Sustaining the Fight: Arming to Win
March 5, 2025
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This transcript was generated with the assistance of AI. Please report inconsistencies to comms@afa.org.
John Venable:
So General Hurry. Just asked me to for a good morning joke. And those are always dangerous. If you, if you really want one, I can so I don’t know if you heard there was a tragedy this last week in Chicago, a series of tragedies. And after those were over, there was three window washers up on the 24 story of a 25 story building. And as you look at them, window washer one, two and three, left to right. One reaches up really high, and as he does his his hat blows off his head and sails over the top of the building. And he goes, Man, that’s quite a wind. And when the washer number two looks at him and says, Yeah, you’re not familiar with the edicts that general daily or Mayor Daley put into place 20 years ago to prevent the kinds of suicides we’ve seen recently. Because, no, no, I haven’t seen anything like it. He goes, Yeah, you can actually jump off of any floor in this building, anyone, and the winds will catch you and carry you back up to at least the four you jumped off of. And one looks at two and said, That can’t be right. And two looks at him, says, watch this. He jumps over, and he starts doing flips and somersaults. Oh, this is great. And then slowly, he starts slowing down, and then comes right back up and lands on the scaffolding between one and three. And when washroom number one looks over and goes, That was amazing. Yeah, you want to try it. You think I can, well, sure you watched me, didn’t you? Okay? So he puts a foot up on the scaffolding, and he leaps and he starts doing flips. This is great. 20th, 15th, 10th. Nothing slows him down. He hits the ground. Number two looks down and kind of smiles, and number three looks over and says, you know, sometimes you can be a real jerk Superman. It’s one of the best dad jokes I’ve got. It won’t get you in trouble. It won’t get me in trouble. That’s an and we’ve debated that all week. Well, we are at 803, and as prompt as we are, why don’t we go ahead and get started? Just as a way of introduction, I’m JV Venable. I’m a senior resident Fellow at the Mitchell Institute. I’ve been there for a little less than a year, and it is my pleasure to welcome you this morning to sustaining the flight, the fight arming to win, is it just a little bit of backdrop. The last three years have kind of changed our paradigm on what munitions are required and what a force on force conflict really looks like. It harkens back to the preparation we did for Desert Storm the Cold War. And actually, we haven’t seen anything like this munitions expenditure rates since World War Two, and if you look at the last just two or three years, the rates are absolutely baffling. In a two week period, Israel’s Iron Dome system fired over 1400 missiles, and they were discriminating against which targets were going to actually land in a in a populated area in which one ones weren’t and global production wise, that was almost twice what we produce Patriot missiles every year. The United States Army has been acquiring 155 millimeter HE rounds every year since ad nauseam, and we have given Ukraine more 155 millimeter HE shells than they’ve acquired in the last 25 years. The expenditure rates are absolutely baffling. And if you look at what this air superiority or lack thereof, does you get into a grinder fight where we really do have things to be concerned about. The good news is we’ve got three panelists here that are going to take that apart and talk about how we’re combating that. And if I could make brief introductions to my immediate left is general Linda Hurry. She is the deputy commander for Air Force Materiel Command. I like it. Bring it on. That was General Richardson in the front row leading that year. Just want you to know that no pressure. To her immediate left is Maj. Gen. Akshai Gandhi, and he is the Deputy Assistant Chief of Staff for operations at headquarters Air Force. And to your far right is Mr.Steve Botwinik. He is the vice president and general manager for Lockheed Martin, missiles and fire control. These folks are wicked smart. They’re also strikingly handsome with. You give them a big round of applause to warm up the morning. So I’ve got a battery of questions for them and and we’ll see how this this unfolds. We’ll start with general Gandhi. You know, finding a balance between that fight tonight mentality, sir and and preparing for a fight in 10 or 15 years has never been more challenging to actually work through the global challenges we’re facing between Iran, China, Russia, North Korea, they’ve never been this daunting. If you go back to the things that led up to World War Two, I don’t think the world was in quite as much turmoil as what we’re facing right now. Could you talk a bit about the balance between our need to be ready to fight tonight and our preparation for a future conflict.
