Next-Generation Battle Management

Watch the Video

---

Read the Transcript

---

Brig. Gen. Joshua Williams:

So good morning, ladies and gentlemen. If you’re looking at me wondering why I’m not Jason Voorhees, it’s because I am not. So I’m Brigadier General Josh Williams and I welcome today’s panel, and our next session is focused on next generation battle management.

So I’m the portfolio acquisition executive for C3BM. Since I’ve stepped in the seat in August, my focus has been driving the organizational and technical momentum built across the enterprise. Our mission is clear, ensure that the acquisition engine operates with the exact same speed, agility, and discipline demanded on the front lines. As everyone in the room understands, in modern high-end warfare, the decisive edge is no longer won solely by exquisite standalone platforms. The fight of the future will be won by connecting the platforms at machine speed, transforming organic kill chains into an adaptive, resilient kill web.

The operational reality of the modern battlefield is straightforward. If it does not integrate, it does not fight. The DAF Battle Network serves as the digital connective tissue that makes the kill web a reality. It is the operational backbone, utilizing our sensors, shooters, and battle managers to deliver a decisive information advantage. To fill this network at the speed of pacing threat, we must approach acquisition as a warfighting function. This means accepting calculated technical risk, stripping out bureaucratic layers, empowering our program offices, and partnering with our industry to deliver capabilities on timelines measured in weeks and months rather than years.

Joining me today, from your right to left, are four industry leaders whose hardware, software and integration architecture sit directly at the core of this transformation. Introducing on your far right, Ms. Elaine Bitonti, Vice President and General Manager for Connected Battlespace and Emerging Capabilities at Collins Aerospace, an RTX business. Next to Elaine is Mr. Scott “Frag” Jobe, Executive Director for Business Development Strategy at Boeing Phantom Works, and a retired Air Force general officer and operational fighter pilot. Next to Frag is Mr. Sean Lowe, Director of Business Development at SAIC, and a former Air Operations Center commander. And finally, Mr. Luke Savoie, President and CEO of what was Elbit, Twenty-Six Defense America.

Before we get into the first round of tough questions … and we’ll have three rounds, exploring everything from open architecture to intellectual property to velocity at the edge and business models … I’d like to give each panelist an opportunity to introduce themselves and talk about what’s going on in their world. Ms. Elaine?

Elaine Bitonti:

Okay. Thank you very much. Good morning. Happy to have the opportunity to speak to everyone here on the panel. I’m Elaine Bitonti. I lead our really advanced technologies and concepts business at Collins Aerospace inside of our mission systems unit. So we’re focused on developing all the next generation of capabilities that are relevant to this panel in the areas of resilient connectivity, C2 and collaborative autonomy.

And so three areas that we are focused on from a DAF Battle Network perspective are, one, we do a lot of work in open communication systems to support the transport layer that’s critical to the DAF Battle Network, so we’re going to talk some about that later. Our second area of focus is around our C2 capabilities. We have a lot of deployed C2 capabilities today. For example, some of them through our Cellypsis business, both across the DoW and across international partners. So we’re very focused on how we’re modernizing those architectures to make those capabilities more rapidly portable to support the kill chains that were just mentioned. And then our third area of focus, which is an area I personally think is very exciting, is the integration of kinetic and non-kinetic effects and how we are going to control that, I’ll say those combined capabilities, from a C2 and Battle Network perspective.

So those are our three areas of focus from a capability perspective. Overall, I think as everyone that supports the DoW knows, we’re also focused at how we modernize our both development and production approaches to deliver all those capabilities much faster than before. So thanks for having me here on the panel, and look forward to the discussion.

Brig. Gen. Joshua Williams:

Thank you, Elaine. Frag?

Scott ‘Frag’ Jobe:

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. So on behalf of Boeing Defense and Phantom Works specifically, thanks for having me this morning, and thanks for the rest of the panel and General Williams for hosting the event in AFA. So we’re focused on a multiple layer of different activities. Agility and speed to ramp in Phantom Works from seabed to space is what we’re focused on executing, getting advanced technologies and going at speed. So machine to machine, fully implemented universal command and control interfaces, and a fully instantiated hybrid SATCOM stack that goes from low Earth orbit, medium and all the way up to GEO, and we’ve done that and connected our labs. I’ll talk more about that here in just a little bit.

