DAF Battle Network: Why Is this Crucial?

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Heather Penney:

So good afternoon. I’m Heather Penney, the director of studies and research from the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, and welcome to our panel on the DAF Battle Network. To succeed in the next conflict, maintaining information dominance will be decisive. Data is important, but the real advantage will go to the side that can filter, sort, and synthesize that data, turn it into actionable insights, and communicate those insights to decision makers, battle managers, and operators faster than the other. The US military recognizes this challenge, which is why it’s working to better connect data decision makers and effects across the services through combined joint all domain command and control, or as we know, CJADC2. And the Department of the Air Force’s contribution to this structure, which seeks to synthesize information across the Air Force and Space Force is the DAF Battle Network. And to discuss this important topic, it’s my pleasure to welcome our guests who are deeply involved in that modernization for effort.

Brigadier General Joshua Williams, Department of the Air Force PAE for C3BM. Hey, great. Glad the team is here. And then we have Dr. Brian Tipton, the chief of architecture and engineering, and rounding out is Colonel Raj Agrawal, military deputy for space. Okay, there we go.

We’re going to grade y’all on how your team… There you go. It’s going to go on your OPRs. All right. So General Williams, we’re going to start with you because before we dive into the content, I want to talk a little bit about the motherhood. Now that Department of the Air Force has transitioned all the PEOs into mission focused portfolio acquisition executives, we’ve really seen a fundamental shift in how the service buys and integrates that kind of capability. And so C3BM was part of the initial tranche of the five PAEs back in January 2026. So we’d like you to explain to the audience what your role is across the enterprise and specifically how your direct acquisition authorities as PAE for C3BM, stick along with the acronyms, differ from your role as the integrating PAE for the DAF Battle Network.

Brig. Gen. Joshua Williams:

Excellent, Heather. So thank you for this opportunity. Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve been in the job seven weeks. If you’re wondering why I have a tablet, it’s because it’s connected to the DAF Battle Network. So I’m going to take that one out of the other panelist’s shelf. But what it really comes down to is the Air Force is really focusing on how do we better align and empower our decision makers to deliver capability. So being in the initial tranche of PAEs, C3BM had the advantage to operationalize really what we call extreme teaming. And that is in the core and the fabric of our DNA. That’s very interesting because it allows us and really proved out what Dr. Tipton and the forefathers, Jenna Cropsy and those who started C3BM four years ago this Friday. So it was our birthday on Friday in concert with another birthday, the Air Force birthday.

Go Air Force. Seriously? But it proved out the fact that you’re going to win the war and you’re going to fight a battle with the systems of systems and it’s the connectivity of those systems. You’re not going to do it in unique stovepipes and the platform stovepipes aren’t going to allow us to do what we need to do when we need to do it in the future.

So the distinction between my two roles and fundamentally it comes down to I have direct acquisition authority over C3BM. So as a program acquisition executive, portfolio acquisition executive PAE, I have direct tasking for contracting, finance, the resourcing in order to produce capability downrange as anything has to do as it pertains to C3BM. As an integrated PAE, it really relies heavily on Dr. Tipton and his team’s authority and expertise. It is the technical authority to drive integration, standards, open architectures so that we can bring systems of systems together to really execute a kill chain and deliver capability downrange ultimately to prosecute the kill chain and enable our war fighters.

So in practice it’s a little bit harder than that. It’s great conceptually. So it takes extreme teaming with myself and other PAEs across the Air Force. It takes Dr. Tipton and his team building the foundation that is the DAF Battle Network in order to really educate and do the work upfront so that we can truly integrate at scale ahead of the need in anticipation of the threat.

