Building the Force of the Future

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This transcript was generated with the assistance of AI. Please report inconsistencies to comms@afa.org.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

Thanks guys. Well, thanks everybody. It’s been 14 years since we first started to sing and dance, 14 years since we first started to talk about the pivot to the Pacific and it’s no doubt that we need to complete that shift sooner rather than later. And like we’ve talked about throughout this symposium, the threat of China’s rise in the Indo-Pacific is greater than we’ve ever seen before. In 2014, China was at best a near-peer or future-peer competitor. The U.S. military was unquestioned in its superiority, and today that’s no longer a given.

China’s Navy is bigger than the U.S. Navy. Its Air Force has more fighter aircraft than the U.S. Air Force, including fifth-generation fighters and long-range missiles. Over 1,000 satellites up in orbit in about the last 10 years. A nuclear force that’s grown to over 600 warheads. The People’s Republic of China has developed partnerships and is exercising with Russia and North Korea. It’s also leveraging access to Russian bases and flexing its muscles in the Arctic and in the Western Pacific to include exercises in the waters south of Australia.

As our conference theme makes clear, the threat is now. The aim of this panel is to explore what Air Force leaders are doing to build that force of tomorrow, essentially to train, equip and organize peace. Please welcome to our panel Major General Mark Mitchum, Commander of the Integrated Capabilities Command Provisional.

General Duke Richardson, Commander Air Force Materiel Command.

Lieutenant General Smokey Robinson, Commander Air Education and Training Command.

And Brigadier General Dave Epperson, special assistant to the Chief of Staff General Dave Allvin.

Thank you all for being here. General Richardson and General Mitchum, let’s just start with you and talk about how in light of these growing threats, how does the Air Force prioritize the modernization efforts to ensure that we can deter and if necessarily prevail over this pacing threat?

Gen. Duke Richardson:

Yeah, thanks for the question. I’m going to get us started. You’re probably wondering why I am not sitting in the first seat, hopefully you’ll understand it as we go through this. So, I think about a very simple model that we’re all familiar with, ends ways and means. I think heretofore we probably haven’t done a great job of prioritizing or we can’t decide what to make the top priority. So, we tend to try to make everything a top priority and then therefore nothing’s really a priority.

And so, when I think about end’s ways and means, I think the ends are pretty clear now. I think the SecDef himself have laid those out for us and that is two of the three priorities for him. 1) rebuild the military. 2) is re-establish deterrence. And so, we know what the ends are, we know what the objectives are, what the target is. And then when I think of ways, what we’ve done in the past is we disaggregated the requirements building process, if you will, that then gets turned over to Air Force Material Command and other acquisition organizations.

And so, I think the ways is something that we’re going to probably talk about here a little bit. And then because of that disaggregation method and the lack of prioritization, when we get to the means, i.e. actually paying for it, we tend to find out that we can’t cover it all. And so, that’s been the Air Force that we’ve been working through for a number of years. Hopefully the folks in here got to sit on the last panel, which was really about the force design.

And so, when you look at the four folks up here, I want you to pretend just to the right of Bull here is another person that’s that whole panel sitting there, that’s the force design panel. And then from there, ICC Provisional, General Mitchum’s job is really to pick up the force design and start working with it and turning it into mission threads. And then my job as the capability development executive officer working with Amanda Gentry, who’s hopefully somewhere out there.

There she is right there, is to start decomposing those mission threads into gaps, into capability gaps that we need and start trying to figure out how we actually, so you’ll hear about this office called the Integrated Development Office. The Integrated Development Office is not a MAJCOM, it’s not center, it’s an office, just what it’s titled and its inside Air Force Material Command. So, it’s a very small organization, but the job of the IDO is to work very closely with ICC Provisional to decompose the mission threads that the force design drives.

And then start looking at what the gaps are that Solo talked about and then figuring out what are candidate material solutions to fill those gaps. And so, that gets you from the ICC Provisional to the CDO, that’s me as a title I guess, but really the IDO. And then in a minute I think General Robinson will probably talk about train. How do we now train Airmen to those capabilities? And eventually Fuge is going to talk about, “Okay, now we need to employ and deploy those capabilities.”