So we’re focused on machine-to-machine advanced autonomy stacks and how we’re getting that decision-making to the operators in the field, so that they can ingest large amounts of data through autonomy and connect all of those interfaces seamlessly across multiple weapon systems that Boeing Defense, has to include the E-7, to include all of our fighter programs and our space programs. Thanks.

Brig. Gen. Joshua Williams:

Thank you, Frag. Sean?

Sean Lowe:

Hey sir, thanks. Excited to join. I spent some time in the fighter business and I went kicking and screaming into the C2 business. After lots of therapy, I’m in a better spot. I essentially do PowerPoint for SAIC. It’s an excellent company, and I answered an email and I find myself on the stage, so it’s going to be great.

At SAIC, we have a ton of, I would call it obsession within the DoW federal network, multiple programs. We talk about that later if you like, but ultimately the priority of the team underneath us is accelerating speed. We’re not content. I think many in this room are not content with the amount of capability we’re pushing to the warfighter. That’s an obsession, I would say, at the smallest and lowest level of the company. That’s pretty cool.

The other thing is we’re trying to drive C2 readiness, right? I think if we’ll talk about this in a couple minutes, but if we look over the last 25 years and what are the marquee milestones that we’re putting into the cockpits through the TAC and operational command and control elements, we can do a lot better. And so to have this conversation with these colleagues, pretty cool. Cheers.

Brig. Gen. Joshua Williams:

Thanks Sean. Luke.

Luke Savoie:

Awesome. As stated, Luke Savoie, CEO of Twenty-Six Defense, formerly Elbit America. Happy to be here. I too was just told, “Hey, I think you’re on a panel.” But hey, I really do appreciate it, and a passionate topic for me. I mean, my background goes back to gunship days, AC-130s and U28s. I like to say I worked for a living. All you guys who flew for a VOL of one hour, tried being strapped into the seat for 16 hours. I did once. But the reality is a lot of interconnectivity, and understanding a long time ago, hey, managing 12 voice comms and six data links with only a couple of guys is a difficult task.

Fast-forward to where we are today, so Twenty-Six Defense are very focused on the compute layer in terms of how do you get more and more compute on the front edge. This data center thing is really interesting, this AI thing is really interesting, but it’s worthless if you can’t get to the compute aspect of it, and backhauling some AI decision agent for you is not going to be possible when half of the Earth is contested airspace and there’s no space. So how do you solve the compute portion on the edge so that these tools and the connected network is further and further forward and faster and faster with inside the loop of the folks that are on the front edge?

On the other side of that is how do people process all of this stuff that we kind of throw at them. It already was a tough job flying some of these assets. Phantom Works is out there working with some of the most advanced ones there are, and it’s even going to get worse when now we’re adding loyal wingmen to all of the CCAs, various increments, et cetera. How does the human on the loop, not necessarily in the loop, but the human on the loop and in the loop manage all of these things? And that’s where we’ve been doing a lot of our advancements on the man-to-machine interface and all of this.

Lastly is, really when you start getting the kinetic effects control layer, is our focus has been on the balance between algorithmic decision-making and AI decision-making when it comes to the application of defensive fires and how that fits into the entirety of the network. So, happy to be here.

Brig. Gen. Joshua Williams:

Thank you, Luke. Thank you for the introduction. Ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to pivot the questions to focus on open architectures and breaking vendor lock, but I’m very interested in the industry perspective of this. So as the PAE for C3BM, one foundational principle I am driving across our portfolio, our portfolio is non-negotiable. We cannot accept proprietary vendor lock. The Department of the Air Force will not accept business models built on closed software sets, black-box hardware or restricted data interfaces. The government must own and govern the technical baseline to ensure rapid iterative upgrades.

