Faster, Smarter, Bolder: Big Bets to Achieve the NDS, 2019 Air Space & Cyber Conference, Dr. Will Roper, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics.
Transcript
[Announcer] Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage AFA’s President, General Orville Wright.
Well, good afternoon, is everybody coffeed up and fired up? Well, it’s my honor, and I keep saying this over and over, to be your Air Force Association President. And even more, all of us together, supporting our airmen and our families. And with Dr. Roper’s arrival here in just a minute or two, continuing, in every way possible, to strengthen the warrior airmen and industry partnership. We need to be inside the enemy’s OODA loop in every way possible. And oh, by the way, the Chinese would not be happy about us all meeting here today as we take on the peer competitor threats that our airmen are gonna face from the Baltics to the South China Sea. So, I hope Dr. Roper’s gonna show up here in just a second, and as a– Back there, let me talk a little bit about Will. He is breaking paradigms, as you all know. He is bringing energy, and oh, by the way, a good deal of intellect, to transform the way we fight. And as I watch Acting Secretary Donovan and Chief Goldfein empower this young man, get out of the way. And again, we have across industry, men and women, who, by the way, high-powered engineers who are every bit as good or better than Will. And he would tell you that. And the good news is, out there flying and fighting in airspace and cyberspace, we have a generation of airmen who are probably, with their engineering degrees and their warfighting experience, the best warfighters we’ve ever had, especially within this environment that we face today, and the danger, undaunted, really, advanced technology we’re facing against peer threats. So, Dr. Roper? Come on out, and by the way, if you don’t have these socks, it was his idea. This is also, by the way, generation one. So, the next generation will be coming out any time, kinda like the Century City fighter experience. So, thank you.
Good afternoon, everyone. Wow, what a good-looking crowd. I just want to thank Orville for the introduction. I also want to thank him for the great honor of doing AFA Crazy Socks. But I do have to set the record straight. When I told AFA that Crazy Socks with an Air Force motif would be a great idea, I was thinking something more like this, a little less this. So, Orville, this is a great first step. Innovation is a continual process. (audience laughs) (clears throat) We’re gonna take this to the next level next year. I wanted to start with a video just so you could see just a snapshot of the wonderful things that happen in Air Force acquisition every day, every week. And I hate that we use terms like acquisition, which are very much an inside Washington term, because acquisition is your tech and operations company, and I have the great privilege to be part of the team that brings amazing technology to bear in airspace and cyberspace, that uses new technology to sustain systems better, that’s bringing in new software and IT practices so that, as the Secretary introduced, we do become a digital service. And it happens all the time. So, Air Force, if you don’t think of yourself as a technology company, you are, and you’re an amazing one. No other company in the world can do what you do, can dominate on all the forefronts that you do, spanning as many technologies as you do. And when we say compete, which is a term industry uses as well, competition is a dead serious business in our game. That’s my message today. What I want to convey to you is what we have to do to become a competitive acquisition system in this century. That is going to be the message every year, every AFA, because the world is different today than it was in the time of the Air Force that was bequeathed to us. And we have to change with it. We have to change everything about how we do business. And I probably don’t have to convince you of that. All right, think about how different the world is today, think about how different technology changes today. So, I’m gonna come back to that theme, but before we go down to the technologies, and the speeding things up, and the working with startups, and all the other things that are not nice-to-dos, they’re must-dos, I want to say why we can pull this off. And if you were able to sit through Sir Richard Branson’s talk this morning, you probably saw in that a snapshot, a microcosm of what we need, Air Force-wide. And it’s empowered people that are authorized, and encouraged, and protected to take risk. Air Force, the greatest gift that I have in this job, thanks to my predecessors, is an amazing acquisition team. I would not say it if it wasn’t true. The training, the technical expertise, the focus on STEM in higher education pays off. I learn something every day from the amazing acquisition professionals that are in these front rows. I cannot imagine why the Air Force would take any other theory of victory for competing for the future other than delegating down the authorities that Congress has given us, back to the lowest possible level that can execute the mission, can execute commanders’ intent. And by the way, isn’t this something we all know? You get, clearly, when you come into the Air Force, the value, the potency, of the OODA loop in the operational side of the Air Force. So, folks, have you heard of the OODA loop? Let’s see a show of hands. Wow, that’s a lot. So, if you haven’t heard of it, it’s this idea from John Boyd that the speed at which you can make decisions on the battlefield is the thing you have to dominate to win. So, it’s observe, orient, decide, act. You have to