So, we’re actually sitting up here in this order for a very specific reason. So, I walked through force design, getting to a set of requirements, getting to an acquisition program of record or a collection of them and then getting to training and then getting to deploy and employ. And so, Bull will certainly cover ICC. I want to focus on the IDO for just a minute, which is really that second piece, which is why I’m in the second chair. So, when you think about this IDO, the Integrated Development Office.

I really do want you to think about going after the chief’s hands and that is General Alvin has directed us to come up with integrated capabilities, not capabilities that are bespoke, not capabilities that just work with themselves, but capabilities that work with other capabilities. And I think that’s really how we get after the SecDef’s priorities. And so, the IDO will really do three things.

So, if you think about the IDO, just think about three things. The first thing they will do is mission engineering and that is taking those mission threads and applying a systems engineering process, breaking them down, decomposing them and figuring out where the gaps are and then figuring out what the candidate solutions are for filling those gaps. We will always be biased towards filling those gaps with maybe things that we already have or changes to things that we already have.

And then in cases where we don’t have things that could be modified, that’s when we would probably spawn or consider spawning new programs. So, that’s the first thing they’ll do in mission engineering. The ICC Provisional and the IDO partnership is extremely tight during that entire process. In fact, if we do this correctly, you won’t really know who works where, they’re just working it as a team. From there, once we have candidate materiale solutions, materiale with an E at the end, then we’re going to do what we call concept development.

This is all pre-program of record work. So, the second thing the IDO will do is concept development. So, if you can imagine assessments, analysis, modeling, eventually experimentation, eventually prototyping to make sure that before we start a program of record that that capability is actually something that we want. That’d be the second phase. Again, working very closely with ICC Provisional. The third thing that the IDO will do is this idea of planning for development.

And really what that means is really now we’re committed to a solution and what do we do to now get that thing into the hands of a program executive officer so that we can actually execute it as a program of record, something that we know is going to come out the other side. And that’s that third phase, planning for development. So, I just wanted to share that with you. I think if the IDO can do that working very, very closely with ICC Provisional, then we’ll have a really good shot at realizing the force design that the last panel talked about. And so, I’ll stop there and see if Bull’s got anything that he’d like to add.

Maj. Gen. Mark Mitchum:

Yes, thanks sir. So, I think that’s an excellent view of how we connect to a lot of partners in this business. So, I’d like to first say with the ICC Provisional right now, we’re about 200 strong and everything we do is focused on accelerating the capability development and the delivery of capabilities to Airmen. It’s focused on the warfighter and accelerating that capability and getting it out to the field. And if I were to pick a metric to measure what we’re doing and how we judge the Air Force over time, it’s the speed element certainly.

And it’s also are we improving our lethality per dollar, our capability per dollar? That’s an important metric going forward and I would put the Air Force on par with anyone delivering lethal capabilities out there and how we do that. But we can get better and we must get better. And so, tying back to the Chief’s keynote yesterday, part of how we have to do that based on the pace of the thread and also the opportunity presented to us right now by our industry partners and some of the pace of technology growth. We have to prioritize missions over platforms, effects and outcomes over individual weapon systems.

And we’ve done a really good job on the behalf of a lot of great Airmen in the past and today doing that work. But we’ve tended to take it through a functional lens, through our individual weapon system and try to make it the best weapon system that we can. And they’ve done amazing work, but that doesn’t necessarily give us the system of systems or the enterprise level capabilities that we need both to deliver it to our Airmen and also to give the joint force commanders holistic capabilities from the Air Force that only we can provide.

So, the first step in that in referencing back to the ghost chair next to me from force design in the last panel, is really having a force design that anchors that we do all the work up here sequentially and iteratively for us to be able to field these capabilities. We know what we’re anchored to, a force design. And there’ll be deviations based on threat, fiscal environment, geopolitics, all those things. But there’s always that path that we’re headed towards a North Star, if you will.

So, here’s what we are actively doing now in ICC, the work that is happening today out on the East Coast predominantly folks are actively engaged in. So, first we’re doing the mission thread work that General Richardson talked about and also the chief talked about yesterday in his keynote. That’s about connecting weapons systems and all the infrastructure to ensure we bring whole capabilities. We don’t bring an a la carte menu of individual weapons systems and offer those to the joint force commander. We give them the opportunity to solve problems, to produce effects and time and space.

