Countering Enemy Kill Webs

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

Maj. Gen. William Betts:

All right, hack, welcome everyone. Thank you for conferencing with us out here in Colorado. B I am Major General William Betts. I’m the director of plans, programs and requirements for Air Combat Command. We’ve got three gentlemen with us who are uniquely qualified to discuss our topic, which is countering enemy kill. Webs. With me on stage is retired fighter pilot and now Vice President of Strategic campaigns at Lockheed Martin, retired general Cobra Harrigian. We also have semi retired mechanical engineer and now President of Space and airborne systems at L3Harris, Mr. Ed Zoiss. And finally, we have retired naval cryptologic officer and now vice president and general manager of countermeasures and electromagnetic attack solutions for bae, Mr. Dave Harold. So gentlemen, a quick scan of war on the rocks and Aviation Week reveals that Western literature most often focuses on the offensive connotation of our own kill webs. But recently, you’re seeing more and more in the news about enemy kill webs, and these include anti access kill webs that do things like guide ballistic and cruise missiles to our bases. They also include things like area denial kill webs that guide air to air and surface to air missiles to our airborne aircraft. And also counter space kill webs that seek to disrupt, degrade and destroy our advantage on orbit. So to scope today’s discussion, we’re interested in your insights for first countering enemy kill webs to protect today’s force, but then also offering insight as to how we should consider designing the force of tomorrow to be more resistant to enemy kill webs now, because the terminology is still evolving, we can take some artistic license to define kill web in our own terms, and that’ll lead us to the first question, gentlemen, I’ll write all these questions are for everybody. I’ll just kind of right kick it off with with someone who’s going to start us. So Mr. Zoiss, this one is for you. The term kill web has been in use for nearly 10 years now, and in your own words, please describe the important aspects of what distinguishes a kill web from a kill chain.

Ed Zoiss:

Well, I appreciate that, and it is a pleasure to be here on stage with my esteemed colleagues. So I very simply put, you know, a kill web is a series of kill chains that have been nested together. You know, for years we’ve talked about countering enemy kill change, but as soon as you put those chains together, whether they be cross domain into a kill web, disrupting any part of the kill chain is no longer good enough, because the kill chain, whatever that kill chain was, can get information from other pieces of the kill web. So countering a kill web becomes much more difficult for our war fighters, because we have to attack several vectors at once to counter really a much more resilient threat. We’ve talked about resiliency in the space domain, which is why we’ve moved to disaggregated and proliferated. Leo kill webs really provide that resiliency, that provide that that shot. So that’s really a challenge for our forces today.

Maj. Gen. William Betts: 

Okay, all right, thanks for that. Anything to add from the other two gentlemen? No, I think

Gen. Jeffrey ‘Cobra’ Harrigian, USAF (Ret.):

No, I think the important part of it is first, as you highlight truly understanding that, you know, we spent a lot of time just talking about kill chains, and we were just talking about it beforehand. And, you know, I’d argue there’s a lot of people that actually don’t understand a kill chain. Must let you kill Webb, so digging into that and decomposing it to a level that, you know, the war fighters, the intelligence community, all understand it, I think, is an important part of the discussion moving forward.

Dave Harold:

Yeah, and I agree with the resilience piece, and I think that what we’re seeing is more and more complexity. Adversaries are using out of band kind of parts of the spectrum that we’re not used to, more communications methods that creates more complexity, which creates a bigger problem for us when it comes to disrupting that kill web.

Maj. Gen. William Betts:

Yeah, great points by all, I think right, the enemy is going where we’re not, with respect to the frequency bands, and then the resiliency is the key piece. They are also right. They’re building right four or five different ways to do each part of the kill chain. So okay, great points. So let’s talk now in terms of countering enemy kill Web. Should I think of countering enemy kill webs like snipping right? The individual? If I think of it like a like a spider web, is it like snipping the individual? Wool threads of that spider web, or is it more like throwing a rock through the middle? We’ll start with general Harrigian on this one.