observe the threat that you’re facing. You have to orient yourself, understand the direction it’s going. Decide what to do, and act expeditiously. If you do this faster than your opponent, you might make a bad choice or two, but on the whole, you should be able to respond, even to your own bad choices, and win. So, contrast that idea, the OODA loop in operations, with acquisition, is there an equivalent? Of course there is. We observe the threat and the trajectory of technology, both in defense and in commercial industry. We orient ourselves to the trends, and we’re gonna talk about quite a few of them today. What’s changing? And you probably can guess, the things we need to orient ourselves to the most are changing outside of the defense industrial base. It’s an amazing time for technology, but it’s changing outside of the old model we had in the Cold War. We’ll have to adapt with it. You have to decide what to do, obviously, make a choice for where you think there’ll be advantage, where a technology will mature in time to deliver for the warfighter. And you have to be able to act with a system that is leaner, meaner, and faster than your opponent’s. Repeat, repeat, repeat. And if you want to think of an analogy, that you can probably imagine what it would be like, I’m gonna guess that, if I asked for a show of hands, how many people brought an iPhone of some type today? Lotta hands. What about the Android users out there? (audience member whoops) (audience laughs) Love passion for technology, live it, brother! Look– (audience laughs) So, just imagine, let’s go on a thought experiment, that we’re on the design team for the next phone. Now, we know we have a competitor. No matter which side of the smartphone divide you’re on, you know the other side can build the same kind of tech you can. You’ve gotta look at a whole landscape of changing technology that could give your next-generation phone a one-up, in terms of what it offers to the consumer. Or maybe you’re going a different way. Maybe you’re looking to bring the cost down, so, rather than look for a breakthrough technology, you’re looking for a breakthrough cost, so you can change the price point. Well, there’s a very difficult calculus, and it probably doesn’t make sense to keep going on the imagination stroll this way, but I’m gonna guess that you would agree that the thing you would come to quickly, the conclusion that you would believe is your strategy to win, is that fielding the best phone too late is a losing strategy, no matter how good it is. That, if you can field a better phone sooner, you will win. That you have to own time to market. That is not how we talk in government acquisition and government tech. We have a model that supposes that we understand the future. Too many technologies today to understand it. That presumes that we can derive the right thing to build to dominate, and that we can build it in time to achieve our victory. That model doesn’t make sense today. There are so many technologies that can change, that the only way you can imagine staying dominant is not to derive the closed solution for the future. Instead, it’s being able to continually impose new capabilities, new concepts, new ideas, so that your adversary is responding to you, your competitor is responding to you. So, if we can dominate the acquisition OODA loop, then I’m willing to hit the I believe button that we’ll win. I’m willing to believe that it’s achievable because we have the people, we have the talent. And the talent, by the way, is not just the tech workforce, the operational acquisition workforce that does the purchasing. It is in the warfighting community, the MAGE comps that we work with every day, could not have better partnerships. They get it, that we’ve gotta somehow fit requirements into the trajectory that commercial technologies are going. We have to think differently. We have to value speed over just the bottom line, nickels and dimes. And it’s wonderful to have those close relationships. If you take nothing else from the talk today, other than we gotta compete, just know that this is a team sport. There is a warfighting side, a financial side, a legal side. Everyone is involved in making this tech company go fast. So, that’s why I think we’ll achieve victory, but we gotta change our processes. And so, what I want to walk you through today are some things that we need to keep trending in Air Force acquisition, we need them to trend to the point that they go viral, if we’re gonna be the type of tech company we want to be. They’re going to hit around a series of buckets, but they fall underneath a general strategy, that we need to be faster than our opponent, we need to have no blind spots in the industry base. Meaning, if anyone’s working on a transformative tech, we need to work with them. That we need to continue to expand the number of disruptive concepts that we look at. So, some of those were introduced by the Secretary earlier. Things like Skyborg and the Valkryie are creating a new kind of aircraft at an unprecedented speed. Those are the kinds of things that make your opponent react to you. And finally, something I’m truly passionate about, and I’ll go into it in a little detail, is bringing innovation into sustainment to achieve cost savings, so we can bankroll this whole strategy. The Secretary mentioned earlier we’re starting to bring predictive maintenance into the Air Force. I’m gonna go deeper into that, but Air Force, there is money to be saved in the side of the Air Force that defies entropy every day, that keeps old things working even when they’re well past their service life. But rather than talk those strategic buckets, I want to talk about the trends that I see. There