Global Strike – The Critical Competitive Edge, 2019 Air Space & Cyber Conference, Gen. Timothy Ray at the 2019 Air, Space & Cyber Conference.
Transcript
Well good afternoon and welcome back to the last session of day one of Air Force Association’s Air, Space, and Cyber Conference. Now the topic of this session is Global Strike The Critical Competitive Edge. This afternoon’s speaker and leader has a vast portfolio. It is comprised of more than 33,000 professionals operating around the clock at two numbered air forces, 11 active duty Air National Guard, and Air Force Reserve wings. The Joint Global Strike Operations Center and the Nuclear Command Control and Communications Center. During his 34-year Air Force career, he has accrued more than 4,000 flight hours and has flown eight different aircraft including, yes, the B-2 and the B-52. Here to speak about the competitive advantage, it is my honor to ask you to please join me in a warm welcome to a good friend and a leader, General Timothy Ray. Sir, the floor is yours.
Terry (mumbles) thanks for that great introduction.
All right, is General Wright in the room? I owe him a thanks for the invite, and certainly to Secretary Peters for putting this amazing event on. He’s been a great leader and advocate for us. He made the joke that the B-52 was younger than him, for the record, I’m younger than it. (audience laughs) But my last sortie I would tell you that every crew member was born after my first B-52 sortie, so it was a little humbling. So I’m going to talk to you about the competitive edge today and so the way you say that actually has a big difference, is it the competitive edge, or the competitive edge in Global Strike? I’ll do a little bit of both, and I’ll talk to you about what I think is more of the texture of this competitive space. I think we’ve talked about it a lot. But I think that there’s a lot more to dialogue on. And then give you what I think is the way to head on how to do that. So I wanna start off with this picture, so I have this clicker now, normally a slide clicker, the slide moves. What happens here is I hit this and Paul advances my slides. We’ll call this Paul, so I’ll have to hit this, and make that go. So the competitive edge. In this picture I chose to start the entire discussion about. Now I had a choice of a thousand things. I coulda put a ICBM on there, or I coulda put a B-17, from the Schweinfurt raid, I coulda put any of a number of things. But this particular picture to me is very important. And as you heard the Secretary talk today, of course we did lose Dick Hall, the last Doolittle Raider, and Jimmy Doolittle’s co-pilot, so somewhat in homage to him. But it says a whole lot more to me than simply that amazing feat. Right, so the idea of taking a bomber off of a carrier in the Pacific, very innovative and very aggressive. But you know at the end of the day this was the very first long-range strike that we did in anger. So there’s the historic dimension. But if you’re a student of history you’ll know that while this wasn’t a militarily significant strike, it was a strategically significant strike, because it really erased the entire idea of invincibility, or of sanctuary, for the Japanese mainland. It was a huge boost to the alliance, and to the American people. And the point I would make to you is that we had catastrophic event at Pearl Harbor, and that we really pulled out all the stops to come up with an answer to that. And the reason why I think this is important to us today is, as you will recall, last week was the 18th anniversary of 9/11. Now I can see in the room some, that I won’t make eye contact in the front row, but a good number of people were in the military on that day. And none of us knew that was coming on 9/10. And on 9/11 we spent the vast majority of that day figuring out what the hell just happened, and what does this mean? Our entire world shifted. And every one of us has a story for where we were. On 9/12 you couldn’t buy an American flag in this country. There was no left or right side of the aisle, it was just America coming together. And it was an amazing event. And the reason why was that while we suffered a devastating attack, it was not existential. And so the question that keeps coming up in my mind as we think about this is are we really thinking about the competitive space? Are we really thinking about what it means to compete in 2019, in the 21st century? Okay, I’ll hit the slide and hope it works. Okay, so this is called a word cloud. Now for everybody over the age of 35 know that everybody under the age of 35 thinks this is a thing, so you’re just gonna have to work with me on this. So the word cloud, when I think about this particular conversation I come back to the NDS. And you’ve heard about great power competition indeed, and you’ve heard the keywords compete, deter, win. But there’s a phrase in there that I think is so much more important, it calls out a long term strategic competition. And I know these two fine gentlemen in the front know exactly