Improving Readiness for Peer Conflict

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

Lt. Gen. Dave Deptula, USAF (Ret.):

Well, okay, good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. As Tobias just said, I’m Dave Deptula, Dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. And welcome to our afternoon panel. Now, as everyone out here knows, the Air Force may have the best strategy, operational concepts, and technology. But without readiness, none of that really matters. We’ve got to ensure that our people, aircraft, and related systems are set to fly, fix, and fight. Now, the good news is that the Air Force understands this, and it’s committed to restoring readiness to where it wants to be. This won’t be an overnight fix. It’s gonna take some time. But that said, there’s no time like the present to press hard on progress. So joining me to discuss this imperative is General “Elmo” Spain, Commander of Air Combat Command, Lieutenant General “Basket” Cunningham, Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations, and Lieutenant General “Reba” Sonkiss, the Deputy Commander of Air Mobility Command. So, lady and gentlemen, thanks very much for being here. Let’s just jump right into the questions. But General Cunningham, let’s set the stage for our conversation. At Headquarters Air Force, you’re the central touchpoint for sustaining daily operations. So could you kind of kick off with an overview of why the readiness imperative is particularly important today?

Lt. Gen. Case Cunningham:

Sure thing, thanks, sir. And it’s always an honor to get to share space and time with you, so thanks for being the host today for the panel. Thanks to AFA, as always, for the forum. It’s an honor to be on stage with two amazing individuals with Commander in their duty title. So, because I am a staff officer, let’s just be clear, two words that should guide any time that I am talking on the mic today. Number one is humility, and number two is brevity. So with that, I’ll get to it. So first, it’s the NDS. So the clear guidance that exists in the NDS for defending the homeland, deterring China. And the piece that is also within those two is the global responsiveness that the NDS requires of us. And so those are easy ones. When the Secretary and the Chief both say that readiness is a priority, those are two additional layers on top of that cake. And so if you think about those three things together and you think about what is going on in the world, readiness becomes critical and key, and of course with air power and the flexibility that we provide to decision makers, that’s a big part of why readiness is so critical today. So thanks for that.

Lt. Gen. Dave Deptula, USAF (Ret.):

Very good. General Spain is the head of Air Combat Command. You’re the direct interface with all the combatant commands who are seeking combat aircraft, fighters, electronic attack, ISR, and all the panoply of other capabilities that you oversee. So talk to us a bit about the demand signals that you see and from those combatant commands and why that places an exclamation mark on the need to improve readiness.

Gen. Adrian L. Spain:

Yeah, thanks again, sir, and echo the sentiments already mentioned. It’s great to be on the panel with these esteemed Airmen. And I do have to pause just briefly for the folks in this area that cheered. I’m glad to know that my checks made it where they were supposed to go, and you’re earning your paycheck, so that’s good. Thank you for that. That was well done. So the demand for air power, and I’ve been on the record with you and others, is no shade to our joint partners, but the indispensable force still remains the Air Force, and the demand is higher than ever. And the things that we’re able to do as a joint force together with our partners are in large part due to the efficacy of the Air Force and our ability to get places quickly in REBA’s team and then to be decisive with our team very quickly at any part of the world and keep it under threat as the nation needs. But the demands have been interesting lately ’cause they’re a little different. Always been a high demand, continues to be a high demand. It’s high, but a little different. We’re starting to actually see high demand and surge demand at the same time. So high demand, steady, kind of consistent has always been kind of the previous method. Now it’s high demand and surge, which is a little bit different for us. And so when we have high demand, the requirement to rebuild readiness is always acute, to build and then rebuild. What is, you know, the AFORGEN model has allowed us a way to articulate capacity and risk. It doesn’t eliminate the possibility that it gets disrupted due to real world constraints, but it’s been our way to articulate, here’s the kind of readiness we need to build to and here’s our process for doing so. And if it is disrupted, here’s the risk that you buy when you choose to allocate forces. And so now the premium on readiness is really, can I do this more quickly? Even within an AFORGEN cycle, I have to be prepared to deploy maybe on a rotational basis, maybe on an ad hoc basis, come back, rebuild readiness quickly because I may have to go out the door again in a window that I wasn’t anticipating and that we didn’t plan for. And that’s becoming a new reality. And it’s just one we’re gonna have to adjust to. But I don’t see the demand going away, which means that we have to look differently about how we build readiness for the force. And we, you know, in some cases, we’ll need to resource that. And that’s a part that I know you and Mitchell have been really strong advocates for and we’re hoping that plan pans out as well.

