Forward Airbase Resilience

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John Tirpak: 

Well, good afternoon, actually, pretty good turnout. Thanks for being here. We’re going to be talking about forward air base resilience today. My name is John Tirpak. I’m editorial director of Air and Space Forces magazine. About eight years ago, I think it was the head of Air Combat Command, General Mike mobile homes, did an AFA program near Washington where he said, Guess what? The future is not what it used to be. There’s not going to be any sanctuary anymore. We can’t hide behind our oceans. Bad guys have satellites. They are tapping our phones. They can see where we are. And they have increasingly long range, precision missiles, missiles that can hit us. So that was the genesis of the new incarnation of expeditionary airmen and the idea of agile combat employment. What are our people going to need as they move to small bases in the Pacific or maybe Arctic locations or somewhere in the jungle, or somewhere anywhere where there may not be any infrastructure, there may not be a runway, they’re going to need water, energy to power their equipment, fuel, resupply, mobility to get there and get back. They’re going to have to do deception, defend against air surface and missile attack. So we’re not going to figure out all the requirements of Ace in one session, but we have some excellent panelists to talk about some of those things today. First of all, we have Robert Winkler. Goes by Otis, Vice President of Corporate Development and national security programs at Kratos. He’s a former F 16 squadron commander. He worked on the Senate Armed Services Committee with DARPA Air Force legislative affairs. He’s got cred. Over here we have Trey Coleman. Raise your hand, Trey. He’s a retired Air Force Colonel. He’s now the Chief Product Officer at raft, which works in command and control products. He was the former commander of the five, oh fifth command and control wing. He has extensive experience in a ox and Jad c2 and finally, Kurt kibbles Ebitz. He’s our token Marine. He’s the Federal Strategic account executive for the Navy, Navy programs with Schneider Electric, which provides power products and energy solutions. So we’re going to get right into the questions Otis. Tell us what the Air Force has shared with you about operating in these austere locations without a runway in place. Are they talking about Marston mats? Are they talking about launching things off the back of a truck? What is the state of the art now?

Robert Winkler: 

Yeah, great question. So I think it’s important to think of all of the above right as we get farther and farther into, at least in the Pacific, into the second and then into the first island chain, you’re going to really want to have the capability in the limited number of islands and the limited limit of land masses that you have in there to operate across the entire spectrum, whether it’s launching off of a rail, whether it’s launching off of a runway that might be available indigenously to The to the island itself, a vertical takeoff and landing capability, or just something that you can build out on that first island chain, launch and attack the enemy. But we’re really the important part of that is we need to get mass forward to be able to initially halt and then eventually decisively defeat the enemy. So you’re going to need not only runways, but alternative solutions to runways as well. There’s lots of various technologies that are available out there that the Air Force is working on, the Marine Corps is working on, but it’s an all of the above solution. If we limit ourselves to the traditional way of thinking, we’re not going to be flexible enough and agile enough in order to do what’s necessary, to halt the enemy and to defend what we need. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s in the Indo Pacific, I use that as an example, but also whether in Europe or in the Arctic, as you mentioned, across the entire spectrum, wherever we are, we need to be able to have a flexible and agile force structure that we can fight from any available situation to put pressure on the enemy.

John Tirpak:

And what’s the Air Force’s interest these days? Are they? They expanding their scope of interest to include things that launch off the back of a truck or a vertical. Cough, that kind of thing.

Robert Winkler:

Yeah, I think you’re, you’re seeing it across the board, and that all of the above type of force structure with the new force design that that general Kunkel has been been briefing here at at AFA, you’re seeing lots of different solutions. We’re working on traditional runways you’re working on very, very short, alternative pieces of concrete, and then off of the back of a truck, off the back of a rail for either recoverable or one way attack surfaces.

John Tirpak:

Great Trey, especially in the Pacific Theater, commanding and controlling lots of forces in lots of different places, is going to be a big challenge, probably under jamming. How do you think the Air Force is going to prepare for this? What is the assumption? Is there going to be no c2 and and squadron commanders are going to have to follow commanders intent without any updates. Tell us what you see for for the future of commanding something that disparate and over such a wide area and under contested conditions. Thanks.