Heather Penney:

So we understand that information really is going to be decisive and the network is how we integrate all of our mission systems, whether or not it’s airborne of its space or it’s a kinetic or non-kinetic effect. And so I’d like to talk about the advantage of the battle that the DAP Battle Network provides because beyond the connectivity and situational awareness, how will you provide commanders and war fighters that operational advantage, particularly when we integrate across those domains into a single unified system? And for those of you that haven’t been tracking my colleagues, Mike Dahm, or we call him Mitchell Jadam, his work with China, their focus on information dominance in that system of systems competition is one that we must, we must dominate. So gentlemen?

Brig. Gen. Joshua Williams:

So I’ll kick it off and I’ll turn it over to Dr. Tipton and Colonel A or Raj or all the other names. So information alone does not create the advantage. I mean, it comes down to the fact that we can connect relevant data, make informed decisions and really get it to the war fighter as soon as possible when they need it, frankly. So Dr. Tipton.

Dr. Bryan Tipton:

Thanks. First of all, thanks to AFA for having a DAP battle network panel. That’s awesome. Also, welcome General Williams. We got a great team in PAC3BM and you’re making it even better.

Brig. Gen. Joshua Williams:

That’s right.

Dr. Bryan Tipton:

Hey, when we talked about this panel, and I’m riffing on the question a little bit, one of the things that we talked about was that the DAF Battle Network is often talked about sort of like a theory. It’s our hopes and dreams for C2 for the future. We’re kind of abstract about it. People come away getting very excited, but actually having no idea really what’s happening. Some of that is kind of intentional because C2 is a place where an adversary can attack. But also, I wanted to talk a little bit about where we’ve been the last four years. And imagine four years ago we were stood up as integrating PE, take all the C2 and the Air Force and Space Force and pull it all together as an integrated construct. So we gave a name to it, DAF Battle Network, it’s everything. At the time we’re like, it’s everything that exists.

So all the old stuff that people don’t like, that’s DAF Battle Network. But then we’re immediately charged to go make modernization plans, like figure out how to fix it all. So we made a lot of plans. I had a team, architecture and system engineering. I was asked to take a very system engineering point of view. Then we had to convince a lot of people that our plans are right, all the way from the secretary, all the air staff, all the space staff, all the match comms, all the fuel comms. They adjusted it. It became the DAF plan. Then we went into the budget, then we got money, then PMs got authority to go make contracts. Then industry started doing real things. And then four years later, things are happening, like real things are coming out. So I’ll talk to a few of them. So our initial strategy was to have a hybrid architecture of cloud and edge where we’re running our processing very resilient.

We did that with a cloud-based command control system, which is currently being operationalized as NORAD. And also on the edge, we’ve deployed the TOC-L system, Tactical Operation Center Light, as well as a few others, giving us edge capability. That we’ve actually talked about quite a lot, but I’ll point out that those things were employed even in operations this past summer and this past year, becoming real.

Things that we haven’t talked about as much. Long range fires. The secretary said yesterday, long-range fires is something we’ve been doing for a long time. Yes, that’s true, but actually there’s a lot of investment in modernization, not just the weapons, but also the C2 behind it. So things that we were planning four years ago for what we need are actually now coming out in testing and operationalization and we’re pretty… I’ll say this. As the engineer, I’m up late at night worrying about all the different ways that things could fail, but I think we’re pretty confident that we got a good plan.

Space control. Yeah, some things were said about that yesterday. I’ll just say there needs to be some C2. That’s part of the DAPAO network. There’s modernization that has happened as part of that. Air planning modernization. We’ve been very agile on how we’re treating the Air Operation Center and the ATO. Kesser Run has done a bang up job trying to get the plan right, partnered with OSWCAO, but also partnered with Joint Fires Network in the Navy. So we’re now coming up with a case where Joint Fires Network is something that’s going into test, can be used.

We’re changing and bringing in new capabilities like AI into the Air Operation Center. And we’re even thinking through how do we get very dynamic in planning. If plans need to change very, very quickly, dynamic mission replanning is something that is being tested out and becoming a thing.

