Flying and Fixing to Fight and Win

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Maj. Gen. Larry Stutzriem, USAF (Ret.):

Hey, well this is the after-lunch crowd and you’re looking really good. These are the warriors in the room here. Hey, don’t forget, there’s an Air Force birthday celebration after the conference ends. So make sure you’re there. I’d love to talk to all of you. So good afternoon. In his letter to the force, General Wilsbach reminded us of the shared purpose of Airmen, to fix and fly aircraft. No matter the time, the place, or the task at hand, all Airmen support the generation of air power to protect, project global vigilance, global reach, and global power. Now remember, our Air Force is in conflict today. We’ve heard this from the keynote speeches all through the first two days and this morning of the conference. 24/7, it’s flying and fighting from deployed locations, and don’t you forget it. The demands on Airmen are higher than ever, and a large range of career specialties serve with honor and enthusiasm. Keeping the flying and fixing going to meet the demands, even under fire, is filled with challenges each day, and to discuss these challenges, we have a power-packed panel with General Davis from Air Force Global Strike Command, Lieutenant General Hurry, Commander Air Force Materiel Command, Lieutenant General Tulley, Commander Air Mobility Command, and General Eberlan, Director of Logistics Engineering and Force Protection at Headquarters Air Combat Command.

So, gentlemen, if we can get to this right into the questions. I find myself, I don’t know about you, but I have to remind a lot of people who are outside the service that we are an Air Force and a Space Force at war today. And I’d like to get some of your perspectives on how our Airmen are doing out there today in the flying and fixing of air power, just a general temperature on how they’re doing. And let’s just go down the line, starting with you, General Davis.

Gen. Stephen L. Davis:

All right, Stutz, first, thanks for putting me on the panel. Thanks to AFA for this world-class event. I do note that we do have the coveted after lunch on the third day slot. So thanks for everyone for showing up. I don’t know that we would, I would say that we’re at war. We’re certainly in conflict and that has been ebbing and flowing recently. For Air Force Global Strike, we obviously have a 24/7, 365, no-fail nuclear mission. So we have Airmen out there ready to go every single day. Out in the missile fields, we have about 600 Airmen deployed every day doing that important mission, fighting often through austere and harsh environments to get that done. They’ve been doing that for the last 63 years. It’s really pretty remarkable. We do the same thing on the bomber side. We’re always prepared to do that nuclear mission, but recently, obviously more of a conventional fight.

Currently, about 700 Airmen deployed forward as a part of an expeditionary bomb wing have been very busy. But I have to tell you, the Airmen are doing fantastic. When you talk about flying and fixing to fight and win, it is the Airmen that get that done for us. And I also tell you, having been out to RAF Fairford, when you see Airmen in that environment actually doing the mission, that is when they’re at their very best.

Lt. Gen. Linda Hurry:

So from Air Force Material Command, I can tell you the focus these days has been transitioning from a peacetime efficiency standpoint to a wartime effectiveness standpoint. And that has been our focus over the past year, and the entire team is all in. So when you talk about your civilian teammates in the community, well, my backyard looks a little different than most other MAJCOMs, where 80% of my 90,000 folks are civilian teammates and they are in the fight every single day. In fact, when we send folks downrange, it is not just our military teammates that go downrange, our civilian engineers and the folks that are doing aircraft battle damage repair or airfield damage repair or setting up a base at a particular location, those are our civilian Airmen that fight alongside all of our military members. And they are passionate about the mission. If you go talk to our engineers and you go talk to the folks that work in our research lab, you know, I literally have 3,000 PhDs out there trying to solve the next greatest challenge and use the science and their education to make our Air Force just a little bit stronger, just a little bit faster, and ready for whatever gets thrown our way. So our Airmen are doing great. They’re a little tired, and I need more of them, but they’re doing great.

Maj. Gen. Larry Stutzriem, USAF (Ret.):

That’s a great reminder. How about Air Mobility Command?