Lt. Gen. Dave Deptula, USAF (Ret.):

Yeah, very good. Hopefully that 1.5 trillion top line actually comes true. Lieutenant General Sonkiss, help us understand readiness from an AMC vantage point. What’s unique in the equation to ensure our mobility capabilities are postured to meet global demands anywhere, anytime?

Lt. Gen. Rebecca “Reba” Sonkiss:

I do think it’s a more complicated equation for our mobility command and it’s foundationally built on two pieces. One, we are the air component to USTRANSCOM. So 24/7, 365, we are providing forces to USTRANSCOM for global mobility operations in airlift, air refueling, air medical evacuation, and the GAMS, the Global Air Mobility Support System, those ground forces that enable that entire system to work. So we are providing forces daily to do that. We have an AFORGEN process that we use to do that as well to try and protect some of those forces in there. But we also get into different surge levels where we’re dipping into that AFORGEN cycle. Simultaneously, we have an organized train and equip responsibility to get after high-end training to be able to provide forces to the theater. So those two are often in complete opposition of each other. But that is the task that we have at hand. So trying to preserve enough training back at home in order to get after that high-end fight so we can win in a theater engagement is often in opposition to what is required day in and day out to execute being the maneuver for the joint force. We’ve been doing a fantastic job at it because now we can actually present to our combatant command the risk when we go into these surge operations and we can present to them what is required on the recovery side after we do those operations. But to General Spain’s point, we are doing set and reset and set and reset in ways that we have not been doing in the past. We are learning from that. And what I think we are getting much better at is the laydown required to execute those mobility operations we’re quickly retracting that back home and allowing some return on readiness to be able to do it again. But I would be remiss if I didn’t say that our forces are running hard. The other piece to it that we don’t talk about that often is that 60% of the capability for the mobility forces reside in our ARC component. So the Guard and Reserve partners in this. And so they are also in that same Afghan cycle. And what we’ve been trying to do to help increase readiness for the active force because they’re the ones that are usually the easiest to access, is to build predictive mobilization models where we can put the ARC in the fight to help give us capacity so we can do those global operations day in and day out and preserve some readiness for that high-end fight for our forces. So hopefully that helps shape–

Lt. Gen. Dave Deptula, USAF (Ret.):

Yeah, no, thanks very much for those insights. General Cunningham, back to you. It’s no secret that a major challenge impacting readiness is the age of our aircraft. I mean, I try to make this point so folks who aren’t in this crowd, but average Joe and Susie Q public understand it. You know, we’re still flying planes that were purchased during the Eisenhower administration. So what unique challenges do aging aircraft place on the readiness equation and what are you doing to meet those challenges?

Lt. Gen. Case Cunningham:

I wanna pause just a second. All of what General Sonkiss just laid out, when she lays it out in that number of words, number one, it’s incredible, but it is just an appreciation for what it takes to make the mobility machine do what it does. So having a chance to watch that in motion is a privilege. So it’s awesome. General Spain’s been on record in forums like this talking about the aging fleet and they break more and they break in new and unique ways. And so with that comes the challenge of the parts, the sustainment, all of the things that come with that. So what that means is, and if there’s any maintainers in the room, I guarantee that if you’re meeting old people on the floor, you have bragging rights over being better maintainers than they were because of the magic that our maintenance career field pulls off with respect to some of these aging aircraft. And so at the enterprise level, in support of the commanders, we’re working through the things like looking at the data in ways that we’re able to pull the leverage for readiness that are parts and supplies to get more of that to the field and then where we put the resources that we are advocating for that appear to be coming in ways that they pay off as soon as possible. Like you said, recovery there takes some time, but that’s just a couple of thoughts there. I’m sure General Spain will have a few others that he’ll lay in on that.

