Readiness Informed Metrics: The New Measure of Readiness
February 25, 2026
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John “JV” Venable:
Thank you. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and thanks for joining us on this panel. It’s a great time to get through lunch and hear some incredible remarks from two of the most strikingly handsome and intelligent people you’ll meet in this conference this year. It’s my pleasure to be with you. I, as Tobias just mentioned, I’m JV Venable. I’m a senior resident fellow at Mitchell Institute, and it’s my pleasure to welcome you to this Readiness Informed Metrics panel. Readiness is something that’s been a driver for me for a long time. I was an F-16 pilot during the post-Cold War, or during the Cold War and beyond era, where we had really high readiness rates. Utilization rate is defined as the number of times an aircraft flies per month. So how many times you fly a jet a month. So back in the lowest point of the Cold War, the worst part of our readiness during the hollow force days, our utilization rates fell down to about 17.5 sorties per month per fighter. In 2014, our Air Force went below 14, and it’s stayed there ever since, which means that we’ve had a series of years where we’ve had very few aircraft with which to maintain readiness. It takes about seven years for a fighter pilot or a bomber pilot to actually mature in their combat capabilities. So you get them out of RTU, you bring them in mission qualification training, then flight lead, then IP, and then you become a mission commander, and for a select few, you go on to fighter weapons school or bomber weapons school, that entire program. And for the last two generations of pilots, combat pilots, we’ve had readiness levels that have not allowed them to achieve the minimum combat capability that our Air Force is predicated on of being ready for a peer competitor. You value what you measure, and today’s panel is really going to be insightful as to how we go about disseminating the information for folks ahead. If you were part of John Michael Dahm’s presentation this morning in this room at eight o’clock, he gave some incredible statistics on the production capacity of China. And while we as an Air Force are going to acquire something on the order of 60 to 70 fighters this year, China is well above 200, and they will be at over 300 fighters a year, four plus generation and fifth generation fighters by 2028. So their ability to generate sorties with brand new aircraft is there, and they’re putting the coals to their flying hour program. Right now, the number of hours that their pilots are getting are well above what our pilots are getting in the active Guard and Reserve Force. And so today’s conversation is going to talk about how we go about amending that and making it better. Here to discuss our readiness, both from an AMC standpoint and an Air Combat Command standpoint, are these two stellar gentlemen to the left of me. We’ve got Brigadier General Derek Salmi. He is the A3, or the Director of Operations at Air Combat Command. And then to his left, we’ve got Brigadier General “Swinger” Laidlaw. And it is a pleasure to have you both with us today. Thank you for joining us. Would you give them a warm round of applause, ladies and gentlemen? So I’ve got a couple of questions that I’ll throw at them, and hopefully this exchange between the two of them will quiet me over the course of our 40 minutes together. Last summer, General Laidlaw, the ACC adopted this new idea, this new concept of readiness-informed metrics. Give us a breakdown of these RIMs, if you would, and how they differ from the way we’ve measured readiness in the past.
