Fixing the Force: Spare Parts and Readiness

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Lt. Gen. Jennifer Hammerstedt:

All right, good afternoon everybody. How’s everybody doing out there? All right, so many thanks go out to AFA for an absolutely fabulous week. The focus on readiness and sustainment has been incredible and it’s just fantastic to be here with so many of you and so many of our partners as we tackle some tough issues. I wanna thank all of you for being here, making it to the last panel of the day. You’re very passionate, obviously, to join the last forum and we’re getting to talk about aircraft parts, right?

Who’s fired up about aircraft parts? All right, all right. So your perseverance will be rewarded by the great panel we have here today. It’s crystal clear to us where our Air Force’s focus, if you’ve heard the chief, it’s about flying and fixing to win and we don’t do that without aircraft parts. So I’m thrilled to be here with these experts on stage today and hopefully we’ll have a great dialogue that you all can learn from. But again, thanks for joining on the last panel of the last day. This is a really, really important topic.

I’m Lieutenant General Jennifer Hammerstedt and the commander of the Air Force Sustainment Center and I have the privilege and honor to serve with 39,000 great Americans whose business is sustainment, a large part of that being the Air Force supply chain. I’m also thrilled to be moderating this panel and not sitting on it because typically, you know, I’m the one that’s on the receiving end of all the questions about, you know, where are my parts? I just produced a paper for my boss that she can take with her to Corona and the title of it was “Where Are My Parts?” So anyway, I’m glad to be here and honored to moderate the panel. So we’ll jump right into it.

So with me today are four amazing experts from industry. We have Mr. Liam Campbell, Vice President of Federal Solutions at Virtuallytics, where he leads solutioning efforts focused on applying AI to real world operational challenges. When we took the first call to prep for this panel, Liam, I think you were in London on his iPhone. That’s how dedicated it is on the sidewalks of London. So grateful for you being here.

Kinda Eastwood, the Vice President of the Sustainment Operations for Military Engines at Pratt & Whitney. Kinda is a former aircraft maintainer and now she’s fighting for readiness on the other side. So we’re grateful for your leadership at Pratt & Whitney.

Melissa [Sutherland], Executive Vice President and Airpower Market Lead at Booz Allen Hamilton, guiding the strategy and performance of the companies over a billion-dollar portfolio of the airpower account. Melissa is a former Marine Signals Intel Officer, although I say there’s never a former Marine, there’s only a Marine. So grateful to have you here today.

And then Adam Wells, Director of Warfighting Support Solutions at Marvin Test Solutions, also a aircraft maintainer at the heart, weapons loader as we’ve talked about this week. So we’re thrilled to have you here as well.

So let’s jump right into some of the questions. And you know, we talked about this, we’re like, hey, this is the last panel of the last day. So we’re gonna start off with a little lighthearted, get to know these guys a little bit. And it is AFA, so a little bit of an icebreaker. First question is super easy. You know, this is the Air Force, what is your favorite Air Force aircraft or platform and why? And we’ll do this kind of quickly just to break the ice a little bit.

Liam Campbell:

Fantastic question, thank you, ma’am. I’ve got to go with the B-52. It’s iconic, it’s big, it’s timeless, and its continued importance is just really indicative of just how much our nation has dominated the skies for the past many decades. So, my fave.

Kinda Eastwood:

Well, I’m sure it won’t surprise most of you that my favorite airplane is the one that’s Pratt powered. So I’ve worked on a lot of them throughout my career, both in the military, but here. And I will tell you the most important part about everything we field is making sure that it’s safe, reliable, and it comes home. So, I think they’re all good.

Lt. Gen. Jennifer Hammerstedt:

Okay, we’ll let you off the hook on that one.

Melissa Sutherland:

Not surprising, as a Marine Corps SIGINT officer, I’m kind of fond of the rivet joint. And jealous, I loved working with an amazing crew of SIGINTers in the Air Force. I had an opportunity across my career to work with many Airmen supporting that mission. And it’s not just about the aircraft, it’s about the sensors and the crew for me. Awesome choice.

Lt. Gen. Jennifer Hammerstedt:

Any rivet joint out there in the audience? RJ? Yeah, okay, we got a few hands going up. All right.