are things that are trending inside Air Force acquisition, and so, this talk is gonna follow three different hashtags today. So, I’m gonna start by explaining why we need being a deft Air Force trending in Air Force acquisition. Deft means that you’re fast, you’re agile, and you’re smart, what a great word. We’ve gotta be all of them, because we face an opponent in China that certainly is. We have got to be faster, smarter, and more agile. More to follow on that. Digital, introduced by the Secretary. Digital is the technology that’s changing the fastest, right? Software literally eating the world. Well, we could have it eat our adversaries and opponents if we’re not be careful, and be turned around on us. It obeys none of the rules of the previous century. You all know that, you all live it every day. I live it, too. The revolution in smart tech empowered by digital. The government has historically been bad on it. I’ve got great news on this front, Air Force, so let that be your teaser. And finally, we have to be more disruptive, and that’s something that I see all Air Force leadership embracing, that if left to our own devices, we tend to be a linear service. We tend to build better versions of what we’ve had in the past, because no one can match them. And with an opponent as capable as China, that’s not a strategy that’s likely to last for very long. So, going linear is usually not as good as taking on orthogonal turn. And the disruptive ideas can come from anywhere. They can come from an operator in the field, a researcher in the lab, someone that’s building technology in a defense company, or from someone that doesn’t even know defense working in a new commercial tech startup. These are things that I see currently trending. Some are viral, and some aren’t yet, but we need all of them to be things that are busting through the tops of the charts, if we’re gonna be the type of tech company that we need to be. So, let’s start with the deft part, let’s start with speeding up the process itself. The idea of focusing on speed makes sense if you believe this idea of the iPhone Samsung competition, right? Time’s the only thing that matters. Saving costs matters up to a degree, but if you’re totally focused on that and sacrificing months or years, then you’re going to lose the time-to-market race. Our Air Force programs have done an amazing job using new authorities given to us by Congress. The Secretary mentioned this morning there’s an authority called Section 804, I won’t bore you with what it is. Just know, it empowers that program manager to move, it empowers the program manager to shrink the OODA loop, and to make decisions faster. Now, you might think, eh, I’m maybe saving a few weeks here, a few months here. As the Secretary mentions, it’s saving years, so this authority has already removed 100 years of unnecessary schedule. This program, which is one of our hypersonic weapons, five years alone, just because it is the government’s propensity to keep adding steps and checks, and then people have to check those checks and steps, until, before you know it, you’re talking to so many people that have no idea how to build a hypersonic weapon, and yet, they say they’re in charge. This gets them out of the way and allows us to return to what I believe has always been the best acquisition approach, which is good, old-fashioned prototyping. Quit following analysis paralysis. Yes, there’s always something better to do, there’s always a reason to crunch a number, but you’re not gonna believe it over good, old-fashioned real-world learning. Disruptive concept, disruptive ideas need dirt on them. The real world tends to bring its own variables that are not captured in the lab. So, I’m extremely pleased with how the Air Force has been able to embrace tailoring to the mindset. It’s not just weapons programs, satellite programs, on average, are removing four years of total time. Software programs are removing, on average, three-and-a-half years of time. It’s just time that, if we allow it, becomes an ankle weight that slows that program down and charges that time tax to the warfighter. So, we’ve reached 100 years, that’s a great goal. We’ll try to reach 150 by this time next year, hopefully a little sooner than that. It gets harder and harder the more we go. We’ve already trimmed the largest portions of fat. From here on out, it becomes the difficult work of using the scalpel and not the hatchet, but every day, every week counts. The programs I am the most proud of are the ones that have come in with just a month’s savings. It means they took the time to value that month in a long-term competition that could go decades. Those months, added up across all programs, add up to years and decades, so, well done, Air Force. I won’t belabor this anymore, this is just where we are now. We do not put unnecessary schedule into our plans. We will never be faster than the fastest schedule we will own. So, there’s another way that we want to be a deft Air Force, and that’s working with a broader industry base. Now, let me take you in the wayback machine to the Cold War to understand why industry-based expansion is important. It kinda helps to know what happened from the early Air Force up through the ’70s, and then into the Cold War. I love being at AFAs and getting to be around heroes from history, like the Tuskegee Airmen, ’cause it’s living history, and I think about what it would’ve been like to see changes occur decade after decade. Well, the early Air Force, there were lots of companies who could build airplanes for us, and airplanes came out every couple of years. They weren’t extremely complicated, they weren’t the integrated weapons systems they are today, but many