Col. Trey Coleman, USAF (Ret.):

I’ll share with you. I’ll share with you my perspective, and it’s a perspective gained from I was commanding the 69th AOC in 2019 and 20 when el cider base was attacked, and so during that time, we were dispersing not only forces throughout the Middle East, but also dispersing Air Operations Center functions back to CONUS. And so lived, lived through this. And I would, you know, probably one of the first real implementations of trying to do ace. At the time, we were writing mission type orders. And so we wrote mission type orders to the forces in Iraq and Syria, and mission type orders to the forces in Afghanistan. We experiment with these efficient mission type orders through exercises. And my opinion is that is that if you’re trying to aggregate air power, if you’re trying to be combat effective, Mission type orders don’t work. And the reason is because the same fundamental principle of air power that goes back to the early days of of, you know, World War One and World War Two, Field Marshal Montgomery was the famous had the famous quote about penny packets of air power are worse than useless, right? And so what, what we’ve experimented with in terms of aggregating air power through mission type orders is, let’s say you’re fully disconnected. You know, here’s what you’re going to do, you’re going to take off and you’re going to launch to point alpha and wait for somebody to tell you what to do. That doesn’t work, because nobody’s going to be there, or there’s no gas, or you’re not aggregating with your forces. And the other reason it doesn’t work is because the way we’ve constructed we’ve built our wings, right? So as we do ace, the idea with the hub and spoke model of ACE is I’m going to disperse all my forces. So I’m going to have some F 16 here. I’m going to have an F 16 wing here, and they’re going to disperse all over the place. I have some F fifteens here we got rid of composite, composite wings, and we have single MDS units. And single MDS units, you know, are very limited in their ability when they’re not paired with, you know, when you’re not pairing DCA with strike, with electronic warfare, with aerial refueling, with all the capabilities that are inherent air power that you need to put together in an effective strike package, you know, including the intelligence that you need to conduct an effective strike. And you can’t Penny packet air power in China, right? A four ships, teens is not going to go out and be effective against the Liu Yang, three and so and so, we’ve got to figure out how to a great air power so I would argue there’s a lot of purpose. There’s a lot of value in Mission type orders, if they are to this is how you survive. If you’re disconnected, your job is to survive, and you can launch air power to defend your base, but your job is to survive and get reconnected. I also think that, I think that that becomes the mission, right? Your job is to is to get reconnected. You have to get reconnected to some form of command control so that air power can be aggregated and used at its most potent way.

John Tirpak: 

Awesome Kurt, we’ve all heard an army travels on its stomach, but really they need electricity. You got to power their communications, heat their hooch, if they’re in the Arctic, power ground equipment, etc. What’s the thinking for these small units? You know, seven, seven to 10 aircraft that may be there for three days, or maybe there for three hours. Is it solar powers? Is its solar panels? Is it small nukes, generators, like we’ve always seen, it’s got to be light. What’s the Air Force thinking on this?

Col. Curt Ebitz, USMC, (Ret.):

Well, first, I think your army term would have been better. You said Marine, but that’s okay. You know, really the four deployed expedition airfields or air base resiliency. For me, first thing comes to my mind is operational energy. And so how do you get there? Well, you got to think about the power generation, your electrical distribution, and then energy storage. And so it really, it’s in order to support seven aircraft attachment that’s out there for deployed really the West. Best way to go about thinking that is, how do you how do you take what we’ve done on installations with micro grids. You take a look at your code air base that was most recently done in Japan with with micro there. How do you make that in a distributed environment? How do you make a mobile micro grid? So you’re really going to use a combination of distribute energy resources? Going to look for solar. You’re going to look for a battery, energy storage system, and of course, you’re still going to have to compliment it with with some sort of multi fuel generator. We’re not just there yet as, I think, as a nation or as a world where you can fully rely on renewables, but I think down the road, as technology gets better, you could see that that your, you know, your multi fuel generators could be ratcheted back a little bit and focus more on the wind, the solar batteries. But really, the key, I think the key to future success, is going to be focused on deployable microwaves, with with, you know, the battery, energy storage, to be able to give you that. Because if I told you that, let’s say, you know, you’re used to getting refueled every day or every two days, but I can reduce your fuel consumption by 40% I think that would be something you’d like to know, or you’d be all about.

John Tirpak:

Great. Trey, you observed the bamboo Eagle exercise recently saw some of what we’re talking about in practice. What can you share with us about what’s working and what maybe not?