Adam Wells:

Good? All right. So, as an armament guy, my favorite aircraft has to be an armed aircraft, as in the workhorse for the last 50 years has been the F-16. So, I gotta go with the F-16.

Lt. Gen. Jennifer Hammerstedt:

All right, all right. Okay, great, thank you guys. We’ll get into a little more, a few more serious questions now. All right, question one, how does your, how does the work you and your company do to support the military’s operational readiness? What is your organization’s role in equipping the warfighters? To kind of get the audience, you know, accustomed to what it is that you guys do in your roles today. Liam, we’ll start with you.

Liam Campbell:

Yeah, so at Virtualitics, we are the mission AI company. And what we do is provide software capabilities primarily to the military with the broad theme of optimizing mission readiness. And we do that across a number of different mission verticals. One very important one being maintenance and sustainment. So very excited to be on this panel today to talk exactly about the ins and outs of that. And one way we really provide power and our capabilities to the military comes down to how we progress beyond descriptive analytics and actually getting to the so what of all the data that we have now. And that comes down to getting prescriptive and predictive in order to drive COA decision making and have confidence at decision nodes backed by data.

Kinda Eastwood:

I’d say for the Pratt & Whitney team, partnering with the services and the international customers to really provide reliable and safe options in terms of readiness, in terms of capabilities, whether that’s at a depot or a base, particularly as we think about contested logistics, how do we support those kind of missions and ensure that people have what they need where they need. And then, you know, really, it’s the partnership piece that’s important. The depots are critical to the success. It’s not just us versus the partnership. It’s together, so.

Melissa Sutherland:

So Booz Allen Hamilton, we’re an advanced technology company. We bring together mission software, AI, cyber autonomy to build mission solutions that can be deployed quickly at the speed and scale that the Department of War needs. A couple of examples of how we’re doing this today, the tactical operations center light, we are the prime vendor for delivering that capability to get after edge command and control in a much more lightweight form and something that’s employing advanced technology to operate in a contested environment. Additionally, we’re building, we’re one of the largest providers of AI and cyber across the Department of War and we’re currently building predictive AI readiness capabilities, some of which are deployed across the Air Force and broader Department of War. And we’ll talk more about how we’re getting after readiness with those capabilities today.

Adam Wells:

I’m part of the Marvin Group and I represent Marvin Test Solutions. The Marvin Group is a world leader in the AME or Alternate Mission Equipment, your missile launchers, bomb racks, we also make the test and diagnostic equipment to help quickly isolate and troubleshoot those pieces of equipment so you can get the right repairs needed and the right supply channel needed. For my role, I bridge that gap between the engineers and the warfighter as an ex-warfighter, help craft and create those solutions needed that modern warfighter needs and take into the 21st, 22nd century hopefully.

Lt. Gen. Jennifer Hammerstedt:

Awesome. Thank you guys. So the title of this panel is “Fixing the Force: Spare Parts and Readiness.” This is simply not what a lot of people think, hey, just go buy more parts and put them on the shelf. That would solve the problem. The supply chain is so much more complex and so much more complicated than that. Other than put more parts on the shelf, what other things come to mind for you when we talk about spare parts and increasing spare parts for readiness? Adam, if we could start here with you.

Adam Wells:

Okay. Thank you, ma’am. That was a great question. So, spare parts, to me, is more than just having the part ready and available on the shelf. It gets further down into the maintenance chain. It’s actually diagnosing and isolating the correct part that needs to be repaired in the first place. Most of the time, the supply chain is actually – becomes part of our troubleshooting processes, where we’re just taking out components, changing components, trying to see if we get closer to fixing the problem. Maintainers call it just throwing the parts at the problem. This doesn’t get to a rapid, expedited repair, but it’s also removing valuable, needed resources from your supply chain. When you take that a step further and where you’re trying to go into the predictive maintenance, this adds a whole litany of problems that are – my peer down there can probably speak to, of when we’re just throwing parts at the problems to try to get to the end goal. That messes up your future historical data. That messes up your future decision-making abilities.

Lt. Gen. Jennifer Hammerstedt:

I’m sure there’s no maintainers that we’re familiar with that are throwing parts at the problem. COA. Good answer.