Lt. Gen. Daniel H. Tulley:

I’ll echo the little bit tired a little bit more. Both would be great if they were resolved, but so AMC has roughly 300 aircraft deployed right now across several AORs, about 10,000 Airmen. You heard General Wilsbach talk about air refueling, hitting just about every one of the air refueling control times the other day. They’re performing superbly, but air refueling’s just part of the story. They’re delivering the supplies, the munitions, the sustainment, the base operating support, all of the mission support functions that are keeping our air bases operating, defended, and functioning. They’re knocking it out of the park.

What strikes me is the lessons that they’re bringing back. We’ve got a generation of Airmen who are going to come back home with combat experience that will be priceless for our pacing threat. How we capture those lessons and carry them forward, it’s up to us to make the most of that, but that’s what we’re thinking these days.

Maj. Gen. Larry Stutzriem, USAF (Ret.):

That’s outstanding. General?

Maj. Gen. Jon A. Eberlan:

Headquarters Air Combat Command, I’ve been there about 10 months. Over my time in Air Combat Command, my eyes have been watered by what an empowered Airman can do and the incredible results they can produce when they’re empowered, led right, and when decision-making is pushed down to the lowest level. I watched us get out of town for this conflict in an unprecedented record-setting amount of time, very, very proud to be associated with all these men and women. And they’re doing remarkable work downrange in terms of how much we’re flying, it is unprecedented. And so all the Airmen, and General Wilsbach talked about it, the stories in his remarks. That’s representative of a lot of men and women downrange getting the job done.

The other thing that I’ve been so impressed with is the ability of our logistics enterprise, engineering community and industry, the amount of combat capability and readiness we can produce when we’re singularly focused on a target or a goal, and we all collaborate and work together. And so from Air Combat Command, it’s been a tremendous, tremendous honor for me to be in this job and the Airmen are doing great.

Maj. Gen. Larry Stutzriem, USAF (Ret.):

That’s great to hear. So for the foreseeable future, we have a fixed inventory basically of aircraft, and we’ve heard for the last two and a half days, a thread of discussion about readiness. I wonder if the four of you could talk from your unique perspectives about those challenges to readiness and how you may be dealing with them, and maybe start with General Tulley and Eberlan first.

Lt. Gen. Daniel H. Tulley:

Absolutely. So when we think about readiness in Air Mobility Command, we really think about answering four questions. Readiness of what, for what, for when, and at what cost. But if we look at the lessons of Ukraine, we also have to ask ourselves for how long, right? And so with Operation Epic Fury, we’re asking those questions. What can we sustain for how long? And it begs a question about regeneration. You know, our Army teammates have regeneration as part of their doctrine. So in contact, readiness in contact is the way we’re approaching this. What can we do to improve how we generate capability while under fire, in contact, persistently, in an extended or protracted conflict?

Lots of great examples of work being done to get after this. General Hurry’s team has brought a lot of capability forward to Mildenhall Air Base. We’re able to turn booms off of KC-135s. I think we’ve turned 30 of those instead of bringing them all the way back to the States. And it’s one example, but how do we change our culture to where we’re always generating readiness in contact?

Lt. Gen. Linda Hurry:

Let me piggyback on that a little bit, if I may. So you know, the teamwork that’s being displayed between, honestly, all of our commands. You know, we knew you needed a capability out at Mildenhall. You know, we have depot capability. Okay, what if we push that forward? Most people think of depots as Tinker Robins and Hill. Well, it doesn’t need to be just there. What if we take that and move it to Mildenhall? What if we take it to Lodges, exactly like what we did with KC-46s? What if? So that’s what we’ve been asking all of our Airmen. How do we do things smarter? How do we deliver capability faster, and it doesn’t have to be 7,000 miles away? How do we mitigate that time-space-distance challenge and push our capability forward to help you be successful, to help you go to places where maybe you’ve never been before? Well, we’ve got to have your back to do that. And so the more integrated we all are, the better off our warfighters are.

