Air Superiority
September 23, 2025
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This transcript was generated with the assistance of AI. Please report inconsistencies to comms@afa.org.
Maj. Gen. William Betts:
Good afternoon airpower enthusiasts. I am Major General Bill Betts. I’m the Director of Plans, Programs, and Requirements for General Spain here in the front row. He has a great sheet, a ruler, and a red pen ready to go for me. So I’ll have to debrief with him at the end. Chief, welcome, thanks for joining the panel. Folks, we’ve got an impressive panel with us today. I’m gonna introduce them going from your left to your right. Across the stage, General Mike Holmes, retired from the Air Force in October 2020 after nearly 40 years of service. He currently serves as the Chairman of the Board at Red 6 and as a Senior Advisor at Boeing, the Roosevelt Group, and Westpac. Additionally, he is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of the Board for the Armed Services YMCA. A seasoned fighter pilot, General Holmes has over 4,000 hours in the F-15 and T-38, including more than 500 combat hours, and he still flies General Aviation today. To his left, your right, Dr. Dan “Animal” Javorsek is a retired colonel and currently the head of Acuity Engineering at Applied Intuition, the vehicle intelligence company that accelerates the global adoption of safe AI driven machines. Dr. Javorsek had a 24 year career that culminated as the commander of Detachment 6, Air Force Operational Test and Evaluation Center at Nellis. He was also a program manager for the DARPA Strategic Technology Office. His research and development programs were tied to the development of key technologies required to realize mosaic warfare and joint all domain command and control with an emphasis on artificial intelligence and machine learning applied to combat systems. Further to your right, Animal’s left, is Mr. Robert Rose. He is the CEO and co-founder of Reliable Robotics, which makes the Reliable Autonomy System. This is an FAA certifiable package that converts fixed wing platforms into an optionally manned or fully unmanned aircraft. Reliable’s autonomy system has been long tested and is slated to automate cargo operations for the United States Air Force. Mr. Rose is a presidentially invited fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society. He holds multiple patents in aviation technology. And he graduated with a master’s in electrical and computer engineering from Oregon State University, with a focus on artificial intelligence. And then finally, the farthest to your right there, is General Retired Gary North. He is the Vice President of Customer Requirements at Lockheed Martin Aeronautics. He does worldwide engagement for Lockheed Martin products and services. He retired after 36 years in the Air Force. He served at the group wing command level, and he was also the PACAF commander. All right, incredible panel that we’ve got. Folks, in June of 1944, as he surveyed the Normandy beaches, General Eisenhower said, “If I didn’t have air supremacy, I wouldn’t be here.” Over the past seven decades, we’ve seen the effects of having or not having some degree of control of the air domain. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Ukraine. Okay, doctrinally speaking, air superiority is achieving control of the air to facilitate freedom of action for a desired duration and location. That’s the doctrinal definition. What I’d like to do first is hear from our panelists what air superiority means to you. Okay, we’re gonna go from that side down to this way. So General North, you are up first, sir. What does air superiority mean to you?
Gen. Gary “Nordo” North, USAF (Ret.):
Perfect, thanks very much. And folks, appreciate your being here. I know there are a tremendous amount of air power experts in the room. So keep your grade sheets down and no throwing popcorn or rolls. What is air superiority? It’s the absolute centerpiece of not only United States Air Force, but US military aviation. It is dominating the air. It is controlling the air. And when you think back to this, it’s not just someone in a biplane going 1v1 in a very tight circle. It is working against airplanes. It’s working against SAMs. It is working in the domain of time. And the other thing that I really think besides the traditional domains that we really need to think about is time. It’s not a traditional domain, but it’s very significant when you think about how to counter the adversaries who are getting better every day and fielding capability that either match or in some cases overmatch us to ensure that our men and women that go out in harm’s way have the best tools they need to do their job. If you think about the analogy in Peyton Manning, who’s a pretty good quarterback, he said the quarterback is the toughest job on the field because you have to manage everything. You have to manage your friends, you have to manage your foes, and you have to ensure that you can win the game. Because in the games that our men and women play of all of our services, there is no second place. So when you think about this at the tactical level, the quarterbacks of today in the air are your fifth generation platforms, the F-22, the F-35, tied in with the fourth generation platforms, the F-15, the F-16, the F-18. And they’re doing work tied to battle managers. How does that all work? It’s got to be completely integrated, and