Gen. Jeffrey ‘Cobra’ Harrigian, USAF (Ret.):

Yeah, thanks, and it’s great to be up here with you guys. Appreciate the time. So I’m going to give you the classic weapon school answer that is all about it depends. The reality is, I don’t think there’s a web that always looks the same, and from my perspective, it starts with understanding that threat and understanding what that web, those chains, look like, decomposing them to a level that you can actually make smarter decisions from a battle management perspective on where you want to go, given the complexity continues to change every day, and there’s not going to be an answer that you can take day one to the fight versus day seven of the fight. Similarly, I think it also drives a little look at our own blue chains and webs and how we are actually because I would charge all of us to think about from tactics, techniques, procedures, the technology that’s out there to go out and actually train to how we were going to execute that, and then determine is it actually working. And I would offer that collectively we we’ve got to realize that doing that in real world training is going to be hard. You know, we were talking a little bit early. My question, particularly from a non kinetic perspective, was, is it working? Because that’s going to drive a little bit your Hey, do I go after a specific thread? Do I go after both of them? Do we have the munitions to do that? How do we synchronize those efforts? And that’s all part of understanding where we are from a blue perspective, which would also include our allies, for that matter. And then I think that helps us better identify the gaps and those areas that we need to collectively work and I’ll say from an intelligence perspective and operator perspective, and with industry importantly to understand not only the red side, but the blue side as we go forward and refine the way we want to get after these specific kill webs.

Maj. Gen. William Betts:

Right on. So no one size fits all approach, and you’ve got to understand the kill web you’re trying to counter. First gentlemen, anything to add?

Ed Zoiss:

I would add on that, that the, you know, from a kill web standpoint, the way you construct the kill webs to get them communicating is, of course, through some type of, usually RF link. And so a way to degrade a large portion of some of these kill webs will be to deny the enemy’s use of the electromagnetic spectrum, which is something that we’re very skilled in, something that we’ve been doing for a very long time. So we’ll be understanding how the kill webs are actually communicating, being able to disrupt the communications on those kill webs, I think, will be absolutely vitally important.

Maj. Gen. William Betts:

Gotcha. Do you? Can I? Can I ask, like, how those kill webs are communicating and potentially disrupt how they’re communicating, and self healing, kind of That’s right. Okay, yep, gotcha. Thanks. Okay, Mr. Harold, yeah,

Dave Harold:

I agree that it’s not either or, it’s both. And sometimes you need the scalpel, sometimes you need the sledgehammer, but, but really, that’s about understanding what objective you’re trying to achieve and what part of the overall campaign you’re in and, and by the way, you know, part of the complexity of the kill web is we’ve gone away from one v1 1v, many to many, V many. You know, we’re in a we’re in a transparent battlefield now, you know, where you can’t just sneak around the way you used to be able to, and so you got to understand how to have simultaneity when it comes to countering some of these threats. And so that’s that’s going to take quite a variety of snipping and rock throwing.

Maj. Gen. William Betts:

Right on, okay, simultaneity, let

Gen. Jeffrey ‘Cobra’ Harrigian, USAF (Ret.):

You bring up a great point, because I do think you’ve got to missionize this a little bit, you know, as you think about the different things we might get asked to do, whether it be, you know, deep strike, or if you’re doing you know, DCA type mission sets. So all of this, I think, comes together, but from the planning and execution perspective, there’s going to be differences. And, you know, the hard part really could be organized and training to this, to be able to sort out what are the best TTPs, and that’s probably something we’ll talk about later, from a, you know, a Nellis perspective in the test community, to refine the way that we actually are going out and training in these, you know, specific mission sets, to be able then to capture some of the lessons learned we’re talking about here and go, you know, clean those up over time, you bet.

Maj. Gen. William Betts:

Okay, great point. And if I don’t come back to organizing and training right for this and remind me, because you know, we’ll have time for closing comments at the end. Okay, great. Okay, so with that, let’s talk what successes and shortcomings that you’ve seen from the. The Combined Air Force industry team in approaches on countering the enemy, kill webs and what can what can the Air Force learn? And how can they help? Let’s start with Mr. Harold on that one.