Maj. Gen. Jon A. Eberlan:

So General Spain, he sat on the panel, I think it was the combat pilot panel, yesterday afternoon. Readiness has factors that we all have to balance at the macro level. You’ve got manpower and training, sustainment, which is all your spare parts, and you have flying hours, and then you have infrastructure. And if any of those areas are out of proportion with the others, then your level that you’re able to achieve is going to be negatively impacted. So at the macro level, we are aligning all of those levers to get the most readiness we can out of what we have. At the micro level, we’re having monthly, and this started when General Wilsbach was at NAMAC, monthly readiness-informed metric reviews where we have a target. Every wing has an aircraft availability target that we’re discussing every single month. We talk about the fleet, the fleet has a target, and then each wing has a target.

And when we get into the discussions with the boss, it gives the wing commanders and the NAF commanders unfettered access with General Spain to address drivers, to talk about fleet drivers and the enterprise, talking about being integrated, ma’am. The enterprise is online to be able to answer any challenges we’re experiencing from a fleet or a wing perspective. And sometimes we can solve problems, you know, within our portfolio from wing to wing. And so that allows us to be able to work issues every single day to increase readiness and combat capability across our command.

Maj. Gen. Larry Stutzriem, USAF (Ret.):

Yeah, very good. Well, let me ask a question of General Davis.

Gen. Stephen L. Davis:

I’d like to jump in on that if I could, because readiness is really important to Global Strike Command. And the chief talks about flying and fixing to fight and win. That flying and fixing really is readiness. Global Strike has been getting after that with the North Star Readiness Campaign. It’s been really a team effort and something the Air Force, I think, is picking up on and trying to replicate. It started on my predecessor, General Boussier, and essentially we did a good job in Global Strike Command looking at what our nuclear commitment was every day.

And then our Wing Commander has really generated enough readiness just to go out and train. But we had a conventional readiness requirement as well with the Immediate Response Force and the Contingency Response Force. So he basically said, “Hey, we’re not meeting the requirement.” We added that all up, and that number for us, the North Star for B-52s, which was our first target, was at the time 55. It’s now 53. We weren’t anywhere close to that. So we really got after it, and really what we saw in the enterprise is the different pillars of the enterprise, the wings, the depots, supply, engines, they were all trying to manage readiness on their own, and we were kind of sub-optimizing things. A good example of that is at depot, we found we had about 17 bombers that were there essentially because there weren’t enough parts. So they would keep inducting bombers so they could get parts, so they could push bombers out the backside.

So we had a wing of B-52s sitting at the depot. The same thing was happening at our wings, right? They were canning birds. We had two to three long-term can birds at every wing, and really the root cause of that was the supply issue and that we didn’t have enough parts for our Airmen. So Steve Gray and his team got after that. Over the last 18 months, we’ve increased supply by about 50%. We’ve reduced our work in process at the depot down to about 11 aircraft, I think is the current number. We’re down to one or zero long-term can birds at our bases every month. So really generating a lot of readiness.

For the B-52 in general, we’re about 40% better in terms of our B-52 readiness. So remarkable work by our Airmen. And probably the most important thing is, we’re not doing this by asking our Airmen to do more and work harder. We’re asking them, and we’re trying to help them work smarter. We’re giving them the things that they need, and we’re allowing them to elevate issues and barriers to their success up to the three and four star level, so then we can get after those. And the ones that Lynn and I can’t fix, we’re elevating up to the Air Force level and asking them for help.

Maj. Gen. Larry Stutzriem, USAF (Ret.):

That’s really good news. How about in the same discussion here, especially for the General Davis and Tulley, you know, we had some discussion this morning in earlier panels about a difference between the Cold War era and what we have today. Much more complex. We’re sending deployments in various, various places on the planet, different threats, different basing, different logistics lines. So how’s that affecting your, how do you think about readiness in terms of this ability or need to deploy in many locations, not just one?

Lt. Gen. Daniel H. Tulley:

Happy to go first on this one. It’s something that I find myself talking about frequently, right? So much like STRATCOM and Global Strike, we are a global air component to U.S. TRANSCOM. Eleven combatant commands, each has five service components. Each of those needs to be supported, right? And we provide a lot of that support, a lot of that sustainment, not necessarily flying and fixing, but driving, sailing and fixing. So how does that integrate? How do we as an integrated joint force get after that?