Col. Trey Coleman, USAF (Ret.):

Yeah, we were fortunate enough to attend bamboo Eagle out in Hawaii, you know, was conducted from across the West Coast. Currently across the US, you know, they’re doing combat planning from Hurlburt field in Florida. They were executing from Nevada and California and and conducting the combat operations mission from the AOC there in Hawaii. So it’s a great example, and it’s a great way to start exercising for the, you know, the wide swath of geography that it’s going to be the conflict with the with China would require. So there’s a lot of, there’s, it’s a really, it’s a really fantastic exercise that just started a couple years ago. And it, you know, Tails. It’s on the tail end of red flag. And as a matter of fact, this summer, it’s going to be part of gonna be part of re four pack here in July and August, it’s so complex to figure out where your forces are and where they’re gonna land, and then get the right maintenance equipment there if they land in a spot that doesn’t have the right maintenance equipment or the right munitions or the right troops that can service those aircraft. And so pairing, making those decisions about, as folks come off target and they come back and they’re, let’s say their air base was was slimed, or is in a condition where, you know, the runway is cratered, and have to land somewhere else. Making the decisions about where they can land is really important decision, because if they land in the wrong spot, they’re not combat effective for a very long time. And so that kind of goes back to the to the c2 piece of it, right? The the challenges of being disconnected in a, c2 in a or challenges of c2 in a disconnected environment. So we saw a couple things. One of the, one of the, one of the things that was most impressive, that really impressed upon me was the importance of your in flight reports. And so, as you have, you know, hundreds of aircraft coming back from your big strikes, and they’re going to come back, and they’ve got a long time a flight back, you know, four or five, six. Or five, six hours to wherever. They come back and recover. They have to pass their in flight reports, because they got to tell command and control. I expended this many bombs and munitions, and, you know, at some point that’s going to start to aggregate, and you’re going to have to know where you got to resupply. So I don’t have to move more GB 32 to this base, because we’re going to be out. And if I want to support tomorrow, tasking order, have to move those, those that equipment. But there’s there wasn’t the ability to pass that information. And so, you know, and so how do you pass that information and make sure it’s done in a meaningful way so that, so that supply can get can get started before somebody lands and goes through debrief? Because that’s too late. And so you have to have that. It just goes back to the ability to pass information, past data, in order to make decisions faster. If we can’t do that, we’re not going to win.

John Tirpak:

If everybody could comment on this. What are the other services doing that the Air Force ought to copy. Some of them have some experience on this. Marine Corps certainly has some experience on this. What would the Air Force do? Well to certainly collaborate with but outright copy?

Robert Winkler: 

I’ll give a shot first. So I think that when you look at the way the other services are operating, the Marine Corps expects to be operating the first island chain period. And I think that that’s one of the things that the Air Force needs to seriously start contemplating before 911 Shaw Air Force Base. Actually, on 911 Shaw Air Force Base was in the middle of a phase two exercise. And if you don’t know what a phase two exercise is, it was you’re practicing how to launch, recover, turn aircraft under fire from the enemy in the middle of a combat situation. That was done at most every Air Force Base across the CONUS and in Europe and the Pacific, continually. And then for the next 25 years, we took a pause on doing operating under combat, under fire, in a combat environment, and focused completely on the global war on terror, and rightfully so, but we stopped focusing on it. We stopped resourcing it effectively, and the enemy didn’t. The enemy continued to develop their capabilities, whether it’s in the Pacific, whether it’s in the Middle East, or whether the stuff you’re seeing in the Ukraine right now, everything kept moving forward and we resourced other things instead. We haven’t actually caught back up again, and that’s one of the things that I think we should take all the other service are learning this at the same time, but we really need to take a look at what we need to. Do to effectively resource our Airmen, to focus on and be able to operate and survive under fire, right? That’s active and passive defenses in theater to be able to generate combat power. It’s the command and control that’s required to generate that combat power and to put forces on target to defeat the enemy. We haven’t done that. We’re now. We recognize that we have the problem the air force, force design is trying to start attacking that but the way that they describe that force design, they take, they look at, there’s a gap between our ability in this ground threat that they’re talking about the missile threat that’s attacking the forces in that first and second island chain they’re going to have to wait to be able to generate combat power. Well, the resources that are required to minimize the amount of time that they need to wait to generate that combat power is a thing that should be a priority for us moving forward.