what I’m talking about when I say that. And maybe a few in the second row. But then that begins to fade as I work my way across the back of the room. It’s an incredibly different dynamic for us, to have a long term strategic competition. We have been in a competition in the Middle East, and we’ve done some great work. But ladies and gentlemen, nothing in that campaign has ever been an existential threat. Nothing in that endeavor has ever created any doubts in our mind about our ability to be world leaders. And so you need to think about who we’re competing with. Now everybody’s heard, of course, about the four plus one. Okay, I just hit the slide. One more time. Paul, help me out brother. Okay, you have to think about this differently. So Russia and China are autocratic, realist entities. And what does that mean? They play by the rules of I win you lose, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and the survival of the state is everything. But these two countries know that without a sphere of influence they are not gonna survive. And that sphere of influence is what we would call the current world order. And they really don’t wanna play by those rules. And they’d be more than willing to get that sphere of influence at our expense. And what does that mean? It means they’re gonna compete with us at every dimension. And it’s happening all over the place. So some of the folks in the audience will go, well what does that really mean? I think what you really have to grasp here is that you could find yourself in another 9/11 type event, or another Pearl Harbor type event. And the intent isn’t to go to war with you, it’s to put you in such a strategic disposition, and disadvantage that you now are on the horns of a dilemma. Do I back off and cede this sphere of influence? Or do I stick my face in the wood chipper? Either way our image as the world leader has been tarnished irrevocably. And so the ability for us to lead the free world is now challenged. And if you don’t understand that to be the core issue with these two countries, then I think you need to think about ’em a little bit closer. Now my time in EUCOM was very helpful, and I see some Wing men that were with me over there. But I’ll tell you I saw first hand the coercion that was going on, I saw the expansion. And if you step back and saw what they’re doing, if you looked at A2AD on the map, it’s awful close to the former Warsaw Pact. It really almost mimics that buffer zone that they had with the West. But you can see their activity up in the North Atlantic, into the Baltics, through the Nordics to the Baltics, into the central part of Europe, with Poland, Romania, you can see it on into the Balkans. I spent a lot of my time with the Balkan Chiefs of Defense in my last job, and folks, the Russian specter was everywhere. Into the Aegeans, certainly Crimea, the Black Sea, on into the Eastern Med, and of course into Syria and Iran. And certainly that’s part of the conversation that we have to continue to have. I look at the new capabilities that they’re working on. And it’s incredible what they’re trying to do with nuclear weapons. And the modernization that they’re very, very keen on. If you go back to April of 2018, some of you might recall we shot cruise missiles into Syria. And you might be thinking, he’s gonna talk about the B-1s. That was a great show. But what I will tell you is the Russians had done a great deal to show us their ability to sink a ship in the Eastern Med. It was a very threatening posture. And then they told us that if any of the cruise missiles comes near our people, not only will we shoot down the cruise missile, we’ll shoot down the shooter. And so on that night we put F-16s and F-15s with live ordinance and caps in the Mediterranean to protect the ships. We were ready to go toe to toe, and kinetic with the Russians. And so as I walked from my particular house there at Patch Barracks to the Headquarters, it was a very long and interesting walk, because I knew that we would probably prevail that night, but the question in my mind is were we as a command postured to deal with the second and third steps. It was a very uncomfortable position. I spent my time in Africa as well, both with my time at EUCOM and at USAFE. And it doesn’t take you long if you go to Djibouti, you can see the Chinese construction, and many of you have been around the Pacific, and you’ve been to Africa, and you’ve been to South America. You see that all at play. The one belt, one road, one way, Huawei. And folks, at the end of the day it’s just 21st century colonialism. It’s a competitive dimension to have dominion over some of those countries and to push us to the side. They will do a lot to achieve these ends, and they would do it at our expense. When I think about what we bring to the table in this conversation as the United States Air Force, okay, one more time there Paul. I think about the core missions. And if I’m honest, this isn’t a speech about Global Strike being the competitive edge. I feel strongly that