For us, it’s really about discerning the requirements across those combatant commands to include TRANSCOM’s own, and then the priorities. We’ve worked with CENTCOM for several years now to try and build a system that pulls this data into MAVEN, lets us see in real time one combatant command’s priorities and requirements. But what we really need and what we’re moving towards is a system that lets us see all eleven combatant commands. We can’t be using an old paper-based process found in Doctrine to make those tough decisions when the demand for mobility forces is coming from INDOPACOM, from STRATCOM, from NORTHCOM, CENTCOM, and UCOM. So we’re thinking through that and what right looks like going forward.

Gen. Stephen L. Davis:

So it’s a good question, it’s a complex problem. I would say in the past we probably didn’t do this the right way. When we thought a conflict was kicking off, the first thing we’d do is start sending bombers forward and that actually consumes our readiness. So I think we got it right during OEF, the bombers stayed back, and then when they were needed we did CONUS-to-CONUS missions for about eight days. So two pulses a day from the United States, a short mission was probably about 34 hours, a long mission was 40 plus hours. So remarkable work from the Airmen. We went from that to forward deploying, so we pushed maintainers and support personnel forward to RAF Fairford, and then we actually took the bombers, we loaded them up at CONUS, we took them to the Middle East, they actually did a mission, they employed-deployed, conducted a combat mission, and then landed at Fairford, and then for the next, well I guess they’ve been there for now six plus months, they’ve been conducting nearly daily operations out of there.

When bombers are back at home base they build readiness, when we deploy them forward they consume readiness, and then as Linda said though, we’re getting great support in terms of parts, in terms of supplies, and in terms of forward depot support, so that fleet remains healthy and continues to perform very well.

Maj. Gen. Larry Stutzriem, USAF (Ret.):

Yeah, I imagine the demand on you, General, is amazing.

Lt. Gen. Linda Hurry:

So the unique thing about AFMC is that we literally support everybody else. If we don’t do our job, it makes your life miserable, and so, you know, we have leaned in beyond belief, and let me kind of explain the homework assignment that the Chief gave me. So I kind of got into the seat, and he’s like, “hey, Linda, I need you to accelerate test.” Got it, Chief. “Hey, I really need you to accelerate depot.” Got it, Chief. “Capability deliver. We need to accelerate that. Hey, MilCon, FSRM.” Yes, Chief, I got it. We have a need for speed. But everybody on the team has been leaning forward and trying to think of what are better ways to do this? How do we better integrate the full lifecycle of the platforms?

This is not just, hey, what are the new bright and shiny aircraft that we can go send to one of these warfighters? The question is, what can we do to maintain the things that we have? How do we use test? How do we use research and development to put things forward, to mitigate a gap? Let me give you an example. The Ultra. There is a low-cost ISR platform right out there on the floor. Not the actual thing, but the description of a thing sitting out there in our research lab. Go out there and go talk to those Airmen. Go see how they’re putting technology so that it can make our lives easier, better, faster. What are we doing in terms of parts? We’ve lived on 30-year RSP packages for years. Maybe that’s not enough. We live in a contested distribution network, so how can we put more things forward? How do we do things based on science? How do we use AI to figure out the tools that we need in a global positioning strategy and a global distribution strategy so that we can put things exactly where these guys need them to be more successful?

In terms of a warfight, AFMC is all in, and it’s not just the military team that’s doing it.

Maj. Gen. Larry Stutzriem, USAF (Ret.):

Good work. Good work. Let me ask, when we talk about, you know, as panels about the flying and fixing, and I’d like to start, ask a question about the flyers, especially General Davis and General Tulley. How are the pilots doing? We’ve gone through an era of pilot shortage, there’s a lot of demand on the pilots, on the crews. How are we doing there?

Gen. Stephen L. Davis:

I’m actually a rider, not a flyer, so I’m going to let General Tulley go first, then I’ll see what I can add.

Lt. Gen. Daniel H. Tulley:

All right, sir, thanks. What AMC is doing is we’re focusing on how do we transition those recruits into a finished product, right? How do we make those folks who want to raise their right hand, join the Air Force, go through the training program, and this can be for pilot training or for maintenance, what have you, but at the end of the day, we really need experience in the squadrons. In between, there’s a pipeline, a training enterprise, that has a lot of different pieces and parts, a lot of variables, and a lot of constraints.