Melissa Sutherland:

One of my customers always reminds me, I can have all the spare parts in the world, but if I don’t have the maintainers, technicians, equipment, and the depot space availability to fix it, then I’m not ready. And when I think of spare parts availability, I think the question’s a bigger one. There’s two things that I think about. One is we need to keep it operating. And two, we need to fix it where it matters. So when I think about keep it operating, we really have to start to understand how do we improve parts reliability. It’s exciting to see the censoring that’s going to be on these next-gen aircraft that are really going to be able to determine even the slightest and subtlest amount of degradation that can help anticipate when a part failure is imminent so that our Airmen are better prepared to look at how do we make decisions ahead of deployment in order to change that part out.

Along with looking at how do we engineer for reliability so that we are extending the lifespan of our parts and optimizing our supply chains and options beyond just the OEM manufacturer for the platform to really help solve some of these challenges. I don’t think it’s a one-size-fits-all, parts on the shelf. It’s going to take a host of solutions to get after this problem. We also have to fix it where it matters. Operating in contested environments changes the game for us, especially with our ACE employment construct where we’re operating in smaller teams. We really have to get to predictive maintenance where we’re looking at not only what parts need to be pre-positioned, but what type of proactive maintenance needs to be done ahead of the aircraft deployment, and what are the alternative supply chain routes we have to help support our Airmen that are going to be in a forward-operating environment more often than not.

Liam Campbell:

I think Melissa put that very well, especially the piece on the importance of predictive maintenance. And then I want to expand on that a bit and kind of break it down in a way that I like to look at it with my team. We have a finite supply footprint at any given time. The things we can tweak with that supply footprint is what we do with that supply. Well, what do we do with that supply? We need to have some idea of what the future demand signal for those parts is going to be. And creating that full picture of that demand signal is a challenge, right? There is an easier side of it, which I’ll call the knowns. It’s going to involve the more routine planned maintenance that we know will be scheduled throughout different phases and whatnot. But then there’s the unknown side that creates a lot of the real issues and affects our mission capability rates, the unscheduled maintenance requirements that pop up. So using methods like you described, sensor data, historical maintenance records with something like some machine learning methodologies to help paint more of a picture of what that total future demand signal looks like, and then providing that to leaders and mapping it back to that finite supply footprint helps make it much more clear what we need to do with that supply footprint. Where should we have where and when to make sure we can actually do the maintenance that arises- or the maintenance needs, rather, that arise when they pop up.

Kinda Eastwood:

I think from an engine perspective, you’ve heard it up here a little bit- reliability of the part. To the extent that you don’t need a spare part, it’s the best spare part you have. So how do we really focus on part reliability and then the time on wing? How do you reduce demand? Sensors, analytics, good troubleshooting, the ability, though, to be able to inspect parts, so having good technical data, and then being able to actually repair the parts in situ and/or at a depot. So there’s pieces of the value stream that each of us have kind of talked about. It’s linking and integrating those all together that’s really, really going to be important. And so I think, as we go forward, how do we do that together as an integrated industry and services team will really provide a lot of benefits.

Lt. Gen. Jennifer Hammerstedt:

Awesome. Thank you all. So I think there’s been a lot of discussion this week about artificial intelligence here. You all heard Chief Wolfe address that. I think that the sustainers and logisticians in the audience, we’re all believers that AI can be a game changer in sustainment and supply chain. The question is just how do we do that? We know it can make us better. How do we do it? So for the panel, how are you leveraging AI and advanced analytics to strengthen operational readiness by identifying and mitigating risks across spare parts, sustainment, planning, preparation, and the broader supply chain? And what specific AI applications should government and industry prioritize next? So Melissa, we’ll start with you.

Melissa Sutherland:

Thanks, General. I want to quote the Secretary in the way he kicked off the conference, because I think it’s so critical. We are in a race for technology against China. And while we’re ahead, we won’t be ahead long if we don’t get these tools filtered and deployed. So the way we think about it is from a top-down perspective. Ready for what? When you think readiness, it’s about what are you ready for and where are you ready for. So we take a top-down approach to looking across all of the different components that comprise readiness. When you look at all the functional disciplines, everything from the aircraft condition, maintenance, parts, supply chain, force design, requirements, to name a few.