So, we’re doing that work to make that be the integral way that we look across all the great work that’s happening in the functionals and we’ll continue to have those functional aspects, but we have to knit it together. So, that’s first, we’re doing the mission thread work. Second, as General Richardson talked about this holistic view, the system of systems also requires us to think differently about requirements. To write better requirements and to ensure our requirements are focused on maximizing the system of systems capabilities, not just an individual weapons system.

We might make trades in individual weapons systems because it actually leads to a better complete capability for the Air Force if we suboptimize some of our individual systems. We’re doing that work today. And the last one, and especially for anyone who has spent time in the Pentagon or in the resourcing world, a very important point, especially to make to our industry partners is we’re actively taking the investment accounts. In our world, that’s the research and development accounts as well as procurement accounts from across the Air Force.

Taking those inputs and trying to give a holistic view of those to hand to headquarters Air Force as the beginning of their work for the 27-palm process. That work is happening right now and that title resourcing from force design all the way down to the resourcing is a much clearer link than we had before and I think it’s critical to how the Air Force does business. If we don’t do that, we’re not going to be able to achieve those outcomes of accelerating capability development to the war fighter and increasing lethality per dollar.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

Okay, that’s great. If we can just continue on that discussion a little bit more. So, I like the way the process is laid out, it’s very clear, but now let’s give you a problem. So, you have the current force structure and some of that needs to be modernized and that modernization could be an upgrade on a specific weapon system or munition or it could be a new weapon system that you have to go through all that process.

All of it has to be sustained and then sometimes you got some immediate need by some new technology or cape that’s thrust in the middle of this all. How do you balance that workload out and how do you prioritize inside of that? Probably through this mission threat analysis and stuff, but can you give some examples of how you’re doing that today?

Gen. Duke Richardson:

I think we talk too much like this, you even did it a little bit. This sustainment thing is since extra bolt on thing that we have to do, I really think we got to get out of that mentality. I think it’s part of what we do, it’s part of the requirements process. And so, if we can get this correct, get this all laying flat, these things are not in conflict. And so, some of the things that we’re trying to do, we’ve been talking so far about requirements and if you get the idea, what we’re really trying to do is get to a durable set of requirements, get to a president’s budget that doesn’t.

When it changes year to year, it’s only because the program changed, not because our priorities drastically change. There’s always going to be some on the margins changes. So, I don’t want to suggest that it’s going to be static, but the way we do that in terms of sustainment, I want to talk about how we do it. And that is some of the newer methods that we’re using that some of our marquee programs right now, collaborative combat aircraft for example, they’re not putting sustainment to the side.

In fact, some of the methods that they’re using, especially some of the digital techniques in the integrated digital environments, what we call digital material management, that stuff is baked in up front. And so, if we do this correctly using open mission systems, standards, architectures, we can integrate digital environments, we will actually have the data that we need to sustain something into the future. I hope that in the future we don’t keep all of our systems for 60 years or even 30.

But for those that we decide that we’re going to do that, we do actually need to have the data in order to do that and I think that’s where we failed in the past. We’ve got too many systems right now that are struggling with diminishing manufacturing sources or we don’t even actually have the data, so we have to figure out how to recreate it and that’s not a good place to be in. And so, all that will be baked in right up front.

Maj. Gen. Mark Mitchum:

If I could add one point to elaborate on what General Richardson said. First off, we understand that fundamentally modernization and sustainment are inseparable discussions. We cannot break those apart and specifically we look at some of the processes that we are setting up and the direction that we have from the chief of staff. We cannot break the connection between sustainment and modernization and I’ll add readiness to that. And a lot of that work right now happens, phenomenal work across our Air Force in a disaggregated fashion at places like Langley and Scott in Barksdale and Hurlberg and San Antonio with those match coms that do that work today.

And we know we can’t break that. So, that’s the first point. The second one though is I’d like to lean into an opportunity and there is a tension between these things, absolutely. But we have a real opportunity right now and the idea that delivering capability fast and potentially very fast to our Airmen days or months as opposed to years and decades. How we expand our industrial base and then how we drive down sustainment costs. When we think about what a lot of our industry partners in this room and listening elsewhere have, our ability to think about things like additive manufacturing to access different parts of the industrial base and expand it.

We can do all of those together because as we think about writing requirements, and particularly from a perspective in my provisional status now in ICC, as we think about it. And I think it’s critical for the Air Force going forward, we have to ensure that the requirements we write for something that we might require five cycles on doesn’t sound like something that we used to write that required 5,000 cycles. And whether that’s the caliber of combat aircraft that I imagine we probably don’t have depots for in the future.