So right now, we’re trying to identify each of those constraints and then controlling what we can control, right? It’s not always as simple as adding more flying hours on the far right end of that, and it’s not always as simple as pushing more people through the pipeline or increasing capacity. You know, example we’re facing right now is we’re taking a hard look at the chief’s request into flying training units. Our flying training units are producing more than what we’ve asked for, but that’s only one part of the equation as we take these folks all the way through and they enter the process. Whatever we choose to do in any one year will then propagate through the next five to ten years unless we take deliberate action.

So working to understand that complex problem, taking the actions that make the most sense, that minimize risk, and also improve things is what we’re after. As a side note, I’ve convened a council of captains and majors over at Andrews this week, so for three days, these folks are answering a question from me. In ANC, it would appear that training has started to accrete and accumulate over time, and if you look at, you know, just making this up, in a 12-month period, maybe you spend no more than 30 days or 60 days in training. How much time do we spend in training now? What are our requirements for all of our mission sets? How can we simplify that?

Always assure we have the basic level of readiness to keep the global transportation system operating, but then tailor the training we need for that high-end fight.

Maj. Gen. Larry Stutzriem, USAF (Ret.):

Anything on that, General Davis?

Gen. Stephen L. Davis:

Well, so I mean, I think our challenge looking forward is how we continue to main that experience going forward, right, both the B-1 and the B-2 will be extended. We are planning on using some of those experienced pilots to be the first B-21 pilots, and some of them will be, but we’re trying to figure that out. We are, we do have a new program called the B-Star. We’re bringing in a Honda Jet to actually help experience some pilots. And also, as some of these airframes have issues with readiness, it gives those pilots a chance to fly and get them time in the seat, which we know is very important.

Maj. Gen. Larry Stutzriem, USAF (Ret.):

Very important. Well, on the flip side of that, the flying is the fixing we’re talking about. We know that we have some shortages, especially in experienced maintainers out there. I wonder if, especially General Eberlan and Hurry, but if any of the panelists wanted to talk about this, how about those readiness challenges? Start with you, General.

Maj. Gen. Jon A. Eberlan:

They’re real. It depends on what career field, in terms of the level. It’s not just raw numbers, and you alluded to it, sir. It’s the experience level, and when you have a gap between your tech sergeants and masters, and you don’t have as many that are mostly seven levels, and then you have a gap where there’s not as many five levels as you need, and then you’ve got a lot of three levels that you have to train.

You have to figure out creative ways to do that. Our NAFs, in cases to assist wings, have sent experienced maintainers from one base to another to help them, targeted to help them get over a hump if it was a certain system that they were struggling with, do the experience levels. We’ve also sent, another wing has also sent three levels to a more healthy, like five and seven level unit to get a lot of initial training done. The ARC has been phenomenal in targeted manning assist to get past some of this stuff and keep us moving in the right direction. And then we’ve really leaned into technology in terms of the training to shorten the timeline, like using augmented and virtual reality for familiarization.

And then it’s not just the maintenance side either. Like in terms of logistics, there’s an enterprise wide initiative that we’ve seen very positive returns in terms of automating the cargo processing function in terms of weighing and manifesting cargo that we’ve seen a lot of gains with that have made us a lot faster and we need fewer people. And so that to me, you know, we have to do the most with what we have and get the most readiness out of what we have and technology offers a unique opportunity when we lean into it with AI too because artificial intelligence is capable if, you know, the model is set up properly to give an Airman a better idea of, okay, this is what’s wrong with the aircraft. Here’s the probability, soup to nuts on the parts that are changed and, you know, this is the most likely down to the least likely.

And then you can also couple it with the operator debriefs and how it’s written up and have it processed that way. So we’re really, really encouraged, you know, using technology to get after some of these challenges.

Maj. Gen. Larry Stutzriem, USAF (Ret.):

Very good.