companies were building them. Even up until the ’70s, every four years, a new airplane was coming out. And then, things really slowed down in the Cold War, and there were a variety of forces that were pushing on them. One I just mentioned, that airplanes became much more than airplanes. You needed a supersonic airplane with cutting-edge stealth, with cutting-edge radar, with cutting-edge weapons, I mean, there are five challenges right there. So, the technology need to have the leap ahead went up. The other thing that is often overlooked about the Cold War is how expensive it was to develop technology during that period, right? For those of you that are, say, millennials or younger, right, the idea that it would take the full might of the U.S. government, or the Soviet Union, to push a technology forward, and that there was no way for a private company that’s small, anything less than a large IBM, to do it, seems completely foreign, right? A person with a laptop and connection to the internet can create technology today. Technology is cheap, which is why everyone is creating it. Technology is everywhere. So, sometimes people will say that the acquisition system broke, or it slowed down, or we’re not doing as well as we did. We’re really doing as well as we’ve done, we’re just now one piece in a much bigger world. So, something bad happened, though, when technology slowed down. Programs slowed down. So, when you reached a new technology milestone, whatever it was, you needed to buy a lot. And so, the way our systems started working with industry, when there was a tech breakthrough, we would do a large production buy, it would cost a lot of money to do that tech development, cost a lot of money to do the large production buy, so we’d need to sustain it for a long time. And we’ve gotten accustomed to new programs only occurring every decade or worse. You know what that’s done? We’ve gone from having over two dozen vendors who can build a tactical aircraft to two or three. We are at the critical point, folks, that if we don’t start thinking about the industry base strategically, we could collapse to two, and then to one. And so, there’s a lot that we’re going to have to do, and I’m gonna end on the thing I’m most excited on, but I wanna give a shout-out to a couple of groups from our space acquisition community who are doing awesome. So, they told me to say, “Space is the place,” so I’ve done that, J.T. So, our launch program is awesome. You heard about some of the launches earlier. The launch program is investing with commercial launch providers to not make them defense companies only, it’s to make them where they’re capable of servicing either a defense launch or a commercial launch. They’re actually creating a new U.S. industry so that we can be dominant in space, and bequeath an industry base that isn’t just providing warfighting for General Raymond, it’s providing a competitive economic advantage to the U.S. That’s a wonderful way of thinking of partnering with industry to expand the number of companies who can fulfill a need. There’s another great set of efforts in our satcom program, so, tactical satcom, strategic satcom, and polar satcom are all using prototyping with multiple companies, not because they think every company’s gonna deliver a final satellite, but it’s so they can take the next step in their technology evolution, so that the next time we have to build a satellite in future, a satcom satellite in future, there are more companies that can. These people are heroes to me, folks, because that is not the normal way that people are trained, to think about the state of satcom, not for their program, but years, and even decades, into the future. Completely awesome. And I’m super-excited about a research lab that’s working on a project to bring what’s very interesting about the defense department. We think of ourselves as being a funder, but you may not think of yourselves as a market. It’s kind of an odd word for us to use in government. But we are, we’re actually quite a big market, right? The Air Force, $160 billion a year. We pay different price points than commercial industry. We tend to pay a little higher. We have different risk tolerances because of the warfighting need. And so, one of the things I’ve been challenging our acquisition community is to think about where our defense market has value. And there’s an area we’re really excited to explore with commercial industry, and that’s in the self-flying cars technology boom that we think will happen. You can imagine that being in Uber cars around the country, well, that sounds cool, but it’s gonna be a tough challenge to get them certified for safe use. Much easier in our world, we have our own safety process. Doing logistics on the battlefield is probably a pretty low bar. But every flight hour that we’re flying in the Air Force is worth millions, if not billions, to those private companies that are wanting to take over this domestic urban mobility boom that’s predicted. It’s a wonderful way to think about using the defense market as a partnership opportunity to expand the industry base. So, for our space programs, awesome, for research lab, well done, it’s gonna be fun to see what comes out of them. We need this everywhere, right? We are at a critical point where, if we’re not thinking this way, the base may collapse to a point of weakness. So, the Secretary mentioned this morning we are super-excited about what’s happening in the world of venture capital tech startup, and everything else that falls in that commercial tech investment envelope. Air Force, this is viral. It has been so amazing to see how far, how fast we have come at being a credible, respected investor, let’s put