Communications. We’ve come up with a strategy to really change line of sight and beyond line of sight communications. We’re getting beyond Link 16. It’s going to be around here for a while, but we’re going beyond it. A lot of things are happening. One of them is the fact that we’re now taking ground and air capabilities and connecting them to space with the Space Force, the Space Data Network, and that’s rolling out. Initial things are happening, but it’s going to grow and really change a lot over the next few years.

And in Intel, a lot of exciting experiments happening now with AI and machine learning for modernization are happening. These are all things that we had envisioned four years ago to change the future fight, but now they’re actually happening. And if I look forward in the future, a good DAF Battle Network is one where integration becomes easy. Things that we’re thinking about, hey, we got to integrate that. It’s got to be really easy to build in the system, get to the data war fighter is going to happen. So things like space space AMTI that the secretary talked about yesterday. When that came up, we had a lot of debates about how do we integrate it, what do we do with the C2? But by and large, actually it wasn’t as hard as you would think. We’re like, “Yeah, we kind of know what the plan is. We’ve done something like this before.”

We think that the data for AMTI is going to get to the war fighter very, very quick after we get space base capability. We’re now working on point defense, homeland air defense, golden dome, lots of new weapons, AI capability. How do we do non-kinetics and kinetic C2? All these things are rolling out into the future as well as resiliency. So by and large, I think we often have talked on these panels about the future and how great it’s going to be. Some of that future is now. Things are coming out. We’re careful about how we talk about it, but it’s real. And that’s the one thing I want to make sure everybody leaves with today.

Col. Raj Agrawal:

And I know, Heather, you probably want to get onto another question, but-

Heather Penney:

Oh no, I totally want to dig on that.

Brig. Gen. Joshua Williams:

You planned that by the way.

Heather Penney:

Please riff.

Col. Raj Agrawal:

So you see that the general’s got the acquisition authority and you got Dr. Tipton’s got kind of the authority over all this technical aspect. And from the Space Force, the vice chief brought in an operator into C3BM. And so I’m kind of the joint operator at the senior level. And one of the things I’m also trying to do is advise on how does space and air work together?

It’s funny because when we stood up the Space Force, we were very focused on how do we make sure that we get space superiority right? And you heard our new CSO talk pretty openly about space superiority being an objective, but he quickly connects that to enable the joint force and to be part of the joint force. And so, one of the things that I get to do is does our acquisition reform end up in not just better stuff that goes to the operators, but that the operators can have a sustained fight, that the operators have things that adapt to the fight that are further provided by the PAEs and the Air Force has got their set of PAEs and all those authorities have come down now and the Space Force has got their set.

And the challenge for operations is the operators don’t really care about the org chart, right? The operator cares about the joint effect. Can we get a sensor to shooter solution quickly and can we have a decision in the loop if necessary to exercise human judgment and accountability? And so I’ve been grateful to be part of this team. We have brilliant people. I mean, somewhat 3,500 folks. I’m not quite sure the number of folks in C3BM.

Brig. Gen. Joshua Williams:

A lot.

Col. Raj Agrawal:

Yeah, a lot. And all over the country. And these are brilliant people that are dedicated. And one of the things that I’ve seen General Cropsy, General Voorhees and General Williams really focus on is not that acquisition supports the war fighter, but that acquisitions and operators are both war fighters. We’re part of the joint force together and we have the same level of accountability and ownership for the joint fight. And so that’s a lot of what I get to focus on and I’m grateful to be part of the team.

Heather Penney:

No, thank you so much. And Dr. Tipton, you brought up a lot of really interesting, it’s real, it’s here. And I’d like to dig a little bit more into that, specifically the AMTI, because we heard the secretary talk about that yesterday morning and those AMTI capabilities of space are really important. So I’m actually going to toss this first, Raj, over to you. Can you give us insight into the timeline for the rest of the constellation? Because proliferated constellations require more than a handful of satellites and we will need to make sure that we have mapped and architected that appropriately so that we can get the information not just down to C2, but into the war fighter’s cockpit and actually into the missiles, whether or not that’s launched from an aircraft or some other long range weapon.