And then there’s personnel readiness, medical, all the things that go into driving readiness outcomes in the form of aircraft availability or mission-ready packages. And as we look at all of those different data sets that are affiliated with all the functional silos, Booz Allen’s investing in agentic AI and readiness capabilities that can do workflow automation and orchestration across those data sets to really get after the question of ready for what. So that’s where we’ve invested, and we’re finding that it’s helping us understand scenario optionality on how we can buy down risk as we move to a more predictive state of readiness, where the bottlenecks reside, where we could have depot maintenance, lack of availability, or supply chain dependencies, or even medical. So we have a tool called Predictive AI Readiness that we’ve deployed that pulls all these data sets together and gets after the question of ready for what.

I think it’s very important that we get these capabilities in the hands of our Airmen. One thing about AI is that it’s iterative. It learns as you deploy it in the environment. We’ve seen a lot of customers take a look at AI and decide that they’re going to go out and first consolidate all the data in one spot. We really need to get these tools deployed, working against workflows, to learn from them. And they will learn. And in some situations, in many situations, they’re better equipped than humans to answer the question of ready for what and pinpoint specific issues. And that has to be done in connection with our subject matter experts, but take a lot of the human workload off their plate so they can really focus on the mission that matters.

Liam Campbell:

I think that’s very well put. And there are a number of points that I just kind of want to reiterate in a slightly different way, especially the agentic piece. Totally on the same page with you on the fact that that is, in my opinion, like the next evolution of how we make AI software capabilities for maintenance and sustainment more relevant to the so what. But there’s multiple pieces to the puzzle, right? And you mentioned a bit of this too about the predictive side of what we’re doing with AI, specifically machine learning.

There’s a lot of different kinds of AI, but I’ll just create two buckets right now for the purpose of the discussion here. Gen AI and non-gen AI, right? So you can’t take an LLM and just slap it on top of a bunch of sustainment data and supply chain data. It’s only going to do so much for you. What’s really key is developing out that predictive layer of capability, right? So using a combination of maybe sensor data, historical maintenance records with some kind of future forecasting or survival analysis modeling, and then taking that new information and mapping it back to all the other supply data. But at that point, you have a lot going on. It’s a lot for a human to look at, and it’s tough to kind of surface in a series of dashboards. And God forbid you want to ask a question as a leader or maintainer for which a dashboard element hasn’t already been created by a forward deployed engineer. Well, that’s where the agentic piece comes in, right? That’s where we can start to use Gen AI to open up the breadth of questions that we can ask and get data-supported answers to.

And then that also brings us back to the point of the importance of subject matter expertise. I was actually having a great conversation with Adam about this this morning. The agentic frameworks that a lot of these capabilities have now, like Virtualitics IRIS- that’s our agentic chat interface feature in our platform- it’s a means through which you can inject and utilize the tribal knowledge, subject matter expertise, little nuances and rule sets that only the warfighters know.

And then that context then gets introduced into a unified platform. And you can run, to your point, automated workflows that get you to the so what. Like, for example, being able to go and select- I want to, say, select these x number of tail numbers, send them here for this long estimated y number of flight hours. What should my spares package look like? Not just including planned maintenance, but it’s also leveraging that AI-generated predictive layer to figure out what needs to be packaged for the unknown, the unscheduled maintenance that’s likely to pop up.

Lt. Gen. Jennifer Hammerstedt:

Yeah, if I can just pile on to that. I mean, we’ve all, for those that are grown up in maintenance, that’s the Friday afternoon, building your 1 to N on your fleet. What are the best aircraft and why? This takes it to a whole other level, right? How have the aircraft been flying at a level of detail that we possibly couldn’t have had sitting in the passenger seat of a truck to really use AI to help say, OK, here’s your best 10 performing aircraft based on the data that exists in the system. And oh, by the way, here’s the things that we think are going to break if you go on a six-month deployment. So there’s some really powerful stuff that we can unleash in there and definitely in the supply chain as well. So thanks.

OK, I want to talk a little bit about supply chain risk management, or SCRM is the acronym we use, which really means that when we talk about spares, we always think, hey, if I just had the funding I needed, I could go buy what I need. But the reality is there’s a lot of risk in the supply chain. There’s limited materials. Sometimes we can’t get the material. We have to do all the work to figure out where we can get certain types of precious metals and different materials. Vendors are leaving the market. There’s also vendors who are unwilling to bid on certain things. Sometimes there’s natural disasters. There’s hurricanes. There’s fires. There’s things that happen that take down parts of our supply chain. So getting your arms around that is all what we call supply chain risk management.