Lt. Gen. Linda Hurry:

Yeah. Let me piggyback on that. So it’s not just the technology, but also process improvement. I mean, if you look at theory of constraints in a lot of the maintenance processes or logistics processes or quite frankly, anything in AFMC, quite frankly, if we can understand the process and break it down to the constraint, mitigate that constraint, the collective throughput of the entire system goes so much better. That’s exactly what’s going on in the depot. That’s exactly what we did when we surged operation for OEF. Literally, the reason that we were so successful is because the depot surged 120% on commodities to enable the war fight and send parts all over the globe.

Now it’s critical we get those carcasses back, hint, bring all that stuff back to help us out here, but process improvement is also extremely critical. Now part of your question dealt with the shortage of maintenance manpower. Yes, there is. We’re not going to give you a specific number in terms of military manpower, but we need some growth there. But what I will foot stomp from an AFMC perspective is that right now we’re short probably 8,000 folks across of AFMC that we need those billets filled. 2,700 of them are in the sustainment center alone. That’s not just pure maintainers. We need engineers. We need contracting specialists. We need program managers. We need all of it, all of these professionals to work the full life cycle to enable warfighting capability. It’s all of us working together.

So yes, we need critical maintainers. Yes, the half A4 is really working on training and educating our workforce so that we can make better use of those Airmen and their Airmen’s time. But at the same time, we need engineers, and we really need them badly. In terms of what types of engineers, cognizant engineers, structural engineers, sustaining engineers, software engineers. So one of the biggest efforts that we have underway in AFMC writ large is how can we partner with our neighbors and the states and you name it, and the universities that are out there to bring the talent into the workforce. How do we partner and develop STEM interests at the high school level, at the college level so that we can bring those folks into our Air Force family so that they can serve the way that I know so many of them want to.

Gen. Stephen L. Davis:

I agree with everything that Linda and Jon said. And, Jon, we do have some experience gaps for sure, but I’m also not convinced that we have all the experience we have in the right places and that’s one of the things that we’re looking at in Global Strike. We’ve got a lot of experience in the headquarters, we’ve got a lot of experience in command centers. I’m also kind of concerned about the training enterprise where we’re taking seven levels to train one levels to be three levels, like I think we can maybe take some risks there. So I think there’s some opportunities to take the experience that we have and repurpose it in the right places to get it back on the flight line.

Maj. Gen. Larry Stutzriem, USAF (Ret.):

Very good. Well, General Hurry, let me come back to you again and talk about supply chains. You know, we have some issues with respect to supply and with the age of some of the aircraft types, boy, those parts are not being produced perhaps now and they have to be reproduced in some way to keep the airplane going. Boneyard’s getting kind of thin, I guess, in some of the aircraft types. How are you addressing these challenges that limit our ability to fly and fix?

Lt. Gen. Linda Hurry:

Yeah. So from a broad picture, if you take a look at the average age of our fleet right now, it’s sitting at about 53% over 30 years. 55% of our fleet is over its useful service life. And so there are lots of supply and maintenance challenges. From a supply perspective, our increase in the supply rate or the number of aircraft that are down from a supply perspective has increased 87% over the last seven years.

So there’s a lot of challenges. So what are we doing? One, we’re asking for resources. We absolutely need additional funding for spares. And I know that we’re working on that. We’re working on the budget, and I know the Air Force is advocating. But once we get even a penny, we have to be ready to execute it. Two, we are getting after our forecasting accuracy. We are using AI models. We’re using all sorts of things to try to make sure we better understand where the needs are and where we can position those critical assets globally around the world. We’re getting after things like additive manufacturing. How can we do new technologies, and how do we reverse engineer some of the parts that we need? We’re also putting long-term contracts in place, because the first thing industry is going to tell me is that I need a demand signal. I don’t need you to tell me I need 100 of them this year, but only five next year. So how do we do long-term contracts so that you can build stability in the collective supply chains?

The other thing is we’re looking for multiple sources of supply. Gone are the days of monopolies. We can’t just have one person producing the one critical part. I need five of you producing them, because if we get down to the crunch, we’re going to have to have a healthy shelf so that we can fight globally. And so those are some of the things that we’re really trying to get after that.