Or it is much more smaller scale autonomous things that we’re maybe printing in remote areas and things that look like CONEX’s, there’s almost no sustainment trail that comes with that of a traditional WSS or working capital fund. So, there’s a real opportunity to accelerate all of those things and achieve those outcomes at the same time. And we have to drive that and that starts with how we write the requirements and how we access our industry partners to drive the right behaviors and think differently.

That either means we have more sustainment money available for General Richardson to prioritize against the other weapons systems or we buy more capability, but it’s all about that as more lethality per dollar.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

Great. General Robinson, so as we look at the force design and look at what’s happening between the equipping part. Now, we have some new concepts for you and how do you work that into training our Airmen both today and in the future and getting them ready for all of this that’s coming down? A changing way of war, changing equipment and making it happen in the battlefield of the future.

Lt. Gen. Brian Robinson:

Yeah, thanks very much. Again, thank you for the opportunity to be here with this guest panel and I’d like to pick up where General Mitchum left off. It was said yesterday too by the chief about a more holistic understanding of the requirement as we field new capabilities. And so, AETC will also be closely knitted with ICC Provisional in terms of understanding the capabilities that I would say the Air Force is seriously going all in on and how do we bring our particular lens in the DOTMLPF spectrum training, doctrine, logistics, materiel in a lot of ways as it specifically applies to training.

And bring that to bear to field a force, the most precious resource we have, which is our Airmen and our Guardians ready to use that capability as it comes off the line in a much more parallel fashion than we do today. And so, that’s key. And so, we take a look at that and leverage the industries, the learning industry in this case, the technologies that are out there that we see growing at tremendous rates these days and how we can train to different capabilities better.

But I’m going to back up just a little bit and talk about the honor and the privilege that the air education training command has is working with Airmen and developing our Airmen and reviving the air-mindedness, the warrior ethos early as soon as we touch them. If you’re wearing a uniform, you’ve come in through air education training command and we have touch points that we have in base military training or reserve officer training corps or officer training school.

And what we’re doing is we’re not forsaking any opportunity to put specific competencies on the foundational competencies and spend time focusing on those in training. And then as well as the occupational competencies that would get to what’s needed to employ the new capabilities specifically to do platform. CCAs is a good example. Or if you think about mission-ready Airmen today, there’s a certain cohort of specialties today that come together to operate an airfield, be it back in the garrison or on a remote location.

That cohort of Airmen need to have a core set of tasks and understanding of being able to do each other’s jobs in a way that you can go out there lighter, leaner, yet more lethal and ready so that you don’t have to travel heavy and allow us to exercise the agile competent employment concept from that aspect. So, focusing on those competencies in basic training, it’s really going to be about resilience, perseverance, teamwork, accountability, self-control.

What it means to be part of a team, but also developing yourself. We’ve made modifications I can talk to later in basic military training and some of the initial skills training as well and how we engender those competencies in those Airmen sooner, further left of bang than we do today. So, the three level or the mission qualified rated officer you see coming out of the initial skills pipelines today are going to be different than what all of us in this room, most of us in this room anyway, have experienced in our time in the Air Force.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

Thank you. And General Epperson, so how do we structure the Air Force a little different to meet these challenges of the future in these contested environments around the globe?

Brig. Gen. David C. Epperson:

Yeah, you bet, thanks. The chief talked about it yesterday. It’s about working towards more cohesively trained units. We’ve been on this journey for a while, we started with expeditionary air bases about a year and a half ago. Right now, we’re training up our air task forces and eventually we’ll be going to deployable combat wings. Each one of those organizations gets to a more cohesively or more cohesive unit that can go through the entire AFFORGEN cycle together.

The thing that’s common about each one of these is that there’s a command layer. It has a C2 layer with the commander and command chief and also an A-staff, an air staff that can support that commander’s decision-making cycle, especially when we move forward into a more contested environment. Then you have the mission layer. The mission layer is those squadrons that you can plug in underneath.

So, whether that’s a fighters or attack airlift or ISR, tankers, whatever that is, that can plug in and be a part of the mission to ultimately accomplish that combatant commander’s mission downrange. And I think a lot of people ask about, “Well, how are you going to be able to build that composite force downrange?” If you have a air task force commander or a deployable combat wing commander that is an airlifter by trade, what’s their expertise with the fifth gen and LO downrange?