Dave Harold:

Good to be with. You guys looking forward to the rest of this dialog. I think you know some things I would point out about successes with industry in the Air Force is, I think the Air Force has done a really nice job of explaining its objective. You know, what is it that we’re going to have to try and accomplish in, you know, in these campaigns? And the more we talk about that, the more industry understands it, the more we can really think hard about the problem set and and come up with the with solution recommendations. So I think the communication is pretty good overall, with regard to how do we collectively meet the national defense strategy objectives there, I think where I would point out some, maybe some challenges, is we still have lots of silos that keep us from having a full and open dialog. I applaud the Air Force for the changes organizationally that you’re trying to make around having integrating capabilities and organizations. Because you know, whether it’s a security silo or, you know, we’re BA Systems is kind of a tier two electronic supplier. So what we see coming down is every different platform wants something almost similar, but bespoke, you know, and so that that costs money, that takes time, that that often has engineering and invention implications. And, you know, sometimes if we could just have that conversation where, you know, this other program office is asking for, like, 95% of the same thing you’re asking for, but this one little thing makes it a little bit harder. So integration of architectures and requirements. You know, there’s always going to be something that’s a little bit different for a particular platform, and we understand that. But the more leverage we can gain, the faster we can we can create solutions and things. But the silos go beyond that. There’s there’s a little bit that rolls into war gaming, there’s a little bit that rolls into operational analysis. You know, War Gaming. Sometimes we do the war games at a classification level that doesn’t include all the Gucci stuff, right? And that changes the entire narrative of what’s in the art of the possible there, from an operational analysis perspective, which is critically important. And I know across the defense industrial base, where all of our companies are investing heavily in operational analysis, the more real threat data that we can have, the more accurate of an answer that we can give. And so sometimes, again, whether that’s classification or flow of information. If all we have to go on is some fuzz ball that doesn’t actually represent a real threat, you’re not going to get this sort of fidelity of the answer that we would like to give to you. So those are some things. And I think that the other thing is in these austere, challenging times around budget, industry gets to see what all the services are trying to accomplish. And so, you know, we’re in an environment where, if you can lever leverage other people’s money, whether that’s from the Air Force, can leverage something the Navy is doing, or we can leverage FMS to use dollars there to, you know, help out domestic programs. I think there’s more to be done there, where we could educate across the services and find out other opportunities to, you know, get those requirements similar and have that much greater leverage.

Maj. Gen. William Betts:

Fantastic answer, yeah, please.

Ed Zoiss:

I was gonna say, look, I think the Air Force is really leading the way to make our kill webs more resilient. You know, I’m not gonna go through a lot of the programmatic details, but I will tell you that many of the platforms right now that are currently in service are being outfitted with additional ways to communicate to methods that were outside the original scope of the platform when it was conceived, allowing for a much more resilient architecture, an architecture to allow it to pass communications and data and targeting, you know, up Until a much broader set of platforms, and so we can see it happening. We can see it happening really across the board. So again, kudos to the Air Force. It’s it’s happening again. I don’t want to go through the program details, but we can still see the kill chains and kill webs becoming much harder and much more resilient.

Gen. Jeffrey ‘Cobra’ Harrigian, USAF (Ret.): 

Okay, so it’s an interesting question for me, because two years ago, I was in uniform, and now I’m seeing it from the other side. So I’m gonna throw stones a little bit, because I was the one complaining, from the war fighter perspective, what I saw not coming our way. And I’ll just put it that way, and I’ll be pretty blatant about it in that there were problems in the field relative to this exact issue that we were challenged to get into the building. I’ll put it that way, and get the building to react to what the war fighter needed. And I would offer ICCs. You know, that’s going to be five years into doing though, and so I agree with you, they’re out front. But just like the chief said, Hey, we got to go faster. And I would offer the key is, and you know this is now kind of sitting on the other side. The more we get industry out front at pack. AF you safey, understanding the problems. Because ultimately, I would say, let’s make sure we’re, we’re, we’re actually getting after the bright problem and fixing those things at the edge for today’s fight, which we can then spiral into the future fight. Because if we can’t fix today and something happens, we’re kind of missing the boat, so to speak. And so I you know, tall you in uniform, if you’re out in the field, you ought to be the demand signal, and then figure out how that gets fed back up into the magic comm level and headquarters Air Force to make sure it is crystal clear what the problem is that you have in the field to, number one, get the kill chain done, and then number two, expand that into a broader kill web. And I think those of us that lived through and you guys probably saw this as well, the beginning of ABMS, we struggled trying to figure out what we wanted to do took a while. And I think the way we were able to work our way through that is through that conversation that occurred between, you know, those that were in the field, those that were working at the headquarters level, because it was hard, and then how we brought in the, you know, to your point, broke down the stove pipes to get the right people in the room to work through that. If we don’t continue to do this together, it’s going to take way longer than we want.