Maj. Gen. Akshai Gandhi:
Sure thing. JV, and thank you very much for hosting this panel and inviting us out here. It’s a honor to be able to talk to the people who are advocates for air power and taking a keen interest in our nation’s betterment. It’s not a secret that our Air Force today is the oldest and smallest that we’ve had in our history. But let’s let’s be clear about one thing, it does not mean that we’re the least ready. So as we look forward, we have to balance a couple things as we address preparation for the current world situation. We kind of look at it from the operations and readiness perspective. We look at four levers that we can kind of manipulate, that would be people, equipment, training and operations. And the key thing is to recognize that, you know, there’s no silver bullet that you can use to get one of these. You know, apply to one lever and solve the problem. We need to do kind of a comprehensive approach where we keep our efforts in balance. And one of the things that goes along with that is, as we, as we make a modification or a investment in one of these areas, we need to see, we need to understand how long it’s going to take for that to take effect. So for example, and I think General, Henry, will probably be able to talk to a little bit more detail, but you know where we’ve backed off investments and weapon system support in the past, and now we’re correcting that. It’s not an immediate fix. There’s a lag time associated with it to get the supply chain in line and move forward to, you know, see that impact on the flight line. What we have to do is recognize also that we’re not going to be able to just stop what we’re doing to increase our readiness. We’ve still got global operations, and that is a pretty significant demand signal. So one of the things that we’re doing within the Air Force, and general Alvin has talked about this, is adjusting what our focus is going to be. In the past, it’s been on a particular platform or a kind of a tribe, and we’re looking at evolving to mission over function, and looking at a capability versus a particular weapon system. So what it amounts to is, what do we need to do, and how are we going to go do it? And then we apply the tools that we have available in our tool set to go ahead and do that. Now, one of the things that’s going to allow enable us to do this a little bit better is adjusting our force presentation model. You you hear the term aforetion That stands for air force, force generation, and this is a model that we’re going to use to be able to prepare our forces and be able to characterize the risk and know what we are able to present to the combatant commands, and quite frankly, at the end of the day, is to provide options to the President. I think this is right in line with what our Secretary of Defense is saying, where we’re focusing on our warrior ethos, and we’re also, you know, making sure that we are focused on readiness for the for the next fight. What this model will do is, you know, it’s a, it’s a, what we’re using right now is a 24 month cycle, and it will enable us in six month chunks. Is what is, we’ve got it set up where, you know, when a unit, you know, starts the cycle there, and what we call the reset phase, where we’re doing some of the more basic and individual type of training. Then you get into the Prepare phase, you transition into a certify phase, and then you have forces available to be presented to the combatant commander. So what we’re doing is, instead of what we’ve done in the past, where we’ve crowd sourced, which served us well in the time following 911 where we had a pretty heavy steady state demand signal, but we had air superiority, and we were sitting in a situation where we could No kidding. Form the teams down range and still be effective in today’s fight with the with the turmoil that you talked about and the capabilities that our adversaries are getting, you know, are presenting already and will be presenting in the future. We’re not going to have that luxury. We need to be able to hit the ground running, and this Afro Gen model is going to allow us do that, where we form our teams, we train them together, we certify them together, and then they’re able to hit the ground running.
John Venable:
Fantastic. Anything to add, General Hurry.
Lt. Gen. Linda S. Hurry:
So, yes, excellent. You know when you talked a little bit about, you know, resilience of the supply chain and recovering the supply chain once we do finally get the funding to build our stocks and build our the assets around the globe. It takes about two years, so the lead time is absolutely critical. The other part is we’ve got to send a consistent demand signal to our industry partners so that we can react together and then position things accordingly.
