Building Combat-Ready Pilots

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John “JV” Venable:

Well, thank you ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the last panel of the afternoon. I think it’s going to be the best, and it’s certainly filled with the most handsome of panelists that you’ll see anywhere in the world. Quick call out to Tobias Naegele over there, the voice of God, been doing this for the last two days, and he just sounds like an amazing man. Would you give our panelists and our moderator a big round of applause? As Tobias mentioned, I’m JV Venable, and I’m a senior research resident fellow here at the Mitchell Institute, and it is my great privilege to talk to you and help these panelists walk through the journey of readiness.

Last, I guess it was yesterday morning, the secretary and the chief of staff both led off with two great keynotes, and they talked and they dwelled on readiness. Readiness has many facets to it, but today, we’re going to dwell on the one that I think is the most important for the air and space power of the world, the United States Air Force. This body of Airmen has been around since 1947, and we’ve been dominating the skies ever since. If you go from World War II all the way to today, there’s no sky that we haven’t ruled. Desert Storm, 43-day air campaign. We just demolished the Iraqi defenses. We allowed a three, make that four day ground campaign ultimately successful because of the air power and the facilitation that our Airmen did over those days.

We lost less than 400 people in that war. If you compare that to where we are right now, where the Ukrainians are, the lines have been mired, the casualties have been in the hundreds of thousands, and they are basically there because neither side can dominate the skies the way we can. Today, we’re going to talk about the most important cog in that process. We’re going to talk about building combat ready Airmen. We’ve got three of the best panelists that you can imagine to do that with us today. The first to my immediate left is General Adrian Spain. General Spain is the Commander of Air Combat Command. To his immediate left is Lt. Gen. Case Cunningham, and he’s the A3 at the headquarters Air Force.

To his immediate left is Clark Quinn, and he is the Commander of Air Education and Training command. Would you give them another round of applause? You get into discussion about readiness today and people say it’s so complicated. There are so many different facets to it. It’s hard to put a pin and say, this is the secret, this is the secret sauce. General Spain, when you think about readiness for pilots and you think about readiness for the air superiority enterprise, how do you define readiness?

Gen. Adrian L. Spain:

Well, first off, JV, thanks for hosting once again, and thanks to AFA for putting on another great conference. Always great to be here and great to be up on the stage with good friends and really smart folks who’ve been working on these kinds of problems for a long time. I’m going to talk about readiness in two facets. One, at the macro level, you have your traditional levers of readiness, manpower, training, infrastructure and sustainment. Those are the things that are in a large organization, in our organization, generate readiness. Are we balanced in our investments in those areas? But if you go down to the micro level, to the tactical at the squadron level, it really comes down to two things.

It’s currency and proficiency. How often am I doing a thing? Currency. Then how good am I at that thing when I do it? Proficiency. That’s why it’s such a complicated topic because the first one I can measure very easily, how often have I done a thing? I can tell you exactly which things you’ve done over the last day, week, month, year. How good you are at something is a little bit harder to measure, and therefore that’s one of the things that we’re working on is, hey, how do I take this qualitative value that is really hard to measure and start measuring it? So that we can inform ourselves as we go through some resource challenges that we have and make the best use of the available sorties.

John “JV” Venable:

That’s a great answer. Sir, gentlemen, the microphones are a little weak. When you talk, just jam that thing up to your chin and the folks out there will be able to hear it a lot better.

Gen. Adrian L. Spain:

I think he just told me I was a little weak. That’s noted. Noted.

John “JV” Venable:

Just a little. It’s the air-to-air background. He had been flying a Viper during his career, just powerful, just powerful. General Cunningham, you’ve got a little time in the F-16, so I imagine your voice is going to come out a little more barrel-ish as you answer this one. We talk about readiness in so many other facets, aircraft availability, spare parts, train personnel from the ground perspective. But as General Spain mentioned, you have this repetition thing process. You’ve got to get reps and sets, but they’ve got to be in a building block process. You can’t go out and do the most complex sortie first. You’ve got to come in mastering the aircraft.

Then the weapon system, basic fighter maneuvers, air combat maneuvers, multi-ship, and then large force employment. Those reps and sets are really important. If that’s true, what better measure of readiness is there than an aircraft sortie?

Lt. Gen. Case Cunningham:

How’s this?

John “JV” Venable:

Ooh, good.