Gen. Adrian L. Spain:

Well, we were in a briefing on Monday and somebody described the aging fleet in this way. There’s a picture up on the screen of the Desert Storm five ship. It’s pretty classic flying over the desert with the flames pluming in the background. And later in the discussion, they put a picture of a P-51 up there. Desert Storm was a little while ago now. And they said, the relative age of the airplanes that we’re flying now is the relative age from those same airplanes to the P-51 at Desert Storm. But our fleet still looks pretty much the same, at least in capacity. So all of those airplanes that are in that picture are still flying in our fleet today. We did not have any P-51 still flying in the Air Force in Desert Storm. There are good reasons for that. And so when we talk about supply chain constraints and issues with sustainment, we don’t do ourselves any favors when we hang on to something for too long, which means that we have to be really deliberate about how we plan transitions. And we do need to transition eventually. We can’t hold on to airplanes as much as we love them forever. But we also don’t want to create gaps unnecessarily that create a capacity drain that goes back to the demand problem that we just talked about. And so when we have a gap in capacity, the demand then drives a readiness bill that we’re unable to pay over time if we’re not careful and we hadn’t already pre-stocked the shelves with excess supply because we’re gonna be using them more and more often. And so it becomes this double-edged sword of, hey, I don’t have enough. What I have is older and breaking differently. And maybe I don’t have the right number and types of parts on the shelves. All of that exacerbates us to a point that we don’t want to be there. And to Baskett’s point, our Airmen do, and the partners helping them in all of those agencies that get a part out to a unit, do Herculean work and execution. And the Air Force delivers and continues to deliver. And we will continue to do so. But it gets harder and harder under those circumstances.

Lt. Gen. Dave Deptula, USAF (Ret.):

Okay, one more for you, General Spain. Key part of readiness is training against modern realistic threats. And today, as you’ve talked about in the past, but perhaps you can elaborate for the audience, comes down to a mix of not just actual flying, but additionally live virtual constructive interactions. Could you share with us your views on why this combined approach is so critical, particularly today?

Gen. Adrian L. Spain:

You bet. We’ve had this model of training that worked very well for a number of decades, really, where we were able to self-support our training because on the adversary side and on the blue side, you actually got not equivalent training value, but close enough training value on both sides to be relevant. And as we did really good work in building new platforms and building really capable platforms, we started to outstrip our ability to get training value out of the adversary side of the equation. And so there’s still flying value. You’re still building airmanship when you go fly if you’re self-supporting and you’re mimicking the red air that you’re attempting to fight. But the blue training value has diminished over time. And so we need to be able to build systems and continue to take advantage of systems that build synthetic environments that allow us to go one, two, four, V many in ways that don’t require self-support. And so we’re continuing to build training environments that far outstrip what General Cunningham and I grew up with in the F-15 back in the old days and are frankly pretty good at our home station operations. But things like the joint synthetic environment are places where we’re trying to really robust the training environment for all of our Air Force forces and enable a robust capability that also isn’t out in open air. When we go out and train in our backyard ranges, the more the space layer becomes contested and filled, it’s much harder to hide the kinds of things that we want to do from a tactics development and practice perspective. And so flying or simulating in the synthetic environment allows us to both practice high-end tactics without giving away the high-end tactics and it allows us to practice against a robust number of threats that are relevant that actually stress the force that we’re in. And so that’s kind of where we are right now. The synthetic environment is getting to a place where it’s much better at emulating the threat. I can go one V many. I can be in an environment that mimics exactly where I’m gonna be in the world. We’ve seen recent examples where the crews who flew in the different operations that we’ve all heard about were able to train beforehand in a almost perfect replica of what they went and actually did, which is great. And we need to continue to do that. The next step is how do I bring that into the cockpit? You know, what is the technology that allows me to bring the synthetic environment into a cockpit so I can still get the flying value for our air crew, but I do it without having to self-support in a one, V many, we’ll call it, kind of a scenario that frankly, you can no longer afford. When we get to F-47, we’re not gonna be able to afford to put the number of adversaries airborne to really stress the weapon system. It’ll just be too much for us to do day in and day out. So I need something that can go into the cockpit so that when I fly the sortie, I can still create a stressing environment for the pilot, I can create a stressing environment for the C2 entities and for the mission planning skills that we need to develop and the mission commander skills that we need to develop. But I also, similarly, don’t give away the tactics, techniques, and procedures in a live fly scenario because there are no adversaries out there or it’s just a minimum number to execute the tactics against. And so all of that is both where we’ve been, where we are, and where we need to go and why that’s so important, that combination of those things to be able to optimize the training value for our air crew.