Brig. Gen. Brian Laidlaw:
JV, thank you. Great question, happy to do it. It’s certainly a privilege. As I’ve heard most who sit on these panels say, and genuinely, thank you to AFA for putting this together and for the effort of reaching out and finding like Derek, great to sit with you, my friend here on the panel, and talk about these issues that are really important. So readiness-informed metric, yes, absolutely. It’s a critical topic. It was hard to miss in SECAF and CSAF’s opening remarks on Monday how critically important this is to the force. As I’ve been going to panels and listening to speakers throughout the week, it’s become crystal clear that everyone is looking at this, albeit in a slightly different way. So I’m happy to share and discuss how we in Air Combat Command are looking at that. Before I dive into RIM and our view on RIM, though, sir, I think it’s important to acknowledge the extensive research and writing and speaking that you’ve personally done on this. And I say that because it’s influenced some of the work that we’ve done as well, specifically the paper “Winning the Next War” that you put out back in September. And as I was going through and reading and trying to learn from your paper, it became clear to me that this is really more similar than it is different in terms of our approaches. In your paper where you looked at mission-capable rates from 1987 to the present and how those have changed over time, you focused in on one metric to try to tell a story. As we talked about prior to coming on stage, and you mentioned it a little bit in your opening remarks, as you look back to General Creech, they chose to focus on utilization rate, and then they tracked that through time. It became their North Star. I would contend that with the RIM effort right now in ACC, it rhymes with that exactly. And before I get into that, I think I wanna give a shout out to General Hurley. For those of you who had the opportunity to hear General Hurley talk in the previous readiness panel, she laser-focused in on the B-52 fleet and said, “55. “That’s our number, 55.” And what that did was align the entirety of the enterprise around getting to 55. They picked a number, and that’s what they stuck to. RIM and ACC is largely the same thing. As we set off on this, and I certainly need to give credit to John Eberlin, my counterpart, he’s the A-4 in ACC, General Jen Hammerstent before him, who was really the brainchild behind a lot of our thinking on this. And it was, what we need to do is, there’s a lot of good numbers out there. There’s nothing wrong with the old metrics. We still use them, we still track them. It’s fundamental to what we do. But we need to pick one that we can rally around that’ll help us tell the story that’ll align the enterprise. And we could’ve done the utilization rates that General Creech talked about. We could’ve done the rates that you talked about in your paper. What we settled on was mission-capable airplanes. Something that we could see, something that we could touch, something that we could communicate across the enterprise and say, “This is the minimum number “of mission-capable airplanes that we need.” That’s the key to getting to Renesas. That became our North Star. It’s important to emphasize that across the fleet, as diverse as air combat command is, it’s not one size fits all. So if you’re a combat-coded fighter unit, your RIM number is based on what you expect to have to deliver to meet your combat requirements. If you’re an FTU or a training unit, your RIM number are the minimum number of mission-capable airplanes that you need to be able to execute your syllabus. What we have found as we’ve implemented RIM is, and like we saw today, General Hurley, I echo her comments, I thought she was spot on, is as we look outward from ACC now and we go to engage with the rest of the enterprise, whether that’s the sustainment enterprise or the Congress or the HAF, it’s very easy to communicate the one number. It also allows our commanders now to decide ready for what. The commanders decide this is the number of jets I need to see on the ramp today to do what the Air Force expects us to do, and that becomes our RIM number. So that’s what’s under the hood in terms of what we’re thinking about when we look at RIM and ACC.
John “JV” Venable:
Oh, fantastic. So RIMs provide that whole number requirement of what you need to generate in order to meet your mission. For several decades, we’ve relied on mission-capable rates, the standard numbers. And so one of these odd facets, we rarely talk openly about fully mission-capable rates. In 1980, the FMC rate was 78% for our fighter fleet. Our mission-capable rate was 80%. It was just 2% off. And so these numbers and how you go about analyzing them and making a determination on how well you’re doing is a big deal. What are the goods and bads of the way we used to do it, and how significantly is RIM changing those? You said that we’re using many of the same. Could you expand on that?