Dave Harold: 

And Cobra, I would just add, you know, if you work in the defense industrial base, it’s because you have an affinity for, you know, the war fighter and what we’re trying to do, I mean, just shameless plug at BA Systems, you know, our mantra is we protect those who protect us and and people work there for that very reason. So we want to do the right things. And in addition to that, the defense industrial base invests a lot of money in capital, in research and development, year in and year out, and we don’t want to spend that money in a place where it doesn’t make sense, or it’s not going to be

Gen. Jeffrey ‘Cobra’ Harrigian, USAF (Ret.): 

Yeah. Okay, and so I’ll just pile on to that, because I didn’t know that, even as the you safety Commander, the amount of investment that companies were doing to get after those problems, if I had to do it over again, I would have tried to been more direct about, hey, we can’t do this right now, or, you know, and you know what some of those things are that, you know, we can’t talk about in this forum, but I think we could have turned the wheel faster by making sure there was complete transparency on the challenges that were out there, that you were already investing dollars into IRAD CRad, whatever it was to get after those, and then figure out how we get it into a program, and do the rest of things that happen that actually get the capability to the right people in the field. Sorry for that, but that

Maj. Gen. William Betts:

That was good, no, so I’ll tell you that was, that was some really good feedback. I’m taking notes here, like, genuinely right, because I’m learning stuff as you guys are, as you guys are talking and so right, the successes in terms of right mission analysis together, mission planning for hypothetical scenarios together, the silos, I think we’re all encouraged right by the right by the start of the integrated capabilities command and what that ought to be able to do for breaking down the silos. And then right the I take, like it’s good feedback on war games and the classification and real, real threat data, indeed. So Right? In order to go faster, like you said, General Regan, it’s right, it’s got, it’s got to be the team effort. So right, I’ll do my part to commit to that. So thanks for the feedback on that, guys. All right, so let’s, I mean, let’s get as specific as we can in this forum. Let’s talk a little bit about this. Next question is for you, Mr. Zoiss, what are the critical technologies that will enable some of these approaches that we’ve been discussing?

Ed Zoiss:

Yeah, you know, it’s interesting. You know, we’ve talked about kill webs. You know, the first thing as you think about a kill. Web and you put these systems together, you know, if you’re an adversary, you look for vulnerabilities in kill webs, just like you would do in any time of IT network, any networks that could get put together. And so number one would be, what cyber technology can I bring to go disable these kill webs? And with that, what AI and ML, could I bring that would understand the topology of a kill web and therefore disable the web at my will? So I think when, when you think about, really, how you’re going to do this, there’s the one v1, meaning I could have a ground effector. Let’s just call it an ew effect, or affecting a satellite in orbit. Or I could deliver a cyber payload to a network somewhere and have that payload be dormant, and use AI and ML to understand the topology of that network and then be able to degrade, deny or destroy that network. So I think with some of those technologies will be key to help countering these, these kill webs as they get put together.

Gen. Jeffrey ‘Cobra’ Harrigian, USAF (Ret.):

If I can just add because your point is spot on here. One of the things that we always struggled with as we work through this was the myriad of classification levels that we’re working through. And as you look particularly at the comms, how do we move past I’ll call it our legacy way of doing that when we’re talking about moving data. And you know, as you think through some of the exquisite capabilities we have out there that shoot out a certain kind of data that then you got to clean stuff off, and then you want to get it to not only your Blue Force, but the joint force and your allies and partners. That remains a very challenging problem that I think technically there are ways to do that. There’s policy issues associated with that, and that all goes into the mix of, hey, when you try to move data across the, you know, the battlefield, the technology is there, but there’s a whole lot of other issues that you have to work your way through to be able to actually leverage the technology that could help the war fighter. And you know, those are things I know you’re aware of, and for the collective group. And we’ve got, you know, Australians here, and I know we’ve got some other friends that are here, they’ve got to be in the mix, and we have to bring that into how we’re going to do this going forward.