Luke, Twenty-Six Defense operates on agile hardware integrator and a mission systems developer. When the DAF mandates that your mission computing hardware must host third-party or direct competitor software applications, where do you see the real technical and intellectual property friction?

Luke Savoie:

Yeah. I mean, when it comes to on the IP side, I mean, when people develop software, they tend to optimize at particular hardware sets. I think what we’re seeing is a good trend, where we finally are having a balance between commercial standards and military standards and understanding on the software side. You kind of have to balance that. If you’re using normal commercial practices, then choosing your hardware that you put in a compute.

By the way, each subsystem is different in terms of how it is optimized for this. I do appreciate some of the architectures I’ve dealt with with our friends in Boeing, is I always called it BYOP, bring your own processor, versus, hey, having a God box and saying, “Hey, well open standards is just 3U VPX.” Well, that does not make anything open, nor does it guarantee software runs on it. It just makes the backplane a single point of failure, and the type of processors you choose on the cards.

So for us it is, hey, how do you have that good balance between commercial standards, having one foot in the door on the commercial standard side and on the military standard side, so that you can leverage and making sure you’re doing that? I think that’s the biggest thing. And then not having … I don’t want to say not having a dog in the fight. I think it’s good to know software very well so that you can then provision to make it open, but I think that’s the biggest thing, is understanding the commercial balance and employing that.

Brig. Gen. Joshua Williams:

Thank you. Let’s pivot to Elaine. Collins Aerospace builds tactical data links, radios, advanced apertures and avionics backbones across both legacy and fifth-generation fleets, while also providing C2 capabilities to multiple service branches. As we operationalize the DAF Battle Network, how is Collins moving away from stovepiped, custom waveforms and software defined open architecture systems that enable dynamic multi-vendor data routing, including with coalition partners at the tactical edge?

Elaine Bitonti:

Yeah, thanks. I think it’s a good question. There’s been a lot of really exciting developments in this area. I think first, we understand from a battle management perspective, it’s all about how we’re moving the data. And when we’re talking particularly about communication links or data links, waveforms, it’s about how is that transport layer enabling the movement of data.

So I think some of the things that we have done to date which I’ll talk about, and then I’ll talk about some new and exciting things we’re doing for the future. So we actually have at Collins, not maybe everyone knows we have, over 50% of our business is commercial business, where we provide both avionics and comm capabilities to commercial airlines and other things like that. And so we actually, probably over 20 years ago, started implementing open architectures on the commercial side of our business and we’ve taken a lot of that into what we do on the defense side.

So I’d say over 10 years ago, we actually did one of the first things. Everyone recalls FACE, which was really focused on avionics. We segregated our flight management software from the hardware and we basically, what we would now call today, containerized it and sold it to the government, so they could use it as an app and put it on multiple pieces of hardware, kind of like was being described earlier. Bring your own processor and you can host this software on that.

And so we’ve taken, I’ll say, that intent and we’ve really pushed that innovation across multiple parts of our business, specifically in the comms area. We have been an early adopter of AMS GRA. So all of our future comm systems are really architected from an Air Force perspective with the AMS GRA in mind. And so when we’ve separated now the modem and the aperture, that allows much more flexibility for the customer to have one aperture that can work with many modems, and that allows flexibility of constellation and really flexibility of transport layer ultimately to move data. So that’s one thing that we’ve been doing, I’ll say on the hardware side.

On the waveform side, I brought some fun facts to the panel. So there today in the DoW information repository, there are over 200 waveforms that various companies have uploaded into the information repository that can be used by any industry member if they wish to implement them. At Collins, we’ve implemented over 70 of them onto our different hardware pieces, but anyone that works in comms knows there’s always a waveform for a new day, right? Because our adversary adapts, there’s always going to continue to be new waveform adaptation. And so what we really have to focus on now, AMS GRA did a lot of great work, I’ll say at the modem and aperture level, but when we think about how we’re going to much more quickly change waveforms, there is a lot of additional I’ll call them hardware acceleration techniques at the integration level we have to be focused on.