Brig. Gen. Brian Laidlaw:
No, I’d be happy to. I think it’s a fair question, and the onus is on us to be able to tell our story. So there’s nothing wrong with the old numbers. We still track fixed rates. We still track break rates. We still track how long it takes to get the jets back. All of those numbers are still valid. They are foundational to what we do when we fly and fix each of these airplanes. What’s a little bit different about RIM, though, is how we measure success in a way that everyone, regardless of the badge that they wear, can understand it and they can see themselves in the solution. I agree, and we did the same thing you did as you walked back through history, and you’re like, “Well, how did we get here?” And as you, I think you did, I won’t try to quote it, but in your paper when you marched us from 1987 back to the present day, and you talked about the graceful degradation over time of numbers that are important, numbers that matter. What we saw when we looked at this was, over time, where we define success was largely based on the previous year’s performance. This is not a slight to any of our maintainers or any of our commanders out in the field. This is just what happens over time, was that graceful degradation of numbers that the goalposts kept shifting over time, and they were no longer timed to mission. I’ll start, I guess, a vignette. Now, I recall in the early 2000s when I was a lieutenant and a captain on the flight line. I was flying F-15Cs, I was an F-15C unit. We were a 24 PAA, PRIMary Assigned Aircraft Unit, a big fighter squadron. When we did our phase one and our phase two exercises, what we found is if you didn’t generate 24 aircraft during your exercise, that was, someone was gonna have to answer to that. That was the bar. Over time, we can’t, we can’t, haven’t necessarily been able to do that. So it’s the acceptable limits and where we set that goalpost. Empower the commanders, where, ready for what? That is what the number is now. So instead of over year after year, you see this setting the goalpost lower and lower, we tie it directly to a mission, directly to a requirement, and go, everyone can see that, it’s a whole number. Either I have the number of airplanes that I need to do what I’ve been tasked to do, or I do not have the number of airplanes I need to be, to do my tasking. And all of us should be asking ourselves the question, how do we close the gap? So I don’t think it’s really that much different. It’s how we define the success and where we decide to put the priorities in terms of what we focus on day in and day out over time.
John “JV” Venable:
Love the description. I think that was very valuable. You use total number of aircraft. One of the big differentiators that you just mentioned was pRIMary assigned aircraft. If you had 24 pRIMary assigned aircraft in 1999, you generally had two attrition spares and one maintenance spare is what we would call them. So you had three additional aircraft. You could roll those into the schedule as they were allowed, but the idea was that you had 24 jets that you were responsible for generating in a crisis. And there were other assisting ideas where you would use other aircraft from other squadrons to actually fill in the gaps when you needed it. So that’s really big. But this total number of combining PAA with BMAI and then attrition spares, that’s a difference, right? Using that whole number is. And then the number of aircraft needed for operations and then the number of aircraft that you have available to fulfill those. I think that’s really a great, those are great markers for folks who are not in tune with what we really need. It’s a big, understandable number. You could actually stick this on the front gate and people would get it. But for the maintenance professionals and for those of us who have been steeped in this for a while, it’s a big, it’s a different change. You said we’re using many of the same metrics, but could you expand on how it’s going to be different?
Brig. Gen. Brian Laidlaw:
Absolutely. I think I would answer that with one word and that’s simplify. All of those variables that you just articulated, there are maintainers on our flight lines and in our back shops and our maintenance squadrons that are tracking all of those things. There are maintenance commanders, maintenance squadron commanders that can speak that language very, very well, just as well as they could 25, 26, 27 years ago when we were 24 PA squadrons. But as I alluded to earlier, what we saw, the trend was over time, we have created a system where our commanders are grading themselves on a curve. And that’s not okay. We needed to simplify this. So I’ll give you an example. And I’m gonna, I will talk, I’ll make the numbers up for very obvious reasons. But let’s say you’re a wing commander and those three numbers that you articulate, why did we focus these? Simplicity, here’s why. So if you’re a wing commander and you’ve got 200 total assigned aircraft, 200 aircraft that the Air Force entrusts to you, and you as the commander know what your assigned mission is, and based on that assigned mission, you know that you have to have 150 mission capable aircraft every day so that you can say yes when you’re called upon to flight and win. But when you show up at work in the morning and you look out the window and you look across the flight line, and there’s only 100 airplanes out there that are mission capable. It doesn’t matter if you’re wearing pilot wings, if you’re wearing a maintenance badge, if you are from any one of the support agencies that are absolutely critical to building those mission capable rates, you got it immediately. I get it. We’re 50 short, 50 airplanes short. It’s simplicity. Take that one step further, and this is the magic in RIM is it forces the right conversations. Now everyone who is involved in flying and fixing airplanes, and you’ve had a chance to hear the chief’s message on Monday, he led right off with that. It’s our job as Airmen to fly and fix airplanes. Everyone should be asking themselves the same question that touches that mission. What am I doing today to get after those 50 airplanes? I’m not gonna get all 50 of them today. That’s unrealistic. But can I do something to get one or two or three today and four or five tomorrow? Let’s get a little bit better. But we’re all shooting at the same target. We’re 50 short. I don’t have to understand, our maintenance officers do, our maintenance chiefs do. They have to understand all of the sauce that went to making that, the numbers that we’ve tracked that have served us very, very well since the age of dawn of aviation. But everybody understands mission capable. That’s the jet. I gotta make sure that tomorrow we got one more jet on that flight line than we have today. So simplicity is the part that’s different.