John Venable:
Two to three years from funding to munitions and weapon systems beyond the line is just daunting. So from when Congress actually puts the money on the table, it takes two to three years. Ma’am, could you talk a little bit about what the service is doing, what AFMC is doing, to actually maybe curtail that a little bit and shorten that absolutely,
Lt. Gen. Linda S. Hurry:
First of all, munitions is absolutely one of our top priorities. We have got to figure out new ways to build or quiver, and it doesn’t always have to be high end assets. Perhaps we can have some low end and a good solid mix. You heard General Wilsbach And you heard General white yesterday talking about the appropriate high low mix, where we’re absolutely getting after both sides. So first, let me talk more on the high end side of things. First and foremost, yes, we do have some funding. Absolutely got to make sure that the CRS we, you know, kind of get rid of those, so that we can continue with that. But we have long term production contracts put in place for Jasmine’s, for lrams, those were put in place in 24 doing the same sort of things with AMRAAMs in 25 so that is going to try to help us get after the high end, long term production contracts. Provides consistent demand signal to our industry partners. We minimize the cost, or we can lower the cost, we can minimize the response time. All that is goodness for all of us. And so that’s more on the high side, but you don’t need a golden BB for literally everything. So what can we do on the low end side? And I got to tell you, I am so proud of our AFMC team, because really getting after this, we put together a team, a capacity task force down at Eglin, and it’s balanced. It’s young folks that are trying to drive change and break the status quo and think differently about how we do munitions. What if we could do something with affordable mass? What if we could do something with modularity? What if we could do something with an open architecture and capitalize on all the digital material management tools and assets that we have at our fingertips, and then push the envelope, and they’re doing just that. In fact, you should see these youngsters, and I’ll be honest, so so unbelievably proud of them just last year. I mean, this team’s only been in place for a little bit over a year, but already they put a contract in place in four months. And seven months later, we actually had four different prototypes being tested. That’s huge, short term life cycle, lots of assets, trying to figure out, how are we going to scale production? So let’s talk a little bit about what we’re doing with digital material management. What if we can additively manufacture some of these critical parts? What if we can minimize the number of fixtures and assets needed to produce the parts? What if we could focus on digitizing the entire production line such that we can increase the throughput and produce 1000s of these assets. What if there are some of the low end assets and we reduce the net explosive weight that just opens up the aperture and the number of facilities that can actually produce these things? Well, the team is getting after exactly that. On top of it, we’re going after things like licensing and franchising. So yes, we’ve got different organizations creating tech data packages, and I know we can’t, you know, risk their IP, but what if we had that licensing and franchising figured out, and then we can produce things at various locations around the globe, maybe in the United States, maybe with our allies and partners. Think about it, if these assets were actually produced in other locations closer to the pointy under the spear, we mitigate the time, space, distance challenge that we have with an adversary that’s 7000 miles away. It’s a big win for everyone. So. And our airmen are making it happen every day. And please know when I say Airmen, I mean big A airmen. So whether you’re active duty or guard, are part of our industry, teammates or civilian teammates. They are really trying to think outside the box to try to give us that deterrent value and increase the size of our quiver. So proud of them.
John Venable:
Fantastic. So if you have not visited an additive manufacturing location, as General Hurry mentioned is key to this, it is a game changer. I’m a living skeptic. I look at everything and doubt it, but this idea of being able to do additive production relies on digital designs, and once you have that in place, you plug it into the machine. These things can do just about anything, as long as industry is willing to step up. Which brings into Steven, into this question. Steven, she’s talked a lot about munitions and the growth of this, what does the government, what does Congress and DOD need to do to help industry facilitate, not just being able to increase our stockpiles, but to increase production rates to where we could keep pace with a with a purified.
Steve Botwinik:
Thanks. JV, um, what? What should Congress do? Is always a great question today in the morning, right? Um, what I would tell you and so General Hurry. Hit it square on the nose, which is a consistent demand signal, consistent demand signal from the DOD and from Congress on munitions accounts drives industry behavior, conversely, right whipsawing munition accounts as Bill payers, the year to year budget activities that that unfortunately also drives the uncertainty into the market those multi years that General Hurry mentioned, are huge helps for industry, and where you see it really manifest itself is in the second and third tier suppliers. Because, you know, many of them are small businesses. Many of them have just a few products that are bespoke to certain munitions. And when they cannot plan, it’s very difficult for them to make a business case that says, hey, I should go ahead and start buying long lead material for three or four years out. So this really being able to get a consistent market demand signal drives those behaviors. That allows them to do that same thing with large primes like Lockheed Martin. It allows us to start looking at capitalization of larger facilities. It’s very difficult to do that when you can’t tell how many we’re actually going to purchase. You know, the other thing it actually allows us to do is, if you’ve got long lead stock in place, to start alleviating those long those long turn times, it allows us to then allow for surge capacity, should a crisis arise that that we need to put all of that long, lean material to use immediately. So it actually serves very well. A consistent demand signal actually allows us to do multiple things. It allows us to drive down those lead times, and it allows us to be a little bit more ready for surge, if necessary.
John Venable:
And certainly continuing resolutions are devastating to that. What kind of contract durations are you looking for in order to have that, that demand signal, be stabilized? What would be rational?