Col. Curt Ebitz, USMC, (Ret.):

I’ll comment on as far as the Marine Corps perspective. So the one thing the Marine Corps has always been really good at is being able to task, organize and operate in small, distributed units. And so when you look at the way that the say, the modern battlefield is going to shape out today, operating, you know, the Navy has just DMO distributed maritime operations, eabo for the Marine Corps, it comes in a cost. So there’s, you know, and that’s going to be the way that we need to fight moving forward. And so you have to be able to resource your the Air Force accordingly to be able to operate in that type of manner. And so being able to task, organize, from combining operational maintenance forces in a squadron, that’s where the Marine Corps, I think, is really good at, as far as when we go out as a debt, we have squadrons, but we were able to debt out two and three debts at a time from a squadron with the full capability and support to operate independently. And I’d also add on, you know, maybe a little twist here, but you know, operating from home station in America is no longer there’s no longer a sanctuary. Our home, our bases are a threat to hypersonics, cyber attacks. And so how do you pivot to harden those installations again? It goes back to what I commented in an exhibition environment is goes back to micro grids for being energy independent or and be able to augment the grid provide the requisite power to those critical infrastructure aboard the insulation. And then the last point I would make is it, I think you need to, we need to change the perception of mindset, of how installations are viewed across the board. Because really, there are, they’re kind of like the Navy’s carriers ashore, if you want to look at that, they’re readiness generators that, you know, generate that combat power for gets our near peer adversaries.

Col. Trey Coleman, USAF (Ret.): 

More you want more more questions on.

John Tirpak:

Oh, okay, I thought you were going to chime in.

Col. Trey Coleman, USAF (Ret.):

No, I know only that we when we had the pre panel, just so we know is I vehemently disagree with the concept of body condoms and at so training, if you lived through the gas mask in the plastic bag over you trying to go to the jet, you know what I’m talking about? Yeah. Talking about. Agreed on that.

Robert Winkler: 

I think that’s great, but I think it’s really important to take away is that it sucked, absolutely sucked, right? But you fought through it, and you ended up knowing that you could actually generate combat power while you were under a chemical attack, right? It was not fun, and it reduced your overall effectiveness, but we were able to do it, and then we lost that. And that goes to my overall point of we got to get back to that level.

John Tirpak:
And what can the what can the Air Force learn from other countries? What have you seen in terms of their ability to we have gentlemen from Sweden, I saw before, they’re very good at operating out of austere locations. What other countries are doing that might be useful to the Air Force to copy?

Col. Trey Coleman, USAF (Ret.): 

I’ve had the chance to spend some time in Israel, particularly during while I was in the Middle East. And their hardened shelters are incredible. We could have, we have a lot to learn from they’re living in the threat, and they know how to do it. And, man, we should just copy those blueprints.

Robert Winkler: 

And I think you could pretty big takeaway. 100% agree that active and passive defenses that you see in Israel and in other countries, the ability that just because you’re being attacked doesn’t stop you from generating combat power. Ukraine as a perfect example, right? They’re generating combat power with legacy aircraft continuously under a significant long range threat, and even a close in range, a close in artillery threat. Same thing with Israel. You’re seeing the same thing in the Middle East, with the ability to continually generate while you’re under fire. It. It is something that we should take away as it’s not just an insurmountable task, just because there’s a lot of missiles that might be coming at you, there’s a there are ways to solve this problem in the short term and the long term, as long as we put effort into it and resources into it.

Col. Curt Ebitz, USMC, (Ret.): 

The other point, I would add is, if you look at the war in Ukraine, is the. The the impact that unmanned systems have had on that both air and ground, it’s totally changed the dynamics of the battlefield. And more, if you look at the statistics of the casualties, more casualties have happened during that war from unmanned systems than people probably, probably worth mentioning.

Col. Trey Coleman, USAF (Ret.):

Also, the Iron Dome capability in Israel is something that I know the United States is looking at that and developing some programs for it, but that is an extremely impressive capability.

John Tirpak:

Okay, is the Air Force overlooking anything as it moves into agile combat employment? Is there some area that’s just not getting the attention it deserves, or maybe, as you said, the funding it deserves.