John “JV” Venable:
What you said really hit a chord with me because grading on a curve is how I got through college. And it worked for me, but it won’t work in a peer fight. They don’t care what our limitations are. And I really enjoyed that. So General Salmi, you and AMC started this process a little behind ACC. How’s the transition going? And could you give us an update?
Brig. Gen. Derek M. Salmi:
Yeah, thanks, JV. And I’ll just echo what Swinger said. Thank you for the opportunity to be here. Thank you to AFA. This is a fantastic forum to focus really on readiness. And I appreciate the question. And as we have, it really gets into the heart of AMC’s approach to modernizing readiness. And we recognize as Swinger identified there, the value of REM is that powerful, simplistic view of what the requirement is, but it’s foundationally underpinned by those key metrics that are logisticians, that are maintainers, that they track to. Those add context, they contextualize what that REM number is. And so as we’ve rolled this out, there are two main areas that we focused on. First was getting the structure correct. And in doing so, we mirrored our REM dashboard after the headquarters Air Force dashboard. So we’re talking apples to apples as we go forward. But second, we spent a lot of time ensuring that we got the North Star number correct so that we were shooting at the right target. And that really speaks to the tension that we find in the mobility Air Forces in having to fulfill two pretty demanding missions. One is providing the capacity for our supported, or the combatant command that we support, US Transportation Command, that capacity for the joint force that’s dynamic, 365, 24/7, every day of the year, the airlift and the tankers for that, while balancing that against the need to build capability within our mobility Air Forces for it to execute those day-to-day missions, as well as to be prepared for any high-end fight. So that was the tension that we were trying to manage. We looked at what our North Star should be, and there were four main areas, approaches that we took. The first was to take a two-year look back at just the historical tasking averages that we received from Transcom, which was a helpful baseline to start with, but really didn’t stretch us. And that’s part of the intent of RIM, is to stretch to the max extent possible. Second, we looked at our wartime plans, which again was another good approach, but didn’t really meet the day-to-day, what we’re seeing out on the flight lines or in the system. Third, we went with a surge approach, so for surging to meet those Transcom taskings, and surging to meet our training taskings. That provided a very clear picture, but also an unsustainable picture. So we ended up with our fourth approach, which combined that historical look back at our taskings with maximizing our training. So again, we could meet the capacity and build the capability. And again, that provides that clear number, that target that we all recognize we need to meet and strive to achieve. And then the second part, and to answer how we’re using this, we’ve incorporated it into our processes, pRIMarily our Commander’s Update Brief with the AMC commander every week. Every week our maintenance professionals pick one of our major weapon systems, and we deep dive into it using the North Star number. And in that meeting, it aligns the NAV commanders, the wing commanders, the group commanders, as we look at what levers we have to pull. Is it more engagement with industry? Is it more engagement with our tremendous partners at AFMC? Is it working with our total force partners, which is an important part of how we do business in the mobility air forces? Or is it working with Transcom to find other ways to move whatever needs to be moved, whether it’s sea lift or surface transportation? So again, aligning everyone to what the clear target is, what levers we’re trying to pull all the way down to the wing level to include more resources, more personnel, more equipment. That’s helpful so we’re aligned and not working at cross purposes either.
John “JV” Venable:
You guys are still in the expeRIMental phase, or are you rolling this out to AMC writ large?