Maj. Gen. Larry Stutzriem, USAF (Ret.):

Yeah. Thank you for that. And I will say AFA is a champion of educating a lot of audiences about the importance of sustainment, funding the sustainment piece. And we’ll continue to champion that.

Gen. Stephen L. Davis:

Hey, Stutz. If I could just pile on. So with the North Shore Readiness Campaign, we’ve been working this for the last 18 months. I have to say that the supply team, Steve Gray and his team have made a humongous, huge, huge leaps forward. And that really is, I mean, that has been the number one driver of improving readiness in the bomber fleet is the gains that we’ve gotten supply in. You know, as a commander, you don’t want everything to be a money problem to solve it. But this, I think, is a money problem. We need more money for parts. I think the chief mentioned it in his keynote. It’s absolutely the case.

Lt. Gen. Linda Hurry:

I mean, if I can throw a number out there right now, we have a $14 billion hole in supply. Let that sink in for a minute. I know we’re not going to get it all at once. But when we get it, we’re going to have to execute. We’re going to have to execute smartly so we can move the needle. And so, yes, we’re managing the fleet more globally, not necessarily by squadron by squadron through some of the partnerships that we’ve had. But we’ve got to look at it from engines with DLA. We’ve got to look all the individual piece parts so that we can get them through the depot so the parts can get turned and out and back into the field. So we’re definitely looking at it holistically. We just have got some work ahead of us.

Maj. Gen. Larry Stutzriem, USAF (Ret.):

Yeah. Very good. Well, let me get back a little bit to the Airmen themselves. And we’ve heard in the presentations, the keynotes about the service needing to have Airmen who can continue to do the mission even under attack. And it’s a different world now that they can — we’re not in the protected spaces we may have been for the last 20 or 30 years. So I’m curious if we can talk a little bit about how you are preparing your Airmen to fight under attack and maybe what we still need to do in the future. And I’ll start down here with you, General Eberlan.

Maj. Gen. Jon A. Eberlan:

Point defense is not a side hustle.

Maj. Gen. Larry Stutzriem, USAF (Ret.):

It’s not a side hustle.

Maj. Gen. Jon A. Eberlan:

So you go back maybe 10 years, you hear the words base defense, and everybody thinks the Security Forces Squadron. And then you watch the proliferation of some of these threats, these UASs. And we’ve moved out. There’s a point defense task force that has representation from the 3, the 4, the 589 at ACC working with the 1/2. We’re trying to get capability to the operational wing commanders soonest. We have mobile training teams working through tactics, techniques, and procedures with units. We also have battle labs where we’re testing systems out. This has to be a layered defense for this threat. Our air base wings are power projection platforms, and what doesn’t get talked about a lot in this discussion is the hardening and resiliency of infrastructure to go along with it. And so any facility modifications or if we build new facilities, it needs to be hardened and it needs to be resilient. And then when you look at where we need to go, point defense as a weapon system, and then the point defense career field, that’s here.

We have to figure out how to get from where we are to the end state. And that’s what we’re doing right now.

Lt. Gen. Daniel H. Tulley:

I’ll just jump in there. Pretty simple for us. Train like you fight. Train like you will fight in a pure fight. So one of the stories I’ve heard in the last few weeks, KC-135 ops crews in the jet, KC-135 maintenance team is about to launch this jet, unexpected alarm red, right? Everyone jumps in a bunker. They make the safe decision to everybody get in the bunker. The crew’s out of the plane. The maintainers are in there following a barrage of ballistic missiles. They come back out. That aircraft is smoking. There are holes in it. And it’s a fully loaded KC-135, 200,000 pounds of jet fuel, JP8. Took 48 hours for that fuel to drain out of that aircraft. In the meantime, first on the scene was, I think, the pro super and the expediter. They immediately begin to collect the fuel. Somebody’s on that task. They start to patch the holes. They start to fix all the systems. Long story short, they were eventually able to get that plane to make a trans-oceanic flight back home to where it could be fully repaired. But training like you fight has got to stress our Airmen. It’s got to train them to be ready for those stresses and then do it again and again and again.