Col. Trey Coleman, USAF (Ret.): 

I think the rub is that resiliency is not efficient, and we have a really hard time wrestling that with that if you really want to be resilient, it’s going to be expensive. You’re going to have to have, you know, duplicate, you know, maintenance equipment everywhere. You’re going to have to have extra people. You’re going to have to have, you know, dispersion costs a lot of money and and so there’s a trade off, and you got to find the right return on investment.

Col. Curt Ebitz, USMC, (Ret.): 

I’ll just add that ties in nicely with what I initially said, operational energy, and that’s where I think that the as far as with the Air Force, focusing much, you know, deeper and finding the funding to support operational energy, and that’s a very broad spectrum, but it does. It costs money to operate and distribute environment.

Robert Winkler:

Yeah, and I think one of the main things we’re overlooking is the infrastructure. You see in the last SEC depth memo that came out talking about the 26 rebalancing, it talked in there about infrastructure in the Indo Pacific, executable infrastructure. We’re not putting our resources effectively into into the preparation of the battle space to be ready to operate, whether it’s command and control, whether it’s energy, whether it’s passive or active defenses in the Pacific, or just the overall infrastructure, to be able to operate out of the various islands that are available. That’s a giant gap, and we need to get after it.

Col. Curt Ebitz, USMC, (Ret.):

I just feel compelled to say one more thing. So as a former installation commander, spot on. I mean, that’s, you know, installations have been built payers for decades in the services, and that can’t happen anymore. You know, in the in Japan and the island chain there, you know, the phrase is, fight tonight. You can’t fight tonight if your installations can’t support you, your ability to generate the combat power to take it to the enemy.

John Tirpak:

So the flip side to this question, then is, what, what do you think the air force should stop doing, or change dramatically? Because this is the new model. Does it have something to do with the way it runs, Super Bases. Are we still going to need Super Bases forward? Take a shot. Yeah, all right. It’s got to pay for this with something so to get something new, you have to give up something old, usually.

Robert Winkler: 

So I think, and we’ve talked about it, we want to be able to mass firepower. Ultimately, you want to be able to mass firepower in an effective way, to put to halt the enemy from what they’re trying to do. And I think what we’re seeing a lot, and I think it’s starting to change now, but the Air Force has continually been moving backwards to try to to garner back to the to the way that they were used to operating in the Middle East, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that, that is the thing that needs to change, right? We and I think it is. It is changing now, but it’s a cultural shift that your original paradigm was, well, wait. We should be able to launch and recover sorties. We can do that very fast. We can rearm. We can big mountain of of logistics. We could have efficient logistics until the enemy gets a vote. And as you said, as Trey said, right, this is war is inefficient, and we have to have resiliency, which costs money to build in the to be able to solve for the inefficiencies and to be able to solve for the enemy trying to stop us from doing what we want to do. So that’s the very first thing. Is we need to accelerate this movement forward, back into the fight. It’s happening, but we need to accelerate even faster.

Robert Winkler:

Yeah, so that, I think that’s where the Air Force was going, right. And the problem with it is you are on the I think I’ll assert that you’re on the wrong side of the cost curve when that happens right. So the enemy is ends up being the driver with long range fires, because you build your force up. To be able to attack the enemy from where you can where you’re not going to be under attack yourself, and then the enemy develops a system that actually closes that gap, and now you have to redesign your entire force structure. And so I agree, there’s a balance that ends up having to happen there. And if we rely solely on a standoff force or solely on long range fires, I think we’ll find ourselves not being able to apply the amount of mass you need to halt the force. So there’s a balance.

John Tirpak:

Great. So we talked about what the Air Force could copy from the other services. How is the collaboration between the services? Are the Marine Corps seems to be getting along pretty well with the Air Force. In this regard, talk about what you’ve observed, and if there are any points of friction.

Col. Curt Ebitz, USMC, (Ret.):

I’m about three years retired, so that’s I’m gonna that’s my point of reference for right now. So I think you know, as the Marine Corps several years ago, like the Air Force, pivoted to the Pacific, I think the what you’re seeing, the collaboration from with with joint training and how the war plans are playing out, I don’t think it could be any better than what it is today, especially with with the F 35 and having the multi service aircraft is something definitely that is worth worthy of How the services are continuing to evolve with their strategy and with with the collaboration from my expect experience.