Col. Raj Agrawal:

Oh, that’s a good question. And one of the things that space brings to the fight is it changes the geometry of the conversation. So we’re able to pull up capabilities that typically are delivered from the air or from the ground or from the sea, and we pull that up into space. And that doesn’t mean that it’s better. In fact, we have to have complimentary capability because there are going to be some areas that we must have a capability from space because of the environment, because of the AOR. And you’re going to have others that an air platform, a maritime platform is more effective.

And so as our PAEs that are focused on that, focus on timelines, my job is to make sure that every time there’s a new satellite put into place, it’s to connect with the intelligence community, connect with Dr. Tipton’s team, and certainly between the Air Force and Space Force to make sure that the joint force understands what they now have available to them, where risk is now mitigated in terms of where we can push in, and how to plan differently too, because even O plans will become affected by the technology that’s being delivered today.

And that technology has got to be sustained and reconstituted in the course of a high end engagement. And so this team is really thinking about not just delivering capability, whether it’s an aerospace or in the rest of the environments, but how do they work together to achieve an effect? And so space is now part of that conversation in a very real way. Space does not talk about ourselves in terms of support to the joint force. We not talk very much about being part of the joint force, and again, that shared ownership of joint outcomes.

Brig. Gen. Joshua Williams:

So Heather, if I might, there’s a reason why we’re the DAF C3BM PAE. DAF is both the AIRS and Space Force. And that technical authority we talked about from the integrating PAE is critical to enabling because we have core programs within C3BM. I also can reach out to my old shop ISR and SOF, cyber networks and other Air Force PAEs, but we have partnerships with Shannon Palone, with SSIO, SWAC, all sorts of functions within the Space Force because it is a layered architecture to bring a joint capability to win. So you want to add anything?

Dr. Bryan Tipton:

Well, I just add that we have a lot of partners and actually, no offense, General Williams, but what you directly control is a small fraction of everything I just described as the DAF Battle Network. As a result of that, partnerships to create delivery that’s an integrated way is really a key part of what we do.

Heather Penney:

Yep. So we’ve got that space layer, AMTI, and as a proliferated architecture, I’m curious because we will all think probably of SpaceX and Starlink as the most easily accessible proliferated constellation that we are commonly in touch with, but there’s a significant attrition, a planned attrition of that constellation. So there’s constant launches to support Starlink. Is that a similar concept for us or are we planning on just in time or do we have that at a higher orbit so we have more longer lifespan over those assets?

Col. Raj Agrawal:

Again, good questions. The challenge is to make sure that what we deploy first enables the joint force in a way that optimizes their power projection, but then take into account the real threat, not a… I think for a long time, and I’ve been in just 25 years, and a lot of times we white card away those effects and exercises and every single time in an exercise the US wins. And now we’re really thinking through what is… We know we’ve got the intelligence. We know exactly what the threat is to the degree that they can sustain that threat, how much power it takes to project from the US to remain superior in another AOR. And so there are aspects of our space capabilities that certainly can handle a hit without detriment to the joint force. And there are plans to deal with those kinds of reconstitution aspects of replenishing the joint force.

But then there are other things that certainly we have to confuse the adversary’s targeting solution by utilizing multiple regimes and multiple capabilities to make sure that no one thing is a point of failure.

Dr. Bryan Tipton:

I’ll pile on that a little bit in that, look, the way we’re viewing the DAF Battle Network, particularly in the last year, we’ve been running through it every single component and asking what if it’s missing, what if it’s taken out? I think current operations confirm things that we already knew, which is command and control and communications is someplace that an adversary can attack. So we have backup plans. We got pace plans, we got alternates. We’re looking at resiliency at every part of our infrastructure. There’s things that we need to clean up that we’re working on now and we’re bringing those plans out.