Steve Botwinik:
So, you know, if you look at some of the lead times that we have on some on a lot of materials, you know, many of them are in the two year time frame, right? So if you start looking at three or four years out, you can get ahead of that very, very quickly, if you can plan that far out, right? So, I mean, there, you know, I would give you a number of that says, you know, infinitely would be great. But, you know, even, even four or five years out, really, really helps position industry. It allows us to make better business decisions and better planning. When we’re able to do that and really get ahead of it, right? We’re allowed to. We can use our own capital and our own resources to start, you know, stocking material, if I can get four or five years ahead of planning?
Lt. Gen. Linda S. Hurry:
Yeah, let me piggyback on that a little bit. One of the other things, you know, we’ve got a very concerted effort to get after supply chain and the resilience of the supply chain, and one of the levers that we’re really trying to pull is long term contracts. Let’s get out of this transactional day to day types of things where I got to buy 10 of these when I know that I’m going to have a requirement for 10 years, sending that demand signal is critical and then communicating openly, you know, we need the operational requirement. What is it that you need so that we can put it on contract and be transparent with you? That’s critical from a funding standpoint? Yes, we all know that. We’ve all been asked about an 8% reduction in the budget, okay, but let’s look at where the priorities of our new SEC def are. If you look at one of the 17 priorities, one of them is munitions. I think we’re going to be in a more stable environment. That’s good news for all of us, that is.
Steve Botwinik:
And the other thing I’d add on to that is, you know, if you look at PEO weapons, you know, philosophy and vision of where we should go. So general, Lyons just talked about this even yesterday that, you know, if you can build a design a system that’s modular at the very beginning, gets after the wosa and Mosa architectures, you can prevent from the downside of having a 10 year you know, of saying, Well, I’m going to be. Locked into a specific vendor, or I’m gonna be locked into a specific technology that 10 years from now we know might not keep up, probably won’t keep up with the pace of the threat. So how do I evolve a system within a contract? And so by getting at that modularity, getting at that inherent upgradability, it allows for, I think, the downside to be mitigated, right? Really mitigate your risk of a large, long duration contract, because you can keep up with the threat inside of that contract. Well, fantastic.
John Venable:
Thank you. Just to turn to general Gandhi for a second, so general Alvin has put out an op ed a couple of weeks ago and then reiterated yesterday our need for more air force meets more iron on the ramp, more everything. And when you look at that in context, the Chinese are actually producing J 20s, their low observable, or stealth fighter, at a rate almost double what we’re acquiring the F 35 and the F 15 ex together. So really this is a powerful signal that’s coming from China, that they’re readying for something. And yet, while we need more, we’ve got what we’ve got. So could you talk a little bit about how we’re answering the call for global demands, while we’re preparing for that fight for both tonight and tomorrow?
Maj. Gen. Akshai Gandhi:
Well, certainly a daunting challenge. One of the things that we’re doing, you know, in order to let’s talk a second about just, you know, when you’re dealing with some of the older systems that we have right now, we have to make some hard decisions about, you know, what we will continue to sustain and what we may need to divest. And one of the things that we need some help with is some stability in those divestment and reinvestment decisions. Now, divesting things you know, we can figure out when that’s going to happen, what’s the right time for that, and it’s when you when you set that timeline for what’s going to divest, you’re going to start doing some actions leading into that. So for example, the a 10, we have a time frame where we’re saying we’re going to divest that a couple years prior to that, we’re going to see we’re going to start offsetting some of that manpower and the personnel and the equipment, but that’s not a hey, we’re divesting it and getting it out of the Air Force. We’re reinvesting that in the new capabilities. And we can kind of figure out those timelines where we get into a real challenge is when that divestment is changed and somebody says, hey, no, you’re not going to be able to divest, for example, the A 10 on this timeline. We want you to keep it around for a little bit longer. Well, we’ve already taken some actions to make investments for the future. Now, those future deliveries of new capabilities. Take the F 35 or the KC 46 for example. You know, we know what we want them, but sometimes there are some things, especially with new technologies, which which slow that down, and that presents the challenge. So what we need to do is focus on keeping the resourcing that allows us to generate that combat power in the right place, and that when we set a schedule to do something, where we when we start moving something out of the force, because it’s becoming too expensive to sustain, or too difficult to sustain, you know, as we talk about suppliers not creating the parts, or, you know, whatever it may Be, and then focusing on, you know, getting those new capabilities up and running. If it becomes a big challenge when you go, Hey, we’ve got new aircraft out there, but we don’t have the manpower and the support to go along with it. Well, you know, you’re going to run into more problems as you try to try to move out with that. So just keeping that investment and infrastructure imbalances, we’re going to have to focus to make what we’ve got go as far as it can and be as capable as it can.