Brig. Gen. Derek M. Salmi:
We are rolling it out. We have North Stars for each of our major weapon systems, and pRIMarily focused early on on the C-17 and the KC-135 as our heavily tasked, heavily utilized, and critical airframes, but we do have them for each of our aircraft and look at it each and every week to see what levers we need to pull.
John “JV” Venable:
So for both of you, this is obviously a really big step and a big picture thing that I completely applaud. The fidelity and the details in between, is this new RIM process allowing you to see gaps that you didn’t see before? And if you can give examples of that, I’d be grateful.
Brig. Gen. Brian Laidlaw:
Okay, no, I’d be happy to take the first swing. I’ll start by saying that, JV, I’m not gonna give our adversaries the answers to the test and identify specifically capability gaps across our combat forces. But what I will do is I’ll give you an example at the enterprise level of how implementation of RIM has changed behaviors and generated action, which if anyone who’s ever had the privilege of working for General Spain, you learn to generate action very, very, very quickly. So as we unrolled the RIM process, what we do now is we have a regular readiness battle rhythm we meet every couple of weeks. We structured it actually very similar to the bins that you used in your paper last September. We got a fighter bin, we have a ISR bin for those platforms. You have General Spain himself as the MAJCOM commander, chairs the meeting. Down each side of the table, he’s got his directors. On the VTC, he’s got his numbered Air Force commanders and he has all of his wing commanders. Also on the VTC, we have senior leaders from across the sustainment enterprise in our depots, all listening to the same thing. And each wing commander gets one slide and that wing commander puts up their one slide and front and center, prominent, large font is the RIM number. And he or she gets to answer the question, am I meeting my RIM or am I not meeting my RIM number? It is clear as day, everybody gets to see it up and down the chain of command. But if you go about halfway down that slide, there’s a section that’s called detractors, detractors. And herein lies the uh-oh for those of us who are not commanders. So each wing commander gets to pick the three detractors that is preventing him or her from being able to get to that RIM number that’s prominent on the slide. Everyone on that VTC, everyone up and down that table is asking themselves the same question. What is my role in fixing that RIM number? I’ll give you an example. During a recent RIM meeting, we had, it unearthed to us the reality that in one particular MDS, one weapon system, we had an abnormally high depot capture rate. And a lot of jets in maintenance. They were in maintenance because they were getting modifications. We absolutely have to send our jets into mod, put ’em in depot status ’cause we gotta modernize to generate readiness for the future. Well that decision was made, in some cases months, years ago by different commanders, maybe even by the staff itself to build that mod schedule. Well that wing commander who just briefed us his or her RIM number, in this case it was a his number, said I can’t generate readiness today because of the number of jets that are in depot status. But we need both. So what we end up having is you’ve got this readiness in the future, that’s the jets getting modded, versus readiness today that’s preventing us from getting to the RIM number. That is a risk decision. And commanders own risk decision. Not the staff, not schedules that were made years ago, under different operational environment that were the right decision at the time. What this process does is it gets everyone in the same room looking at the same North Star, which is that number, and now we can see very clearly what the levers are. Not only can we see what the levers are, you’ve got General Spain, COMAC at the end of the table going here is how I want, here’s my risk decision. We’re gonna prioritize this and this. Everyone up and down the chain sees it. Go out and now we go and we execute. So yes, we do identify gaps, but we do it in a way that uses the process. It’s commander focused, like the chief already talks about. It puts risk where risk needs to be, and everyone gets to hear the guidance from General Spain before we move out. That’s what we’ve seen as we’ve unrolled the RIM process. That’s where we’re making, that’s where we’re identifying gaps and we’re generating actions out of them.
John “JV” Venable:
Love it. I’ll have a follow up for you in a second, but General Salmi.