Lt. Gen. Case Cunningham:

JV put me up against COMACC, so thanks for that, JV. Thanks for hosting, JV, really appreciate it. It’s always an honor to be up here with COMACC and Com AETC, two commanders. They got the staff officer bracketed here in the middle. The way that we measure, as you said, JV, what matters more than sorties, I’m not going to argue with that at all. In fact, it’s the framework that we all grew up in. I stood shoulder to shoulder at the duty desk in the 27th Fighter Squadron a quarter-century ago, which means we’re old, with then Captain Spain and then Captain Cunningham as we filled out a sheet that logged what we had just accomplished.

Not too far down the road, Captain Quinn was doing the same thing in the 78th Fighter Squadron. That’s the program that General Spain’s team runs, which is the ready air crew program, where you log the things that you do every time you fly. It’s not just about the numbers of times, to General Spain’s point, it’s about the things that you are doing when you are flying. There’s that aspect of it. Then the other piece that I would throw in here that I think is important, and I’m going to hand this really quick to General Spain to comment on it, is a thing that we did not have over a quarter-century ago when we were logging those squares.

By the way, that program is essentially the same today, except you do it on a computer, is we did not have the combat experience that the force today has. The combat experience that, whether you’re an Airman on the ground, and you heard some of the great stories that the chief told in his remarks, or an aviator in the air, nothing experiences a force as much as combat experience. We always talked about the first 10 sorties when you grow up in red flag. If you think about what our force is today and the experience that our Airmen have had in combat, they are unmatched across the globe in what they have been doing, and nothing tests a force in the way that combat does.

I think that’s an aspect that is also important in this as we continue to work on the sortie piece. General Spain just had an opportunity to give out some distinguished flying crosses to some folks who are great representatives of that, so General Spain.

Gen. Adrian L. Spain:

Yeah, I think that’s a great point. One of the things that, as Basket was describing, as we were growing up, deployment meant readiness degrading. To some degree that’s true. You’re not doing your highest end training, you’re not going to the Nellis Range or JPARC, you’re not working in the JSE while you’re deployed. Some of those skills are degrading over time, but there are a ton of skills that you’re getting that you will never get anywhere else. Part of this is a cultural mindset of, hey, when I’m deploying, I’m actually becoming more combat ready in a number of ways that are very relevant. Even if the specific TTP, the tactic that I normally am used to training at our local range is not something that I’m doing every day.

All of the other things are things that I won’t get at my backyard range. I’m not getting shot at, number one. I’m not landing at a base or being told to land at a different base because mine is under attack. I’m not planning fuel for 17 different divert bases on the way up to the vol area or the cap area and on the way back. I’m not worried about the tanker falling out and having to drop in and get gas somewhere else. All these things are things you get in a combat sortie every day. We’ve got to convince ourselves that that is value added, that is readiness building, even if not perfect readiness for all of the things, those are things that you can’t replace.

John “JV” Venable:

Yeah, I love the dialogue. When I was a kid, I ran into a Vietnam era fighter pilot and he said, “How many times do you fly in a week?” I said, “A couple.” He goes, “This is what I found. You’re a lot better than me, but if I flew three times or more a week, I got better at everything. If I flew two times a week, I struggled to remember things. If I flew one time or more a week, I was really putting myself and other people at risk. Things weren’t natural anymore.” This idea of getting reps and sets is really critical.

Lt. Gen. Case Cunningham:

Yeah, in fact, JV, as you know, the chief’s on record having said that in open testimony, that three times a week is the goal that we’re shooting for. No argument there at all.

John “JV” Venable:

I’ve heard that handsome man to your immediate right say the same thing. I think it all goes bell, book, and candle. Readiness begins, that journey for readiness begins at that basic training unit where you’re learning to fly the F-16, F-15, the F-22, the F-35. This is where we get into General Quinn’s area of expertise. Sir, you’re watching people come out of operational units and that environment is starting to change, has changed over time. What trends are you seeing and what’s the impact of that sortie rate in the operational world? How is that impacting you in the training world?

Lt. Gen. Clark J. Quinn:

JV, teammates, thanks for hosting and for having the panel. I’m going to go all the way back to the very beginning of this. You talked about the formal training units and training, but I’ll go all the way back to white jets, if you will, T6s, T-38s. I would say T1s, but not anymore. Our instructor core is a reflection of the operational air force across the board. We were bringing in the major weapon system pilots and bringing them in and making instructors at the most basic level. If I go back in time, like Captain Cunningham did when he referenced a squadron that no longer exists, if you’re like 78th Fighter Squadron, that’s not a thing.