it’s got to ensure that across those domains, we are ahead of the enemy, and frankly, ensuring that the tools that we give men and women can do their job. So what really is air superiority that we think about? You know, back in the day, Baron von Richthofen said, “Fighter pilot roves their allotted airspace and shoots down the enemy, and everything else is rubbish.” That is pretty much true even today. But across that domain, we have learned, as our secretary told us yesterday, we’ve learned from all of the lessons that we have watched, fought, and endured as we go through when we have air power superiority and when we don’t. There’s a reason I’m wearing a yellow tie. It is a three-year lesson that if you don’t have air power, it’s going to be extremely tough. And if you have air supremacy, you will do well. And quite frankly, when we think about how we do well preparing for the future, air supremacy requires exquisite exercising. And you think about how that both our militaries, our friends and allies tie into it to go through the flag series, the Bamboo Eagles, the Pitch Blacks, the Talisman Sabres, the Ramstein Flags, to bring that capability forward. So our adversaries are watching. They are learning. They’re learning fast. Their industries are evolving as fast as they can, and in many cases, are faster than ours. When we talked about how they probe us and what I think is the most important thing for air superiority, it’s our data. It’s the capability of our ability to have secure data and ensure that flows to a shooter in the field that we know that is accurate, we know that the assessment is there, and we know that when they decide to shoot something, it’s at the right target with the right weapon at the right time. And so in industry, and I’ll just segue a bit to industry, how does industry in our militaries work together? We’ve got to work together better. We’ve got to work together faster. We’ve got to bring software capability to the fight quicker, and we’ve got to ensure that the training piece of this enables capability for the warfighters in the field. And quite frankly, you have to turn it almost sortie to sortie. I don’t think we’ll ever be there, but we should be using that as an example because the enemy is turning things sortie to sortie in very quickly. So when you think about the traditional fight of today, those of you in the room that do this every day, you need to help industry define what you need, the requirements set to ensure that we’ve got the agility to work together, the acquisition cycle works, the training cycle works, such that when you go out in the field, you know, the leaders know exactly what to present to those that are flying, fighting, driving, maintaining, and ensuring across that domain that it works completely. More to follow, but I think that’s a good set. You know, when you think about what is air superiority, it’s in the eye of the beholder. I don’t think anybody who goes out on a cap, who sits in a battle management piece of equipment, who sits back at home station watching on the screen, believes that we cannot have air superiority and air supremacy when we go to the next fight. So thank you.
Maj. Gen. William Betts:
General North, thanks for that. That was quite comprehensive. I saw our other panelists kind of mentally checking off the things that they were going to talk about. I’m interested to hear some other perspectives. Mr. Rose.
Robert Rose:
I’m not sure what I can add to that. That was excellent. So thank you for the opportunity to be here. It really is a great honor, and thank you all, you in the audience, for your service to our great nation. I don’t have the warfighting background, so you might be wondering, well, why would an automation person like Robert be here? Prior to founding Reliable Robotics, which is building systems that automate aircraft, I worked at SpaceX on the flight software for the Falcon 9 and Dragon, and also the very, very first version of autopilot on the Tesla Model S, which included the adaptive cruise control and lane keeping function. So when I think about air superiority, I don’t think about it perhaps through the same lens as everybody else. I’ve played a lot of video games, and so I think about it perhaps through that lens. But in my work at Reliable, I’ve come to understand air cargo and air cargo logistics quite well. We work quite closely with a major Fortune 500 air carrier and have been studying their network pretty extensively over the last eight or nine years now. And so when I first heard this word air superiority in context of this panel, my thought was, well, you know, we talk a lot about the pointy end of the stick, and you see a lot of that downstairs in the show floor, but there’s a whole stick behind that. And so it means logistics, it means sustainment, and all of the things necessary to get in place so that you can have the pointy end. Where I think companies like ours can provide additional value to the Air Force and all of our armed services is in making that whole backhaul logistics operation run much smoother. By taking those systems unmanned, it can be run by computers ideally and purely automated so that the goods just show up in the places where you need them at the times that you wanted them to. So that’s what I think about when I hear air superiority.
Maj. Gen. William Betts:
Nice one. Thanks for that alternate perspective. Animal, what do you have to add?