Brig. Gen. Derek M. Salmi:
Yeah, no thanks. And again, we’re still a little bit early in the process here, but I think we are applying that same framework. Again, we’ve moved away from the metrics that are important, but the focus on the metrics, the fleet health metrics that don’t translate into operational impact. For a long time, we used mission capable rates, and as a former C5 pilot, I was always very interested in mission capable rates, but it really always required context, required explanation. So moving to that RIM provides that clarity, that simple approach. And what we value about the framework of RIM, from half, from the very baseline, it’s to optimize what we have in three main areas and find the balance in operations, modernization and sustainment. And that really overlays with three key focus areas that we have in air mobility command as we move forward for connectivity, viability and survivability. So as we look to connect the force for the future fight, that’s a modernization undertaking that will impact the fleet. As we look to recapitalize the fleet, that’s something we’ll need to manage. As we look forward, as we look to sustainment, as we look at viability, how do we keep our aging fleet going? How do we sustain our new fleet that we’re onboarding? Those are challenges that we need to balance in there. And that last piece, when we focus on survivability, that ties to that operations piece. How do we still manage to have the aircraft available to meet our target, to satisfy the US Transcom taskings along with those high-end training sorties and missions that we need at the same time. So RIM really provides that framework to align with and overlay with our focus areas to make sure that we are achieving the ends that we want to achieve. And it’s moving it with clarity out of what it was otherwise an abstract metrics discussion.
John “JV” Venable:
Fantastic. So you talked about detractors. I assume that that’s a slide Air Force wide on the bottom of the RIM numbers. Detractors are crazy when you start talking about injecting depot demands or systematic upgrading of an aircraft and giving that power to a commander is, it seems like that’s a big change. Is that not?
Brig. Gen. Brian Laidlaw:
I wouldn’t call it a big change because the foundation of those decisions have not changed at all. We’re looking at this, we’ve been doing depots since the beginning of time. Depot capture rates are something that we always track. Modernization schedules have always existed. But what we’ve never done is put them all together into one slide and tied it to the mission, which is tied to the number. And now the commander who owns the risk, the wing commander, gets to go out to the system, to the enterprise and go, this is where I need help. I’ll tell you, there are two very uncomfortable seats to be sitting in, in ACC RIM update meetings. One is the seat that I sit in and then directly across the table is the one that the four sits in. Exactly, John Eberlin. And I guarantee you every time that slide switches or when we’re going through the read aheads, we go straight to the detractors. We go, okay, are any of these in my bailiwick? ‘Cause we know if they’re in our bailiwick, we got knife hands from General Spain coming in the meeting. What are you gonna do to fix that problem so that that wing commander can get there? So no, I don’t think it has changed a lot. It’s driven a culture change. It’s driven a focus and it’s put the heat and light on the staff where it should be so that we can empower the commanders in the field who own the risk.
John “JV” Venable:
Fantastic. General Salmi.
Brig. Gen. Derek M. Salmi:
No, I think Swinger captured it perfectly there. And again, it’s just that clarifying what the target is, we can work target backwards to meet that. And I think our detractors are all the same and I’ll be on the lookout for knife hands too as we mature this in the AMC.
John “JV” Venable:
I love that descriptor, knife hands. So it’s very visual. So you go back through this idea of this is the number, this is the RIM number we’re shooting for and you’re meeting an operational demand with that. I think that’s really important. So let’s go back to the 80s and you had 70s, you had bottoming out of the utilization rate, 17.5. It took General Creech’s initiatives several years to actually be implemented before money came in and you started seeing it tick up. And so if 17.5 was the bottom, the next year, what was the goal? And the next year, what was the goal? And they ended up almost doubling the utilization rate when the Reagan dollars kicked in. Is the number that this REM number, is that going to be elevated over time as your maintenance practices, as this entire process catches hold or is it going to stay, you think, pretty much stable?