So the question for the panel is, how are you approaching supply chain risk management, meaning ensuring we see and mitigate the risks that exist in our supply chains, and how are you mitigating the problems you see, or how would you recommend that we mitigate the problems that we may see? Slim, you wanna kick us off?

Liam Campbell:

Yes, thank you, ma’am. It’ll also do with the DIB, the Defense Industrial Base, right? That’s where it all comes from, and if we could ramp up what the DIB can provide to the military, then that can solve at least a good chunk of the issue, right? But it’s kind of fun. You take a step back, and the same issues that the Air Force deals with for sustainment supply, it’s really the same kind of issue that the primes providing finished assets to the Air Force are also experiencing, right? They have some kind of demand that they have to meet, and they have a limited supply, right? It’s the same kind of problem, and then those primes have their own suppliers and their own suppliers.

So everyone’s kind of facing the same issue and same challenge, and at Virtuallytics, what we found the past year is a lot of the sustainment and supply chain readiness optimization capabilities that we built out for the military were actually a really good fit for the DIB. So it’s a two-way street as well. We’re learning things on the DIP side that are informing improvements that we’re making to our capabilities deployed with the military. So I think kind of attacking it from the bottom up in that sense, by targeting the DIB and having cross-pollination to see what works on one end, what might help things more on the other, is what Virtualitics has seen to be really promising on that end.

Kinda Eastwood:

I’d add that for the Pratt side of the business, areas that, you know, demand is the highest we’ve ever seen it. And as Liam just noted, right, it’s throughout the supply chain. It’s not, it’s everywhere. So things that we’ve really been focused on, not only with ourselves, but with our supply bases, trying to understand where the constraints are, investing in the supply chain as well as ourselves, focused on modernization. That’s inclusive of things like automation to the extent possible, simplifying processes around use of the MRL technologies and OpEx, where we’re really going at after quality signatures, improving yields, so that those critical rare earth elements or other kind of constrained capacities like castings or forgings, you’re getting better yield out of the processes right from the beginning.

So that’s one area. Another area is back kind of to the reliability and the demand to the extent that you can improve your demand signals. So the content that’s coming in, in forecasting better, getting transparency all the way through to the lowest levels of the supply chain, so they can also see better planning. That’s a really big focus and some of the bigger primes and maybe your first and second level tiers have had more visibility, but it’s really the lower levels that we’re really focused on getting to as well.

Melissa Sutherland:

Liam, to your point, I think we are all struggling with this, even at Booz Allen as we are designing and building capability for our solutions, we can get single threaded on suppliers. So we’re approaching it from a couple of different ways. One, we’re applying a lot more digital engineering and digital twin technologies in the design process. A lot of weapon systems have been built for performance, not necessarily for production. They were designed to perform, not necessarily to sustain and scale. With digital engineering, you can really look at complex systems and the interdependencies across the different components that comprise that system and the supply chain base to better model out and predict what order you need to manufacture those components, pieces, and the supply chain partners you need. A couple of examples, Booz Allen’s delivering the test infrastructure for hypersonic weapons, and we’re building nozzles as part of the hypersonic test process.

One of the designs we inherited for our first job, the designs had already been built and they were built with CAD models and other things, and I kid you not, there was one manufacturer in all the United States that could actually manufacture this nozzle. So we had a huge lesson learned there that we really have to design in the need to be able to produce these things at scale and not get single-threaded on a supplier. So what we moved to, using those digital twins and digital designs, are how and where can we add in additive manufacturing, and then how do we factor in the supply base as part of our design on the front end as we work the build. So that’s very critical, especially as the complexity of these weapon systems can continue to grow and the supply chain challenge isn’t going away. So we really have to get after it in a different way.

Second example is with depot maintenance. One of the areas we’ve also looked at, how can we use digital twin modeling to look at the depot space availability before we bring an aircraft in and we take it apart in order to fix it? How do we optimize the space based on understanding scheduling and the different type of aircraft that are coming in there and the supply chain dependencies to really optimize not just the use of the space, but the timing on bringing the assets into the depot. Those techniques have been very effective to be a lot more efficient in how we go about it and to buy down risk.