Col. Trey Coleman, USAF (Ret.):

You know, the services get along pretty well. You know the the airmen and the Marines and the soldiers and the sailors get along pretty well. I think that the rub today is actually between between the combatant commands and the services. I think that’s where we see the greatest challenges. The unified command plan creates this structure where combatant commanders fight but services get funded, and so the services have to support the combatant commanders, but they want to do so in a way that’s an enterprise level. You know, one solution for everybody, and the combatant commanders all have unique requirements. I think that’s where we really get the most disconnected. I certainly see that in the air operations center construct today that the Air Force wants to present a, you know, an enterprise solution, and we’ve failed to do that for the past 30 years, whether it’s, you know, TV MCs or, you know, Kratos or whatever the other solution is, and it fails to meet the needs of all the individual air operation centers because those those requirements come from their combatant commands. That’s who they’re really working for. Those combatant commanders have unique needs, and we haven’t solved that problem yet. For how do you how do you have combat and command? How do you meet combatant command requirements through service funding?

John Tirpak:

All right. Otis Kratos is is very experienced with unmanned aircraft. Talk about some of the emerging technologies that are going to make ace work in the future. I’m thinking of unmanned aircraft that can go between these bases do resupply, or maybe bringing additive technologies right to the front so they don’t have to reach back for parts 7000 miles.

Robert Winkler:

Yeah, so Mitchell actually just did a war game that talked one about the logistics aspect and the use of unmanned aircraft for logistics, and then also the placement, or where you would want to raise your forces during a combat situation in the Indo Pacific. The two big takeaways that that I thought were were fascinating, one on the on the just for the logistics aspects, a very small, King Air sized airplane operating out of the first and second island chain. What was enough to turn the entire war game into a success by solving for the logistics problem, so you could move the the large amounts of logistics forward into a main operating base, and then used these small unmanned aircraft that was one or two pallets forward to resupply with parts, to resupply with munitions. And what it did is it opened up all of the airfields and all of the islands in the first island chain, it provided complete resupply autonomy. So we could either have something like an additive manufacturing parts at each one of these locations, or we could just fly in the parts, because it’s tough to actually do additive manufacturing for detailed electronics that we’re going to need for our sensors and capabilities but but that autonomous end state or end game Logistics was something that that turned the war game into a success for the US, and the other thing it allowed us to do was to array our forces inside that first island chain using light, lean, runway, independent CCA is to be able to apply pressure to the enemy at all times. So while we were having, while we were operating under these pulsed operations, where we had the big, a big gorilla package that would come in attack, gain local air superiority and then move back out, it seeded timing and tempo to the enemy. What did. This array inside the first second island chain of CCAs allowed us to do is to maintain that pressure on the enemy the entire time. So the KJS were no longer effective. They were always trying to move. They were always trying to survive. And so keeping that pressure on the enemy made a large difference overall in those two war games.

John Tirpak:

Awesome. Trake, very. Variation on that. Is there anything bubbling up in c2 that would be helpful in this regard, the Air Force has talked about making its KC 46 as internet providers in the sky. What other kinds of ideas are coming around that could help you fight through especially if there’s communications or internet denied situation.

Col. Trey Coleman, USAF (Ret.):