Lt. Gen. Linda Hurry:

Well, I’ll pick right up on that because it was our aircraft battle damage repair team that was actually able to patch that aircraft back together to get it back to tinker so that we can put it completely back where it needed to be.

I agree. Train like you fight. And so one of the things that we have at the Air Force Installation and Mission Support Center is our combat support training ranges and where we purposely bring in our teams that are going downrange to put them through their paces to make sure they are ready to go when we send them downrange. So that is one thing we’re trying to do. Piggybacking on Tex, when he starts talking a little bit about point defense, okay, we’ve got our research lab developing new capabilities and how we can take down some of these threats.

We’ve got our test center and out at the test ranges out there testing to see if we can be successful in doing this. Collectively, we then bring in the IMSC team to figure out, okay, how do we train these folks on a repeated basis so they can go execute when we send them downrange.

Gen. Stephen L. Davis:

So Stutz, for this conflict, all of our bomber platforms have been outside of the weapons engagement zone, but we know that there aren’t any sanctuaries. Certainly during our OEF, we saw concerning things at our global strike bases in terms of UAS. We’re fortunate that we’re at the top of the list for JETA 401, so we want to get our point of defense up online, and we want to be innovating for the Air Force and learning quickly so we can share those lessons.

Maj. Gen. Larry Stutzriem, USAF (Ret.):

Is there concern with logistical lines in your perspective, if anybody’s got a thought about that? I thought, General Hurry, you might want to talk about this, but we’re vulnerable there, too, more than we have been before.

Lt. Gen. Linda Hurry:

Yes, I could definitely talk logistics lines. So writ large, one of the things that was re-highlighted during OEF is that we do not have good, solid command and control of logistics writ large. So one of the things that we are getting after now, it is a work in progress, is we’re going to stand up an Air Force Logistics Operations Center, because we made a lot of things work. A lot of it was done on phone calls between the A4s, between the collective logistics family that’s out there, and that’s great, but we should not rely on relationships. We need connectivity, we need fed into MAVEN, it needs to be a joint solution set because the distribution network is joint, the supply chain is joint, we’ve got to be connected with our joint brothers and sisters. And so standing up the lock is absolutely critically important.

Where we’re looking to do this, we’re going to do it at Scott, sitting side by side with TACC, nothing like having the supplies and the distribution network joined at the hip so that we can move things around in a smart, integrated fashion. So that is one of the things we’re trying to get after. On top of that, multimodal distribution and multiple lines of distribution writ large. You cannot rely on a single line, otherwise you’re going to be under attack. The other thing you need to kind of think through as we’re laying things out is our global prepositioning strategy. We have got to better set the theater. It has to be spread out. We’ve got to consider things like CCD, concealment, deception, et cetera. How do we increase the calculus for our adversaries so they use more of their quiver on things that don’t matter? And so those are the types of things we’re looking at from a holistic logistics and sustainment perspective as we try to support the joint fight.

Lt. Gen. Daniel H. Tulley:

Let me just piggyback on that for a second, Linda. So one of the things I’d say about logistics and supply lines are that we are good but we’re getting better. This is causing us to evolve.

Over in Epic Fury, one example where our teams identified something was going on with class nine, so replacement parts, right? An increase in MICAPs, mission-capable parts required for aircraft that were in the fight. It’s something that our teams see. The rest of the team, the joint team, might not. You know, combatant commands tend to prioritize supply in terms of class. I need more class one, three, five. Early days in a conflict, you want more munitions. It makes perfect sense. But if you can get to the granularity and the precision to say, okay, I need these MICAPs delivered with those munitions, you’re increasing combat capability, you’re turning aircraft back into the fight faster. So we’re seeing that. We’re learning those lessons and bringing that forward.

Lt. Gen. Linda Hurry:

And that part we’ve already integrated. So we do have some of our supply chain professionals sitting in his backyard doing that integration. Now we need to scale it for all the rest of the classes of supply.

Maj. Gen. Larry Stutzriem, USAF (Ret.):

Very good. Well, that was a great discussion. Please keep them flying and fixing. You’re doing a great job. Thank you for your time today. A round of applause for our panel.