Lt. Gen. Dave Deptula, USAF (Ret.):

Very good, a bit of a related follow-up for you. Our ranges need updates when it comes to threat simulation in proliferating LVC capabilities throughout the Air Force. And that requires a significant investment. So what upgrades are necessary to make sure that we can maintain that training edge that you’re talking about?

Gen. Adrian L. Spain:

Well, I think we have really prided ourselves on being able to provide representative threats on our ranges, local and regional. And I think we’re, for the same reasons that you can’t buy enough threat for an F-47 when it comes online, or a B-21 for that matter, we have to get to threat representative and emulated threats on these ranges that give us the ability to stress our tactics execute and practice our tactics against representative threat, but maybe not such a perfect replica that we’re arguing about which specific frequency we’re on because our airplanes are smart enough to reprogram them, to emulate the threats so that I get the cues that the pilot’s gonna respond to and that the air crew are gonna respond to, but I may not need a perfect replica of that thing to still stress them in ways that are gonna be relevant. And that also don’t buy negative habit patterns in the real world.

Lt. Gen. Dave Deptula, USAF (Ret.):

Very good, General Sonkiss, for the past two decades our mobility crews operated at a relatively permissible locations. How does the notion of logistics under attack impact the way that you think about readiness?

Lt. Gen. Rebecca “Reba” Sonkiss:

First off, it begins at the homeland when you talk about logistics under attack. You know, the predominance of our missions do generate out of home station. And so cyber threats matter to us immensely. Transcom is one of the most attacked combatant commands because our enemy knows that attacking the logistics enterprise is how they win the war. So we’re keenly aware of that. So the ability to assure that we launch from home station matters. The awareness that the enemy is tracking us from when we launch from home station and that we are showing what the force flow looks like when we do that. You can look at that and say, hey, we’re at risk in that space, but it’s also opportunity in that space to be able to deceive and tell a message that we want versus what the enemy believes that they’re seeing. So there’s opportunity in that space as well. But let’s begin the discussion at the homeland. And then I can fast forward all the way to General Spain’s comments when he’s talking about the training environment that they’re in and what they need to see to in that environment and what they need to survive in that environment. And what I will tell you that I’m most worried about for our crews remains connectivity for our aircraft. Your mobility forces are not connected and we are on a pathway to try and get there, but I do not have battle space awareness. I need to train with and be integrated in the joint schema maneuver. So I have to have connectivity to be able to do that. I need connectivity so that I know what enemy is coming after me to be able to respond to it. And that would then get into the survivability discussion. If I’m integrated into the schema maneuver, my increase in survivability is, it’s imperative for me to do that. We can get into other pieces on survivability, have a protect and the rest of it. But the first and foremost piece of that is I have to have connectivity. And it’s not just for when we’re at risk and at war, it’s to train before we get there. So we’re on a pathway for that. I could go on and on about this.

Lt. Gen. Dave Deptula, USAF (Ret.):

Yeah, no, so could I, because it gets into the whole area of JADC2. And connectivity may not be the most desirable attribute but it’s fundamental, not just to mobility, to readiness, but to command and control and our ability to operate. And assured connectivity, not sparse here now, whatever. I mean, I think of stories where F-35 deployment not too long ago, took off from Guam, arrives over Kadena four hours later and doesn’t have SATCOM, isn’t able to stay connected, and then finds out this individual who’s supposed to fly in a wingman position is now the mission commander for the entire operation. That kind of stuff.

Lt. Gen. Rebecca “Reba” Sonkiss:

Yes, sir, and just to pull the thread on that a little bit more from current operations. We had Midnight Hammer and the SOUTHCOM operation as well where the connectivity in our KC-46 fleet actually played out in being that assured connectivity for our CAF partners, where they were able to relay information on the mission to ensure that there was not failure in execution. And I won’t get into the specifics of it in this environment, but it is essential for the Air Force that we get after connectivity, specifically for the tanker fleet but on the rest of the mobility fleet as well. It’s gonna let us win.

Gen. Adrian L. Spain:

Yeah, if I can chime in on that point. You know, this is not a technology problem. The technology is there, and I think the good news is we, for a long time, we were really attempting to convince ourselves that we needed to go down this way, and we’re convinced now. And so we’re moving out on this path. There are some long-term paths, and then there are some shorter-term paths that we’re pursuing, kind of all of the above mix in order to do exactly what Reba says, which is effectively, hey, do I have domain awareness? Do I have situational awareness first? If I don’t know I’m being targeted, I can’t take the appropriate actions to defend myself. Even if I don’t have perfect defensive measures, I can do something if I know that I’m being targeted. And if I don’t, I can’t do anything about that. So we’re working really hard to resolve that particular state for as many of our forces as possible, and I’m pretty bullish on where we are headed there. We just have to continue to keep the pressure on and continue to fund and field as rapidly as possible those technologies to get us there.