Well, the way that we’re structuring it is these mission layers, this mission gen force element will bring expertise to add on to the A-staff. So, you would bring, if you’re going to say the commander from Little Rock or something like that is the deployable combat wing commander and F-35s from Hill Air Force Base, join them in theater. Then the F-35 unit would send folks that are going to be part of the A4 staff and part of the A3 staff so that they can help in that commander’s decision-making process to make sure that they’re ready to go with those F-35s.

And then at the bottom layer, it’s the sustaining layer. And similar to what General Mitchum talked about when we talk about capability and kit and the system of systems approach and not being functionally stovepipe like we have been in the past. That’s exactly what we’re doing with these air task forces and as we move into the deployable combat wings. We’re making that sustaining layer, the Combat Airbase Squadron be something that is mission focused.

It has three basic missions when it’s forward. It’s the sustainment, the protection, and the airfield operations. And so, instead of aligning in separate functional squadrons, we’re aligning and training those mission ready Airmen up to be able to go across that entire mission scope. And really leverage the stuff that AETC is training our Airmen from the very beginning in basic military training and use that moving forward into the mission ready Airmen that are going to be mission focused in that combat AOR.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

So, that’s a fascinating concept and obviously your staff General Robinson is thinking about how do I develop that Airman and then when we throw them out into our Air Force, how do we continually develop them? And so, I have a multi-skilled Airman and it’s just different than before. I knew how long it took to make a crew chief. I knew how long it took to make a pilot. I knew how long it took to make an engineer.

But if I want people to do different skills to add onto that, how does that change both your initial training and the continuation training in the units?

Lt. Gen. Brian Robinson:

Yeah, great question. So, it is actually very exciting to try to solve this. And so, at a cornerstone, let me just take a moment to unpack. I think the word training is, I’d say very ubiquitously used, right? Air education training command trains to institutional training. So, it’s your foundational or your institutional skills is a better way to think of it. What does it mean? What does it take to be an Airman? What does it take for you to be a three level in your initial skills training or your perspective discipline?

And we get all that done and we send them out to the operational force. Training continues in the operational force, but now it’s focused on events like General Epperson talked about. It’s geared against the combat readiness exercise or it’s inspection rather, where the squadron commander or the wing commander says, “This is the operations plan we’re aligned against. We need to make sure we can meet these requirements.” We understand the geography of the AOR, we’re going to on and on and on.

So, training is a continuing thing for all of us. We own this slice of it, but we take that feedback back from Air Combat Command and others to go, these skills need more work in the institutional training. We’ll get those turned in through our Centers of Excellence and get the syllabi adjusted quickly using modern technology and modern methods in that way. Be that as it may going forward now past that, for example, in basic military training, many of us in here remember what we used to call the beast exercise, which was really focused on expeditionary.

Here’s how you fall in on the camp that’s already built, those kinds of things. We’re in the throes now of making the second iteration or evolution into what’s an exercise called Pacer Forge where it used to be right now 36 hours of same environment and same space at Lackland. But now, this group of Airmen that have been working together for about five weeks gets broken down into smaller teams. It was 36 hours, we’re expanding it out to 57 hours now.

And it’s focused on small team dynamics and effectiveness and instead of being overly prescriptive by MTIs, what happens now is here’s the objectives you’re set to achieve. Here’s the resources that are available to you. You have the strengths or weaknesses of the team you have. You have 57 hours to solve this problem and try to achieve the objective. And the MTIs really become essentially risk managers and coaches and mentors in that way. So, you spent five weeks with a very, what I call conform, conform, conform, conform and now you’re in a place where we want you to understand you need to be able to be agile, flexible, accountable, and show initiative and solve problems.

That’s happening at BMT. Initial skills training, we’re doing a similar but more advanced exercise there. Second Air Force, I should really give them the credit for this, it’s called BRACER FORGE, don’t ask me what they stand for it’s really long, it sounds better in the acronym. But this is something that we should all understand, Airmen that come out of initial skills training at Shepard right now will have anywhere from six to upwards of 26 reps and sets at a base level exercise, right?