Heather Penney:

Thank you. I’d like to get to long range kill chains, which is something that you had also mentioned and also that the secretary had mentioned yesterday morning, because in a future conflict, speed will be critical for the custody targeting and maneuvering, but latency expounds across distance. So the further the distance in that long range kill chain, we have to consider the relevance of the information, the position of the information due to latency. So in the architecture that you’re building out for the DAF Battle Network, how do you move that data to complete that long range kill chain in a timely manner?

Brig. Gen. Joshua Williams:

That’s all you.

Dr. Bryan Tipton:

Well, the first thing I’ll say is I, of course, talk to a number of people in the industry. This event is really great for that, but also people in the financial industry come talk to me and I was surprised. They have timing requirements that seem even more aggressive than ours. They talk about milliseconds across the earth to try and beat the stock ticker and they use architectures that are in some cases not that different, which gives me confidence to say there’s commercial things that make what we’re trying to do very, very feasible. As far as how we’ve moved the data, I mean, I won’t get into the specifics of that, but one thing I’ll say is that we’re taking a very careful look at pretty much timing everything. That’s part of being careful about this. We time every single step in data movement across the architecture to understand where the bottlenecks are.

Things like cross domain solutions, we know every time we hit one of those, it creates a big bottleneck in timing. As a result of that, we’re able to get a sense of what exactly is limiting us. A big thing is if I get humongous amounts of data off of a space constellation and I need to reduce it into something that’s actionable, where that happens actually matters a lot for how fast the data is going to move. That reduction is usually the big bottleneck step. So we’re getting after it. I would say for most of the missions we looked at, and we take a very mission centric point of view, we’re very comfortable that we’re going to be able to meet the timelines in a lot of cases, not entirely. And there’s other cases that are hard that we’re working on. We’re trying to get better and we’re only getting better by timing every single step.

Col. Raj Agrawal:

A lot of these problems are not simply technology problems, but they’re human machine problems. And so as Dr. Tipton’s team works at reducing the timeline in a given kill chain, we’ve got to make sure that the human factors as well converge at the decision point so that as we speed up a kill chain, that the human is also prepared to make a decision at the point when that decision becomes available. And so options have to be made available like General Chess talked about yesterday, but also confidence levels for each of those options and an understanding of what to do next, anticipatory co-generation and training a human or at least making a human capable of making a decision under contest, typically in a deceived environment, a deteriorated environment, and often without perfect information. And so as we design the perfect system, we have to train the human to be prepared for an imperfect system, imperfect information, so that when the human and the machine converge, we end up with a kill chain that closes.

And so that’s a thing that I try to focus my time on is where’s a human element in this? Sometimes there are leaders that we fully automate a kill chain. I think there are aspects or certain targets that a fully automated kill chain makes sense, but a combatant commander in particular and at every command level below that is focused on three types of risk, risk to force, risk to mission, and risk of unmanaged or unmanageable escalation. Those things, risk to force, risk to mission and risk of escalation are often policy driven, obviously conflict driven. Those can be dynamic and often those decisions are made in the absence of correct information and often with information that is imposed upon us by the enemy while we’re trying to do the same to them. And so as we think through the problem together, this is definitely a human machine problem and not just one or the other.

Heather Penney:

That’s really important that you pointed that out because in the end it will be contextual, it will be human. And as you mentioned, those three priorities of risk to force, risk to mission and escalation risk will be essential for us to be able to manage moving forward. And there may be scenarios where we dial one up or down in terms of the human and the timeline and the machine. So this really gets to operating within a contested environment because our adversaries, as you’re all well aware of, are mainly investing or are investing in capabilities to degrade our connectivity and networks through the electromagnetic spectrum, cyber attacks and other means. So as you’re looking at the DAF Battle Network, how will you work to provide that information advantage and connectivity at the tactical edge in this contested environment? Because that will be crucial towards optimizing all of our operations and doing the battle management piece, which is an essential element of our success.