Lt. Gen. Dave Deptula, USAF (Ret.):

Yeah, and resources obviously play a role in this too. SATCOM and every US Air Force aircraft. Okay, this one’s for all of you. Whether we’re looking at pilots, maintainers, logistics folks, or other mission specialties, one of the key challenges is ensuring that we have enough experienced personnel to assimilate and train new entrants. So is there, could you talk about experience/inexperience ratios, or is there a key one that we need to maintain? And how’s the Air Force working this, especially in the light of the ongoing pilot and maintainer shortfalls? We’ll start with you, General Spain, and we can go down the–

Gen. Adrian L. Spain:

Okay, it’s a great question. So I think the experience ratios, which is what you’re driving at, do matter, and they’re critical. But there isn’t a perfect ratio. There’s a number of factors that drive what the right mix may be at any individual squadron. But we know effectively about when it starts to tip in a bad way to too much inexperience, not enough experience, which means that I don’t train the youngsters to become the more experienced folks fast enough, and I get into this death spiral of experience levels and capability. And so we are in the middle of what I’ll call a generational reset on pilot training production that is really gonna stress this for us. And we’re working on FTU throughput next, so we’re working on options to do that. And then right after that is gonna be seasoning and absorption inside of our squadrons. And the more of this problem that we solve, the more people we’re gonna be able to bring in effectively and we’re gonna be able to train ’em and get the basketball through the snake. But this is also a risk conversation. There’s gonna be some things that we’re gonna have to do a little bit differently in order to take advantage of what we’re doing on the production side and build to a healthier environment and ecosystem in 10 years. This is gonna take, if we start now, which is why we’re moving out on the production increase, 10 years from now, I have a pool of people that can actually fill the requirements that the Air Force has on the active and reserve and guard side. If I don’t start now, I kick the can. When was the best time to plant a tree? 20 years ago, right? Next best time is today. So it’s the same thing with pilot production. We have to do this or we’ll never get there. So we’re focused really, really deliberately and intently on ensuring that the risk that we are gonna take and the levers that we’re gonna pull will enable us to retain a healthy enough experience ratio to season to a particular point. And one of the things that we’ve learned is that getting people to flight lead is really the key discriminator. If we can get our youngsters on the air crew side to a flight lead or a flight lead equivalent, you go from being a consumer of squadron resources to a producer of squadron resources, right? If I’m a wingman in a squadron, I need somebody to help drag me around and kinda show me the way, as it were. It’s the same thing on the maintenance side. If I’m a young three-level, I need somebody to show me the way. Somebody else has to sign off on my work. Somebody, I have to get more training hours in in order to be effective. And sometimes I make more mistakes, right? And so we have to get people through this seasoning part to become the experienced cadre that we need to absorb even more down the road. On the maintenance side, we’ve recently really streamlined the maintenance AFSCs to enable us to get a core skill group of folks in the early years so they all get kind of the same experience as up through three levels and go into five levels, and can then branch and specialize out as opposed to specializing right away, which we think will help with this. But even that, there’s a risk discussion in there. We have to keep an eye on this to make sure that what we believe is an efficient and effective model still doesn’t generate too much risk on the flight line when we’re trying to operate in conditions that are testing all of us, whether that’s at home or deployed.

Lt. Gen. Rebecca “Reba” Sonkiss:

So again, another question with many layers to it. I do want to start out with saying that typically you never had FTU constraints or absorption issues in the MAF, but we’re at a place now where we’re seeing that. And that is noteworthy, because it used to be we could overabsorb in the MAF and it would help bolster some of the experienced pilots that we could put in some of those positions to help the rest of the Air Force. And we don’t have that wiggle room like we used to do, and I’m pointing that out for a reason. If we look at the Air Mobility Command staff, we are at 34% rated manning on the AMC staff, which includes our Global Air Operations Center. That’s executing 24/7, 365 global operations at 34% rated manning, and the lead MAJCOM OT&E oversight role for the active guard and reserve components. And I believe that aviation’s a compliance-based business that does require experienced aviators on the staff to execute that role. It is essential to ensure that we don’t kill our Airmen. And so we’re committed now to looking at some of those processes on the staff, leaning some of them out, and then getting the right aviators in those positions to ensure that we have oversight of what the wings are doing on the training side. If we back all the way up to pilot training, it does look different. And what we’re receiving at the FTU is a different round that we’re putting through training, and it’s putting a demand signal on the FTU, which is impacting some of their production ability as well. So we’re getting more junior aviators coming into the squadrons at this point with those inexperienced pilots. I appreciate that we’ve pushed the talent to the wings, but it does look different than when we were young. The experience level is not as high, and we’ve got the data that goes behind that as well. So we are working through that. I’d like to say there’s a magical solution to it, but it is not the ratio that you asked for. It is really doubles in the details on each and every position at this point that we have to pay attention. Do we have the right instructor pilots at the wing level to grow the force we need? Are we putting our patches in the right places at the wing to ensure that they have the oversight on the training to get after the high-end fight? And then on the staff, are we getting the right one or two people we need to execute those oversight functions? That’s the path that we’re on, and it’s gonna be a long path to healthy.

Lt. Gen. Case Cunningham:

Just a couple quick ones from the staff officer’s perspective. First, yeah, exactly, fix our problems. Working on it, ma’am. From the production piece, this is just an opportunity to give a shout-out to AETC. All of the work that they’ve done over the years, and many of you are tracking this journey, and General Spain just hinted at this, at or about 1500, they’ll make this fiscal year, and that is the plan, again, for the fiscal year to follow. That’s incredible, and that’s a reflection of a lot of great work, which is what puts us in the place that General Spain and General Sankis have just characterized well. The other piece that I’ll hit from the enterprise level is you heard this resident in both of their comments, too, and at the enterprise level, this is a thing that we’re working on. The retention piece plays a big factor in all of this, and so when we wanna retain the right experience, and there’s analogs, we’ve talked about pilots up here a lot, but there’s analogs across all career fields. So that quality of life, quality of service, and you see that loud and clear in both the chiefs and the SEMSAP messaging about our responsibility to Airmen and their families, and we all know that the retention piece happens at the dinner table, so we take that very seriously in the headquarters as I know the commanders do, and we’re in support of commanders with the policies to make sure that that takes place.

Gen. Adrian L. Spain:

On that point, Basket, that I wanna also reinforce that this is a total force solution space. We have opportunities, if we think about this a little bit differently, to take advantage of where there’s capacity, where there is experience, and allow ourselves to use those things, and maybe in ways that we haven’t done historically because we’re solely focused on either our component or on our wing only, as opposed to, hey, the enterprise actually has capacity, it’s just not at your wing, so can I send you to places where there are capacity to get some of the seasoning and absorbing? And there are policy changes that we’re testing out right now in terms of allowing wing commanders more flexibility to keep experience at the wing by identifying individuals up to a certain level to stick around for a second assignment. We’ve initiated effectively a disaggregated staff opportunity for rated officers that can stay at the base that they’re at work for the MAJCOM staff, so we get access to rated experience that Reba highlighted. They get to continue to fly, and if they’re net producers of readiness and absorption and seasoning, they will continue to fly in those same roles in the wing that they’re at, and then they’ll do part-time or maybe half-time work for a staff somewhere, which gets some stability for them and the family, and it gets us access to a rated officer with experience that we probably wouldn’t have had access to otherwise, and potentially helps us with retention. And so these policy changes that we’re putting in place, I’ll ask the crowd, and if you’re in this boat and you’re a recipient of these things, give us feedback on whether these are meaningful or not, because we don’t want to do them if they’re not meaningful. I think they will be, and I think they can help. It’s a little bit on the margins right now, but there will be some things that are really good options that we want to double down on at some point, and we need to be open to continuing to experiment and pursue those options when they arrive. But the Garden Reserves have a clear role in the absorption, seasoning, and experiencing. That’s where a lot of experience lives day-to-day, and we want to take advantage of that to help us all get through the next few years of increased cohorts as they come through.

Lt. Gen. Dave Deptula, USAF (Ret.):

Okay, we got five minutes left, and I’m gonna skip a couple of questions, but I want to get to this one on out-year assessments. Where, and this is for all of you again, where do EGU think that the Air Force should be from a readiness perspective in the out-years, and what measures of effectiveness should we use in judging whether or not we get there?