Brig. Gen. Brian Laidlaw:
Derek, I’ll take that one first unless you want to. That question is right down the strike zone for what we’re talking about in ACC. The number, the REM number today is based on the current operational environment where we exist. It’s tied to the mission. It’s not going to change in the near future. I can’t predict what it’s going to look like 10 years from, but it’s going to be tied, if we’re still doing it, it’s going to be tied to the mission and the taskings that we got. But what I want to go back to is, and I’m glad you brought up the General Creech, the reference, because early in this process, I know you’ve had the privilege of serving under General Creech. There were others who served under General Creech who are currently our senior mentors and we, I, have leveraged their expertise extensively. In fact, I’ve asked them to come in and educate me and they’ve walked us through the charts that General Creech used to brief off of. They explained to us, he says, “Swinger,” I got to give General Jumper a call out on this one. He’s been a tremendous mentor to me. He said, “Swinger, this is about culture change. “This is about prioritizing what is right.” When General Creech took over in 1978 from TAC, he went out and said, he went and took stripes, NCOs out of the back shops, put ’em on the flight line. He talked about TO adherence and being disciplined about how we walk through this. He emphasized the need to have a flying schedule that both ops and maintenance agreed to and not deviating unless you really had to to build some discipline into the process. And to your point, which is exactly, I’ve spent hours going over those charts. I know the ones that you’re speaking of. What we saw is from 1978 to early into the 1980s, the readiness curve reversed. In that case, it was utilization rate was what he chose. That did not take resources. That took leadership. A lot of people like to cite, and rightfully so, that there was this infusion of resources under the Reagan buildup. There absolutely was. But what enabled that to be so successful was all the groundwork that General Creech and his team had built. They had built conditions so that when those resources did fall in on top of the new processes, the new focus, instead of seeing a linear increase in utilization rate, they saw an exponential increase in the utilization rate. And it bought, it purchased, it procured the force that you, sir, and others like you took to Desert Storm and proved to the world exactly what the United States Air Force can do. We tried to bake that into every step of the RIM process. It is about resources, and we look forward to resources. That is requirement. But we need to set the foundation first so that when those resources do come, if they come, and we hope they come, we can quickly translate that into combat readiness and combat capability just like General Creech did.
John “JV” Venable:
Sir?
Brig. Gen. Derek M. Salmi:
Thanks for the question. And I will say our North Star target won’t change, and that’s why we spent a lot of time trying to get that number to include all the variables that are important to the MAF enterprise. I will agree, Swinger says it takes leadership. I think for us, what it also helps to do is focus how do you manage a fleet that is literally employed and deployed around the world day in and day out. And again, going back to those legacy metrics, that’s very important to our logistician and to our maintainers of how the fleet is doing out in the in-route system, whether it’s at some of our more established locations, at some of our austere locations. That’s where we manage our fleet, at each of those places, and those metrics are key. If you look back in the past 12 months, just a quick roll-up of where mobility forces have been in support of joint forces, about this time last year, setting the theater in Europe and in CENTCOM for Operation Midnight Hammer. Switched from there to the summer to the department-level exercise, underpinning the joint force out in the Indo-Pacific. Switched from there to the fall to SOUTHCOM, preparing for Operation Absolute Resolve, and then certainly ongoing operations right now. The mobility forces are always setting and resetting, lifting and shifting, and so this focus on RIM, one, make sure we have the aircraft available to do this, but also focuses our attention where it should be in that in-route system. We’re taking those legacy metrics. They’re telling us, they’re sending demand signals of where we need to put parts, where we need to put supplies. We’re also able to use the information gathered over many decades of operating in this way to forecast where we need to put additional resources so that we can continue to have the operations ongoing and ultimately meet the joint forces’ need, and that’s really what that North Star’s predicated on, but it helps us to focus.
John “JV” Venable:
Loved it, and so there’s a bunch of follow-ups I could do with both of you, but you just triggered something that is really important to understand. When a fighter squadron deploys, it deploys with a maintenance package, so you got the team there to repair stuff as you need it. Mobility forces, by definition, are always deployed, except during home training stations, and you don’t take a maintenance package with you. You have a crew chief that has the ability to service the jet to some level, but significant repairs, they take time, and you have to send crews out to get them at times. Extended en route maintenance, bare base recovery statistics, are we still holding to those in the RIM process, or is that gonna change?