Col. Raj Agrawal:

So I’ll jump in first and talk more about the human aspect of this. Commanders at all echelons are arriving at that command position with some element of experience and education and ability to tolerate cognitive burden. And what we can’t do is design information systems that just pour information out and expect the commander to figure out what information is important and which isn’t, which ones provide options or which ones kind of chaff. And so our job at the technology level is to figure out how to work with each echelon of command to design an outcome that gives each the ability to make decisions without cognitive burden, but at the same time, understanding risk that they’re imposing, not just at the tactical level for tactical commander, but all the way up through the strategic level, the theater level.

And so as we consider the DAF Battle Network, I often don’t talk about it as a network, but a war fighting architecture because I always think about where does a human converge on this, especially the commander who is held accountable by the American people through our constitutional processes to make sure that any decision that is made that may result in some type of unintended effect that can cost human life, that can affect risk and certainly make us less capable of projecting power, that commander’s often held responsible.

And so human judgment, we have to provide an opportunity for human judgment to be part of that kill chain. That might be at the beginning of it, but sometimes it’s at the middle and sometimes human judgment can change during the course of a kill chain depending on how long that kill chain is. And we have to determine whether or not we’re going to provide opportunities for our minds to be changed during a long range kill chain. Or if once it’s gone, we hope it works out. And so that’s the kind of charge that our engineers and our acquirers are put under. And so when they challenge you as industry, first of all, we consider you part of the team. We’re not looking at you as some outside entity. We’re looking at you as part of the American team that is the supply chain for a long-term conflict. And so the things we’re asking for are often because our human lives, our national security may be at risk if we don’t understand it properly. But sir, over to you.

Dr. Bryan Tipton:

I’ll pile on that a little bit, unless you want to go first, General Williams.

Brig. Gen. Joshua Williams:

So I just want to reinforce acquisition is a war fighting function. Us being us, the big us, industry, the people in the program offices, me as a PAE, understanding what the war fighter does, how they do it and why they do it. More importantly, what they need and when they need it is really what we’re talking about. Everything in that transformation, everything with empowering integrating PAEs, whether it be myself or Jenna Vorhees, is focused on the war fighter. We’re just not blowing smoke. There’s a reason why we have certain leaders in positions today who absolutely know what that means, who have sat on operations, but also understand what we can do as a multiplier to really enable their ability to be successful and prosecute their mission.

Dr. Bryan Tipton:

Well, I was going to add, Roger was talking about trying to find the right level of human judgment. The secretary said in his speech yesterday something that really resonated with me, which is, well, first of all, we all want to provide automation AI to help our war fighters. I saw a lot of really interesting capabilities demoed downstairs. Secretary said, “Hey, you got to get comfortable with it, and then you start to trust it.” That’s actually what we found in experiments that we’ve been doing, like initial experiments. I think we need to expand it, but we try out algorithms to automate part of a war fighter’s job, and initially they hate it, but they give you a lot of feedback and they iterate and they get more comfortable with it. And then what we found is after they get more comfortable with it, though they won’t tell you that sometimes, you put them in an exercise where they’re stressed and overloaded and they actually know what the algorithm’s doing because they’re comfortable with it and they let it go.

And then suddenly they’re using it and they’re actually very comfortable with it. And that’s the kind of iteration I think we need to do to get that right level of judgment.

Col. Raj Agrawal:

So this is important just to kind of foot stomp. In mission command, when we focus on mission command in the joint force, what we’re trying to do is get to a point where we have expected outcomes at the unit level so that we can empower a commander with the trust to be able to move out without any further communication because they understand the intent. We understand the expected outcome. We can get there with AI when we have expected outcomes for certain functions along the kill chain. And I think that’s really what we want in a high-end fight where we’ve got to deal with not only multiple targets, but multiple domains that are all dependent on each other in order to affect a risk level in theater or to accomplish an objective. And so I consider AI very much part of the machine, the human machine team.

