mike Stefanelli:

Yeah. I think just the availability of all that data and supporting all the operations we’re talking about I think will be a-

Mark Gunzinger:

Hey Mike, if I could add a quick note.

Mike Stefanelli:

Yeah.

Mark Gunzinger:

I’m concerned about warfare in the EMS, EMSO. I don’t think we’re asleep to the threat, but China has made a central focus of its war-fighting strategy achieving information dominance over the United States. And that includes war fighting in the EMS. It is a war-fighting domain where we can win or lose wars just as we can in space, in the air and so on. I believe that we need to go faster and we need to increase our investments to be able to maintain our dominance of the EMS, which leads to our information dominance, which leads to more resilient networks we’re going to need to fight a peer adversary.

Mike Stefanelli:

All right. So I think we talked a bit about what’s going to be important in conflict. Maybe let’s actually talk a little bit about, actually thinking about peace time and how you optimize for resiliency in peace time. So maybe I’d like to start with how do we justify investments in resilience even when they introduce cost, redundancy, or apparent inefficiency? Maybe General Nordhaus, I’ll turn to you.

Gen. Steven S. Nordhaus:

Yeah. Hey, thanks Mike. As we think about, you start off homeland response, you take Hurricane Ida, which hit New Orleans, and how much destruction one hurricane does, but with the National Guard, Title X forces, interagency, FEMA, everybody responding so quickly and to take care of it. Yeah, we can’t rebuild a house or rebuild a roof in a day, but very quickly we respond and get that city back up to life. And then from that standpoint, how we continue to take that across the board when you look at an adversary going and looking how we respond in the homeland to a cyber attack across the board. I’ll give you an example. Up in Minnesota, a cyber attack happened into a town, took the whole town down, got together with the state, brought in some guardsmen, brought in some other tool sets, and they respond very quickly and clean it up where they though would be months and months, they get it done in a couple weeks.

And so these resiliency things and how we respond across the homeland together, NORTHCOM, the National Guard, all of our forces together being joint and integrated, I think sends a huge deterrent signal to our adversary that, “You might be able to come in and take away a this or a that, but you’re not going to keep us down for very long. And then we’re going to energize and be able to take the whole joint force back at you with a punch.”

Maj. Gen. Sean M. Choquette:

Mike, I think your question about how or why we would invest in some of these systems in this resiliency and peace time is a really good one. And I think there are a couple things that apply here. Number one, you go to war with the Army, the Navy, the Air Force that you have. And I think that the soft truths apply here, whether you’re talking specialized or conventional forces, you don’t grow a competent force overnight. You have to grow that force across time. And the only way to do that is to think in the out years, to make investments, to ensure that you’re putting the money down today that’s going to pay off in the future. And I guess I would even challenge the paradigm that we have a peace time now. Since I’ve been in the military, we’ve been somewhere on the competition spectrum all along the way. So I’m not sure that we have time to get that dividend, but we’ve got to make the investment because we’ve got to have the future force.

The second piece why I think that’s important or the justification for doing that is when you’re talking about performance delivery and costs and those factors that you can affect, you’re going to have a better chance of controlling those things now and in the time when you’re thinking ahead as opposed to just in time when you get into combat. And as we talked about earlier, you’re not going to have much time to do that anyways because the adversary today is going to close in and have significant effects right out the gate. So we’ve got to make those investments or we’re just going to behind as we cross the LD.

Susan Davenport:

Yeah, I would add to that by saying I think technology is changing some of the economics about resilience. And what I mean by that is with the advent of the cloud and infrastructure as code and AI, we can now spin up capability, we can find and fix vulnerabilities, we can regenerate entire mission systems without a human in the loop. So technology has really helped us look at resiliency from a different standpoint. And what I mean by that is in the past, we would create a mission system, and then we would create the hardware underneath it, and then we would create many different backups of that just to make sure that we were able to operate through some sort of degraded ops. If this becomes a smoking hole, I want several redundant capabilities spread across the country, potentially globally.

That was very expensive, because a lot of that infrastructure just sat idle. We would recap infrastructure without one bit ever running across it just because we needed it just in case. But now again, with the advent of AI and infrastructure as code, we’re able to just keep those things dormant until something becomes a smoking hole, and then instantaneously we can recreate those missions. So that means we don’t have to invest in all the hardware that we used to. So again, technology is a bit of a game changer here from the past and how we used to look at nailing up specific instantiations of hardware in different places of the globe.

Mark Gunzinger:

So I’ll flip the question around, how do we justify our lack of resiliency? Throughout the ’90s and the 2010s and so forth, we cut our fighter force in half and bomber force by a third. We failed to defend our foreign air bases, and the Army did not invest in the air missile defenses that the Air Force is now going to invest in. We use our munitions inventories as bill payers to pay other bills, the same for our nuclear enterprise. So we’ve got a lot of work to do to build back the resiliency that we once had. And if we don’t, the ultimate price will be paid in the battle space by our men and women and loss of treasure.

Mike Stefanelli:

I would love to distill a little bit, that we started to talk about, I think we covered a lot of ground here. We started to talk about the investments that you would make, I think we heard a bunch of number of areas. If you could just make one investment, or it could be an organizational change, that would most improve the joint force’s ability to adapt over the next decade, what would that one thing be?

