Battle-Hardening Commercial Space

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Lt. Col. Timothy Trimailo:

All right. Good morning. First off, thanks to AFA for having us for setting up such an incredible event. This kind of weather in Colorado this time of year is fantastic. This is a tough act to follow, going after Colonel Angelo Fernandez, who was my third boss ever in uniform. We worked together down at Schriever many, many years ago. So it’s good to follow such a great leader and a great guy with this. So this morning, we’re going to spend about the next 40 minutes talking about commercial capability and specifically battle hardening commercial capability for the fight. I’m Colonel Tim Trimailo, Director of the Commercial Space Office or COMSO at Space Systems Command in El Segundo, California. If you’re not aware, COMSO’s role really within the Space Force is to help integrate commercial space technology into the U.S. government’s space architecture, how we’re going to fight and win the next war, and how we can use our great commercial partners, commercial capabilities to get after the fight.

Spent over 20 years in space operations and acquisitions, mostly acquisitions. I’ve worked in ops with Angelo at Schriever. Worked a staff tour at the Pentagon in Air Force Legislative Affairs, and then several acquisition assignments at Space and Missile Systems Center, now Space Systems Command, a couple different times, National Reconnaissance Office and the Space Development Agency as well. I’m thrilled to be joined this morning by an incredible group of panelists on stage. I’ll do a couple introductions and then we’ll get into the questions. So first off, on the far end, Mark Lundstrom is an MIT aerospace engineer and serial entrepreneur who founded Radia to build WindRunner, the world’s largest cargo aircraft by volume. Originally developed to enable the deployment of much larger onshore wind turbines, WindRunner is a dual use platform with applications across defense, aerospace, and oversized logistics. Under Mark’s leadership, Radia has been recognized by both the World Economic Forum and Endeavor for its global industrial impact. Mark holds advanced degrees from MIT and Oxford, is a Road Scholar and is a private pilot and inventor with 20 patents. Thanks for joining us, Mark.

Next up, we have Matt Hungerford. Matt serves as the CTO for the Space and Intel Business Group at SAIC, overseeing the technology roadmaps, investments, and architecture solutions for SAIC’s space business. He joined SAIC in 2021 and has more than 20 years of experience in the space industry with the majority of his time spent with Raytheon. Throughout his career, he has held numerous positions of increasing authority, developing both satellites and satellite ground systems. Prior to becoming Tech Director for SAIC, he led internal research and development projects focused on artificial intelligence and data centricity for satellite systems. Matt earned his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Stanford University and his master’s degree in computer science from the University of Colorado Boulder. Thanks for joining us today, Matt.

And finally, we have David Schmolke, Vice President of the Mission Connections and Cybersecurity Business within Viasat Government. In this role, David is responsible for Viasat’s information assurance, cybersecurity, tactical wireless and networking, soldier wearable, narrowband SATCOM, and RF simulation portfolios. Since joining Viasat over 20 years ago, David has held several engineering, program management, and strategic leadership roles. Most recently, he served as general manager for Viasat’s advanced networking and cybersecurity solutions business, where he led the development of next generation solutions in support of connected tactical operations, including free space optics, 5G, tactical software defined networking, soldier wearable, and cybersecurity services. David, thanks for joining us today as well.

All right. So now down to business. As we get into the panel, I want to start by kind of framing the topic a little bit. As most have been tracking, there’s a major thrust within the U.S. government to implement what we’re calling commercial first acquisitions. And really what we’re trying to get after is speed of delivery of capability of the war fighter. We’re increasingly looking at how we can fight and win a future war using a hybrid architecture that includes commercial capabilities across all domains. With that in mind, I’d like each of our panelists to define what “battle hardening of commercial technology” means to you. And Mark, let’s start with you on the far end.

Mark Lundstrom:

Sure. Thank you. So I think when you think about battle hardening, you have to start to think about a system. And the system in our mind really starts from the factory and goes all the way to orbital insertion. And so how do you think about the ways not only to play the space game, but how do you play the ground game? How can you reposition things and move things from launch site to launch site? How can you move more complete satellites intact with a larger lift capability on the ground? It can just provide a lot of flexibility, whether it’s to deal with kinetic attacks, cyber attacks, weather events. Being able to reposition things terrestrially is as important as being able to position the things in space. And so just to give not an advertisement, but some context. So this is the WindRunner that we’re building. The military variant of it is called the C242. 242, because that’s 242,000 cubic feet, which is about 7 times bigger than a C5.