It was 20 something years ago, but we measured sorties and the sorties were an assumption that essentially in a fighter, each sortie was one hour, it was maybe an hour and a half. To be experienced, it was measured in hours. Three or 500 hours meant you had about 250 or 300 sorties. That changed drastically when we started doing the global war on terror, because one sortie could be seven or eight hours. That measurement of hours did not any longer equate to the measurement of number of exposures to takeoffs, landings, air traffic control, weather, because they were really long sorties. We’re a reflection of that. About eight or nine years ago, we did see an uptick in entry waivers.

Everybody that comes in to be an instructor pilot in AETC, certain requirements. If you come from a math background, it’s usually a hundred hours as an aircraft commander. If you come from a fighter background, it’s we want you to be a four ship flight lead. We started seeing an increase in the number of waivers, that is stabilized. But what was interesting was the graduation rates through pilot instructor training stayed about the same. That actually makes me question whether that entry criteria was valid in the first place. Maybe it was valid in the 1970s or ’80s when we came up with it, maybe it’s no longer valid.

To the point about the amazing war fighters, the learning in combat, General Cunningham just mentioned that General Spain gave out a couple of distinguished flying crosses. He actually did that at ENJJPT to some of the instructors that are now teaching NATO pilots in white jets. We are a beneficiary of that same operational experience, even at the most basic training levels.

John “JV” Venable:

I cannot imagine what kind of surge that put in the audience of the kids going through ENJJPT. That just had to be huge, and you had to feel it yourself on stage. I’m going to dwell a little bit more on sorties. The more you fly, obviously, your air crews get to upgrade faster. You get that experience level, you get a two ship, four ship flight lead, and then on into mission commander soft, all of the upgrades happen fast. But the same thing is true with every other facet of the flying industry. Maintainers, the more airplanes that they fix, the more airplanes that are flying in front of them and they help actually move forward, they get their upgraded training.

They go from a three to a five level much more rapidly. General Spain, this is coming back to you. It seems like sorties grease every aspect of readiness, including logistics, including the supply chain for spare parts. Sorties appear to be the currency of readiness. What is ACC doing to increase that dollar value?

Gen. Adrian L. Spain:

This is a great question and it starts with combat ready or mission capable aircraft. How many mission capable aircraft do I have? We have been working, and really General Wilsbach started this when he was the ACC Commander a year and a half ago, in an effort to really focus on the habits inside of the command. I think that we’ve been able to take what he built and accelerate it in terms of our attention to the act of executing the priorities of the Air Force, which are to fly and fix airplanes to deter and then go fight and win if deterrence fails. But in the flying and fixing, it is a cultural thing and habitual thing as much as a parts and supply and physical thing.

I spoke to a lot of people before taking over Air Combat Command and I talked to a lot of folks who were around in the ’70s when General Creech reformed TAC. The not so dirty secret about that initiative was that for the first couple of years, there was no money, but they saw a significant increase in mission capable rates just out of changing their habits and their focus and their attention at the wing commander level. The commander’s understanding that, hey, your grade is based on how well you are flying your airplanes and how well you are fixing your airplanes. General Wilsbach also commented that flying and fixings are the most important things we do. Of the two, fixing is more important in order to fly.

We have to be really intentional about how we’re training folks about the business of fixing airplanes and what is the most effective way to fix airplanes so that I can get a sortie generation rate that builds on all those things that JV mentioned. We are working really hard on spending a lot of attention at my level all the way down at every command level between me and the squadron. We are focused on, hey, how many airplanes do you have available that are mission capable, and how many sorties can you generate? Then once we have done all that we can there, it will require some more resourcing. The good thing about this effort is that, if the resources that have been described come through, we’ll be in a much better position to take advantage of those resources as they hit the flight line.

Because there’s a temporal disconnect, right? If I had a hundred billion dollars to spend on spare parts today, they would start hitting the line in about two years. Regardless of when the money is spent, there’s a temporal disconnect between the spend and the benefit. We’ve got some time here to fix our habits and to get better with our habits so that the architecture that the resources are falling on are actually primed to accelerate when those things come. In the meantime, if the resources don’t come, we get better along the way anyway. That’s how we’ve been spending our time. I’d say a year ago when I was having these meetings about all of our weapon systems, most of the platforms were not hitting their targets.