Maj. Gen. William Betts:

Do you guys mind if I take a minute and just expand, or ask you to expand a little bit on em, right? Electromagnetic battle management, right? I think, I think you called it like describe in layman’s terms, exactly what that is. Please, go ahead.

Dave Harold: 
Yeah, you brought it up, so I was pointing to you just as I was drinking some water. Yeah, right. I mean, it’s a complex environment. We’ve described that very well. Blue kill webs, red kill webs, lots of different networks and links that have to be addressed and threats that have to be addressed. And so because of that, there’s going to be a lot of simultaneous, disrupt, deny, degrade, initiatives happening all the same time. Well, you know, I mean, Cobra, I’m sure you very familiar with this. You know, you don’t want, while you’re going after a red threat to blank out all your blue comms, right? You know? And so how do you manage all of those different pieces? And we live in a world now where it’s it’s everything is a node on the net right? Now, we don’t have all the data links between things that we need to but at the end of the day, we we’d have all these things in the electromagnetic spectrum that need that are sensing or addressing a threat. Well, somebody or something has to manage all of that in the electromagnetic spectrum. And so, you know, there’s debates about where that should be. I know General Cropsey is sort of and his crew are leaning into this to try and, you know, figure it out. Maybe there’s a quarterback in the sky that that sort of manages this stuff real time with E was on board and and, you know, things like that, like an EA 30 7b or some other platform, but somebody or some entity has to make sure we’re not zapping each other’s lightning bolts while we’re trying to disable the red kill Web.

Gen. Jeffrey ‘Cobra’ Harrigian, USAF (Ret.):

Great. And I think in the realm of battle management, you know, I can give you plenty of examples to your point where, you know, find a target and we shoot 19 things at the same thing. That’s not good battle management. It’s the same thing that you’re talking about. And what we uncovered over time is there were so many humans in that loop that we missed an opportunity to actually capitalize on technology that’s out there that allows machine machine stuff, which is exactly the realm you’re working in, to help us with that. And you know, I completely agree with the AI part. I will tell you. I will my answer first was, well, let’s get the machine to machine person work first, and then we can talk about AI. What do you think? And that people have listened, and we’re making progress there, but you’ve got to have that connection, and, you know, you’re building that right now. I think collectively, we all are that we’ve got to be able to now take that and figure out the right place to leverage AI, build that library, and then help, ultimately, the human that’s going to decide where we go, and that it’s applicable, whether it’s, you know, kinetic, non kinetic, and we’re still, I think, working through that as a team.

Maj. Gen. William Betts: 

Great. Okay, thanks for that. This next one, General, Regan, I’ll actually have you start off with this one. And this has to do with right we’ve our current force is what it is. And even though, right our aircraft are older than they’ve ever been, we’re gonna have them around for a little while longer. But when we think about, you know, what comes next? What adjustments should we consider for the next generation of sensors, weapons and weapon systems that make our force packaging more resistant or immune to enemy kill, webs,

Gen. Jeffrey ‘Cobra’ Harrigian, USAF (Ret.):