Dan Javorsek:
Yeah, not a whole lot to add to the General’s comments there. I’ll punctuate something he mentioned, though, and that is it is about time. And that has two meanings. It means that three minutes into the war, we’re going to find out all the bad assumptions that we made and all the things that we are going to have to adapt to. And there’s a whole host of technologies that we’ll probably get into talking here on the panel about that enable us to really maybe recuperate some of that aspect. The other piece is that it’s easy to take for granted how much air superiority and really everything from air denial to air dominance has played a role and how contested it actually is. It’s extremely important not to take that for granted. I think General John Loh from — he was the tactical air command commander many years ago, said that Congress and the public now expect U.S. forces to prevail 99 to 1, not 55 to 54 in double overtime. And that’s really what air superiority, air supremacy, and air dominance is really striving to do. Give us that overwhelming advantage so that more of our guys come back home safely to their families.
Maj. Gen. William Betts:
I like the way you put that. Thanks. General Holmes.
Gen. James “Mike” Holmes, USAF (Ret.):
Thanks. And hello, everybody. Thanks for joining us in this room for this panel. Chief, Gina, Elmo, General Spain, thank you, everybody, for being here. It’s a pleasure to be back with you. You know, I was — in retirement, you do things like the Air Force birthday ball speakers every year. Somebody wants you. You know, this year I did it at Army Navy Club downtown here in D.C. As I was thinking about that, you know, why do we have an Air Force? Why do we become a separate Air Force? Why do we have an Air Force birthday to celebrate? I think it’s because in World War II, in addition to providing great teamwork with the Army and the Navy, we demonstrated that with if we could control the air, we could exploit the air and go straight to the enemy’s homeland or their centers of gravity. From time to time, over the 78 years, you know, since our birthday, people have argued about whether that’s still necessary or not. Do you need to control the air? Can you fight with parity? You know, is air superiority over and dead? You know, I believe it’s not. I believe it’s still a requirement. The Air Force has to control the air so that the joint force can exploit it. But it’s something that you have to fight for. In 40 years in the Air Force, I was in kind of three different Air Forces. In the ’80s, I was in that Cold War force where we fought Russia and the Warsaw Pact, both in Europe and then stationed at Kadena. We were going to fight them in the Pacific. And we trained hard for that mission. And we knew that we would have to fight to get air superiority and win it. It wouldn’t be easy. It would be bloody. And we would have to fight for it. And then we kind of got used to then, after 9/11, that fight had already been done. We beat down Iraq’s air power in the no-fly zone for many years. Afghanistan’s Air Force only lasted hours. And so we got used as an Air Force and as a joint force to taking that for granted. We had control of the air so we could exploit it, all our services. And then the third Air Force I was in was getting ready to counter the threats posed by China, the People’s Republic of China. And now we’re back into a world where we have to get used to thinking about fighting. There’s two kind of main battles out there that people are looking at when you think about air superiority of the future. One is the conflict going on in Europe now between Russia and Ukraine, which, you know, the systems that we built to fight Russia, the range and distance and payload equations still work out pretty well from bases in Europe, even much like they did in World War II. But when we had to destroy the Japanese Air Force so we could get to the Japanese homeland, we had to develop new systems. We developed the B-29, things with longer range. Didn’t need it in Europe, but needed it to reach Japan. We had to fight for the basing structure and the ability to operate there, and we had to learn how to see to it. So I think we still need air superiority. I think you have to fight for it. And I think, you know, next door they’re talking about shooting down Vietnamese MiGs with F-4s and shooting down a satellite with an F-15 in a test. And we tend to think, well, that’s what air superiority is about, is that shooting down at the end. But the truth is it takes the whole Air Force, what we used to call, you know, all the core functions of intelligence, surveillance, air reconnaissance, command and control, strategic attack, global, rapid global mobility, it takes all those pieces to operate and achieve the air superiority mission, not just the guy shooting at the end. So as we go forward, we’re going to have to think about what are the right tools for that environment in that European kind of combined arms scenario, and what are the right tools to think about projecting power all the way across in the Pacific. Air superiority mission is the same, but we may have to think about different tools and platforms to achieve it.