John Venable:
Fantastic, General Hurry. Let me turn back to you. We obviously need a force that’s ready to fight tonight, but we need one that’s resilient, able to take hits and still deliver extraordinary combat effects against an enemy who would challenge us. The Air Force is obviously moving on the ACE our concept for moving eggs around and being hard to find as a target. What new ways, if you could talk about new ways that AFMC is considering pursuing for that next fine,
Lt. Gen. Linda S. Hurry:
Yeah, honestly, we’re trying to think differently. I mean, if you think about ace operations and the ability to pick up and move in smaller organizations, you know the requirements to actually sustain that and generate combat power actually go up by about 35% so we’ve got to figure out a way. Make our support lighter, leaner, more agile and more movable as we try to move our assets around, because we, quite frankly, need to. So we’re doing a lot of different things, but I’m going to start with our airmen first. So first and foremost, you heard the chief talk the other day about combat support training ranges. How do we make sure they are ready, that they’re developed as a team, and they develop that worth warfighter ethos, everything we do is a team sport. I mean, all of us up here, we have to work side by side, and having operators and logisticians and sustainers and acquisition in an industry working side by side is absolutely critical. Well, the same thing is on the on the battlefield. When we’ve got folks working on protection and sustainment in airfield ops, we want them out there training. So we have two combat support training ranges up and running right now. Now they’re not all the way where we want them to be, but it’s a work in progress. We’d like to build four more. We’ve already put 2000 airmen through there to work on that teaming, to work side by side. I want to know what my teammates strengths are, what their weaknesses are. I want them to know what mine are. And quite frankly, when we go down range, we got to know what our best capabilities are and how we can work together. So those combat support training ranges, which is run out of our installation and Mission Support Center team. They’re doing phenomenal things, and we’re developing those capabilities. When I speak of capabilities, we’re trying to modernize the tools that we hand to our airmen. So our research lab is developing new types of concrete so that we can set when we’re doing airfield damage repair, they’ve come up with new drones so that we can assess the airfield when it’s damaged without putting our Airmen, our most precious research resource, at risk. The other thing we’re doing to try to protect our Airmen, think of goggles. We want to minimize the number of Airmen we put in harm’s way. Well, we don’t have to put all of them forward. What if we had our maintainers down on the line and they had goggles, and they’ve got reach back to the engineers, reach back to supervisors that can kind of coach them through whatever it is they’re trying to do, so we can get those jets back up in the year that’s happening today. So those are a couple of things we’re trying to do to take care of our airmen. Next common support equipment. In the past, every program office had their own set of tools. Well, what if we started looking horizontally? What if we came up with common assets that we can support across the board. Think of the dash 60s that are out there. Heck, they’re older than me. Where is the new version of that? Where is the new, you know, swiss army knife, of support equipment so that we can become more light and lean. The good news is our teammates in the research lab and our just teammates across the board are coming up with new ways to do support equipment. We’ve also centralized it in the supply chain wing so that we can management and move it around regardless of platform. It’s there to support new capabilities. Those drones, not only are they there for airfield research, what if you’re doing aircraft maintenance through drones, and you can look at the tops of aircraft through those drones. Again, it speeds the timeline. In my first answer, I talked a little bit about digital material management. Well, the same thing applies here. What if we could digitize and and come up with digital twins for our aircraft. And we are today. We’re doing that. We’ve got a digital twin for the F 16. We’ve got it for the b1 we’re doing it for other aircraft that are out there. And if we can digitize things, it speeds the amount of time that it takes to get those jets turn them green, which is what we need. We’re trying to generate readiness. Another thing we’re trying to do, there’s a tool that we’ve put in place called panda. It’s AI based predictive maintenance analytics, so we know when we need to turn apart before it actually breaks again. We want to make sure that we’re protecting those maintainers, protecting those folks that are going down range, and we put them in the best readiness posture available. The last thing I want to touch on is a new concept that our Sustainment Center is putting forth, called genus. What if we could take depo level capabilities and push it forward? Like I said earlier, our distance to the potential adversary, 7000 miles. We don’t need to take act assets and send them all the way back to tinker Robins or hill. What if we could take a depo level artisan and posture them forward? And I will tell you we’re doing that today. First Falcon node that we’ve created. Is out at Fairchild. We’ve actually turned a KC 135 boom, there. Not send it back to a depot. Not send it back anywhere else. Let’s take our depot artisans and our engineers and place them forward and turn assets faster. We are doing this today, and it’s really, really increasing the readiness that we have. You guys are busy. It’s fun. It’s fun.