Susan Davenport:

I would invest in an organizational change that allowed us to immediately adopt emerging technology. And what I mean by that is we need infrastructure and organizational modularity. I want to be able to rapidly ingest something into my organization and into my infrastructure, I want to be able to scale that when I need it, and I want to be able to pull and replace it if there’s something that I no longer need. So really it’s an organizational change that allows me to move fast and scale technology.

Mark Gunzinger:

I’ll add that procedural change, if you will, our department of war still plans programs and budgets in a very stovepipe fashion, service department by service department. We need cross-service, cross-domain trade-off analysis. Instead of trying to optimize the force military department by military department, what investment for the department as a whole will minimize risk for the joint force? And if we do it on a cost-per-effect basis, we’ll end up with a far more resilient force and perhaps even save some money by not investing in some capabilities that are excessively redundant with things that the Space Force, the Air Force and other services are already investing in.

Maj. Gen. Sean M. Choquette:

I think the biggest change I would make, and across the joint formation, is a significant increase or a push for distributed and delegated authorities down to the lowest levels that we can push them, and training and exercising to that. And some elements of the joint force do a better job of that. And we talk a lot about mission command and commander’s intent, we don’t always execute it very well, because behind that, we continue to build these exquisite data systems and capabilities to see and sense and have global essay out to the tactical edge, and then we tend to go there where we can make decisions at the highest level because we have that situational awareness. In the future fight, from my perspective, it’s not if, but when we lose that global essay, because the systems will go down. They’ll get degraded or they’ll get entirely taken out. So if we don’t train to fight today and teach our young subordinate leaders to be able to work in chaos, to work with limited information and make decisions and take intent and continue to move out on the field of battle, we’ll fail. We need to train it and we need to exercise it now.

Gen. Steven S. Nordhaus:

Great answer, Sean. And it really goes back to cost-effective combat capability, and we really have to focus and drive all the way through that. It’s got to be scalable, it’s got to be affordable, and we got to get it across the force. Like we talk about, a unified joint force that can fight subsea to space, completely integrated and interoperable, and we have to continue to go after those systems and really focus like we’re doing in the department. And Secretary Meink talked about cost-effective combat systems that can respond in the homeland, that can also take capability to the war fight like we’re seeing that makes a difference every day for us.

Mike Stefanelli:

Great. All right, looks like we got a few minutes left in today’s panel. So maybe just to bring us home, Mark, I’ll go back to you on this one, what’s the most likely way that you think the joint force could be surprised in the next major conflict?

Mark Gunzinger:

What’s the most likely way what?

Mike Stefanelli:

What’s the most likely way the joint force could be surprised in the next major conflict?

Mark Gunzinger:

We are so dependent on space today, and we’ve had other panels that have addressed space, but I’ll tell you, we have the advantage in space over China. China knows that. They have the advantage in proximity to the battle space, so if we happen to engage in a conflict on their periphery with shorter lines of communication and so forth. So if they do get into shooting war with the United States America, they could surprise us by saying, “Well, US is more dependent on space than we are. We’re going to frag out space, because it’s going to hurt our adversary more than it does us.” That drives the need to ensure that our networks for communications, battle space command and control, ISR are redundant, multilayered, airborne, sea base as well as space base. And that includes AMTI, GMTI.

Mike Stefanelli:

Great. All right. Maybe we’ll end with a lightning round of questions for each of you. So just maybe in a few sentences, what is one thing you hope the audience starts doing differently when they return to work? I’ll start with you, sir.

Gen. Steven S. Nordhaus:

Okay, thanks Mike. It’s the integration across the joint force. So reach out across the departments, reach out across the services, reach out across the interagencies, build partnerships that matter local to global. If you don’t know the other service that’s nearby, get to know them. If you don’t know the National Guard or the reserve forces nearby, get to know them, because on America’s worst day, we’re going to have to be able to integrate and interoperate in the homeland and around the globe to be able to take the fight to the adversaries.

Maj. Gen. Sean M. Choquette:

Mike, if I had one piece of advice, I would say study. Go home and study. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a senior leader or a junior leader, we need to go out and read our history, read our technology, read our science fiction, read the news, reach out and touch everything that’s out there because integrating all of that in today’s world to understand where we stand and how we’re going to execute these operations and bring all of these capabilities together, when you couple that with our history, we need to know what has happened, because there’s nothing new under the sun. When you look at Operation Spiderweb that Ukraine executed against Russia, it’s a Trojan horse operation, it’s in our history… Not history, but fiction. These things we talk about will happen again. We need to be able to take all those ideas and integrate them together and become smarter, better warriors.

Susan Davenport:

I love that answer because reading is one of my favorite pastimes and I love sci-fi. So thank you for that excuse to go do that. Now I have some homework that I can actually use. So I would say to all the Airmen and Guardians out there, I would go to work Monday morning, find a process that really annoys you or a process that doesn’t make sense to you, and use AI to automate that or either get rid of it using an agent. And if you need help doing that, please send me an email and I will walk you through it.

Mark Gunzinger:

I’ve also enjoyed being on a panel, my distinguished peers here, I’ll tell you, be an advocate for the Air Force, for the Space Force, because if you’re not, who will be? I’ve dedicated my life being an advocate for what I believe our nation really needs. Each and every one of you have an opportunity to do that as well.

Mike Stefanelli:

Great. And with that, I’d like to thank all of my panelists for joining us for today’s discussion. And thank you all for joining us.