And so it has the capability to land on dirt. It can move 100 meter long payloads, 10 meter wide objects. And so it should give a lot of resiliency to be able to reposition the biggest rockets in the world and also be able to move not only today’s biggest satellites, but also satellites that’ll be twice as big for other capability. So we’re excited about it being part of the fabric of resiliency for battle hardening.

Lt. Col. Timothy Trimailo:

Great. Thanks, Mark. David?

David Schmolke:

Yeah. So when we look at hardening, I don’t think we should let industry off the hook when we talk about security and hardening and robustness. If you look at what plays out in the commercial space today, every other day, you’re reading a story about a data leak or some sort of cyber event. There’s plenty of motivation by industry to raise the bar of security. And so when we take that now into the DOW in context, it’s important to look at it. And I think there’s what I call six key hardening and security principles that I think all of industry should be able to strive towards. And they’re all very achievable, they’re very commercial-based practices. Not kind of a simple guy. So I’m going to frame this with an analogy to a castle. You have a castle, you have a wall around that castle. The wall is your base fundamental security principles. This is doing things like encryption, multifactor authentication, hardware rooted trust, design principles like model-based systems engineering. All of that go into building a good fundamental foundation and a good wall.

But the reality is that over time, cracks are going to develop. Adversaries are going to find ways to get around and get in. And so you have to get into what I call DevSecOps principles, where you have the ability to pull pieces of the wall out and replace those pieces in a fashion and basically secure by design principles of that ability to be able to inject it and update real time on the fly. You see this with your commercial phones in your cars today where there’s software updates that are constantly being pushed out. We have to build that into battle systems as well.

A third component is your full supply chain has to be on board with this as well. If you’re outsourcing elements of your wall that you’re building and those suppliers aren’t on board with these basic security principles, that is the weakest link in your chain.

The fourth is that at some point somebody’s going to get over that wall and they’re going to be in the castle. And so once they’re in, how do you minimize their exposure to the things that you care about? So this gets into like zero trust principles. And a good example I have around here is we do a lot of work in the area of swarm unmanned system connectivity and networking. And so you may have hundreds of systems out there and what happens if one of them disappears for an hour and then comes back online? How do you know that that system wasn’t compromised or tampered with? And so what you do with zero trust principles is you assume least privileged access. You don’t give that system any more access than it requires and you monitor the behavior of that system to see if it’s behaving in a manner that’s consistent with a system that was designed and should be on the network. And if it’s not, you pull it off the network.

The last, well, the fifth piece I would point out, and what is often forgot is building a redundancy into your design. You want to have multiple paths. I don’t want to have just one castle, but I want to have multiple castles. I want to spread my equities. I want to have a front door and a back door exit. So if we’re talking about wireless communications and transport, I don’t want to be relying on any one transport provider on any one network. I want to be able to use multiple networks to be able to communicate resiliently.

And then finally, we want to have standards. So things like CMMC and IAP in order to be able to create a baseline for industry to operate against and that we can test against, we can measure robustness against. None of these principles are hard, but they take work and we have to come together as an industry to do this in order to be able to build the robust capabilities that the war fighter needs.

Lt. Col. Timothy Trimailo:

Thanks, David, Matt?

Matt Hungerford:

Yeah. So I agree very much with what you’re saying. I think, especially on the commercial side, most commercial products have quite a high cyber threshold, cyber exposure. They’re connected to things on the open internet and there are a lot of commercial best practices to come to play. I think part of industry and government working together is to take things like the NIST standards, take some of the MIL-specs, turn that into good enough commercial speak in order for people to build robust solutions, but maybe without all the overhead that maybe doing a full MIL-spec or NIST standard CMC process entails.