Depending on the length of their time at Shepard. So, yesteryear, we would’ve thought a three-level coming to us at you picked the wing, wouldn’t understand what an exercise is. And now, you’ve got somebody who’s been in any range of that many, so they’ve got more experience in those kind of areas. And we’re doing very similar things, the flying training curricula, they’re developing ACE exercises into that too. What does it take to not recover and operate at your main training base?

Go somewhere to the aux field, for example, where the facilities and logistics support aren’t as robust and still generate student, in this case, student sorties, but generate air power in the way that it’s needed for that particular application. So, it’s an exciting time.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

And I’m guessing you take that in the operational area and in your exercises and training?

Brig. Gen. David C. Epperson:

Absolutely. And that’s an exciting thing General Alvin mentioned it yesterday, but under AFMC, IMSC has stood up combat support training ranges, and we have two of those that are up and operational today and we’re building out a larger structure. But when you look at a unit of action and you put them into the entire AFFORGEN cycle, it enables them to go off station to these combat support training ranges and to really build on those mission-ready Airmen skills that we have.

And so, the air task forces, the first ones stood up this summer and they had their Airmen detailed to the CABS on one October. And each one of those air task forces have already been to the combat support training ranges for two trips for two to three weeks each time. And you talk about what does it look like when you put together all these different skills? First of all, I think it’s important to understand that we’re not trying to make you a three level in maintenance and a three level in logistics and a three level in security forces.

In a lot of these mission-ready Airmen skill sets, it’s really about the mindset and it’s about familiarization. And so, getting to go out and personally observe some of the things that they did, defenders had learned how to drive forklifts and force support Airmen had learned how to load pallets. And they all got to go shoot and move and employ the M-4 in ways that they hadn’t done before. And so, it’s continuing to build on that so that really when you get in that deployed environment, you don’t know what the demand of the mission is going to be.

In general, you know what the mission is, but on a day-to-day, hour-to-hour basis, you don’t always know that. And we’re taking what air education and training command is, is building at a foundational level in our Airmen, and then we build on that through the AFFORGEN cycle so that they’re ready to go in the combat and commands AORs.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

Thank you. General Richardson and General Mitchum. So, we are looking at how we’re changing the way we’re thinking about all of this inside our Air Force. How are you bringing in industry and our industry partners so that they understand the changes that you’re making and making sure that they’re up to the task of adapting with you as we move forward?

Maj. Gen. Mark Mitchum:

Great, thanks. I’ll lead that off. And if I could make one observation, I love the panel that is put together because we’re showing how we go from forced design. We get capabilities, requirements, we acquire them, we train our Airmen and ultimately deploy them to produce combat capability downrange to our joint force commanders and ensure our Airmen are ready to do that. So, I love the continuity and it’s what the chief tells us to be doing every day is thinking about it holistically to see the life cycle here, and it’s what we’re trying to achieve every day.

So, I’m grateful to be out with these partners on stage to industry. First off, I think it’s always important we acknowledge we don’t deter compete, and if required win as an Air Force. We don’t even do it as a military force, as a U.S. military, and even with our partners and allies, we fight as whole of nation. And if I were to bet on the United States and our asymmetric advantage, it is our industry and it’s the innovation and the competitive spirit. So, our goal as we look to industry is to ensure we are helping you to help the Air Force.

And we are helping you understand what problems the Air Force needs to solve. We’re giving you that demand signal, we’re making it consistent so that you can make better investments both in your human capital and certainly in your resourcing. And when your CEO or senior leader is preparing for a shareholder meeting or a call with the street or trying to do the next private equity raise, and they say, “Where’s the Air Force going?” You shouldn’t have to make 14 phone calls to answer that question.

And so, we’re committed to providing that integrated demand signal that brings in all the pieces of the Air Force. It says, here are the key problems in the priorities for the Air Force. There’ll still be tons of other discussions that can and will happen, but we need to do a lot of your frankly business development work for you and make it easier to understand where we’re headed so that you can make decisions. And frankly, the more you make decisions with full knowledge, the more your money, especially in the terms of IRAD or things like that, help solve our problems.

So, that’s where we’re focused because how we accelerate capability development, it’s how we win as a nation. And at the end of the day, it’s how we do our lethality per dollar and increase that metric as well. So, obviously General Richardson have a huge piece in that.