Brig. Gen. Derek M. Salmi:
They are. Those metrics continue to be incredibly important as that rich, granular-level detail that helps to inform what that clear RIM target is. So they’re very complementary to each other, and again, our logisticians use that to provide the diagnostics. They can forecast, they can send the right number of people, equipment, or parts out to our en route structure. We have a very robust structure in both the Pacific and in Europe, and really around the world, that helps to send some of that demand signal. But they work part and parcel together. In order to make sure that we can achieve our RIM, fed by those metrics that are still pretty critical, pretty important.
John “JV” Venable:
Fantastic. So this readiness is so complicated, and for folks who don’t understand all of the levers, organization is a big deal. Motivation and changing this paradigm of how you’re going to go about fixing and flying aircraft was what General Creech did, and sir, you did a great job of laying that out. This idea of changing the way we do operations. General Hurry brought it up this morning about starting to integrate, and she didn’t use General Creech’s names, but we used to have three levels of maintenance on base that would repair components all the way to supply, that whole thing was really streamlined, that allowed us to jack up our utilization rates. And General Hurry brought it up this morning about moving some of the depot functions forward into flying units. When these opportunities actually begin to bear fruit, and it may take several years for that to happen, will we elevate RIM for both of your commands?
Brig. Gen. Brian Laidlaw:
I’ll take the first swing at that one. I think, I know we’re getting close to our time, so in that regard, it’s crystal clear to us, it was crystal clear in the secretary and the chief’s message yesterday, that there is an insatiable demand for air power across our combatant commanders. And as Airmen, we should take that as a compliment, but at the same time, there’s a task in there. And that task, especially for leaders across our Air Force, for us as leadership, is to generate as ready a force as we possibly can, so that we send our Airmen forward to meet that demand, because we will send our Airmen forward to meet that demand, with as ready a force as we possibly can do. We all, it’s important to say, and I think we would all agree, that deterrence remains plan A. And we spend a lot of time and effort to making sure that that happens. But we have to be clear-eyed, and we see plenty of examples of it all the time, that when conflict comes knocking, we are gonna have to fight with the equipment that we have on the flight line today. And that’s the why behind RIM. We have to do all that we can, whether with culture change, leadership change, set conditions for hopefully an infusion of resources, to make that fleet as ready as it possibly can. We need to fly and fix airplanes like the chief told us to do, so that when the call comes, and the call will come, to fight and win, that our Airmen do what they’ve always been able to do, which is generate air power in a meaningful way for the joint force.
John “JV” Venable:
Well, that’s a great exclamation point. General Salmi. Any final remarks?
Brig. Gen. Derek M. Salmi:
I’ll just, I’ll maybe conclude by returning to what you started with, with the amount of time that it takes to build the judgment and the experience for combat leaders, combat air crew going forward. And I think if you look out at the world right now, there are factors at play that may shorten that timeline from what it’s been in the past. And so we’re very focused, day in and day out, there are aircraft commanders in Air Mobility Command making amazing decisions in all parts of the world without the same experience, without the same seasonings that maybe previous generations had. So that’s really what drives us for this focus on readiness, so that every flight hour counts, every wrench turn counts, every dollar spent counts, so that we can provide the most ready force. We can provide a force that’s ready to be the maneuver force for the joint force, so that we can be ready when called upon.
John “JV” Venable:
Well, thank you both, gentlemen. I told you they were wicked smart, didn’t I? It’s been a wonderful session with you. Thank you both for your very frank remarks. And ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your attention. If you get a chance to stop by the Mitchell booth, it’s about two blocks up here on the left. We got some great paraphernalia for you to take away. And we don’t wanna ship all of the documents and the products that we printed out. So if you have a backpack and you can stuff them in there, be very grateful. It’s been a great privilege to be with you, gentlemen. Thank you and have a great air and space power kind of day, ladies and gentlemen.