I think when we look at kind of our hardening, there’s two ways to think about it. There’s actually securing the assets themselves, and there’s also the proliferation, and as you were mentioning, the redundancy of assets that are available. Onboarding a lot of different commercial capabilities and making sure you know how to isolate those within the architecture should there be a problem, but having other paths and redundancy and other capabilities, I think really, really fosters a lot of the innovation that we can bring to the war fighter quicker without going through onerous ATO steps that often slow down that process. Or even worse sometimes with commercial providers, force them to have a separate baseline and maintain a separate baseline that will fall behind sustainment, et cetera.

So being able to kind of black box API, where the interface to the enterprise is, harden that, understand and treat cyber and other risks as part of a broader context of maybe I can attrit this resource. I’m okay losing this because I have other redundancies and backups and putting that into a broader risk framework, I think would really aid getting commercial and battle ready capabilities to the war fighter.

Lt. Col. Timothy Trimailo:

Yeah, all great answers. I think what strikes me the most is that battle hardening is really about layering in different types of resiliency, redundancy in order to make our commercial capabilities more robust and ensure that they will be available to us when we need them the most. So whether it’s cybersecurity, whether it’s logistics and getting supplies or items in place when we need them, it’s really all hands on deck and there’s no one silver bullet to sort of battle heartening commercial capability. So as a follow-up to that, many commercial solutions aren’t born with specific defense applications in mind. Some companies are started up with dual use development in mind from the start. Some are started with a commercial customer in mind, and then they pivot to also providing defense applications. So with those definitions of battle hardening in mind, how do you think about that when government missions and the threat environment weren’t the original design drivers for some of our capabilities? Matt, let’s start here.

Matt Hungerford:

Yeah. So I mean, and that’s something we as a country have to do. I mean, our innovation, just the frothing innovation and investment we have is coming from commercial applications. And a lot of times we’re back purposing that, we see that as, “Hey, that has a real defense applicability.” I think a lot of commercial industry is very smart and knows exactly how … Sometimes maybe oversold sometimes, but how their technology could really apply to a defense situation. I think one of the tricks here is to get out of the RFI, RFP cycle, requirements cycle, and really start understand … Communicating to industry what are the objectives. Not worrying about the internals of the black box, but if I can meet this objective, add an interface layer and provide some level of service that I can guarantee, I believe I can meet that mission.

And then on the government side, understanding what that is and saying, yes, that meets the mission. We talk a lot of times about an 80% solution. Often that’s good enough, maybe for target quality information, maybe not, but really being able to sit there, clearly communicate the objectives from the government side, having that kind of rapport with industry saying, “I believe I meet it this way.” And during that kind of pre-negotiation, that design phase, as the commercial companies are investing capital to upgrade this commercial product, to have a defense capability, helping them understand where any shortfalls are and truly open and honest communication, I think that would really help get some of this Valley of Death that we often see trying to get these commercial capabilities into operations.

Lt. Col. Timothy Trimailo:

Thanks. David?

David Schmolke:

Yeah. I mean, I think the opportunity here is you do want to bring the best of commercial innovation into the ecosystem. And some of those elements of the ecosystem may not be at the security level that you ultimately desire, but you can then overlay security principles on top of that. So I’ll go back to my example from earlier regarding the redundancy and having multiple different networks. You may be operating, leveraging multiple different networks and you can make decisions leveraging software defined networking technology where you choose to push certain types of traffic over certain types of networks because it’s a lower level of classification, it’s perishable data, you’re comfortable with what happens there.

And then you then choose to push more sensitive traffic over other types of network. And this gives you that flexibility depending upon the operational environment you’re operating in. You can make those decisions software-based in real time on how your security posture wants to be adjusted. And so that allows you to rapidly integrate existing technologies in current state and leveraging overlay security principles and routing techniques and management techniques and policy in order to be able to be flexible as needed. But then those underlying systems themselves, being programmable and upgradable, over time it allows you to increase that security posture. And so it gives you that best of both worlds of the flexibility to upgrade over time while leveraging what you have today so you could feel the capability now. Because one of the things that I feel like we’ve run into is we create a lot of fear around security and perfection becomes the enemy of good enough. And so fielding and capability, but having that flexibility to have resilience around it, redundancy around it and programmability around it, to me is the key.