Now when we have our meetings, it’s a different story and there have been no increased resources in that time. It’s just been focus and attention. The part that you haven’t asked, JV, is the second part. Okay, when I have the sorties, when I have the aircraft availability, what do I do with each sortie? When I’m constrained in the number of sorties I can produce, I have to be really focused on the utilization of each sortie and getting the most out of it. What is the best use of the sortie? Who gets the most benefit out of flying within that sortie if I have a constrained sortie amount? Those are the things that we’re working on right now inside of Air Combat Command and 15th Air Force.

Cajun Behmer is doing a great job helping us with that inside of the command. Then as we learn some things on these initial steps, we’ll look to scale it across the fighter force in particular.

John “JV” Venable:

Fantastic. General Cunningham, this one’s coming to you. Readiness isn’t binary. It ebbs and flows with the way you feed it. You could argue that we haven’t been feeding readiness very well since 2012 in sequestration. The degradation and the number of sorties that air crew were getting after that point actually fell off significantly. We just heard General Spain talking about the benefits of sorties and specific elements of them and maximizing it, but that coming back into the building block process, the lowest end of it, going out and doing basic fighter maneuvers all the way up to large force employment, what are we doing well in that building block process and where can we do better?

Lt. Gen. Case Cunningham:

Yeah, so I’ll build off of some of the things that COMACC hit on. The first is, I’m admittedly biased when I say this, having spent three years at the Warfare Center and privileged enough to do so, but our high-end training is unmatched on the globe. There’s just no doubt about it. Our adversaries recognize it. Our allies recognize it, they want to show up at every high-end training event that we have. I think that’s a place where we do particularly well. Frankly, we’ve done that well forever and ever, and I think we will continue to do so, although we always feel the demand to continue to get better and better at it.

Where we can be better is in getting aircraft into the hands of aviators to fly the three sorties a week, in order to get the basic building blocks so that they’re ready to go excel in those high-end training environments. The kind of leadership that General Spain has shown at ACC that is having the kind of impact it has. Then I get to brag on my teammate, the Air Force A4, Lieutenant General Bell, who’s having the same kind of leadership impact up at the headquarters Air Force with his Aircraft Readiness Machine initiative, which is in direct support of the MAJCOM commanders, where 17 different systems are coming into a dashboard, where you can see, what are the constraining factors for aircraft availability?

The vice chief every month is hosting a session where we’re specifically digging into weapon systems, because as you might imagine, they’re all unique in their own special ways. We’re finding things that are supporting the MAJCOMs across the enterprise that are making things better. One, and I won’t get the specific details of it, but one was a part that was available from one of our friends. Instead of lamenting that we couldn’t find the part anywhere, we asked one of our friends for the part, somebody really important had to ask for the part, and we get the parts. That’s a good example of where we’re finding the constraints to get airplanes in the hands of aviators, to get at the building block things that you highlighted well there, JV, so thanks.

John “JV” Venable:

Yeah, that’s a great answer. Thank you, sir.

Gen. Adrian L. Spain:

If I can-

John “JV” Venable:

Yeah, please. Absolutely.

Gen. Adrian L. Spain:

… just follow on to that. One of the things that has become really clear, particularly as resources are constrained, is that the higher you go, the more resources are available even when constrained. There are levers that are at my level in the MAJCOM and at the air staff level for the chief or for the deputy chiefs of staff that they can pull that a wing commander or a squadron commander cannot. In our history, we have typically focused on the squadron as the center of mass for generating sorties. Hey, if you’re a squadron commander, it’s your job to take your airplanes that are within your squadron and generate the most sorties that you can.

Maybe the group commander gets involved because you’re getting ready to deploy and they force a squadron to help you get ready for that. But mostly, you’ve been on an island, certainly at the wing level. I, as a wing commander, was not mature enough probably to go ask my peer wing commanders, “Hey, I know we’re all struggling here, but can you give me some of your resources to help me out?” That was just not a discussion that we had, but I can have that at the MAJCOM level and Cajun Behmer as the 15th Air Force commander can have that at his level where the NAF has several wings of a particular type of weapon system and we can look around the enterprise and say, “Hey, where is their capacity?

Do I have parts that exist at base X that need to go to base Y without decrementing too far at base X?” We can make those decisions. When Basket’s talking about ARM, the Aircraft Readiness Machine, it’s really looking around the enterprise and going, “Hey, where is their capacity that somebody needs that can be given and help the entire enterprise?” What enables that is data and the information, all of us having the same information. If the squadron commander up through the headquarters air force has the same information, we can all make choices that are helpful to the enterprise that 10 years ago we couldn’t make because the data was really garbled, I’ll call it.