You started with it. It starts with UCI and OMS, you know, I think the government has declared appropriately that anything that, you know, we do out there together needs to start with that underpinning the capability, whether it be, like you said, the sensor, the weapon, the weapon system. And I’ll tell you, from my perspective now, on the other side of the fence, industry gets that. You know, there’s always some proprietary issues we got to work through. But I think collectively, people are nodding their head, going, we have got to do this, and we’ve got to do it to get. They’re moving forward, that, in my mind, facilitates us being digitally agile, which will be a requirement for all three of those. And, you know, you talked about software based radios, all that kind of things will facilitate that digital agility that will be so critical given the changing complexities of the threat that’s, you know, now occurring in weeks, months, as opposed to the way it happened in previous years. The other thing that I would offer, and you know, I’ll use this term, we can’t try to solve world hunger. We need to prioritize as you look at those sensors, you look at the weapons and those kind of things that allow us to focus in on what? Again, I’m going to go back to kind of a bottoms up approach. What did the war fighter need today that facilitates grown to that next gen so that it’s not hey, we’re going to wait till this exquisite capability comes along and then give it to us. We can’t afford to do that. We’ve got to keep turning the wheel, and while we do that, two things come to mind, that wheel is going to require a supply chain that can handle what we’re trying to do. I’ve learned long lead items is a thing, and if you don’t get in front of those, you’re not going to get that next gen capability. And so we’ve got to keep that working and anticipate that, and as we do that, the other thing I would offer is build it to be exportable, bake it into what you do. Because if we don’t that, do that, and you try to strap it on later, it’s hard. Can get real hard. And I’ll tell you, from when I was in Europe, when we tried to, you know, strap it in on at the end, it was fighting an uphill battle. And I think we would all agree, you know, whether it be deterrence or the big fight, we want friends with us. And I would argue we want friends that have the good stuff. Now we can protect, we know how to protect the, you know, the crown jewels, but if we don’t bake in exportability, it’s going to be a heavy lift, and so let’s learn our lessons over the last several years and get that right as we looked at next gen things, because that will also help us, I think, understand what are those gaps in areas that we need to know kid and get after early to start building out those next gen capabilities that align with the priorities and UCI and OMS and everything else that I talked about up front. So that’s be something

Ed Zoiss: 

I would add to that as you know, the more we connect our systems together, the more vulnerable they become, period. And you know, oftentimes, you know, industries focused on, you know, dB per hertz, or power on the ground or power on the target or resolution or imaging, but I don’t think we spend enough time looking at how we make our systems more cyber resilient, because that really is the soft underbelly of our platforms. And so, you know, if the enemy can get into our systems some lane, we’re only good as the weakest link, whether it’s an error in space or on the ground, and they get into the network, and then the networks are connected together. Now in a kill web, that means they have access to much more of our command and control infrastructure than they ever had before. So I think we need to spend more time as an industry and and service team of really making sure that we’ve cyber hardened these platforms. Then the second thing I’d say is the platforms that we do feel we need to try to provide as much diversity for mission systems on those platforms, so that if one of the elements gets degraded, that the platform still has some mission capability. And we’re starting to see that now. You know, as new systems become fielded, there’s some diversity of comms and other things that allow the system to continue to perform.

Dave Harold: 

Yeah, yeah. I like that. Ed, I think that, you know, what we’re seeing is just, you know, more desire for multi function out of every box, right? Because we can’t keep putting new hardware on these platforms. And, you know, as we, you know, as we look to the future for what needs to go on future platforms, we have to be ambidextrous about, yeah, but can that roll into the current fleet. And so the kinds of things we’re looking at is, let’s pretend it’s a radio today. But what other wave forms could be added? What other processing power could we add to that? Or, you know, to really it’s going to have a primary function. But what else can it do to cover some of this stuff? I think Cobra The I’d like to pick up on your FMS, you know, design for exportability, and I agree with you, if you don’t do it up front, it’s not going to happen. I think the challenge that we probably have sometimes is, and this is when we’re trying to manage cost, schedule, performance, and, you know, we’re trying to negotiate a contract, and we get into a conversation about scope, and everybody agrees that I’d love for this thing to be designed for exportability or designed for sustainability up front, but I got to get in the box. Somebody else will deal with that later on. And the problem is you can’t deal it’s very, very difficult to deal with it later on.

Gen. Jeffrey ‘Cobra’ Harrigian, USAF (Ret.):

Yeah. And I think the other thing coming back to what you’d raised earlier, is. We think about this next gen pieces is the TTPs and the.mil piece of this. I think plenty of us know systems that get built and then you’re like, Whoa, yeah, some training, sustainability requirements. And that can’t be last. I know that’s easily, you know, it’s easy to say that, but you know, when you think about because we spent last two days talking about airspace integration, right? And, you know, and I’ll just say, I know inside Lockheed, we are leaning into that, but it’s got to be done with an eye towards okay. What does it do from a mission perspective? How does it inherently fix some of the human in the loop issues that we run into and know are out there, and get after what the war fighter needs. And I think that just needs. It’s got to be part of the equation as we think across the next gen capabilities that we want to bring forward.