the American Air and Space Power is the competitive edge. It’s the thing that makes everybody successful. It makes our joint and coaliltion partners successful, it makes everybody in the team better. Every study has shown it will be at the forefront of everything that happens, no matter what the conflict is. And so I think about our air and space superiority, our ISR, I think about the mobility and our ability to command and control airspace and cyber. It’s foundational to what we’re trying to do right now with joint, all domain command and control. I call that the artist formally known as multi domain command and control. But at the end of the day it talks about how we connect everybody in a very different dynamic. I consider then what’s the Global Strike role in this. And I see right now is the JFAC and air component commander for STRATCOM. I have the requirement to think about bomber and ICBM resources, and how I play those across all the theaters at the same time. That’s a new role that we’re filling at Global Strike Command. And it’s been very helpful to us at the strategic level, because I can balance each of the theaters in the nuclear mission. So it’s incredibly important. But I stand there, and I look at, you can see the numbers, 156. We have 156 US bombers. Now the studies have shown us that, and we’ve talked about it this morning with the Secretary, 386 is the number that we need in terms of squadrons to get us to the low risk posture. And now that’s the question of the size of the force. And certainly that means good growth for the bomber force. You know, we have our 400 ICBMs. But I think about that in all the real good research that’s been done outside the Air Force will tell you the number is north of 225. So the current bomber roadmap says a minimum of 100 B-21s, and 75 B-52s. Folks, that doesn’t get it if we’re really gonna try to grow past 225. Now we’re working on that game plan, it’s not an easy one. We wanna consider where we are with the B-52, the B-1, and the B-2 and the Minuteman 3. These are very old airplanes, and so they’re not very easy to work with. But then I consider my ability to handle the broader situation in front of us. I go through the core missions of the Air Force, you know, air and space superiority, ISR, mobility, and command and control. Ladies and gentleman there are vast resources in our allies in each of those categories. Now granted they don’t have the capacity that we have in the air lift or the ISR, but folks, there’s thousands of allied fighters, there’s allied fifth gen. And my point isn’t to say it’s bomber versus fighter, my point is to say there are no allied bombers. The last allied bomber squadron retired in 1984, and for the record that was before I came on active duty. So I’ve never been in the service when there was a coalition capability in this particular mission set. We have friends out there with SLBMs, but those are for their own personal use, their own sovereign application. There are no allied ICBMs. There are many open lines to produce fighters, tankers, transports, ISRs, space. There are no open bomber lines to produce bombers that are operationally relevant, right. B-21s doing great, but we’re years away. There’s no open production line for Minutemen. And so we’re living with a very ancient fleet. And so when I think about my ability to mitigate I really don’t have anywhere to turn to. And that’s a pretty acute point that I just wanna punctuate with this team, and how we really have to think about using these resources as wisely as we can for the next few years until we get ourselves to the new capacity. Now the Triad has been a conversation that has been battered around here in this past budget season. And so when I think about the Triad I think about a couple of things. You know, when I think about the brightest military mind in our generation, and that I would call is Secretary Mattis. He came in as a disbeliever, as was said earlier this morning, because he came from Stanford, and there’s a philosophical bent behind that, and I understand that. But as he reasoned and thought his way through it he said I cannot solve the deterrent equation reducing from the Triad. It is foundational. Now day to day our bombers are not on alert, but that’s a temporal dimension. And we’re working very hard to create the capacity to generate those much faster than where we’ve been in the past. But the Triad, ladies and gentlemen, is the cornerstone. It’s the cornerstone for everything that happens in the free world. When I think of our Triad, and after working the NPR through the capitols of Europe, and the nuclear question, we have promised the extended deterrents to all of our allies, in Europe and in the Pacific. So whatever we do with our Triad does not live in a vacuum. It lives in the same space as a modernized Chinese Triad. While not very big it is new and modern. We absolutely live in the context of the Russian Triad. Altogether modernized, in fact they’re adding very innovative things as you’ve seen in the