I think that we’ve we’ve got to relook at our assumptions about D deal. I think that the D deal hypothesis of five years ago has changed, because in an era where you have internet connectivity and tankers and 9000 LEO satellites flying around. I don’t think that we’re going to have to worry about a state of total disconnection, for disconnection for any long period of time. I think that we’re going to be able to get enough data, enough communications through that we can fight the war and and we’ve done a lot of planning and a lot of thinking on on what do you do if you’re disconnected? I just don’t see us being disconnected for days on end. I think that we’re going to be able to get kilobytes or megabytes through just about any given time. So I think that that requires, you know, some rethinking of our tactics and our strategies. And then the second big thing, obviously, is the rise of artificial intelligence. You know, you know, if you’ve been in this game for a while, you know you’ve been frustrated with the air tasking order cycle, and you’ve heard the complaints about 72 hours, it’s too long, it’s too slow, it’s too inflexible. And it doesn’t have to be 72 hours. It’s all driven by, you know, targets come in, and then the combat planners figure out what aircraft and which weapons are repaired against those targets that Matt, that process called Master air attack planning takes 14 or so hours, and then you have to issue your air tasking order 12 hours before the first aircraft takes off, because pilots are in care rest. And so there’s some, there’s some things that you know are inflexible, and there’s there are some things that are flexible. I would tell you that mapping that 14 hour process where you’re pairing weapons and assets to targets, that is that can be revolutionized. I’ve seen several tools applications that can do that in minutes using artificial intelligence. One of them is AFRL. Apex gear is an incredible application that, again, during bamboo Eagle, they were going through the mapping process at Robert and in, you know, they spent their 12 or 14 hours doing the mapping. And the AFRL scientists were showing me how Apex gear is running in the background and generating, they generated 36 maps, Master attack plans in like two minutes, and you can just pick one right now that that’s still in development, by the way, it requires really good data, so you have to have your data you know where your aircraft, aircraft status, ammunition status, it’s all got to be current in Chimera or whatever database you’re using. But if your data is good, if your data is refined, if your data is usable, and you have an AI tool like Apex gear or something similar to it, you can really revolutionize the way that we plan.

John Tirpak:

You see a CCA role in this area? Well, absolutely.

Col. Trey Coleman, USAF (Ret.):

I mean, this is CCA is certainly a game changer. I think right now we’re figuring out, you know, we’ve, we’ve got some really great CCA capabilities, how those feedback and to see to and how you see to those I think is something we’re still we’re still working through. But, man, that’s a, that’s a, certainly another revolution in the way we fight.

John Tirpak: 

Okay, I think we’re almost ready to have some closing thoughts. If you could each take a minute and talk about what you think is the most important thing for the Air Force to do now and the most important thing they should be reaching for, say, in the next five years, with regard to ace, sure.

Robert Winkler:

So I think that the focus that we should do right now is what we talked about before, with it, with the preparation of the battle space. And so if you look at what we did in the Cold War, and when we were planning on fighting through the fold, the gap, there was a large amount of resources and preparation of the battle space for passive and active defenses to be able to fight and operate in a relevant location to the fight, to be able to apply that mass to the Soviet army that’s coming through the folding gap. That’s not that different than what we’re running to today. There are new technologies, new capabilities, new ways of doing business, but ultimately, the principles of war still remain the same, and being able to stop the enemy, in this case, in the Indo Pacific, let’s say stop the Chinese from massing across the Taiwan Strait is not wholly different from trying to stop the Soviet army from going through the fold the gap. And so resourcing in the same way that we had the resources to in the in Europe, right? We need to resource those same things going forward in the Pacific. Do?

Col. Curt Ebitz, USMC, (Ret.):

I’ll start off by saying that air power without power is just air, right? So, little pun there, right? So, but in all seriousness, the resiliency costs money, and in order to do things we need to do as a nation and operate in a distributed environment, you have to have the right amount of funding for the operational energy. Trey said, ai, ai generates a lot of power, skips, mobile skiffs, data centers. As you see, those become more prevalent on the battlefield today, those have to be resourced properly for the power requirements. And again, it’s the power generation, the electrical distribution along with battery energy storage. And how do you get there with making sure that those operating bases that are forward or back in the rear can sustain the right power requirements for these new technologies as they continue to come online? And so that’s where, again, my, my, my first opinion, is where we need to continue to move forward with micro grids and deployable micro grids to give you those, those return on investment and those added benefits of not just solely relying on fuel. Fuel, as everyone knows, is one of the largest logistical requirements anywhere in the world where we go and do battle,

Col. Trey Coleman, USAF (Ret.):

In my opinion, the one thing to focus on, if I were to pick one, is getting the daft Battle Network right, getting that set. I think General Cropsey and the c3 BM team have really done a phenomenal job of moving the ball forward in terms of, you know, how we think about and how we acquire and how we field c2 forces, and they are, they are very much focused on the daft Battle Network, and I think they’d agree that we just need to go faster to get that set both from the cloud all the way to the edge infrastructure, so that we have the ability to communicate and share data. Because without the ability to communicate, without the ability to share that sure that information picture, we will not be able to succeed. The reality is that the side, the side that is able to make decisions faster, is a side that’s going to win, and to do that, you got to get the dafl network set

John Tirpak:

All right. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thank you all for coming today. You.