Mark Lundstrom:

So I guess we’re squarely down the fairway for what you described as like a dual use technology. And a decade ago, practically we identified this multi-decade gap in strategic airlift and just started to invest in that as a private company. So instead of waiting for a procurement program, we identified commercial as well as military applications that we could be pursuing and the business could survive and thrive whether it is commercial or military. And so thankfully we’ve been investing for many years and now that there’s recognition that there’s a need for additional strategic airlift in the U.S. and with our allies, we happen to be almost a decade ahead, I think, of where we would’ve been had we waited for a traditional procurement program. And so it’s like industry and Pentagon now need to work together really closely because there’s these different procurement mechanisms and acquisition mechanisms and service mechanisms that a lot of them are emphasized in the NDAA 26. So applaud the administration for moving forward in that direction.

And for the type of thing that we’re doing, it would cost many tens of billions of dollars to develop this capability and it would show up 2040 plus. And since we’ve been investing in it for so long, we’ll be able to provide capability in the early 2030s for a small fraction of that cost. But in order to do that, we have to have a capability where on Monday we can deliver rockets or satellites, and on Wednesday we’ll be delivering large jet engines or wind turbines. And so having a capability that we can repurpose across commercial as well as military applications allows us to be more flexible for the military as well.

Lt. Col. Timothy Trimailo:

Yeah. All great answers. From my side on the government end, I think a lot of what we see is we’ve traditionally had a requirements process that is sort of inflexible and very prescriptive and that is inconducive to being able to take advantage of commercial and dual use capabilities that weren’t built for those specific requirements. And so part of our ac-reform efforts across the department is looking at more what I would call sort of opportunity-based acquisitions, capability-based acquisitions. Let’s get after an effect on the battlefield, not after a specific specification in the system itself. And I think you guys kind of laid all that out really well.

Okay. So now that we’ve sort of defined the topic, let’s jump into sort of mission insights. From your perspectives, how well do you think commercial providers, and you can talk from your specific company’s vantage point or kind of what you’ve seen along your careers, how well do commercial providers truly understand operational government missions? Are there blind spots that exist or even blind spots that frankly we, the government have created over time?

Matt Hungerford:

Yeah. I mean, this is a great question. I think there are … In my company especially, we really like building up a commercial ecosystem and bringing that and making that operational. But we do definitely see that there’s a chasm there. Sometimes, as we talked about is security, sometimes it’s just how the CONOP on how this is actually going to be used. What is the duty cycle that something actually may be used in in real life? I mean, a commercial technology, let’s just say it’s some kind of radar or something like that, may be differently employed if it’s being built for a civilian use or something like the FAA or other techniques rather than how it may be used in a kind of a fighting government scenario.

Other things simply like just deploying logistic chains, a lot of times that’s not understood by a commercial technology, especially in a for a commercial company, especially if you have to get something into a forward deployed environment. I think when we’re talking specifically about space, we’ve actually seen quite a reversal where I think where the kind of government programs led the space industry so long with very exquisite technologies and very risk-adverse, very understanding of protecting the data, making sure it gets to the ground there. They’ve actually done the reverse and opened our eyes and said, “Okay, these are disposable resources now. I can bring a completely new paradigm.” So that’s to me an example where maybe that former kind of government mindset was actually locking us into the art of the not possible there.

But I think there still needs to be better communication on things like maintenance, sustainment, logistics to a lot of these commercial products to support the war fighters as well as like usability. A lot of our systems have very prescribed interfaces to use them. They need to be swapped and used with other interfaces. We either need to communicate making that similar or adjust on the government side to be able to take these more diverse technologies for the war fighter.

Lt. Col. Timothy Trimailo:

Okay. David?

David Schmolke:

Yeah. And really good question and interesting because this gets back to not every provider of technology is going to understand the end mission impact and the mission CONOPS and the problem they’re trying to solve. But again, big fan of bringing best to bring technologies to bear and integrating them together. And the entity that’s responsible for integrating or delivering that service capability does need to understand the mission problem. They need to be closely partnered with the government customer in order to ensure that that translates in. This gets a little into the acquisition physics, but I’m a fan of kind of an as a service-based approach where basically we’re measuring a capability based on SLAs and let the provider go off and do the lower level work of understanding how to stitch that together.