media. So we think about that Triad, we’re thinking about how we keep those ICBMs on alert, and they’re very old, until such time as the new ones come, and that we bring a new bomber fleets on. But we have no back up to be able to handle that, and it goes simply beyond an alert force. I think there’s a lot of folks out there who think this is just some exquisite, extant force that never gets used, but ladies and gentlemen, it keeps conflict where it is. And that’s not with major state on state conflict with those with nuclear weapons. It is a stabilizing factor. So I have to constantly think about how we do that. And as you consider the third leg of the Triad, which is of course the current recapitalization from Ohio Class to the Columbia, all of these things now have to be thought about in context. And if any one of them, old or new, fails you have to flex to pick up the margin in the remaining legs. And that margin isn’t really there. So I took the realities of what I’ve seen first hand in Europe. And I’ve taken a great good look at the NDS. And we had the time with General Mattis then, Secretary Mattis, and if you’ve not sat there across the table, and he points that boney finger at you and gives you a lecture, then you haven’t lived. But he said T Ray, if this was the last week of peace what would you be doing different today? That just echoes to your core, and then you step back and you reflect upon what I just talked to you about. And so you go back to the NDS and you think, wow, there’s some very important words that we really need to bring. And so when I talked about coming to be the commander at Global Strike I had this thought exercise with the staff and with the team. Okay, one more time. That’s the Triad, compete, deter, win. I asked the staff which is the most important of the three words, and you’ve got it there that compete is, but obviously the temptation was to say win. And that’s across the board. A lot of our Air Force thinks of that, but that takes us down a mechanical path that says let’s look at our plans, let’s look at our resources and understand what our ability is. Folks, I’ve commanded three times in combat. It has never gone according to plan. And I have never gone with the resources they said I was gonna have. It’s a very strong suggestion. And if you think you can win simply by putting the resources on the table and calling the play you do not understand conflict. You have to play this very differently. Now as the commander of Global Strike there’s a lot of folks who’ve said, yeah he’s gonna be a deterrence guy. And I said, hey folks, and I’ve talked to the Chief about this, and I’ve talked to General Hayden, I’m not in the deterrence business. Deterrence belongs to the President of the United States, to the Secretary of Defense, to the Secretary of State, it belongs to the Chairman and to the COCOMs. I’m in a war fighting business. And if you don’t take a war fighting mentality to what we’re trying to do, then you’re gonna really struggle to make the old stuff work right. You’re gonna really struggle to bring new things on to have them relevant. But folks, at the end of the day this is a very competitive dimension, and I’ve told the team this is where we need to really focus. And if we wanna be deterrent we gotta believe that that’s not a static conversation. It’s about competing on a daily basis. And what does that mean? And I said that, and of course the folks that live in Montana, or North Dakota, said what are you talking about? Hey, blinding flash now is that you no longer have sanctuary in the United States. Space, cyber, hyper sonics, cruise and ballistic missiles, hey, we’ve been protected in the last many conflicts. But right now folks, the strategic resources are vulnerable. Certainly when you think about the space and the communications dimension. So I said let’s unpack this competitive dimension here. The first thing I brought up to them is that, hey, you gotta really understand, like I’ve just said at the beginning of the briefing, that this is a competition on a daily basis. And you’re up against the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, and the North Koreans. And certainly you monitor all that we would do to support the VEO campaign. So as the Air Component Commander in JFAC, the STRATCOM, we monitor those problem sets on a daily basis, we understand where those campaigns are going, because we have this difficult chore of making sure that we have the bomber resources correctly postured, and that we are pursuing the right postures in the ICBM field. And we’ve done a few smart things there to give us more margin about how we respond. And what’s turned out is we can work a little bit less, and we actually do better. So I think that’s been very important for us. And I think the team’s beginning to understand that. But there’s also the competition that you are in for resources. Folks, if this was the last good budget we were supposed to have, and if you felt like you really benefited from that, you have to stop and