Adam Wells:

So to echo a little bit of what they’re saying, I agree completely. We have the same challenges and a lot of times we’re actually taking the same approaches going forward. We’re trying to get a robust supply chain. I think most of us up here, we’re trying to make sure we’re leveraging commercial parts to the maximum extent possible, using common solutions across the board. The challenge that I see is two things. First of all, in the requirement, you have to think forward. You have to think 25, 30, 50 years in advance, and that’s very difficult. Most of these systems specifically around, well, it’s my topic, test systems, they have to be out there 25 years, 30 years sometimes. You’re going to have obsolescence. There’s no way to overcome that. So you have to make sure it’s baked in.

The bigger challenge that I, some of what I had to sustain was how do you go backwards and fix your legacy platforms? How do you, you can bake some of this stuff into the requirement up front. You can make sure that this message is heard from industry and back and forth. We have this open communication going forward, but these systems that are out there at 16, 50 years, how do we make sure that we overcome that same challenge with our systems that might need to be out there not to 35, 40 years? And that’s a true vulnerability that I see right now is it’s getting harder and harder and harder to find some of these systems that were so gucci, if you will, or unique back in the day to do this very, very specific capability that we needed. The decoy systems, for example, they’re very specific, highly needed, but they have such unique things in them to make them work. Well, how do you keep them into your next generations and keep them going forward? That is a huge challenge that we’re all trying to figure out going forward is just be really critical thinkers about your requirement.

Make sure you’re thinking about sustainment. Spares up front, I say it all the time. Often we field systems like test equipment or support equipment. The spares come on at the fifth or sixth year. We start maintainers. We’re very good at breaking things. We start breaking things on day one. Those spares packages aren’t coming until later on. Your spare test system. So now you’re already digging the hole that you’re eventually gonna have to get out of. And most of anybody who sat in sustainment knows that those budgets for support equipment, sustainment is very limited. It’s very small budget. So you have to think up front, how are you gonna make sure you get through that fielding phase? How are you gonna get into that sustainment phase? And then what are you gonna do in the life cycle phase?

Lt. Gen. Jennifer Hammerstedt:

Great discussions. So for this question, for the younger members of our audience, really gets to the challenges with supply chain. So if you’re on the receiving end of parts coming out of supply or industry, really the things you guys just talked through are really where the challenges are. I’m constantly reminded by the supply chain that we produce hundreds of thousands of parts every year for our Air Force, and we do it really, really well. But it’s that 10% that you guys need out there on that flight line that has either gone obsolete, there’s material we can’t get, and there’s a very difficult challenge associated with it. So it’s really great work that happens both in industry and the supply chain to get after that risk and make sure that we can mitigate it in some kind of creative way. And it’s extremely challenging. Mr. Gray, my former supply chain management director would always say, “We can’t go on Amazon and order this stuff up.” It takes some real heroics and some deep analytics and understanding of the supply chain to get some of these parts on hand. So thank you all for those great answers.

So taking it up a level, when we talk about industry partnering with the Department of Air Force, what types of partnerships are gonna be the most valuable to enhance our readiness? And how can industry and the Air Force collaborate to drive innovation and improve capability? And then more importantly, candidly, what are some of the roadblocks that prevent us from partnering effectively? Is it how we communicate? Is it our ability to contract? I think that feedback for the audience would be really valuable. What keeps us from each other from being better partners? See who wants to go first on this. Kinda, do you wanna start us off?

Kinda Eastwood:

I’ll take that. I would say Pratt & Whitney’s had an amazing public-private partnership with the US Air Force depots for quite some time. I think the first one started in 2006 with our F-117. It’s grown to the F-119 and now into the F-135. I think we’re successful with those weapon systems and the readiness because of the partnership. I think the data substantiates that. I will tell you that the ability to leverage each other’s engineering expertise, the ability to leverage elements like facilities and digital tools, modernization, where we can do more of that and faster will really be kind of, I think, what takes us from part idle power to full power.

You know, there’s amazing skill sets amongst our teams. There’s amazing capacities and facilities that we’re probably still under-utilizing and we still probably need to do more in the way of modernization. But when we work together, and it’s really, you know, we’ve got some great examples across the last couple of years, but a really good example just recently of integrating together between industry and U.S. Air Force engineering teams went out and did some pilot interviews on the F-119 recently, which is the power for the F-22.