that in quotes. We’re not owning equity in these companies, but we’re playing the same role that a commercial investor was. We’re giving that company capital and access to our market. It’s been amazing. The Secretary mentioned the success of Pitch Day and the fact that we were able to award contracts and pay those companies. It wasn’t just putting them on contract, they had money in their accounts in less than 15 minutes on average. So, if you’re very small company, that matters, it really does. It’s the difference between making payroll or not. If you’re a scale-up company, maybe not as critical to get it within 15 minutes, but the fact that we do that shows that we truly care about doing business at the speed of relevance. So, we’ve done a great job of getting out and showing we can do it, five pitch events have been done, there are 13 total that are planned before the end of this year, and we’re very excited to see what’s gonna happen in November for Space Pitch Day. Given that space commercial innovation is booming, I expect some crazy ideas. So, I’m gonna be there just for, like, my mental health, to help me recover from being in the Pentagon. Although, I did, Sir Richard Branson did give me back a little bit of pep in my step today. I thought, how cool to be working on the things that Virgin is doing. So, I’m excited to see what the future will be, but now our issue is scale. So, I hope at next AFA, I will talking about the scale of our venture work. So, we’re still not one Air Force to the outside world. I’m working very closely with AFWERX to try to have a standard open door to the outside world, so you don’t have to be an Air Force expert to work with us. Make the way that you work through our small business accounts, and by the way, we’ve had over $1 billion a year to work with these companies. And we don’t expect much from it, and so we wanna bring this money to bear in a way that isn’t just for Air Force purposes, although it needs to be. We want it to be for dual use. We want these companies to be successful with us, but then also successful commercially, and what’s really exciting about the future is we’ve just done our first events where we have co-invested, where we the Air Force have guaranteed to match commercial investment in a company dollar for dollar up to a certain amount. Air Force, if we get this right, so many of the things that we are interested in are commercially viable. There is huge capital to touch, money multiplies, but those commercial investors have to believe that when they see the Air Force investment, it comes from a one-stop shop that’s a consistent validator of that company’s ability to work successfully within our marketplace. And one of the things that I’m hoping will happen after we get these 13 pitch events done is that we’ll host one big mega-pitch event at the Air Force level, where we really are trying to turn companies into future unicorns. And we’re already seeing companies get close to the billion-dollar investment mark that are working with the Air Force Small Business Program. So, amazing progress, companies working with us, over 400 contracts awarded over the last four months. Amazing, but we’ve gotta take it to a next level, and it’s gotta be consistent and scalable. So, let’s go to the last area of being deft, being a better-processed, faster, more agile, and smart. This is all of them. If you are here and represent sustainment or logistics, just know that you have a special place in my heart. You are doing amazing work with very little technology to aid you. That’s been my consistent feedback to Air Force leadership. If we were a company, invest in sustainment, we will see that money back. Yeah, I’ve realized, not knowing a ton about sustainment and logistics, that these people are the difference between having an Air Force and an air show. There are lots of countries that can go fly an air show, but the ability to go fly and put an airplane anywhere in the globe and sustain it is truly what delineates the U.S. Air Force from all others. That comes from this amazing community. I’ve got to give a shout-out to our Rapid Sustainment Office and our Life Cycle Management Center for doing amazing work bringing in technology, as the Secretary referenced. Predictive maintenance is already saving money, increasing availability by as much as 10%, and we’ve only started for two months. And the thing that’s pretty awesome, is this isn’t something we’re having to push to the field. There are already 16 different fleets that have signed up to be predicting failures, as opposed to responding to them, by the year 2020. 3-D printing, going like gangbusters. Over 1,000 parts printed and out in the field, and I expect that to continue going, because we’re not just thinking about certifying parts, we’re certifying the process. We’ve got great partnerships with companies like General Electric to help us understand, how do they do this on their commercial side? And then, how do we harness the best practices from industry and adopt them? And this picture, this here, let’s see, can we put the picture back up? Wonderful, that’s great, should’ve asked for something bigger. So, this is from one of the programs you may have heard of, it’s called Mad Hatter, and it’s where we’re bringing our software expertise to bear to help Lockheed Martin and the JPO to fix the logistics systems for the F-35, to bring in modern software development so that we can make things easier for maintainers. And we went from having very difficult challenges with those maintainers to removing over 10 hours of their workload in less than two months of coding, right? We’ve gotta start thinking of these investments. Yes, yes, they’re money that