think how we’re gonna do this a little bit smarter. We have a great deal on the next two budgets that we’re gonna be able to get to the back end of sequestration, and that’s fantastic. But at the end of the day we’re not gonna spend our way out of this problem. So we gotta think, and we gotta think a lot more diligently about how we do this business. You’re in a competition for talent. And if you’re in the NC3, or the highly technical business, you’ll know that not everybody in industry has all the talent that we really want. Part of that is for lots of different reasons. The business model, but certainly CRs, and where your funding isn’t correct, means that none of industry is gonna come to the table to give you the best people. You’re not that hot stock where you’re gonna get that return on investment. You’re more like that long term low yield CD, and it’s a good foundational piece. And where is every business leader gonna put their talent? Where they’re gonna get the best return on investment. So there is something to be said about how we think about bringing the right parts of industry to play to get the right things on there. And folks, when I think about NC3 there’s a lot of technology out there, and there’s just not a lot of folks to bring everything together that make you just really feel comfortable about how that’s all gonna happen. You’re also in a competition for talent. You know there’s a great economy out there. It’s on fire. There’s a lot of choices to be made. And so keeping folks on the rolls, and in our service, and in uniform, or to even stay in the guard on reserve, or to come back as a civilian is so incredibly important for us to compete for that talent. And if we keep running it at an all in pace then we can’t really ask ourselves how we got there. And so that’s part of the reason why I’ve asked us to step back a little bit and really think about connecting airmen to the organization so that we’re preserving that talent base. So I thought about, okay, so we’ve got this challenge for who we’re up against, and we’ve got this challenge for resources and talent. How am I gonna execute this? And one of the good things that I have going for me is I get to talk to a guy named General Larry Welch. And if you’re in the nuclear business, you know, that’s the guy. The report is the Welch Report. And I’ve had three or four fantastic sessions with this icon in the business. And he said, T Ray, you know, my job back then was really easy. But your job is incredibly hard. You know, it’s kinda like the doctor telling you that’s the worst case of poison ivy you’ve ever had, and all it does is validate your suffering, right. It doesn’t really get you to where you wanna go. But I thought a little bit longer and harder about what he had to say, and if you reflect, back in World War Two there was an existential dimension to what we were up against. We as the military were clearly in the lead for where technology was going, and we were driving. So there was a national consensus, you had purpose, and you had resources, and you were in the lead. If you roll it forward into the 1980s, there was still very much a consensus. So here again is where I don’t make eye contact with the front row. But there are many people back then who remember diving under their desks for the air raid drills. Because they lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis. I asked my mom, hey mom, you know, she’s in her late 70s, were you ever scared as an American citizen? She said, one time, and it was the Cuban Missile Crisis. I thought we were gone. And so there’s not some compelling thing now I think is the challenge, right. So General Welch was in the lead. He only had parameter for delivering the goods, and that was time. He said, T Ray, these were the President’s programs. These weren’t the Air Force programs, and they weren’t my programs. I was accountable, but these were the President’s programs. And now you reflect upon where we are, I would candidly ask you where’s the national consensus on China? What’s the national consensus on Russia? What’s the national consensus on Iran or North Korea? I don’t see any people going yeah, there is one. I asked some airmen the other day, so is Russia a threat? And they kinda looked at each other, not that we can tell. And so while we collectively in this room can grasp that, we have to realize that we’re trying to do is turn our hand in a strategic situation where most people really don’t understand the game that they’re in. And so the bill to lift there is incredible. And certainly I would tell you we are not in the lead from a technology standpoint. You can argue that there are more corporate and market dimensions that are gonna steer who we are as a military than we’ve ever seen. And I think that’s just starting. There’s a significant issue with that. Okay. I read a book not long ago called Why Air Forces Fail. And so when I talk now about what we’re up against, and what we have to do to recapitalize on what the Triad means, I reflect now on