And I think the more that we optimize AI, the more we’ll optimize a human relying on that AI and vice versa. The more we optimize the human, the more we optimize the AI that’s supporting us.

Heather Penney:

So I have to ask about optimizing the AI because AI, A, it’s not monolithic, right? I mean, so you are developing unique algorithms for specific tasks, but also as we’re trying to make them hyper effective, can we get them too narrow? Because when we go into conflict, we have to expect war reserve modes, deception, camouflage, destruction, those kinds of things, which are either edge cases or data that’s absolutely outside of our training data. So how do you adapt to that?

Col. Raj Agrawal:

You want me to jump in?

Brig. Gen. Joshua Williams:

Dr. Tipton.

Col. Raj Agrawal:

Well, so I’m doing a lot of studying on operationalization of AI. I guess I can say it in this way. I’m trying to make sure that I don’t say something that I’ll get in trouble for. My PA guys are right here. AI is going to pull from information sources. Sometimes they’re going to be closed sources, sometimes going to be open, sometimes from just the internet. And a committed adversary will take advantage of that and will train aspects of how we use our AI in order to move us in a direction that we might not otherwise move. And we ought to be doing the same to the enemy. And so as we think about how AI is employed, we also have to think about what the vulnerabilities are. We have to, on the friendly forces side, mitigate those, understand them and not get into a dead hand situation if you’re familiar with that story to where all indications seem like that is a nuclear missile coming from the US toward the Soviet Union and I’ve got to launch.

Well, it took a human and human judgment to understand that despite everything looking as though World War III had just started, he knew through human judgment and accountability not to launch. And those kinds of moments are the kind of moments that we want to make sure that we empower humans to understand their environment despite the fact that we’ll have trained them to rely on machines to make them better and vice versa. We want to impose that kind of deception and stress upon the enemy’s AI as well.

Heather Penney:

So it sounds like we need to retain a little bit of healthy skepticism as we engage with our algorithms, yet continue to develop trust in those tools as well.

Brig. Gen. Joshua Williams:

We have to prove that before the smoke goes up. It’s got to be part of the way we do business. It’s got to be the part of how we train, how we do acquiring of the system. It has to be second nature. So we’re fighting with it and we’re used to it and we’re comfortable with it. So the trust is built within the system. It can’t be a solution after the fact. It has to be anticipated, has to be integrated, has to be proven. And that’s exactly what I’m seeing since being in a PAE for five years and then coming into the seat is the amount of work that this PAE and C3BM has done to get after that very thing, the recognition that you have to build it before you need it. So it’s ready when you go to the fight.

Dr. Bryan Tipton:

I’ll just add my point of view as a designer and an engineer. Sometimes people give me the strategy for designing a network, DAF Battle Network of, “Hey, we’re going to do the simplest thing first and then I’ll do the next thing that’s a little bit harder and I’ll do the next thing that’s a little bit harder.” And what happens is you get stuck on the first simple thing and you never get off of it. We’re always training on the nominal case. So what I tell my team is, “No, actually we’re designing a DAF Battle Network for the worst day ever. Half our infrastructure’s gone. They’re doing all sorts of nasty things to us. We still got to make it work. Envision that, figure out how do we make it work.” And that’s the case that we got designed to.

Heather Penney:

No, that’s really exciting because the ability to adapt to the fight will be crucial to our success as we move into the future. And in studies that we have done at the Mitchell Institute, when we look at the command and control architecture, the operational architecture, so how we actually do stuff and the information that we actually need and then the information architecture, if those are not aligned, that actually creates a tremendous amount of friction internal to our own systems that the adversary doesn’t even need to be able to impose upon us. And so the ability to adapt to that fight and be able to execute that bad day will be essential to our ability to fight through that contested environment. So we’ve got about five minutes left and what I’d like to do is give a charge to you gentlemen. One, grade your homework five and 10 years from now. What does good look like? And then also lightning round. Give us your last thoughts that you want to leave the audience. What do you want them to have learned from today?