And so that now is where we are focused on that next level of innovation. For instance, when you’re using waveforms, there’s different encoders today for each waveform. Well, what if there were things like common encoders that would allow you to switch waveforms much more quickly? So we’re focused on investing, I’ll say, at that next level of architecture now below AMS GRA to continue to deliver that speed of capability. So very exciting times, and look forward to the collaboration.

Brig. Gen. Joshua Williams:

Go ahead, Frag.

Scott ‘Frag’ Jobe:

I have a comment on a couple of these really great responses, and I think, both on the architectures and how we do common interfaces and all the way down to the waveform and subsystem engineering level, one of the keys I think for the government is rapid prototyping, demonstrations and ensuring that we have industry partnerships, because everyone brings different components to the table in terms of capabilities or technologies. But in order to really prove to the DAF Battle Network, so to you or to the joint force, you gotta go out there and demonstrate it. Show that it’s real. Get into live fly, and then use those live fly data points to go to your constructive models and then go back into the virtual environment and do scaling and see what that looks like.

Brig. Gen. Joshua Williams:

Perfect lead-in to our next round of questions, Frag, so I appreciate that setup. So the operational risk in the contested theater vastly outweighs programmatic risk at home. We cannot wait for multiyear block upgrades when the adversary, tactics, electronic warfare baselines and operational environments evolve continuously. Delivering an 85% solution to the field today is infinitely better than delivering a 100% solution that arrives too late.

Sean, with your operational background as a former AOC commander and your focus at SAIC on enterprise data systems, where is the primary friction between developing software in a modern CICD pipeline and getting those operational increments accredited and deployed to the operational AOC baseline? This one should be good.

Sean Lowe:

Sir, how much time do I have? We got six hours or so? In two minutes or less, as Frag points to that clock. There’s no easy fix. I tell you that it is a point of frustration though. I think everyone who’s been in a cockpit around scope and has heard promises made from industry, “Hey man, this thing’s coming down the road,” particularly on the software side, has some scar tissue of disappointment. I certainly had that perspective in a different life in a different uniform. On the industry side, we look into it and we can clearly see there’s room for improvement.

One of the pieces I think I like to talk about is the sequential nature of software development. Man, I sound like a big nerd, right? There’s a pipeline development aspect that happens. It could be days, it could be weeks, but we push out a capability to the, we’ll call it the operational, the development, the test, security compliance, and it takes sequential effort. A software increment is developed. We pass it over to the security folks, the compliance, to get or update an ATO that happens next, right? That takes not hours, not days. It takes weeks and months, and sometimes that comes back and the cycle starts over.

And then typically we push this to the developmental tester folks that don’t live with the security folks, that don’t live with the developmental folks. The DT folks have their own set of objectives, their own set of priorities, and they’re good Americans and they’re holding the line. Sometimes, oftentimes, that then hits roadblocks and goes all the way back to the dev folks and we start all over. And then eventually we get to the operational test folks, who don’t live with the developmental test folks that don’t live with the security folks, that don’t live with the developmental folks. This is how you get months and years of delay, right?

So those systems have been designed for good reasons. In fact, it’s been designed based on hardware-centric developmental testing. There’s a better way to do it, I think. And I don’t have all the answers, but I will tell you with my limited time, as Frag’s nudging towards that clock, is when I was a young captain, the best assignment was at Nellis and some of the best assignments you could find were the 422 Test and Evaluation Squadron. And what the 422 figured out is you have to bring in industry, the developmenters, with the DT and operational test folks. There’s a guy named Dan the Man. He sat in the strike vault of the 422, and Dan had OFP root core access to the Strike Eagle ADCP. We’d go out and fly a test as the operational test folks. We’d come back, we’d give Dan a hard time that that button sucked, that color sucked. Dan would get on his laptop, he’d change it and the afternoon sortie would fly it again, and we’d progress quickly through operational tests. So that vision may or may not apply to all of our use cases across the DAF Battle Network, but by putting the DTOT folks in the right places, particularly with the developmental teams, man, we can accelerate this. You can close that loop much, much faster. Cheers.