Lt. Gen. Linda S. Hurry:
You know, it’s great. You know, we talk about thinking differently and empowering our airmen to come up with these new ideas. They’re doing it every single day, and again, not just our military Airmen, our civilian airmen, and I’m so proud of them. I mean, my goodness, if you take a look at AFMC, 80% of our team are civilian airmen, and they’re doing great,
John Venable:
Fantastic. Thank you. Ma’am Stephen, let me turn back to you. We talked about supply chains earlier in regard to producing missiles, producing aircraft and making that streamline and predictable. But those those same conditions are very important for mission capability rates. Supply chains are critical for that. AFMC is obviously improving input from both organic and defense industrial bases to that end. But could you talk a little bit specifically about what Lockheed Martin is doing to ensure that our supply chains are moving and healthy, sure.
Steve Botwinik:
So, you know, one of the things that we’re doing, obviously, we talked about that, the importance of the supply chain at any given time. For instance, Lockheed Martin has hundreds of employees out in the supply chain, both mentoring and coaching, ensuring that, you know, we can get the product that we need to build and try and reduce times, right? One of the one of the key things we’re trying to get after is reducing that time from, like you said, from contract till the time munitions are on the ramp. There’s an old saying in the munitions arena, right? How many parts does it take to make a cruise missile? The answer is, all of them. And the reason you know so it doesn’t matter how insignificant the part may be, if it takes you two years to get that part, you’re waiting on that one part. That one part, and so trying to really get after that is one of the key things. The other one we’re doing is we’re investing pretty significantly, is venture capital, Lockheed Martin, as many of my industry peers are as well, into the ecosystem to bring more suppliers along. One of the clear, obvious ways is to increase the supply base, to drive additional suppliers into the supply base and to coach and mentor them along. So we’re making significant investments there and really trying to expand the supply base, both here, in the US as well as within our allies. And that would obviously help contribute to the supply base. One of the other things we’re really getting at is, and I’ll talk about this notion of time, value of capability, right? Like, I think we’re all familiar with the idea of time value of money, right, $1 today is worth more than, say, $1 510, years from now. I’m not really a finance guy, but I think that math works. The idea that a munition today has more value, particularly when it comes to deterrence, than some munition of additional capability at some point in the future, right? Makes sense. We want to have munitions today on the ramp as best as we can. So let’s get after the requirements that drive those lead times, right? And so we’re starting with many, many concepts now where we’re essentially revamping the design process within Lockheed Martin to not just look at performance, not just look at cost, but look at the supply chain as we do the design from inception, right? That’s, that’s, that’s key there is to be able to drive the design, to reflect the supply chain, both today and in the future, as well as the lead time understanding of those of those parts that are going to drive your design. But even with legacy systems today, I think one of the things we need to do, and Lockheed Martin’s already started, Martin’s already starting to look at it, which is what requirements today on our systems, whether it’s a patriot advanced capability, a Loras and a jasm, what requirements today drive those lead times? So I’ll give you again a simple example. Most industrial electronics microchips in particular, work at minus 40 degrees Celsius, the military requirement usually is around minus 55 degrees, another 15 degrees lower right. That’s pretty cold, by the way. So what do we do? We take those industrial chips and we either repackage them, we redesign them, we take them as is, and we re screen them, we test them. By definition, we’re constraining the supply of those chips to get to minus 55 so the question becomes, what operational delta would there be if we accepted minus 40 and we released all of those parts now into the supply chain, we, by definition, can shorten now our supply chain time right to field by relieving that requirement as an example, right? So that’s a I’m not suggesting that by relieving that one requirement, we’re going to suddenly open the floodgates of munitions, but that’s one example of probably a whole series of them we’re looking at that says, if, with our partners and PEOs, right, and the program managers on the government side said, Hey, let me understand the implication of that requirement. Uh, from an employment perspective, or maybe even a logistics perspective, and is it worth it to trade that today and get additional stockpile right, recognizing I can still go to minus 55 later on in the future, or maybe it’s a requirement I don’t have to do ever again. But let’s talk about that time phase requirement. What requirement could I relieve today that yields additional capability on the field today, and that’s where we’re starting to get at kind of looking at those requirements, which ones did we impose on ourselves? Because in a lot of times, we have very high level requirements, right? General, Lyons, again yesterday, just spoke about, he’d love to get to one page of requirements. I think all of us would love that. Right? So of those requirements, which ones did we impose on ourselves, which ones were imposed by the government and which ones are driving our supply chain? And let’s go have a conversation about that. I think that’s one of the key ways today, even with legacy systems that are in production, that we can get after faster supply, faster times,