Amazing, you guys will be surprised to hear this, the pilots wanted more thrust. So, you know, the two teams went back together and really started looking at it. From pilot interviews to development, validation and fielding of a software package was less than a year, so speed and relevance of being able to leverage that expertise and get it into the hands of the warfighter or the maintainer is also really, really important and a focus that I think we really have to stay glued on. I would tell you the strongest, in my opinion, the strongest sustainment model is really the one where we’re integrating. So what is the next level? How do we integrate better with, say, the HMC, the 76PMXG Colonel Levy and his team relative to back shop repairs? How do we bring engineering sources together? How do we think about the artisans that are inside each of those depots each and every day?

You might have heard me say it earlier. How do we inspect to repair parts and have repairs available so that we’re quick turning within the footprint of the depot and faster repair and turn times? I think those are things that we’re thinking about and trying to figure out how to go faster on as we look at that next evolution of integration and partnering together.

Lt. Gen. Jennifer Hammerstedt:

Thanks, great answer, great example, thank you.

Melissa Sutherland:

I think about it in terms of what I would characterize as the three Cs, commit, collaborate and convert. We all need collectively government industry to have a commitment toward readiness. Liam, you made the point about dashboards earlier. Readiness isn’t a dashboard, it’s a decision. And it’s a decision that we need to honor across government and industry. Industry, we need to own it to not just design to perform but to scale.

We also need to build sustainment requirements into the beginning of the procurement process so that it’s not an afterthought. We’re building it into the design and we’re thinking through the problem sets and supply chain dependencies ahead of the procurement. Then we have to collaborate. We have a saying in Booz Allen, we can’t go it alone. Even the Toc-L example I described earlier, L3Harris is a critical partner for us. They have hardware solutions that really help Booz Allen accelerate our software capabilities to fill the speed that the mission necessitated. Same with our PredictAir solution. We’ve brought in a novel tech partner called FISNA that’s helping us get after the supply chain components to look at parts optionality to help speed the process up. Government needs to own their data and the governance and really set the standards, but they also, industry needs to be incentivized to innovate and invest.

We talked earlier about artificial intelligence. We’re investing heavily in the AI orchestration and models that are gonna really help unpack the value of the data and get after readiness, but it really has to be a partnership in order to solve this readiness challenge ahead of us. The other thing is conversion. The last thing I’ll say and the most important thing is we have to convert. Readiness is only as good as the mission outcomes it produces, whether that’s in the form of aircraft availability or mission-ready packages.

We have to hold each other accountable for those end mission results because our Airmen are relying on us to get it right.

Lt. Gen. Jennifer Hammerstedt:

Okay, I know the others probably wanted to answer. We’re down to a minute left, 51 seconds. So for the panel, is any of you have anything that you did not get a chance to articulate that you’d like to use the remainder of our time to say this one more thing?

Adam Wells:

I guess back to what I said earlier, you got two challenges. You have the legacy challenge and the going forward challenge. These lessons learned, you need to bake them in going forward, make sure your requirements are there. Make sure you think through the life cycle of everything you’re gonna get. Otherwise, you’re gonna keep this OODA loop and the OODA loop will never break.

Lt. Gen. Jennifer Hammerstedt:

Awesome, I couldn’t agree more.

Kinda Eastwood:

It’s okay, ma’am, I’d say we’ve talked a lot today about the challenges and the hurdles associated with supply chain or things that we need to go do better. The missing thing that we can never lose sight of is the people. We have to have the investment in the people, the training, the decision making, the ability to make great decisions and be empowered at the point of need. And so as I sit here and kind of look at some of the young faces in the crowd and think about where I was, I wish somebody would have been advocating for me to get better training as an Airman and to be able to have more experiences to be better prepared for the first deployment and the first contested logistics environment. So I think we can’t lose sight of that, ma’am.

Lt. Gen. Jennifer Hammerstedt:

Awesome. Anyone else? Okay, can I get a round of applause for this panel? I wrote down some really good nuggets and just appreciate you all and all that you give. Thanks to everyone in the audience for your attention and for all that you do. I’m assuming if you’re in the audience, you’re in this fight with us. So keep up the good fight and thanks for leading. Thanks.