So again, I like illustrating with examples. And so there’s a use case out there that we’re all aware of about if you’re a tactical user on an aircraft, ground, maritime, whatever it may be, if you’re not on the network, you’re not in the fight. But delivering that network connectivity out to the end user so they have access to the data and the information they need to inform decisions and to perform their mission is a very difficult problem. The average provider of communication capabilities out there doesn’t necessarily design towards cyber effects and EW effects and things like this. So this is an example where you can stitch a lot of things together and overlay that in order to be able to provide a robust capability. So you can go off and you can buy transports from a lot of commercial providers that get you that B loss connectivity and line of sight connectivity from the edge back to some sort of ground station.

But then you need a way to securely route and push that traffic to cloud service providers. So we partner a lot with AWS and delivering connectivity at IL5 and IL6 where you have that secure classified connectivity from the edge back to the enterprise. But that enterprise may not be just a corporate enterprise, that may be a distributed cloud capability that’s across the tactical battle space. And the idea here is when I make that connectivity, I build in the security overlay, I build in the high assurance encryption, I build in the latency requirements to ensure that I can meet kill chain requirements, to ensure I have that ability to sense, make sense and act.

And so then you leverage the power of the cloud and the compute and processing resources to overlay the different applications, AI applications and other third party applications that allow you to take all that disparate data, process it and turn it into actual intelligence that they can then be pushed back to the war fighter and the decision-makers. And so that’s a great example of where you’re taking software defined opening technologies, wireless technologies, security technologies, fiber and satellite, and you’re integrating that together to provide a mission-focused mission network as a service capability to the war fighter. That to me is a great example of like those pieces don’t necessarily need to understand the mission, but the service solution provider does, and that’s through a partnership.

Lt. Col. Timothy Trimailo:

That’s great. Mark?

Mark Lundstrom:

Sure. So on the question about whether commercial can anticipate the needs and understand the mission requirements, I sort of look at that in two or three different dimensions. One is it’s just so important for industry to get involved very early with DOW to understand the requirements. And when I say that, it’s not just to understand the needs. In our case, when we’re talking to like Air Mobility Command or TRANSCOM, but going beyond that and understanding their customer needs. So what are the needs of Space Force? What are the needs of NRO? What are the needs of the Army to move Chinook helicopters? Understanding the pull from the end user is really important.

Secondly, it’s one thing to be able to move things around in peace time, but when things get really chaotic in conflict time, it’s all about adaptation. And so as there’s more of this hybrid model between commercial industry and military, how can we create a business model that works really well for adaptation? How do we make a model so that the military doesn’t have to pay too much for adaptation, but also incentivizes private industry to rapidly innovate as necessary when things are changing rapidly.

And then finally, I’ll turn the question around and not just say, does commercial industry understand the mission? I’d also say the people that are defining the mission requirements can … There’s a different world right now, I think, in terms of the speed of technology development. And so what can be done differently to make sure that there’s new mission requirements that can be developed based on new technology that’s developing on the timescale of months or years and not a decade?

Lt. Col. Timothy Trimailo:

Yeah, that’s great. It’s a perfect segue. First on that last point, what I’m hearing is that the government needs to continue to advance its level of transparency, open and honest feedback, communication, getting engaged and involved very early with commercial companies as they’re designing their systems so that they can be sort of born dual use is really important. And so kind of turning the page here a little bit, I’m going to do a little bit of a shameless plug for COMSO, but one of the things we’re working to solve in my office is how to responsibly operationalize commercial capabilities at scale without breaking what makes them commercial in the first place.

We have an initiative called CASR, it’s the Commercial Augmentation Space Reserve. And in this effort, we are setting up contracts where we can leverage commercial capabilities in crisis or conflict and bring those capabilities to bear in the future fight. Put simply, we want to make sure that commercial providers and the capabilities that they bring will be there for the war fighter to help us fight and win the next war.

Some of the things as we’ve gone through CASR that we’ve frankly struggled with a little bit as we define the framework for each mission area are things like incentive structures. We just talked about incentives a little bit, but incentive structures, liability. If a commercial asset, whether it’s on the ground in the air or on orbit is targeted by an adversary, who’s responsible for that? And how to guarantee commercial providers will be there by our side in a fight when we need you to be shoulder to shoulder with us. So with that in mind, sort of help me do a little brainstorming for my office here. What kinds of business or other incentives do you see in your specific area that would promote participation in something like a CASR type framework?