Brig. Gen. Joshua Williams:

I don’t know if I want to give Dr. Tipton the mic with five minutes to go and 10 years on the horizon. No, I think it’s winning. It’s protecting our way of life five years, 10 years, 20 years from now. It’s understanding the threat, adapting ahead of what they’re doing and making sure we’re making matching capability to the threat ahead of time. Anticipation, proactiveness, integration across the industrial base, scaling the industrial base and building out that mechanism. That to me is what success looks like.

Col. Raj Agrawal:

So this is a tough one because I really do believe we’re living in the best nation in the world and I mean that with all due respect to our allies and partners in the audience. And I think we’re the best in the world, not because of necessarily our economics and our politics, but because Americans are just rebellious by nature and we always root for the underdog. We always want to buck authority. And no matter what, we don’t like to lose. And so I am confident no matter what engagement we get into, we’re going to win.

But the cost of getting to that win is what I’m concerned about. How long will it take us to learn, to adapt, and to be able to prevail? And we have right now ongoing at the leadership level all the way up to Congress and the White House, an opportunity to team together as all of America with our industrial base, all of us ready so that ideally we don’t have to go to war in the first place, but if we must, we’re learning on the fly, we’re sustaining, we’re planning for an extended conflict and that as the conflict changes, as the character of war changes, that our industrial base adapts with us and that we understand that at the commander level that we must adapt.

And so I have confidence that we are at a great place as a nation and certainly a great place as a PAE to make this happen. I just pray that our nation doesn’t have to pay a high cost in order to learn during the course of conflict. Dr. Tipton.

Dr. Bryan Tipton:

So I’ll give a simple quick answer. We’re doing a very complicated integration, all demands, joint force, advanced adversaries. In the future, I think success means that we make it look easy. Our war fighter is confident without having to think about it. The system that we deliver to them is going to work and they’re confident that it’s being upgraded with new technology, new capabilities in a way that is not complicated and a thrash each time. I think if we get to that point and our war fighters are confident in everything to the point where we’re not even having a panel, it’s so easy, you don’t talk about it, then we hit success.

Heather Penney:

No, thank you so much. So quick 30 seconds. What do you want people walking out of here remembering about the DAF Battle Network?

Brig. Gen. Joshua Williams:

It’s a department-wide capability. Air Force Base Force Joint Force, as Dr. Tipton said, it is real. Real capability is integrating for real war fighters on a scale that I’ve never seen in 25 years of my career. It’s impressive. It’s going to take all of us to realize that and focus on how you can bring your capabilities to bear and quickly integrate because Dr. Tipton is correct. Speed of integration is how we’re going to win. And if we make it look easy, we’ve done our jobs.

Dr. Bryan Tipton:

So I think I’ll resonate on the real. I was debating whether I was going to go into this, but look, when we map out as an engineer of the Dapatal network, we divide it up into different domains and then we start plotting out in a very methodical way how do we incrementally upgrade its increments. We make increments going forward in each area. For all my engineering teams, this year is increment one because of everything I said previously about plans that we made a few years ago. Now I’ve gone through money, contracts, delivery, things are happening. So a lot more to come though. We know what two, three, four, five, six are going to be.

Col. Raj Agrawal:

Operators and acquirers are both war fighters. And if you’re an operator and you’re not in that mindset, you’re not inviting the acquirer to your joint planning session, you’re failing your forces. And acquirer is the same thing. If you’re not inviting the operator to your planning sessions, you’re missing an opportunity to tune what you’re doing to what the operator requires. So we just got to work as a team. Our senior leaders have already painted the picture. They’ve already made it possible for us to work together. I just encourage us as a joint force and certainly as the Air Force and Space Force, it’s time for us to work together and make this happen.

Heather Penney:

Thank you gentlemen so much. It’s been a great panel and thank you for joining us for the DAF Battle Network. A round of applause for our guests and have a great air and space power kind of day.