Maj. Gen. William Betts:
Nice. You guys did a great job complimenting each other there with those answers. All right, I set this up as a, like a fantasy football reverse snake draft. So even though General Holmes just got finished talking, he’s going to get the first question. But first of all, just a quick fun fact. Major Holmes published a SAS paper entitled “The Counter Air Companion, a Short Guide to Air Superiority for the Joint Commander.” It was 75 pages. It wasn’t too short, but it did, it talked about F-15, F-22, and the F-16 for the suppression of enemy air defenses mission. We’ll come back to those platforms later, but first I’m going to ask you about something that was not in “The Counter Air Companion.” General Holmes, the proliferation of low-cost, unmanned aerial vehicles and precision-guided munitions is challenging traditional notions of air superiority. In light of these effects, can air superiority be achieved by CCAs and other unmanned systems at a lower cost and at a lower risk to life?
Gen. James “Mike” Holmes, USAF (Ret.):
You know, thanks for the question. Maybe someday. But when you look at that, the theater right now that we talked about where those shorter-range unmanned systems are proliferating or being used to great effect, it’s hard to make the argument of long-range and lower-cost go together. So we have to invest in the tools to be able to fight that battle right over a forward line of troops, which will be largely shorter-range systems and ways to counter that. And then we also have to think about how we’re going to do that in the long-range system where low-cost systems and long-range don’t always match up together. So I think the path the Air Force is going down of trying to figure out how to combine manned and unmanned systems and have them work together with places where autonomy works. You know, we’re ready for rapid global mobility to where autonomy in certain cases works and reliable robotics has proven that it can for the things that were done in algorithms and controlling things. We’ve certainly made some great work there. I’m a believer that the answer is manned or unmanned. You know, the answer is, well, yes. And the right question for decision-makers going forward is what’s the right mix every year as we work over the next five to ten years.
Maj. Gen. William Betts:
Right on. Thank you. Yeah, I think that, you know, as we look at the characteristics of platforms, it’s becoming less and less important the distinction between manned and unmanned and there are other characteristics that are becoming more dominant or will become more dominant. All right. This next question is for Dr. Javorsek. So fun fact about him. Doctoral thesis at Purdue was entitled “Exploring Physics Beyond the Standard Model. Astrophysical Motivations and Accelerator Applications.” I was going to ask you questions about bosons and particle accelerators, but I’m going to stick with: So far, the 21st century has been dominated by the unique attributes of a new digital world powered by data. With artificial intelligence and autonomy playing an ever-increasing role in our daily lives, what challenges and opportunities do you see for human machine teaming for air superiority 2030 and beyond?
Dan Javorsek:
Yeah. First part, did you really go and look all that stuff up? That’s so silly. All right. Let’s talk through — there have been four major eras in human development, the way that humans interact with their tools, right? If you think about it, the hunter-gatherer age lasted for millions of years. The agricultural age lasted for thousands of years. The industrial age lasted for hundreds of years. And the digital age has lasted for a few decades. And we are at kind of a unique juncture right now, given the technology that we’re presented with. And so a quick question for the crowd here. Show of hands, how many of you are augmented cyborgs? Yeah, that’s normally the one or two hands go up. But I would argue that if you were at a cocktail party tonight and someone asked you what the date was for the Treaty of Westphalia or something like that, the first thing that you’re going to pull out — or accelerators, I suppose — the first thing that you’re going to pull out is one of these, right? And you’re going to consult with this supercomputer that’s in your pocket. And I say that because we’re really finding that we are on the precipice of an augmented age. I had the privilege of flying pretty much all of our fighter aircraft, including the F-22, F-35. And, you know, if you don’t think that when the pilot gets into that airplane that they’re an augmented cyborg, they go higher and faster than they were born with. They can see in parts of the spectrum and at ranges that they were never embodied with. And the entire airplane is wrapped with a digital central nervous system that is all about empowering them and elevating their performance. And if you think about what’s happening in your domestic lives, you have recognized that data is what really runs everything. In fact, all of the people that — and all of the companies that you’re interfacing with are essentially that. They’re really just data companies that exploit one element of that to create some sort of an outcome on your behalf, whether it’s Amazon, Google, Meta, the whole nine yards, all of them are really capitalizing on this unique attribute of the 21st century that is driven by data. And the same thing applies to combat as well. There is an opportunity to think about what it takes to transition our tools for air superiority and air dominance and air supremacy from just tools to teammates. But in the process of that transition, there are a whole host of things that come with that that are really squishy and a lot less sciencey and a lot more art in what it takes — what does it mean to trust a teammate? What does it mean to — you know, trust is one of those sorts of things that’s hard to gain and easy to lose. It’s also something that is contextual, relational, and subjective. And how do I embody precisely and embrace this new technology in precisely these sorts of environments that we think air supremacy and air dominance are going to require? And it means that we have to completely rethink what our teams look like. And I think what General Holmes was talking about, that we’re not there yet. There’s definitely a place for manned aircraft. But the ability to elevate human performance by working together with this evolving, emerging technology is an extremely critical part.