I was going to say garbage, but garbled is probably a better way of saying it. Everybody had different information at the different levels and none of it was coherent. Now we all can see the information. We can see where there’s a problem. I can see where the parts are, and we can make choices to spread that out in smart ways that don’t penalize people for high performance while also not allowing somebody to languish that could get some help and pull them out of a ditch.

John “JV” Venable:

In the 1990s, we did a startup squadron at Pope Air Force Base with targeting pods. It was a lantern squadron, and we did exactly that with units around the United States to try to get enough spare parts to where we could actually mount the targeting pods on the jets and begin our request for that first increment of readiness. It worked like a champ, and we actually were IOC much earlier and went to Vigilant Warrior in 1994, a year before we should have been able to go. It works and I’m glad to hear that’s working for you. This idea of sorties and flying hours, General Quinn, it all relies on the budget. You could argue that we’re at historic lows on sorties and hours.

If not there, around the margins of it. Maybe this question is self-evident, but if we don’t get a budget that actually increases flying hours this year, how will that impact our readiness?

Lt. Gen. Clark J. Quinn:

Great question. I’m going to perhaps not answer at the overall Air Force level. I’ll answer at the AETC level, because there’s two aspects to it. One, we have to have the budget, we have to have the flying hours. The next aspect is we’d have to have the aircraft available to actually fly them. We can have all the hours in the world, if we don’t have the aircraft on the ramp and the sustainment to go with it, we’re not flying them. That fix and the fly, fix, fight and win. I think for most of the operational commands, I would equate flying hours almost to a readiness metric. If we were just going to do home station flying, I’ve got 30 pilots, this many experience, this many not.

They all need those three sorties a week, average sortie duration, and then you aggregate it up, this is how many hours I need to be ready. If I get this many hours, everybody gets their three sorties a week. It’s actually a little bit different within AETC. I see flying hours as a production metric because I am tasked to produce 1500 pilots, is the number right now. It’s actually pretty simple math. 1500 pilots, I need this many for T6s. I need this many for T38s. If you give me that many hours, I am capable of producing 1500. If you don’t give me 1500 hours, I’m not going to be able to make the 1500. It’s much more of a production metric.

Don’t get me wrong, the instructor pilots in white jets, there is about a 10% instructor development, kind of a continuation training that is taxed on above so that we can keep making them better. That would be the first thing that goes, because production is why I exist, so I would have to take away that instructor development. I would prefer not to do that, but as we had discussions earlier this year about what would have to come off the top if we had a flying hour cut, which we didn’t get, it would’ve been those extra CT sorties for the instructors. Then since I’m here and I’m also in charge of recruiting, we fly a lot in AETC.

If you have folks that want to fly, they like to fly, if they want to fly twice a day and they don’t mind really old jets and sweating a lot in the Laughlin heat, come my way. I was out at Laughlin about two weeks ago and had multiple sessions with a whole bunch of my instructors, including a couple of groups of FAPs who, by the way, if you want very, very direct feedback on how things are going, just get 10 first assignment instructor pilots in a room and you’ll get direct feedback. But we finished that session at about 2:00 in the afternoon and I asked them, I’m like, “Is anybody else flying?” It was Friday, 2:00 in the afternoon on Friday. “Is anybody else flying today? “All 10 of their hands went up. They were all stepping to go brief a student sortie. Come fly with AETC.

John “JV” Venable:

You don’t happen to need an old guy, do you?

Lt. Gen. Clark J. Quinn:

Can you instruct in the sims?

John “JV” Venable:

Well, okay. We’ll go into the SIMs in just a second. Gentlemen, want to pile onto that real quick?

Gen. Adrian L. Spain:

Yeah, just real quick. I think that flying hours is an important topic. In my experience, it is one of four pillars that we have to get right, and it has to be in the right balance or you don’t actually get the capability that you want. I can’t talk flying hours without talking maintenance manpower. I can’t talk maintenance manpower without talking infrastructure. I can’t talk infrastructure without talking weapon system sustainment. It’s really the balance of those four levers that we have to get right. If I increase the flying hours without increasing maintenance manpower or increasing weapon sustainment, I will waste certain resources because I’ll be out of balance and I won’t be able to take advantage of the flying hours.