Gen. Adrian L. Spain:

Well, I’m gonna let the staff officer talk for the Air Force. I’ll talk for ACC, though. We’ve taken a couple of pages out of General Creech’s book, and the state that we’re in right now from a CAP perspective is not that unlike what he inherited in the late ’70s before he got Reagan-era money, and most of the benefit that came from the procedures and policies and culture that he established preceded the money and had pretty dramatic returns, and so we’re focusing on, hey, what are those cultural environmental habits that we need to rebuild, because clearly we have known them at one point or another, to drive a focus on readiness and flying and fixing so that we’re able to get to these metrics that are meaningful changes, and I’m pretty ambitious about where I think we can go just with cultural change and just with our habits and just with our focus, and I’m gonna say a significant increase in two to three years. You can define what significant is, and you can hold me to that, and if you don’t like it in three years, you can give me an F on that, but I think we can get to significant improvements as we wait to see if resources arrive. If resources do arrive, we can accelerate, but we can’t wait for them to arrive for us to build that improvement in.

Lt. Gen. Rebecca “Reba” Sonkiss:

So from Air Mobility Command, due to the fact that we are always in motion, and I’ll just phrase it that way, we’ve operated at a incredibly high rate of readiness for a sustained amount of time. Where we have, I think, some deficiency is our ability to preserve some forces to get after high-end readiness. I think the progress that we’ve made on the AFORGEN model to be able to articulate what forces are available for transcom taskings, and then preserve some of those forces at home to get after exercises in that high-end training, it does matter, but that is, again, it’s in direct consternation with the current global requirements. So that’s a journey that we will continue to be on, but we are committed to make sure that we are highlighting where our forces need to get after that high-end training. One of the really significant problems that we do have, though, and I think that this is gonna start to play out in a good place once we do get some more funding into it, is when our aircraft aren’t available to fly when they are actually home, then our training is directly cut into, right? So I’m not gonna take us through the readiness, or the mission capability rates across the fleet, but we know that that’s been a deficit in the Air Force. So as we put more money into that, and we’re able to generate aircraft to be able to get after that training when the aircraft are home, that matters. One aircraft down for us matters significantly. So that’s on the sustain the current fleet. The other part, and I’m gonna go back to the opener that you were talking about, the aircraft modernization discussion. If you go by the Department of Transportation and look down on the ground, it says the dawn of the jet age, and it’s got a picture of the Boeing 707. That’s a KC-135. I have to modernize the mobility fleet. And if you wanna judge me 10, 15 years from now, look at whether I was actually able to gain traction on next generation airlifter, because that’s the next big problem that we have that we’re behind on, is we must figure out what the pathway for C-5 and C-17, that strategic airlift fleet that doesn’t often gain traction in the narrative of what we need to modernize. But it’s struggling. We need it. We can’t get rid of it, but we must come up with what the next generation airlifter is, because it is key to the readiness for the joint force. So I could go on about that as well, but thank you, sir, for the opportunity to talk about your mobility command and how we are woven in with the greater air scheme and maneuver.

Lt. Gen. Dave Deptula, USAF (Ret.):

And just as an advertisement, Mitchell Institute just wrote a paper on that, advocating for what you just said, so.

Lt. Gen. Rebecca “Reba” Sonkiss:

We didn’t get to craft, but next time, sir, next time.

Lt. Gen. Dave Deptula, USAF (Ret.):

Okay, final batter.

Lt. Gen. Case Cunningham:

Brevity, 45 seconds. I said up front I’d be brief. The ultimate scorecard to readiness is the ability to fight and win decisively. That’s the ultimate scorecard. The question is how do we posture our force and able to do that? And that’s why I think you hear the Secretary and the Chief, readiness and modernization, and with that has to come the resources. So I’m confident that we will fight and win decisively, and with the resources, we will do even more of that if asked to do so. So that’s the ultimate scorecard there.

Lt. Gen. Dave Deptula, USAF (Ret.):

Okay, well, thank you for an incredibly awesome panel. Readiness is not an easy subject to deal with, but I think after listening to our panelists, you’ll agree with me that we have the best people in the places to tackle this extraordinary challenge. So please join me in thanking them, and we wish all of you to have a great air and space power kind of day.