Maj. Gen. William Betts:
Nice. Okay. Thanks for that. All right. Next up, we’ve got — all right. We’ve got — I’m actually going to go to General North for the next one. General North — well, fun fact about General North, he not only flew the F-15 and the T-38, but he also flew the greatest fighter known to man, the F-16, for a short period of time. General North, we heard, right, kind of the amazing, like, scope and magnitude of your portfolio earlier in the introduction. You clearly work very closely with the Air Force. What kind of feedback and what kind of demand signals are you receiving from us?
Gen. Gary “Nordo” North, USAF (Ret.):
Yeah. Thanks for the question. You know, I actually am pretty old. I started in the F-4 with the pulse radar that you were lucky if you got about a nine-mile contact. So we’ve come a long way. What signals are we getting? On occasion, it’s love. On occasion, it’s a hammer. And it’s really important that in our business, we all remember that we’re all in this together. And it’s so critical that the capabilities that industry across the spectrum can deliver on time, on cost, on schedule, on capability. It’s hard. We know that. Working together, it makes it easier. Things like this where you can sit with leaders at every level, and then also with the youngest Airmen who are actually the implementers of our capabilities and listen to them. You know, the F-35, I think, is a perfect example. We went, or the company and the Air Force years ago got all the maintainers together and said, how do you build an airplane that’s easy to maintain and can do the business it does with the capability it’s got? So listening to each other is actually the way to get better. And open, honest, transparent alignment is really, really important. From industry, we know that those in uniform are very busy. You know, our services are not as large as they used to be. The budgets are not what they used to be. The demand signal is incredible across all of the domains. And so ensuring that the communication lines are open and we understand what the requirements really are, how do we make the requirements go faster, how do we deliver faster across the domains, and how industry can work together better. Yes, each industry, company has got, you know, priority things. But when you think about where we’re going now, open system architecture is going to drive our capability to be successful in the future. When you can adapt quickly in the domain and you understand what is needed and then you can provide it faster and ensure that it works when it’s fielded, that’s a success story. We know it’s challenging. You know, those of us who wore your uniform spent a lot of time talking, both formally and informally, about what everybody can do better to get to ensure everyone is successful. It’s absolutely really critical. And I would say just to add on, it’s not just about the relationship with our U.S. Air Force. It’s the relationship with friends, partners, and allies. Our Air Force is huge, with huge problems and challenges and capabilities. The Air Forces that partner with our U.S. Air Force and our Navy and others are small. And so the scope and scale of their challenges and problems, from resourcing acquisition to politics, is different than ours. And so listening to them and our Air Force as, you know, the lead in the world, if you will, for how to mold and help define other Air Forces’ capabilities is critical. So Chief, thank you very much. And for everyone who helps drive the Air Forces of the world, because none of us can do this together anymore. Or none of us can do it alone. We have to do it together. We’ve been doing that for decades. We need to continue to do it because we are much stronger together and we’re much stronger when we can look at each other across a table or chairs or on a flight line and drive success for our warfighters. It’s absolutely critical. Thank you for the question.
Maj. Gen. William Betts:
Great. Now, I wholeheartedly agree with what you said about us being stronger together. I may come back to you. I’ll just give you a heads up. I may come back to you and ask, right, so I asked for, right, what demand signal are you hearing from us? I may come back to you, or maybe you can incorporate it into your closing comments. What are you surprised that you’re not hearing from us as well? I’ll come back to you on that. But first, I’ll go to Mr. Rose. Mr. Rose, you’ve got — let me start with — so Mr. Rose worked for PlayStation back in the day. He mentioned video games earlier. Mr. Rose contributed to like three of the Game of the Year awards while he was working for PlayStation. Mr. Rose, you’ve also — you mentioned, right, Tesla and SpaceX as well. All right. Sorry for the random facts. Just trying to lighten it here. All right. And I’m like filling in the time here. You know, I’m trying to adjust. Okay. I got more. I got more on you, Animal. So just, you know, just keep it up. All right. Mr. Rose, you’ve got experience working for and with industry partners. You mentioned Tesla and SpaceX. They are known for rapid iteration and disruptive innovation. As the Air Force looks to novel approaches to gain and maintain air superiority, what lessons can we adopt from industry about bringing the future forward?