I’ll have the hours, but I won’t have the ability to generate the number of sorties to fly the hours. In addition to, hey, are we at the right level of flying hours? Do I have the right level of maintenance? Support infrastructure and weapon system sustainment to go along with those flying hours, that’s the trick. The secretary mentioned yesterday, the Air Force is committed to increasing the investment into all of those, what we call foundational accounts. It’s in order to raise the floor for all of those things so that the capability increases, not just one element does, and we end up out of balance because the rest don’t come with it.

John “JV” Venable:

It takes it all, right? General Cunningham, any thoughts from the HAF’s perspective?

Lt. Gen. Case Cunningham:

What COMACC said.

John “JV” Venable:

It’s interesting, the budget for 2027 had some really great injects into it. We’ve been historically around 85%, 87% weapon system sustainment, and that’s 85% of the weapon system sustainment or spare parts it takes to fly 100% of the hours. This year we’re up to 93%, which I think is a big boost. Manpower, we’re 12,000 additional blue suits coming into the service. I understand many of those are heading toward maintenance. Those are two great injects from this year, and I can only imagine what the following year’s budgets will look like. Just a bit of a follow-up on the question writ large. In your opinion, what capabilities in the air superiority enterprise are the most challenging to sustain? Anyone can answer.

Gen. Adrian L. Spain:

Which capabilities are the most challenging to sustain? You’re talking the people or the aircraft in general?

John “JV” Venable:

No, sir, I’m more talking about capabilities. You’ve got a brand new EW platform coming online. You’ve got a very limited supply of AWACs. We’ve certainly got the fighters. We’ve got other elements, airborne battle management, a big, big deal. If you thought about it all, which would be the most challenging to sustain?

Gen. Adrian L. Spain:

Yeah, they all have the same challenge. Right now it’s that we are out of balance in our resourcing of them. Some of them are older and they’re out of balance in resources. That balance includes things like diminished manufacturing sources. The people are not making the parts any longer. When something breaks, you end up in this catch 22 of, I’m going to have to pay somebody to start up a process to build this part again. Then I’m going to have to pay a lot more than I would like to for it in order to keep flying, or I’m not going to pay for that and we’re just going to watch the weapon system slowly degrade.

I think it starts with across the weapon systems, ensuring that we’re in balance on those investments regardless. They could be a low balance where our capability isn’t as high as we’d like, but it’s at least balanced to the point that I can optimize it. Those are choices when you don’t have enough resources that you have to make. I think that across the weapon systems, we see similar symptoms of those same challenges. Hey, we have an older weapon system or even the new weapon system that doesn’t have the right number of initial spares. I have a parts problem with that. Then I become out of balance. I can’t fix them fast enough so that I can’t fly them enough times to build the readiness that we need. The attributes of the challenges are a little bit different whether you’re talking new or old systems, but the elements of them actually are the same.

John “JV” Venable:

Fantastic. Gentlemen, anything to add?

Lt. Gen. Case Cunningham:

Just quickly, JV, since I’m looking at the professional development event on the screen here, what COMACC just described really well is a lot about risk. Just for the crowd in here, for Airmen, when it comes to what we’re talking about, it’s very, very, very, very, very rare that we eliminate risk. In a world of constrained resources, that’s just not a thing that happens very frequently. Really, what you’re talking about is where you’re accepting risk deliberately, where you’re shifting risk. We have made some resourcing decisions over the years where we’ve shifted risk into different pieces of the portfolio.

When we do that and the risk comes home to roost, then this is the situation that we find ourselves in. Ultimately, that’s our job. Of course, in the A3 seat, I do a lot of talking about risk here, but these are not unknowns unknowns. These are deliberate decisions that have been made and General Spain did a really good job of talking through those. Thanks.

John “JV” Venable:

Fantastic. There’s one more element we haven’t talked about with regard to readiness, and that’s simulators. Now, absolutely, sorties grease all skids, but when you go to high-end combat, you’re going to actually have to employ systems of systems that have great complexity to them, sensors, processing capacity, electronic warfare, all of those elements coming together in areas where you can’t always actually mimic in the air. It’s best done sometimes in a simulator. The development of the joint simulation environment, the JSE, it was supposed to answer that mail. I think it’s delivering some results. General Spain, General Cunningham, could you talk about why JSE is so important to your air crews?