Matt Hungerford:

Yeah. You have a fascinating number of problems there with that, but I think there’s another thing to think about too, is that commercial companies need to stay viable. I mean, part of the commercial and the brilliance of our commercial industry is that companies are bored and some companies die. So I know traditionally when we’ve been working with commercial companies as part of integrating a larger system, we’ve had to do things like escrow, some certain technologies and whatnot, just to make sure that that technology’s still there.

I think on the incentive structure though, the liability one’s fascinating. The government may have to get involved with the insurance business as part of that and beginning to understand how to ensure these assets. If I have an entire comm relay system that’s taken out, that’s a significant hit to a business model. So I think there’s going to be a savviness that the government, and I think your office is way ahead of a lot of other procurement parts of the government, but to truly try to understand these commercial business models. They definitely want to use the government as a customer, but it’s not the only customer. And what can you do to preserve that business model going forward? In a time of conflict, do you have the right agreements and to preempt for the war fighter to take, number one priority? Have you done enough testing to put them on cold storage to understand that that capability is ready to be fielded and have you probably procured up to this cold storage point? Is something you could do. Do you have the right environments to test to know that this could be fielded quickly?

And then understanding that you may be in a complex scenario where fielding a system may be taking many of these companies, I’m calling it cold storage, but getting them ready to fight, reorienting what they do very quickly. I think there’s a huge CONOP process to that that’s actually really fascinating, but that needs to be worked ahead of time in order to turn these systems on quickly.

Lt. Col. Timothy Trimailo:

Thanks Matt. David?

David Schmolke:

Yeah. So as a satellite service provider, global satellite service provider, we’re able to scale and build out a very powerful network because we have commercial users operating on the network along with DOW users, and we value both types of users on the network. The elephant in the room here is around in a wartime mode, you basically turn off all the commercial traffic and only allow DOW traffic to pass. And that’s certainly an approach. I would sort of propose there’s a better way around that problem. I think when you build the network to be hybrid, like I spoke about earlier, where it’s multi-constellation, multiple service providers, you have terminals that have the ability to be able to hop onto multiple different networks. This is something that we do today. We’re on 700 aircraft today, where we hop across different networks as aircraft is flying for Air Force and other services. You can create that hybrid model where you mix in intermittently DOW and commercial traffic.

And if you stop and think about it from a security perspective, it’s an advantage because it frustrates the adversary because they don’t actually know how the traffic is being routed, over what networks it’s being routed. And you start to establish basically a pattern of life, if you will. And that pattern in life, if it looks the same in a wartime mode as a peacetime mode, it makes it very difficult to pinpoint the traffic and what to go after and what to attack. So that’s one point that I would leave you with, kind of operating on that sort of commercial operated, commercial owned model. And there’s sort of a government owned commercial operated model where there’s a lot of advancements happening in satellite technology today. You see the proliferation of LEO, of course, but that’s driven technology improvements for things like mini and small geo satellites, where the government can relatively cheaply run and operate their own geo network constellation and use techniques like network maneuverability to steer bandwidth as needed into hotspots because of the advantages that geo gets you with global coverage, with a relatively small constellation.

So to me, there is a model by which you leverage the power of commercial and all that provides, and you leverage all the advancements in satellite technology to give you diversity in a government purpose network and a commercial network.

Lt. Col. Timothy Trimailo:

Great David. Mark?

Mark Lundstrom:

So I guess from a company’s perspective, if you’re not going to get paid for procurement, you need to figure out how to get cash from commitment. And so new acquisition paths, new procurement paths, new service paths are really important to get signals from the customer so that the companies can go out and raise investment quicker. And ultimately, I think that’s a faster and a cheaper way to deliver capability, but one of the things that the military needs to be mindful, we all have to be mindful of is how do you make sure that you don’t put too many military requirements on something so that it can’t be a true dual use repurposement of a very expensive asset?