John Venable:
Great points. And this operating temperature of a microprocessing that’s really important. So that’s going to be on the test questions before you guys leave, I’m going to finish this with a discussion about readiness and general Gandhi. I’d like to turn to you on this. Historically, we know that flying hours and sortie rates for our pile is very important. Back in the Cold War days when General Deb Tula was out on the front lines defending the world against the Soviet Horde, he was getting between 203 100 hours a year, as was everyone else, and he was ready to go to war. Today, our pilots are getting around 130 hours, which is the same number the Soviet pilots were getting, and all of the Allied pilots were just scoffing at them, because we knew we would club them. So today, the Chinese have kind of flipped that on us. Reportedly, the Chinese fighter pilots, they’ve increased production of their jets, and they’re getting upwards of 200 hours of flying time a year. Could you talk about that challenge and what the what you’re doing and what your staff is doing to address it?
Maj. Gen. Akshai Gandhi:
Certainly. So as general, Alvin has already spoken, we need to fly more, and that’s the truth. Now, one thing I’d like to talk to is, you know, I’ve been flying operationally for about 30 years now, so I’ve been pretty fortunate with that regards. But during that time, I can’t think of too many times where I was flying consistently, three to four times a week. It was episodically. Certainly, when we surged, we did do that. With that, we’re still able to get pretty effective training. You know, we did that level of training and had the opportunity to fight an allied force and in the opening days of Iraqi Freedom, and I did not feel unprepared to go into those environments. Now the new environment is more complex, as they have become over time, so what we have to focus on is with the resources we have available, which are finite. I’m not sure that will be resourced to the point that we can get back to those 1980s time frame of flying rates. But one other capacity that we have is with the simulators. Now, a simulator can’t do everything, but there are some things that we can do in there, quite frankly, better than we can do in a live fly situation, such as some of the advanced adversaries, the numbers of adversaries. Because our simulator environment is so robust, we’re developing new capabilities where we’re tying multiple environments together, and we’re able to work together as a joint force in the simulator environment. And that, you know, you get lots of sets and reps with that meaning I don’t have to fly out to the airspace and fly back. I can. Okay, we finished that mission set. Some things went well. Some things didn’t go well. We hit the reset button. We go do it again, and we do it better, and we’re able to get more sets and reps that way. Additionally, there’s some things that we don’t want to show our hand to to the enemy, and we can do that in that simulator environment pretty effectively. Now let’s talk about flying, because that’s where your question started. Absolutely we have to fly, because you can’t do everything in the simulator. There are some things that you do out there that live flies, the only place that you get that experience. And if you take a look at a lot of our you know, company, grade, you know, your captains and lieutenants in the in the squadrons nowadays, they do a great job with a lot of the mission execution. They’re studied up. They’re reading about the tactics. They’re executing them well. But some of the other parts that are just as important are the administrative pieces. Now we say admin and we think, okay, that’s kind of paperwork stuff we call the admin portion. Flying is getting out to where you’re supposed to go, executing it, managing and leading your formations, whether it be your four ship or an entire strike package. Those are. Skill sets that they struggle with a little bit, and that’s where the flying needs to come into play, where we need to develop that a little bit more. So I think, you know, three times a week with the high fidelity simulators that we have, is probably a good place to be, sometimes a little bit more. And the other key thing is taking a look at what are we giving credit to for, as far as readiness events, so the flying hour itself, just just flying being up in the air. Yes, there’s a benefit to that, but does that get us everything that we need? We need to take a look at what we’re measuring and making sure that those measurements are effective to get towards the readiness state that we need to need to be. Some of the challenges that I’ve seen in my experiences, especially in combat, sometimes the hard part is just getting to the fight. You know, weather is out there and it presents challenges, or the plan because of the weather or some other factor is impacted, and the assets that you think are going to be there aren’t. And you have to make an adjustment on the fly as a mission commander and utilizing your command and control resources out there to help you do that, in addition to the simulators, and we’re kind of starting this in our training command. We’re starting this at day one is we’re partnered with industry and academia to take the systems that are out there, take the advanced technologies, instead of doing things the way we’ve always done in the past, following the same methods, now applying those technologies and capabilities into the process of training our folks, and then we can bring these to the operational squadrons as well. So now your training capacity is expanded upon beyond just the flying hour. Again, the flying time is essential. You need those sets and reps in the air, but you also need to focus on the tactics, and we can do it both together.