Gen. Adrian L. Spain:

Yeah, you hit on it. Number one, no synthetic environment is going to replace flying and being in the environment and actually putting yourself and the weapon system at risk and having that threat factor of a safe takeoff and a safe landing in the back of your mind the whole time. But there are some things that we can only do in the sim. As the weapon systems get better and better, which is a good thing, between Raptor to F-35, B2 to B21, they’re getting better and they’re getting more lethal. To stress them in a combat relevant environment, either requires every airframe in the United States Air Force showing up at the Nellis Test and Training Range at the same time, or we go into the sim.

I can generate a thousand different adversary tracks. I can do the same run or multiple runs over and over and over again. I can visually see missile threats coming back at me and reacting to them. Those are things that we can only do in the sim. Eventually, we’ll have CCA platforms in the sim where a lot of our training and learning the habits of the CCA along with the manned platform will be rung out and trust built in a synthetic environment and as well as going to live fly with them. Not only for the relevance of the threat do we need to continue to double down on the investments in the JSE and get more platforms into it, but also the ability to do only those things that the synthetic environment allow us to do from a mission rehearsal standpoint.

John “JV” Venable:

Great. I’m going to ask one more question out of General Quinn, and this is a take-off of something you said earlier about 1500 pilots a year. The Air Force is currently roughly 2000 pilots short. At least that was the last reported numbers, and there’s rumors that it’s crept up by 10% or 15%. Filling that gap begins with you and your folks. If you had the ability to pull all the levers or any specific lever, what would you need to do to fill that 2000 pilot void by the end of this decade?

Lt. Gen. Clark J. Quinn:

Oh, by the end of the decade.

John “JV” Venable:

Yes, sir. The clock’s running.

Lt. Gen. Clark J. Quinn:

Yeah. I don’t know that I’m going to have an answer here on the stage to get us there by the end of the decade, because it’s certainly not just AETC. I can produce them, but there’s a retention aspect that’s hard to predict into the future. Airline hiring economy, you don’t know where that’s going to be and what our retention rates will be. I’ll also say that when we talk about the 2000 pilot shortage, and I’m certainly getting into General Cunningham’s world here, those are generally not lieutenants in cockpits. We’ve got lieutenants and captains in cockpits. These are staff officers. The 1500 that I’m producing this year, they’re not going to be filling those positions for 15 to 17 years.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t produce the 1500, we need to. The bad analogy is if you want a big shady tree in your backyard, you should have planted it 45 years ago. Well, if you didn’t, the next best day to plant it is today. That’s what we’re doing. We’ve recognized we had a, I’ll call it a couple of years, if not a decade of underproduction. We can’t sustain that. The only way to get out of it is to make the pilots that we need. There’s a follow on to that, that they also have to be absorbed and experienced and appropriate to come back to the staff later. Basket, anything to add onto that?

Lt. Gen. Case Cunningham:

Yeah, I’ll be quick, JV. Production, absorption and retention. That’s the three that we got to get to get at the number there. I will tell you that AETC is doing their part a thousand percent, and so please don’t ask them to produce more than 1500 right now. I’m saying that somewhat in jest because to his point, it will take a long time if we are to do that. Absorption and retention is really where our focus is now that AETC is here. The thing that I will hit with retention is, we’ve seen some great results with some of our recent initiatives there that is increasing retention number. 60% is what we’re shooting at.

Then with General Spain’s leadership and the FTUs coming to ACC, the absorption piece is really the next levers that we’re going to pull out. Then the last thing I’ll hit on this is it is about risk. The 2000 pilots, whatever the number is, where we are accepting risk today is in the staff position. Most of those numbers are in staff positions. Our ops units are manned or resourced with people at 100% today. That’s where that risk is going with respect to the pilot shortage. But General Spain, I’ll let you talk to the absorption.

Gen. Adrian L. Spain:

Nope, I think you got it exactly right. It’s going to take 10 years to get out of a 10-year at least hole. I think if we are disciplined about keeping production at 1500, then in a decade we’ll be in a much better place than we are today. If we stop at any point along the way, then at some point we will create another bathtub of humans that will take a decade to fill. I’m glad and grateful that we started. It does create some challenges for us to mitigate, but that is work that we must do in order to bring this risk down in the future.

John “JV” Venable:

Wonderful. Well, we’re at the end of our time, ladies and gentlemen. I really am grateful for the frankness and the direct answers that these three gentlemen gave us. Would you give them a big round of applause?