Robert Rose:
Yeah. I think it comes down to, you know, what do you get in a commercial product? And you already pulled out the iPhone earlier. I’ll pull out mine. I got one, too. We all have one of these or an Android or some equivalent. This is not an exquisite device by any stretch. Apple makes how many of these? Like four variants at the moment. And when they initially came out, there was just one. But the advantage here is you can buy these, well, maybe not this week, but, you know, a week ago, you could buy these in mass quantity. You could go to the Apple store and you could say, I’d like 100 of these. And they would say, okay, just give us a few minutes and we’ll pull them out. But there’s compromises. There’s things that the iPhone can’t do. You can dunk it in water for a few seconds, but you can’t leave it submerged in water. You can leave it outside and on a 125-degree sidewalk, Fahrenheit, for a certain amount of time, and then it’s going to shut off. So at SpaceX, you know, we built a commodity commercial rocket. This was not an exquisite rocket. It was designed around our first early commercial payload customers. ICOM was one of the first where they had a payload requirement. And then when the Air Force came to us, and back then it was the Air Force, they wanted to negotiate, you all wanted to negotiate all these special requirements. And we said, well, it doesn’t really work that way. There’s a payload mass adapter and that’s what you get. And so you need to adapt your thing to work on top of it. And we did later end up making, you know, modified off-the-shelf versions of Falcon. But, I mean, look at the result. Now by changing your requirements set and being able to compromise on some things, you know, we’ve been launching these things like crazy. So when I think about autonomous aircraft and the problem that we’re solving at Reliable Robotics, I look at it through much the same lens. It’s not going to do all of the incredible things that the F-35 and 47 and these other vehicles will be able to do one day. But gosh darn it, we’re going to be able to crank these things out. There’s a factory in Independence, Kansas that manufactures Cessna caravans. And we have — it already exists today, by the way. You can go there and you can visit it. And we have a kit that we’re working on certifying that will be able to automate that plane and we’ll be able to crank these things out. And you’re probably not going to send them to go do the, you know, crazy circling dogfighting stuff. But, man, if you’ve got like a couple of pallets of goods and you just need to get them from here to over there and you don’t want to think about it, great. The other thing we can offer through a commercial product is integration into the rest of the commercial aerospace or aviation ecosystem. File and fly capabilities. So you can push a button and go interoperate with civilian air towers and military air towers and none of that really matters. So in summary, it’s — if you can slightly adjust your requirements, Seth, then we can offer certainly a lot of quantity and a lot of very interesting mass as well.
Maj. Gen. William Betts:
Okay. Thanks. Okay. Gentlemen, we’ve got about seven minutes left. So General North, I won’t come back to you because I want to give everybody about, right, a minute and a half, two minutes for their kind of closing comments. I’ll — well, I mean, I’ll come back to you first. But if you would, incorporate that previous question into your closing comments. So all right, folks, I wanted to give everybody a chance to share their perspective on the road ahead. We’ve talked a little bit about the future. But considering kind of everything we’ve discussed today, all the themes that you guys have woven in, what do you think the future of air superiority looks like? And I will start with you, General North. General North? I said I wasn’t going to come back to you, like, for an individual question. Okay. I’m going to put you at the end. Okay. So I’ll go this way. General Holmes, how about you start, sir? You just kind of shut off there for a second when I said I wasn’t coming back to you. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry for the unclear direction. General Holmes, over to you, sir.
Gen. James “Mike” Holmes, USAF (Ret.):
You know, I think the path going forward in the future, like I said briefly, is, you know, the answer is yes. Does the answer include more autonomy? Yes. Does the answer include more support to, you know, automated cyborgs? The answer is yes. We have to think through the various scenarios we’re going to operate in, and we have to pick some things, and we have to start building them in quantity, and we have to get those tools in the hands of you so that you can figure out the best way to use them, and we have to learn how to go faster. And I know that that’s something that the Air Force talks about. But if you think about it, a land-attack cruise missile is an autonomous kill vehicle. We only allow it to make decisions within a certain criteria, but we’re comfortable with that. If you think about the support that’s given to a Raptor pilot where an ESA radar works and it builds a shoot list for an air crew member that can choose to execute that or to modify it, we’re comfortable with autonomy and with having help from automated systems, automated decision systems. It’s how much, what criteria do we give them, and how will we move forward. And then we just have to make sure that we build everything it takes to make these things work, not just the platforms, not just the weapons, but the command and control, the air refueling, the mobility, and everything it takes to get there. Thank you.