Gen. Duke Richardson:

So, hopefully industry is listening, it’s a great question. I mentioned I walked through the three primary activities that the integrated development office will be focused on. Industry has a role in all of those, and so when we talk about threat models, we talk about actually the mission threats themselves. We’re going to share that with industry and we owe that to industry because there’s no way for industry to offer candidate solutions unless they actually know what the gaps are. And so, I’d start there.

So, just if you’re in the industry, you should want to be involved in all three of those. So, that’s the first point. The second point that I would make is, and I talked about how we used to do things. And so, because we couldn’t make choices, we would end up funding a lot of programs and we would end up unfortunately funding them, assuming that they would be successful and not hit any problems. That every risk that we knew was there wouldn’t actually turn into an issue that everything, the acquisition guides would just be looking upon us and we know that that never happens.

I’m trying to think of a program where that has happened. So, for the programs that we really, really want, we just stick it out. For the ones that we were a little lukewarm on, we ditched them and we end up the trail of wasted investment monies has been behind us. And so, I think the second way that industry can really help is when we get down to brass tax and when General Mitchum and the ICC have to write requirements, and when we have to figure out what budget to ask for those that we do a couple of things.

We set realistic requirements, achievable requirements. I’m not saying that we throw the game, but we set realistic requirements that we can achieve that we have a reasonable chance of achieving that we put trade space in those requirements. That there’s actually an ability to make some trades inside there. And then the other part of that is the actual, what we think that they’re going to cost to deliver that capability. And so, the B-21 program is touted, rightfully so for being very successful.

We actually funded that program fairly well. So, there’s enough funding in that program to actually deal with risks that come up, to manage risks, and then if those risks turn into issues to actually sort through that. And so, I think industry can help us do that, help us work through the candidate solutions, help us pick the ones that we want to turn into programs of record, and then help us build realistic requirements. Requirements is a two-way street, realistic requirements and budget profiles to get after that so that we don’t have things that we start and aren’t able to finish.

It’s really important that we actually, our yield rate. So, one of the metrics you mentioned a pretty good metric, and that is cost per capability, I think, or something like that. I can’t remember exactly what you said, but a metric for me will be a yield rate. So, if we start, and Amanda’s listening right now, and I’m just making this up, I won’t say what it should be, but at some it can’t be like one out of 10 things. We’re going to have to have a yield rate on our success in getting programs of record established that have a good chance of success.

Maj. Gen. Mark Mitchum:

And I’ll just say one quick thing, you should be able to see that connection through force design, through the demand signal that we put out to industry and to our S&T partners. I see our lab commander here that we work with, that enterprise see that the requirements and then ultimately where the Air Force chooses to spend its money are linked together. And so, you should see that path from where the problems and if you solve those problems, you should see a much clearer path through the proverbial valley of death or whatever else that we’re turning programs of record and we see a better yield rate as General Richardson mentioned.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

Okay, we’re almost out of time, but I have one last question I’d like to ask you, General Robinson. We’ve been talking about this changing the nature of war, the contested environments, how much tougher it’s going to be, what kind of changes are we making in training our flight crews, our pilots, and the rest in terms of meeting those challenges in the future?

Lt. Gen. Brian Robinson:

Thanks. A great question. In the interest of time, what I would tell you is there is a difference between flying an aircraft or any platform and how you would operate it, drive it, fly it, whatever that is. But in the case of your question, flying an aircraft and then employing the capabilities of that weapon system that happens to be delivered, that operates as an aircraft. So, what we see is the mechanical skills, take-offs, landings, procedural skills, engine starts, emergencies things, those are largely still the same.

But the decision-making skills that the pilot has to make from a quarterback perspective in delegating mission tasks, for example, to combat collaborative aircraft or other manned aircraft that are part of the formation that may not have the same skills are the capabilities that pilot’s platform has. So, we have a higher demand in processing a multitude of high volume of information and deciding what to do with it, a certain part of the fight as opposed to the manual skills of getting into basic fighter maneuvers or a dogfight itself.

So, there’s a grave difference in that space that we are I think increasingly growing to appreciate and that changes how we train using augmented reality, the Joint Simulation Environment, virtual reality, and the technologies that exist in that way.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

Okay. Well unfortunately we’re out of time. We’re going to have to have you all back for part two of this to continue the discussion because it’s been great and I really appreciate all you’re doing to make our Air Force so much better. So, let’s give them all a big round of applause.