comes out of some other coffer, but that’s 10 hours back in that airman’s life. Amazing savings. So, hopefully this is enough to stand that we need to have smart practices everywhere, we need to continually innovate, continually accelerate, continually bring in lean process and efficiency, so that we continue to look more and more like a commercial powerhouse, like a Toyota would look to the automotive industry. But it’s not enough, we have to have more trends in Air Force, and you probably can guess that, I’ve already hinted at this one, I’ve teed it up with Mad Hatter, and that’s digital. So, I think it’s fair to say if our process isn’t faster, we’ve already lost, but right behind that is, if we don’t learn to do software well, then we’ve already lost. Software is what binds everything together, and I spoke at last AFA, but I’ll hit the point of why government has had a tough time with software. A year and a half ago, we were using the same development process that was used in the 1970s. It’s called Waterfall, and you’d probably be just about as safe being in a barrel going over one than relying on systems that use that code. It is a very cumbersome process. And so, you all know, there’s been a software revolution, that’s not what the Googles and Amazons use. They use amazing tools, and a process called Agile, or DevSecOps, that allow code to be done continuously, fluidly, and securely. And I have to admit, coming in to the Air Force, I thought, this coding challenge we have is gonna be really hard. Well, it hasn’t been. In fact, this is only a handful of the amazing software programs around the Air Force. Kessel Run was given two awards today. They tend to be remembered with the cool Star Wars name. But you may not have heard of BESPIN, working on logistics, or EDDGE, doing amazing code in the software engineering group in the 309th. Or Mad Hatter, I just mentioned, helping F-35. Level Up, working on cyber, and every time I turn around, there are more of these. I think we have 31 rapid coding organizations right now, and it’s not just the software factories with cool sci-fi names. Programs like F-16 are bringing in a new software technology called Kubernetes that will allow them to move code back and forth between development and production at lightning speed, setting up the path to get to Artificial Intelligence. And our B-21 program has taken a challenge from me to take on a series of software accelerations called digital bullet challenges. The ultimate goal is to get to a Raider that can land with better software than it took off with. To get to the point that software is a living, breathing warfighter advantage, but to do it in a way that’s safe and secure. Now, the last two things, safe and secure, are no small feats. So, we have a lot of great software work, but it’s all going in different directions. And the big shift we’re going to be making over the next 60 days is getting all of our software development environments at the unclass and secret level into our Air Force cloud that we just awarded. It’s called Cloud One, it’s a pretty good name for a service that has Air Force One, and since Sir Richard Branson named everything something one, we may have beaten him to Cloud One. It’s a name that you need to put on your radar, because as we get our software development into Cloud, then what happens? Our data naturally lives there. What happens when our data naturally lives there? Then, we set ourselves up for what we see now in commercial industry, Artificial Intelligence and all the other benefits that come from getting infrastructure and platform right. But we have to treat security as a high priority. And I’ve gotta give a shout-out to the team, from our Chief Software Officer and all the software factories taking on security before it’s too late. And the thing they’ve convinced me of, security doesn’t mean you have to go slow. And in fact, the more secure you go, the faster you can go. So, this is gonna be a little painful, Air Force, but if we’re gonna be a digital service, we gotta look like one, from infrastructure to platform to apps. So, as the Marines say, our next evolution is about to begin. Let’s go on to the last, being a disruptive Air Force. So, part of this, you can probably guess what’s gonna pop up. We should always be looking at game-changing warfighting ideas. This is mainly what I did when I was in OSD. I love thinking about technologies that will change the way we fight future wars. The Secretary mentioned the Skyborg earlier, gonna make systems collaborate together, fighters with lower-end airplanes, so that we can take risk in a smart way. Other programs that are being pushed right now in the collaboration scheme are making weapons work together. This is all setting up for the Chief’s big priority, which is Advanced Battle Management System, which is trying to make a true internet-type effect in the Air Force, where systems separated by space and time work together seamlessly. This is gonna be a big challenge, but if we get it right, it should change the future of warfighting. Super-excited about our Chief Architect and all the great work that they’ve done to create a program around the highway and not the trucks, as the Chief says. But I typically like talking about technologies that are gonna change future warfighting. I want to talk about something a little different, and try to explain why I’m excited about it, and the help that I need from industry to achieve it, and that’s creating technologies disruptively. Let’s go back to the previous slide. Can you help me back up, Paul? It’s a slight nuance, but it’s really important. So, this is creating disruptive technology, and the next slide, Paul, is creating technology