Brig. Gen. Joshua Williams:

Thanks, Sean. So that’s a little bit of a tease for a panel that starts at 1500 today on the DAF Battle Network. We’re going to be talking all about it, myself, Dr. Tipton and others, but this is not about us. This is about Frag. So Frag, bringing in both your operational fighter background and your leadership inside Phantom Works, you focus heavily on advancing prototyping, autonomy, and disruptive capabilities. The operational value of autonomous and distributed systems only materializes if they can seamlessly ingest, process, and pass target-quality data across the broader battle management network. How does Phantom Works balance pushing the envelope on rapid software and autonomy experimentation with the engineering discipline required to ensure those capabilities plug cleanly into the DAF Battle Network systems of systems?

Scott ‘Frag’ Jobe:

All right. Thanks, General. That’s a great question. So last year we took an idea, concept, to fulfillment of shooting an AMRAAM off an MQ-28 Ghost Bat in Australia, integrated with an E-7 Wedgetail and integrated with an F-18 inside nine months. So agility and speed to ramp to get effects and put the weapon on the drone target absolutely went off flawlessly. So that’s one example of the many things we’re doing in the rapid prototyping and getting to the field to demonstrate capabilities.

Inside Phantom Works, we stood up and are heavily invested in an activity called joint warfighting integration, and joint warfighting integration is a small core team of experts that are focused on multidomain integration of advanced technologies and going speed to ramp to get them to the field. We do that through live virtual constructive demonstrations. We do it with our autonomy stack that is fully government-reference architecture and Agile Mission Suite-capable and architected in that fashion. So we’ve ingested, through other partners in industry, three different AI skills into that architecture so that we can fly it on our autonomous platforms with our autonomy stack.

We do all this and connect it, as I talked about in the intro, through our Hybrid SATCOM lab, which is, all in, LEO, MEO and GEO, fully integrated with our lab in Seattle, a lab in St. Louis, with the Air Force Datalinks lab in the Gulf of America, and that is done all the way across the continental United States seamlessly, machine to machine on the interfaces.

We fully implemented the Universal Command and Control Interface and then we push all of that data to our manned/unmanned teaming. So we have human-on-the-loop doing that command and control activity, and actually we’re doing that live fly, pushing virtual tracks in there … or sorry, constructive tracks in there … and we do that activity live. We take all that data, bring it back into the Virtual Warfare Center, and then we do at scale across the joint force operational analytics to see if those models held up and if those gaps were closed or not, and then we go back and we rapidly iterate and we do that activity.

So over the last multiple years, we’ve been to almost every single Emerald Flag. We’ve been to two already this year. We’ve been at Gray Flag. We’re flying off of Point Mugu with the Navy as well, and we are integrated with multiple industry partners. So we’re integrated with Northrop Grumman and Collins and we’re heading to Northern Edge 27 to do a fully-integrated long-range kill web instantiation as we get up into Admiral Paparo’s backyard and his exercise.

So we’re leaning heavily into that. Lots of partnerships. There’s a lot of work that goes into obviously standing those up, but we think this is absolutely the way that we can get to the DAF Battle Network and eventually to the Joint Fires Network and get it fielded as rapidly as we can.

My final note on engineering, so how do we do all that stuff? It’s not guys like me in the field doing it. It is our engineers. We take our engineers into the field. They’re on our test bed platforms. They’re actually in the labs. They’re integrating all that activity, and they’re bringing that engineering discipline and expertise that Boeing Defense is so well known for. And we make sure that all of that data is true, accurate, and it works, and it’s available to you guys in the government to take a look at anytime you want. So thanks for the question.

Brig. Gen. Joshua Williams:

Absolutely. Thanks for the answer. So we’re going to pivot to our next round of questions, where we’re going to focus on ag transformation, government demand signals, and affordable mass. So as a core priority under the PAE model, it’s breaking down traditional program silos and delivering integrated operational capabilities. But we recognize that for industry to commit private capital, hire specialized talent, and build manufacturing capacity for the next generation battle management nodes, you need clear, dependable demand signals from the government.