And when you do get to that point where you’re in a real threat environment, that’s when military procurement, like actually owning the hardware is essential, I think, or great insurance programs are essential. But if you’re not going that far and you’re using a dual use, we have to make sure that the requirements that are being put on the asset from the military’s perspective are not too onerous to make it very profitable on the commercial side as well.

Lt. Col. Timothy Trimailo:

That’s great. So as part of CASR, we’ve started to do war games, and it gets back to the transparency and communication we talked about previously, but we’re bringing together commercial partners to come in and do war games with us. And this is not just specific to comms. So we’ve got other pockets of the Space Force and the US government doing war games with commercial providers and bringing them into the fold. And part of that is not just to figure out how they’re going to integrate into the fight. It’s also to understand sort of what are the red lines for commercial companies and what they’re willing to take on or not take on? What are the types of incentives that you all are interested in as you sign up for these contracts and you sign up to be shoulder to shoulder with us in the next fight?

So all really great points. We only have about five minutes left and we tackled a lot of topics in this session. I want to let each one of you spend about a minute talking about sort of one, whether it’s a concept or a talking point or even an ask to the government or to your fellow industry partners. When it comes to battle hardening commercial capabilities, what is the one ask or final thought that you want to leave with this group?

Matt Hungerford:

All right, I’ll start. So I think we’ve been hitting on it throughout the talk. And when we’re doing a lot of commercial investment, there’s upfront capital outlays or investment rises. We have to raise investment from VC funds or maybe private equity. But what that means is that the commercial company is putting a lot of time and money at risk with a downstream promise that the government will buy this, that this is military ready.

So I think I like the idea of the war games, even having that early on as part of some of these brainstorming sessions to keep to us when we’re putting our own capital into it, are we on the right track? Because we have to answer to our leadership, we have to answer to our investors and getting some kind of feedback and negative feedback’s good too. It’s not just, “Yeah, this was great, this works.” What do you need to do to improve it to show that the time, effort, and money investment has an end goal and will pay off and we can correct problems when they’re nascent and early on, rather when they get hard and very expensive to bolt on at the end?

Lt. Col. Timothy Trimailo:

That’s a great point. And I think you just hit on something and a couple of you have hit on it throughout this. I was at an industry event a couple of weeks ago and someone made the remark that our secret weapon today is not only the operators who are innovating across the commercial landscape, but it’s also the immense amount of investment going into those capabilities, the private equity, the venture capital, traditional banks, et cetera. It’s the immense amount of private capital flowing into these capabilities that the U.S. government can take advantage of. So that’s great. David?

David Schmolke:

One point I’d just like to hit on in is all the work that’s gone into acquisition reform, keep doing that, keep moving down that path. We have to move at speed. The years of the seven plus year acquisition cycle, whereby the time the technology is fielded, it’s obsolete, we can’t have that. And the current threat environment and the current landscape, our adversary does not have that limitation. And so we have to move at speed of commercial. We have to take the best of commercial innovation, overlay it with the security and robustness capabilities and move at speed. And we have to have the acquisition approach in place to be able to deliver it just like we do in the security space or in the commercial space where we leverage as a service type business models. So I’ve seen a lot of good movement in that space in DOW. And so I would say that acquisition … OTAs is another example of that. Keep driving that acquisition improvement.

Lt. Col. Timothy Trimailo:

Yeah, that’s a great point. As many of our Space Force and senior leaders have talked about, this is really a generational opportunity to reframe how we do acquisitions. Being more flexible, being more open aperture to commercial capabilities is front and center in that effort. So I appreciate that. Mark?

Mark Lundstrom:

I was going to make identical comments. So I think it is just so essential to think of everything as a system and think of the space game as needing to be resilient, but think of the ground game and the logistics as part of the fundamental fabric to provide that resiliency. And we should start to think creatively about how movement of launch vehicles, of satellites in unique ways, or being able to build things of bigger dimensionality can really help us with battle hardening and resiliency in the future.

Lt. Col. Timothy Trimailo:

That’s great. Well, we are effectively up on time. I want to thank the panelists for joining me here today. I want to thank AFA once again. I think battle hardening commercial capabilities across all domains is at the center of what we’re trying to do with ACRA form today, and it is essential to being able to fight and win the next war, if and when that comes. So appreciate your time today and thanks to the audience.