disruptively. This has been the big aha for me, the technologies that I am most excited about are not the technologies that are the end-state warfighting technology, it’s not the tips of the spear, cool and necessary though they are, it’s the technologies that change how we make those spears. Everything I’ve talked about today, about a declining industry base, a pace of programs that is too slow, the thing that gets me most excited is a way to accelerate the system again. And there is a holy trinity of technologies that we are starting to see be applied in programs that should change everything about how we build future systems. Now, I’ve already mentioned one. One is Agile software development, that’s gotta continue going viral until we’re a digital Air Force. It speeds up the pace at which you can update things, allows things to be connected together. I’m gonna guess that that’s kind of the no-brainer. The second is open architecture, which we’ve historically been bad at, precisely because programs are so few and far between, industry has no financial incentive to design things to be open, right? If most of your profit comes in production and sustainment, and I say, and why don’t you choose to give up that profit so that I can modify and change things, you’re gonna say, uh-huh, don’t have a business case that closes. So, we’re going to have to have a business model that incentivizes open architecture. We have some good ideas about how to do that. The third technology is becoming a Pentagon buzzword, and I want to try to prevent it from going that path, and that is digital engineering. I want to do another thought experiment with you. Y’know, we the Air Force are already accustomed to digital knowledge equating to real-world learning, right? They’re called simulators, right? They’re the lifeblood of keeping our readiness. When we put pilots in them, and they fly, we accept that there is a very credible and beneficial translation of learning to the real world. Now, it’s not perfect, it’s why we still put people up on flight hours, but there’s value. Now, something amazing, amazing, is happening in design of aircraft and satellites, and if we can make our next generation of programs harness it, then we have a chance to flip the script on how fast the future Air Force can be here. So, keeping in that thought experiment, imagine if you could have a completely digital model, not just of the airplane or satellite that you’re building, but the building process itself, the assembly line, where every person is, where all the machines are that make all the manipulations of the system. And not just model it, optimize it, change the design so you can build it faster, more upgradeable, more adaptable, and you could do all of that in the digital world over and over again, before you ever have to bend the first piece of metal. Imagine if you could build the hundredth airplane, or hundredth satellite, like that level of proficiency, you could achieve on satellite or airplane one. So at one, just as if you’re at 100. That is here, that’s here if we choose to harness it. And so, our goal, our hope, is to use a low-hanging opportunity in our Next Generation Air Dominance programs to start bringing in this holy trinity, Agile software, open architecture, digital engineering, to see if we can fully build, design, and optimize digitally, so that when we hit the real world, we’re fast, we’re correct, and we’re lower in cost. And the inspiration for this is something that I have to live as I walk into the Pentagon each day. Let’s cue the video, please. Every day I walk in, there’s Wings Over Time, it’s a large painting that was commissioned for the 50th anniversary of the Air Force, and it shows where airplanes first appeared into the service, starting with the Wright Brothers, then the explosion of biplanes, and then monoplanes. And what I love about this image is just how many airplanes were being created. All different types, sizes, some experimental, some operational, then we transition into jets, and the boom is still there, it would’ve been exciting to be in the Air Force during this period. But as you get further and further to the right of the painting, things start stretching out. And I’ve already given you the punchline. By the time you get to the end, there’s a lot of blank space, right? The technology we need most is a technology that can help us rewind time, get back to a period where we can build without regret, and become a design-centric Air Force. Now, we’ve got a lot of hard work to do this, Air Force, if we’re gonna still have airplanes galore moving to the right of the slide, and certainly, this new Digital Century series idea, leveraging these digital technologies, will not be like the original. We will not buy these airplanes in the hundreds of thousands. But the idea of constantly building, cycling, incorporating new technologies, upgrading, because we don’t know what the future adversary will bring, and therefore, our cycle time is our ultimate weapon. I think that’s achievable. And so, what I ask is, if you’re here from industry, and you’re not invested in this technology, invest. If you’re a program manager, and you’re not smart on it, learn. If you’re an operator, I ask that you learn as well, because we’re gonna need to talk with you about how these programs might work. And if we can harness this, speed up the clock, and keep the trending on those three hashtags so they become viral, we’ll have shifted the next gear in acquisition, and be moving in the right direction to be competitive over time. Let me take a couple of your questions. So, if a moderator’s, any help on, Orville, how were you doing questions, here? Are we not doing them?