So this question’s for all panelists. We’ll start with Frag, then go to Elaine, Luke, and then Sean. When the DAF demands agile development, open system architectures and rapid prototyping, what specific contracting mechanisms, multi-year commitments or requirement structures do you need from the government to confidently invest internal RDT&E dollars ahead of need and help to scale for affordable mass? Frag?

Scott ‘Frag’ Jobe:

Yeah, that’s another great question. So as I think you’ve seen with the panel up here, all of industry is embracing open architectures and we’re actively getting after that. We know that’s a need, but how do we do development programs and what contractual kind of mechanisms that you need in place? There’s several that are in there.

So first of all, in development programs, fixed-price development programs don’t really work for industry very well. There’s a lot of risk in there. In new technologies that you bring to bear, you always have discovery, you always have failures, and you always have things that you need to go fix. And in order to do that, and rapidly iterate without putting the company at risk as far as a business case is concerned, you really kind of need cost-plus type of development contracts. That’s the first thing I would say on the contract type.

Now, there are places to do firm fixed-price. We do a lot of those different things. So it depends on the risk level, so if it’s low technical readiness level kind of technologies, you probably need more cost-plus. If it’s more mature or we’ve done IRAD, internal investments and we got them to a maturity state, those are probably okay to continue in a contractual way.

On multiyears, it really kind of depends on the program, right? If they’re large, stable manufacturing programs, multiyears can be definitely beneficial, so that now you have the confidence as an industry partner to go invest in capital primarily. There’s one of your major outlays, is tooling, facilities, infrastructure, IT, all the engineering skills that go into it. There’s a lot of capital outlay, so multiyears can help in that regard as long as they stay intact. If it’s just a multiyear that’s a promise but not consummated in the contract vehicle, then obviously that puts the company at risk as well. So I think there’s a couple ideas in there that might spur some discussion with the rest of our industry partners.

Brig. Gen. Joshua Williams:

Thank you, Frag. Elaine?

Elaine Bitonti:

Yeah, I think I definitely second Frank’s thoughts on making sure appropriate use of fixed-price development is considered, right? Many times, fixed-price development can actually result in going slower, and so I think we’ve really got to thread that needle the right way.

There’s two other things that I would say. One, clarity of production timing is really critically important. We’re seeing a lot of programs now. Particularly at Collins, we make capabilities that go across the DoW, right? So we may sell the same capability to the Air Force, the Navy, when we’re talking about communication systems and we’re talking about crypto, et cetera. And a lot of times you’re getting a fragmented demand signal from each service, and if there, I’ll say, was better collection of the entirety of the DoW demand signal, one, that would help industry understand what ramps do we need to undertake and when, right? Because ramping and then slowing down, ramping and then slowing down, that is not effective for delivering capability to the warfighter. And number two, it’s not cost-effective for when we have to buy from our supply chain.

And so I think aggregation of demand and then a very clear production demand signal is one of the most important things to industry to enable us to go faster and commit those business cases, which many times they have to go to our board of director and other levels because of the amount of capital industry is committing. We need to have confidence in those forecasts, so that we can best plan and we can optimize our factories and our supply chain.

The second thing I think also would help is a lot of times I think people may think, “Well, industry, why don’t you just produce faster?” But as many of the other panelists have talked about, there are multiple stakeholders before we ever can get to a production decision. And particularly with a lot of the enabling capabilities that we make at Collins, there are certification authorities involved. And so having the certification authority aligned with the acquisition authority on the timeline that all these things must happen, and I’ll say the right support from the cert authority to get through those development milestones so we can get to production. On the industry side, a lot of times we see the acquisition authority may have one imperative and the certification authority may have another, and so alignment of those two imperatives so that the DoW is speaking with one consistent voice also will help industry go much faster and deliver those capabilities when needed.

Brig. Gen. Joshua Williams:

Thank you, Elaine. Luke?