Maj. Gen. William Betts:

Thanks for that. Okay, let’s see. All right, James, we got about five minutes left, so what I’ll do is I’ll go around the horn for closing comments. I’ll read the last question. You can choose to incorporate it in your closing comments, or not. We’ve talked a little bit about it already, but it is right. Essentially, getting back to the kind of the policy barriers that we scratched a little bit at earlier. Are there policy barriers, or what I would call cultural habit patterns or cultural inertia that hamper the optimal approaches for countering enemy kill webs, and how can the Air Force help with that? Okay, let’s start with Mr. Harold.

Dave Harold: 

Wow. What a last question you can choose to answer. We could probably go on on this one for a bit. I’ll just, I’ll just say this that for me, culture change is way harder than policy change. We should be able to rally around a policy that’s obstructing us and figure out a way to get that changed. But the bigger obstacles, in my mind, in the ability to go fast and to meet the kind of targets that we collectively need to meet, they are the cultural pieces. They are the, well, this is the way we’ve always done it. You know, we talk about, I’ll give you just a couple examples. We talk about doing digital twins, and, you know, model based systems engineering. And, you know, that stuff’s all good up front, but the, but the, the thing you should benefit from that is you shouldn’t have to do so much testing and verification and validation on the back end, but we are reluctant to, you know, it’s going to cost us more up front to do all these digital twin and MBSE stuff, and it’s still going to cost us on the end, on the back end, because the test community can’t, isn’t getting there at the same time. So I think you know, whether it’s how we negotiate contracts. I mean, I think all of us have lived through a situation where you’re well aligned with the program office, and the program office is saying, Yeah, let’s go, let’s go, and then it gets handed over to supply chain or contracts, and let’s know, let’s know, and you know. So there are cultural pieces of how we have always done business that that’s the stuff that I would look to go after. Policy changes should, should be easy. I mean, easy to do, but the culture change is the thing that takes time. Thanks.

Maj. Gen. William Betts:

All right, General, hurry again. Can you give me maybe 90 seconds? Yeah,

Gen. Jeffrey ‘Cobra’ Harrigian, USAF (Ret.):

Okay, I’ll give you 30. You know, the policy piece, my position was, don’t take no for an answer and be willing to fight for the right thing. And oftentimes, the bureaucracy will try to get in the way. But for those of you that have to go fight the good battle, load yourself up with the facts and be prepared to roll your sleeves up and go after it, because it’s the right thing to do. Last thing I’ll say is just the importance of this collaboration. And, you know, breaking through would have been the traditional stove pipes of, oh, we can’t tell you that. If you can’t tell industry that you’re not going to get the help you need. And you know, I think the more we find mechanisms to make that happen and work through the classification issues, et cetera, et cetera, that will drive innovation and all the things that make America great, that has put us where we are today. But we can’t be afraid to take risk and move out on something recognizing Well, it may not work the first time, but we’re moving the needle, and that’s going to take leadership and people that are willing to go, lean forward and and buy that risk and, you know, move the needle as we all try to get to where we need to go, versus the threat that’s out there today and for tomorrow.

Ed Zoiss:

Great. I think this space, we’re really fuzzy on policy. Was in space, but I think the fuzz is gone. It’s crystal clear, you know, what our objectives are in space. I think a lot of that is due to Dr John plum, when he was leading policy for space. I think we’re very clear on that. You know, we’re going to maintain our capability in space and have the ability to hold, you know, our adversaries at risk. And so I think we’re very clear on what we’re doing. And I think that was the one area that was unclear for a little while. But I think I don’t see any policy barriers.

Maj. Gen. William Betts:

All right, great. Thank you so folks, we’ve hit our we’ve hit our to T at this point you guys have given us, I mean, great tips on extreme teaming with industry, which you know, quite honestly, starts with extreme teaming with allies and partners as well. Great tips for being able to go faster. We owe you a vision right for the Organize and and train piece, and you’ve got my commitment to the to the extreme teaming, because I’ve seen the goodness that comes out of that with several examples. So ladies and gentlemen, please a warm thank you to our panelists so we’re very frank.