Maj. Gen. William Betts:
Thanks, sir. Dr. Javorsek.
Dan Javorsek:
I would say, just to keep it brief, I see a future where we offload risk and routine to allow our pilots to focus on what matters most, and that is defeating our adversaries.
Maj. Gen. William Betts:
That was brief. Okay. Thank you. Mr. Rose.
Robert Rose:
I’m up already. That’s great. Actually, I want to go back and expand on what I was saying earlier. There was an example I forgot to bring about commercial opportunities. And a specific example that was brought to us recently was we were told that the vast majority of payloads that go onto a C-130 for cargo missions can be broken down into smaller pieces that could fit on a Cessna caravan. And so if you can rethink your operations on the ground, then it can fit within a commercial context. Okay. So what does the future mean? Was that the question? Sorry, I couldn’t get that out of my head.
Maj. Gen. William Betts:
No, I don’t blame you. No, I mean, the question is really, like, what do you see for the future of air superiority?
Robert Rose:
Yeah, well, so going to the video games thing, somebody asked me earlier if we could have a single pilot remotely manage multiple aircraft. And I started to go, well, of course. You know, it should work like a video game. You should be able to drag, select, right click, attack, attack, attack, or pick up, drop off, pick up, drop off. And then I went, well, wait a second. No, it should — there shouldn’t be a person involved at all. You should be able to just give demands to a computer, and then it will automatically figure out, using AI and other constraint satisfaction routines, a solution to the problem. But this all needs to begin with a solid foundation. We need to have systems that just work. Like, we need to have systems that are like eight nines, nine nines reliable so that we can interoperate them in and around not only military airspaces, but also civilian airspaces. So I envision a future that is radically more automated than what we have today.
Maj. Gen. William Betts:
Great. Thanks, Mr. Rose. General North, over to you, sir.
Gen. Gary “Nordo” North, USAF (Ret.):
Okay. The future of air power and the future of air superiority, it is going — it’s not going to quite be Star Wars R2-D2. But when you think about, as you just said, when you can have one crude platform controlling eight or more uncrewed platforms who can do things, and you’re using AI, and you’re integrated, the future needs to ensure that we can do that with friends, partners, and allies. And that gets to the policy piece of, you know, we need to have policy release capability such that some of the tools that the U.S. has only can be shared, and then backwards, the tools that we have can be — or they have can be shared with us. What’s it going to look like? AI is going to drive incredible capability. Enhanced technology, digital engineering is going to allow us to all go faster from concept to design, from acquisition, from requirements to testing to fielding to operational capability for the men and women in the field. So the future of air superiority is actually each of you out in the audience. Because you’re going to carry the mail, you’re going to carry the water, you’re going to deliver, and you need to press all of us to ensure that we’re listening to you and that we have a dialogue that goes back and forth. Your original question is, what am I — what do I look at that we don’t get asked by some of the services, is how much more can you do for us, particularly in not the traditional build, sustain, maintain, drive, but let’s think about operational analysis, and let’s think about how we all look at the fight. Because there’s some significant folks in all of our industries who have been doing this for 10, 15, 20, 30 years, and that’s all they do. And they’re really, really good at it. When I was the CFAC in the Middle East, I used to bring multiple industries, OA teams over to give me assessment of what’s going on in the Middle East, and they were amazing. So ask beyond just the traditional, you know, are you on time or are you on schedule or you’re on cost, and what can you do for me lately. Thank you for the time.
Maj. Gen. William Betts:
Thank you all for the answers. So we’re — I will close up very briefly and just say I really like what we talked about in terms of the changing nature of air superiority, if you will, and a lot of what the future brings. But I think all of us, especially the young warriors in the room out there, recognize that something we can’t forget is — you talked about the element of time, General North, and the enemy gets a vote, and so we’ve got to make sure that along with ensuring we fill the capability gaps that we see in the future and the opportunities we have, we also have to make sure that the fleets that we have today are available and ready for the warfighters that are in this room. Please join me in thanking once more the four panelists here.