Okay, here we go. There’s probably 100 questions. I’ll forward all of them to you.
Okay. (audience laughs)
But I’m gonna summarize. We actually had a workshop Saturday talking about you. How does the Air Force Association best support your initiative and your leadership in bringing industry, and the innovators in industry, closer to Warrior Airmen requirements? So, what we would offer, and you’re the invited first speaker, is go out to Edwards, either on base or off base at Edwards, bring in mid-career leaders from SMC, Edwards, obviously Nellis, close by. And we’ve got a new leader in the Lemay chapter we’re rebooting out in California, Berner Sergeant, many of you know, thanks, Berner, for joining the fight. And what we would do is bring together, Will, a group of mid-career industry leads at about the project-manager level, and we’d go out with a wide-area announcement so everybody had a shot, and then bring in, obviously, the mid-career innovators from both the operational community, for example, Air Combat Command, bring in AFMC, bring in SMC, probably bring in AMC, and if you’d like to do that, we’re all in. And you don’t have to say yes or no. That’s all we need, ready to go. The other question, then, and I’ll give you a chance to talk now that we’ve got your thumbs-up, is, generally, the questions go to FARs. What is your role, and I know you’re leading this fight in a big way, to modify the FARs to do what you want to do? Thank you.
It’s a good question, I mean, the process is cumbersome, it weighs eight and a half pounds if you print it, but there are ways through it. And I would say, if you want the summary of how you get through it, you have to take all of the exceptions and other rules. So, there are some really interesting modifications to the FAR that are being proposed by commissions. There’s a big panel called the Section 809 Panel that’s looking at contracting reform. And so, I would like to see those go through because they help on commercial systems, but the thing I usually tell people is that it’s not a, it’s not that we lack the authority. There are a few small things I would request. It’s that we haven’t fully encouraged the workforce that those exceptions, that maverick behavior, is what we really want. It’s easy to say we’ll just be maverick-y, but when you’re dealing with the money side of the Air Force, there’s a difference between being maverick-y and breaking the law. And so, we need to tell people, you need to know your laws, you need to know the hard rules. And where there’s interpretation, we trust your judgment, right? We trust the judgment of the workforce to make the right calls for speed. And what I’ve seen in the year and a half I’ve been here is that there’s amazing talent, so I have no reason not trust the judgment. But flip it around another way, if we can’t trust it, we’ve already lost, we’ve already opened up our OODA loop so large that we’re not gonna lose today or tomorrow, but we’ll lose over time. So, I think the big struggle in acquisition always has been, you want to trust people or process? People or process? And I think people—
This system works unbelievably well, 100 great questions. How can we improve our Air Force acquisition community’s ability to communicate with industry more during our complicated acquisition programs? Often, government program managers are reluctant to openly communicate or meet with industry under their contract officer’s eagle eye as the threat of legal challenges because of the perception of preferential treatment.
I think that’s an empowerment and culture issue as well. So, I mean, those have been the tough things for me, where you see an ingrained behavior towards conservatism. And I think the solution for this is just trying to apply some radical common sense, and I’ll tell you to lead by example from the top. So, I’ll take on the challenge of trying to do it on this question, Orville, but one thing that I can tell you I have seen is this huge divide between the way we think about research dollars and sustainment dollars, so the people out in the field feel like they’re frozen in the two sides of this prison, and they’re not making common-sense decisions. So, I’m working right now with our lead lawyer and our lead financial manager, so that we can bring common sense back to the way we do business. And common sense means, ’cause what does common sense mean? It means human judgment, is that we’re bringing in human judgment, and that only goes if it’s one for one with an absolute belief in top cover. So, everything I do, I try to make people believe that that top cover’s gonna be there from me, and one of the great things that I enjoy is the same level of top cover from the Chief, from Secretary Donovan, from all the Air Force leaders. Air Force has taken on this China battle, and it’s all things Air Force to compete with China. So, I think the thing we gotta do is just be patient and let the sponge effect occur, and let that top cover sink down to the field, to the lowest echelons, and if that happens, our adversaries better watch out.
Amen, thank you, sir.
Thanks, Orville. (audience applause drowns out speakers) (rousing music)
Running a bit behind, I think, about a 10-minute break and we’ll be back at it. Thank you very much.