Luke Savoie:

I could talk about this one forever. I’m a little bit different of opinion when it comes to the CPF versus firm-fixed. I mean, I think the firm-fixed side, we can tolerate a lot of risk and a lot of investment if you have a guarantee of production. If it’s all part of the plan and you can guarantee that the plan’s going to go through, industry can do a lot, but there’s a lot of things out of the uniformed control. That’s kind of a whole-government problem. I mean, there’s a $67 billion supplemental bill to be paid. By the way, we’ve spent that money already in the current operations. The Army is trying to do a reprogramming right now for like $1.6 billion just to keep their marquee program from going into a stop-work.

These are the things that are out there, where on the industry side, it’s like, “Hey, we can go fast, but we’re the ones writing the checks, keeping food on the table for people, and that’s a zero-sum game type of a thing.” So for us, we can tolerate risk and we can go fast, but understanding priorities, you don’t do that on the bottom priority of the service. So having consistent priorities of where that’s at, and then the things that are kind of all out of our control, is every year we go through different procurement cycles. Apparently no one else has this problem. Italy procures at 10-year increments and they by law cannot undo their own budget. Once it’s passed, they know that they would mess with it so much that they cannot undo it. These are changes for policy that need to happen to affect this. So on the multi-year side and all of us, that’s kind of another thing.

The other thing is, back to your original opening statement, 85%, live that then on the customer side. I had a hundred displays get held up for delivery to Boeing, not for Boeing’s fault, because someone on the customer side argued the difference between orange and tangerine. I kid you not. We had to do three different end user tests. By the way, the Air Force was fine taking these. It was actually on another service that had this debate. One person was like, “That doesn’t look orange.” And you’re like, “Man, I got nothing for you, man. Really?” And that held up delivery of a hundred wide-area displays for Block III F-18s and F-15EXes for close to three months.

I’m going as fast as I can, making things as fast as I can. But it’s things like that, especially when you’re iterating, much less at full rate, where it’s like, hey, understanding if we’re going to embrace that, don’t let perfect be the enemy of good, even when it’s unperceivable to the human eye, that we kind of live up to that standard. So that’s what I got.

Brig. Gen. Joshua Williams:

Outstanding. Sean?

Sean Lowe:

It’s orange.

Brig. Gen. Joshua Williams:

For sure it’s orange.

Sean Lowe:

Yeah. It’s good points. From price, we’re making a bet. I would argue it that way. And so if you make a bet in any part of life, it’s a question of whether you trust your customer. And so as industry looks at the government and says, “How well do I know their requirements? How well have they kept their promises in the last six months?” There’s this intangible personal relationship that is a variable.

And we look across in the company, we have eight or nine programs on the DAF Battle Network, and you could see the aggressive, call it, wrong word, trustworthy customer relationships, and those are the environments that rapidly deliver prototypes because the company, our company, and the colleagues here are willing to take a risk. So from the actor system tribe to industry tribe to the operator tribe, there is this intangible relationship of communication and delivering on promises, both from industry to government and vice versa.

I would say the other thing is data. Man, for smalls that we partner, and even at our level of a company, to get access to IL-6 and IL-7 data is … it’s not extremely difficult. I don’t want to make this harder than it sounds, but it’s asking. Create a system that exists for a purpose, but to get one is not, “I’ll see you next week, I’ll see you next month.” It is bureaucratic process to unlock government data to deliver a prototype. That should be second nature. We should be able to do this on PowerPoint, automated to an email, automated to approval. You see what I’m getting at? Just let’s make the bureaucratic things less dramatic. You can bring in small aggressive firms much faster than we can today. It’ll be part of the solution. Cheers.

Brig. Gen. Joshua Williams:

This is a partner. This is a team fight, so thank you, Sean. So we have a little bit over seven minutes, so we’re going to wrap it up with a speed round. So this is going to be very interesting, knowing the personalities on this panel. If you could eliminate or change one specific policy, testing barrier or acquisition requirement to accelerate battle management delivery over the next 12 months, what would that be? Luke, let’s go with you, and then down the panel.

Luke Savoie:

Ooh. There’s so many things.

Brig. Gen. Joshua Williams:

This is called a softball.