John Venable:
I love the answer. Really. Grateful, ma’am. Did you want to that clean up there or see she was preparing for the next question? So we’re actually at the end of this is Final Jeopardy. We’re coming to the end. And I know I’ve asked you a battery of questions, but I want to give each of you the opportunity to take on an issue or a subject that we haven’t addressed, or re attack, something that we have General Hurry. We’ll start with you sure.
Lt. Gen. Linda S. Hurry:
So you know, we have got to generate air power. You know, we’ve been asked to increase readiness. We’ve been increased asked to increase the warrior ethos. We’ve increased the deterrent capabilities of our Air Force. One of the things that as a backbone to that is really regenerating the supply chain, regenerating the health of the shelf, quite frankly, you know, the good news is, we’ve got the support of our senior leaders to get after that. In fact, we got a $1.5 billion ask to actually put assets back on the shelf so that we can generate the readiness we need and build the capability. The other thing is, we have got to get out of this just in time cycle. Okay, I’m an operational logistician. Just in time scares the heck out of me. I want to be able to execute the tip fit now. I want to be able to position things forward so that you know when we deploy wherever it is, they’re there, they’re ready. And we’re working on that. We’re expanding the repair network capabilities. We’re expanding the ingenuity of our workforce to try to take these digital mindset, these digital tools, and generate the readiness we need. What I can say, we’ve all been asked for deterrence. We’ve been asked to generate readiness. We’ve been asked to generate a warrior ethos. I can tell you, AFMC is on it. We’re already at it, and we’re doing exactly what our new SecDef has asked us to do. Thank you for allowing us to be here. Yeah.
John Venable:
Thank you, ma’am, for being here. And I’ll turn to general Gandhi. Your turn, sir.
Maj. Gen. Akshai Gandhi:
All right, thank you again. Thanks for having us at this panel. I’m going to talk to our air crew out there, and you know, like you to know that we’re on the verge of getting to back to where we want to be, and we think in 2028 we’ll be producing 1500 pilots a year, which is what we’ve been striving for for quite some time. I think we’ve also kind of really won the readiness argument. It’s certainly a priority of the Secretary of Defense, and as these events, as these investments, hit the flight line, we’re going to need to focus on getting the most out of everything that we go out there and do so to the air crew, don’t skimp on the debriefs. Focus on. Advanced tactics and utilize the Sims and other capabilities that we have to the maximum extent possible. We don’t want to get into a high end war, and the way we do that is by being ready and focusing on what the threat is, and if it does come to the point where we end up in an active conflict, we will win. We have the capability do that. And you know, at the end of the day, we will make a device decisive impact. And the way we the way we ensure that, is to make sure that you all are as ready as possible. Thank you. Thank you,
Steve Botwinik:
Sir and Steve, I know we’re out of time. So JV, I just want to thank you again for hosting the panel, inviting industry to be part of this team discussion, particularly when we talk about how we surge capacity, how we get additional munitions out there. The supply chain is obviously the critical item here, and I think just working together as a team to alleviate that, ensure a robust supply chain, and then get ahead of that market demand, like we talked about, that will allow our Air Force to fly, fight and win.
John Venable:
Fantastic. Well, it’s been a great session. Would you give our three panelists a great round of applause if.