Luke Savoie:

It is a softball. I think we all are probably going to be unanimous in talking about, when we talk about the security side of things, in terms of how that comes into things. There’s necessary things in terms of table stakes and stuff like that. But for instance, the ATO processes, I don’t want to say it’s broke, but it is. One, it’s out of control of most of the people in program office, and when you get to it, it does bring everything to a screeching halt when we look at the ATO side.

So the rules around that are … that’s where things need to change. We want to talk about AI, AI, AI. I can’t get Copilot to access the internet, and I operate on GCC High. And every tech startup that’s out there is sitting there running six agents per person, making software, just chunking out code like crazy and leveraging it to its max extent because it can talk to the internet, which is weird because I can talk to the internet at Nipper. I can sit there and in a web browser go to the internet, but I can’t let my simplest of AI agents talk to the internet.

So the things around cybersecurity, IT security, ATOs, we really need to either do a bottoms-up reconstruction of what that really means because it’s almost impossible to modify at this point, to a point where it’s just the no factory. The first answer is just no. It’s Like, “Maybe? Can I get a maybe? Can I get a possible? Can I get a how-to?” Because that seems to be our biggest impediment. I took two minutes. I’m sorry.

Brig. Gen. Joshua Williams:

All right. Sean.

Sean Lowe:

I’ll do it in 30 seconds. Ready? All right. Systems integration. When the government takes the systems integration role, it sounds good. It sounds like the power is concentrated on the people that own the requirements. The problem typically is speed. Actually, and accountability sucks as well. So when the government holds requirements and is in charge of the integration and is in charge of testing, what happens to accountability is diffused across the consortium of industry players. And then when the program doesn’t work, that blame is then spread across. Instead of one prime whose investment or profit is at risk, it’s spread out to 12 subs, in a program office that typically is not manned or equipped to do integration work. So a better solution, if we’re going to change one thing in 30 seconds, is look for opportunities to put someone in charge in the industry. Hold them accountable for an outcome and then charge their profits if they can’t deliver. Get out of the way. We’ll go super fast. Cheers.

Brig. Gen. Joshua Williams:

Thanks, Sean. Frag?

Scott ‘Frag’ Jobe:

I think the security environment and authority to operate. Just for our government partners in the room, you go into work and you sit down, you jump on SIPR, NIPR, JWIX, and it’s all right there at your fingertips. It is not like that in industry. We have five distinct networks in the Virtual Warfare Center alone, all with different authority to operate, people that give us permission to move data. We’re sneakernetting things around.

It’s very difficult from that regard, but I’ll take a little bit of a different approach. So perhaps a policy implementation of directing from Headquarters Air Force all the way down through the PAEs, down to the program offices to enable them to make decisions quicker, because a lot of times it takes us weeks to months to get permission to put a piece of software into our networks, and it’s down at the program level. It’s down at the lower authority level that I think we could probably move a lot faster. So maybe some communication, education to the personnel that are inside the acquisition system might be beneficial.

Brig. Gen. Joshua Williams:

That’s right. Elaine?

Elaine Bitonti:

I’m going to say the rule sets for data sharing, both amongst the joint force and amongst coalition partners. We talk about really wanting to operate as a joint force and also with our coalition partners, but there are multiple restrictions, policy restrictions, on rule sets of what data we can and can’t share. And those are all, I’m going to call them, manual paper processes that are updated by each different COCOM in different ways according to the way they want to operate. I think that entire process needs to be looked at, modernized. How do we do that from a more agile perspective? Because at this point, it’s not actually a technological impediment that is causing some of our struggles sharing data, it’s policy impediments, and those are things that are within the government’s control to consider changing.

Brig. Gen. Joshua Williams:

Outstanding. Well, I would like to thank the panel, Elaine, Frag, Sean, Luke, for your direct insights, your leadership, and your continued partnership with the Department of the Air Force. Our mandate across C3BM and the DAF Battle Network is absolute. Acquisition is a warfighting function. We must deliver open, resilient, software-driven capability at the speed of operational relevance.

Thank you all for your time on the panel. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your time, your dedication to our national defense, and please enjoy the rest of your conference. Have a nice day.