what I read in Why Air Forces Fail. How many people have read that book? I don’t know of any of those scenarios where the Air Force failed for a lack of TTP. Tactics, techniques and procedures. Every single one of ’em failed because they didn’t anticipate the nature of the conflict they were going into. Air Forces don’t fail on a day for lack of performance at the individual level. They fail over the course of time, by not making the decisions that they need to make to set themselves up. And if you go look at the DOTMLPF, the doctrine organization training, the material, the leadership, the personnel, the facilities dimensions. Each of those entities you would see one very clear message. They had no margin. And so when the campaign started they were ill fit, and moreover if they were somewhat fit they could not keep up with the change, and they failed. Folks, that’s how we have to think about this business today. If we really want to be competitive, we gotta think about this in terms of margin. What do I mean by margin? Margin in acquisition. Obviously there’s things that we’re doing smart here in the United States Air Force. We’ve knocked off 100 years of acquisition, and are on our path to 150. But margin has to be thought of in multiple levels. So when I buy things today they’re exquisitely designed. Because I have the engineering capacity and the market out there in incentivized for building you the most precise thing as effectively and efficiently as they can. What that means though, is you may not have the agility to change if that particular component becomes fragile or less relevant. And so I believe you gotta start thinking about things where we bake in much more capacity into what’s out there than simply buying the thing on the shelf. Or you’ve got the ability to rapidly change out the components of a platform. Our particular formula in Global Strike for acquisition is mature technology, stable requirements, to be owner of the base line, the technical baseline. Which means if you wanna change stuff you don’t have to ask the company. Preferably you’ve got a digital model of that, and that you’ve applied digital engineering. And then that you’re modular in design, so that when changes are required you can make them much more effective. If I think about trying to recapitalize, or just basically reinvigorate the Minuteman 3 none of those things are in play, which means that’s an incredibly expensive dimension. But everything we’ve got coming down the line, with the GBSD, with the B-21, with the LRS-7 helicopter, all feature those things. And so when we had this last, you know, when we put out our bid for the GBSD, we rolled it out on time. And that caught a lot of people of guard. We’ve got a great team, as you saw, Jason Bartolomei won two awards this morning for his great work. So when I start to think about that margin piece, you know, it also relates to the things that we buy for platforms. You’ll hear us talk a lot more about how we wanna go into connecting everything to the network. You can make the case that we’ve got shooters with nodes that connect, and then we need to be talking about how we connect nodes and then basically build shooters around them. When I think about this dynamic, and I consider where we going with NC2, it draws me really, really quickly to the idea that I need to do NC2 over assured comm. And they have so much more in common with joint all domain C2, they are radically aligned. And folks, that’s a different way of thinking. Rather than to pursue the old ways of doing it, where we had very fragile things from an exploitation dimension. But folks, if we’re honest about the competition, we need to take NC2 in a very different direction. And we’re gonna write a force development concept that gets us through that as the lead MAJCOM. You have to think about margin as well in terms of the critical capabilities. So this is a little complicated, but when I go to industry, and I go to the free market to get stuff, I have to be very mindful of the fact that if it is a critical thing and the market changes its mind I have to have margin that says I can overcome that. You can consider lots of different things for a modern military, if they answer micro electronics, the computing capacity, there’s a lot of little things that we’d like to leverage, but if the market goes in a different direction we have to have the ability to respond to that, not react to it. Because if you have to react that might take too long. The relationships that we have out there absolutely have to be much better than we have. I see lots of pockets of things happening out there at the labs, and I see them at other MAJCOMs, but folks, there’s just no way to connect it all. And there’s such great thinking, I’m seeing it not really play. But I believe there has to be a way we bring all these organizations more together to go think about how to put all these capabilities in play. I know with AFWIC as part of the dimension and the effort there is to get us to think about an integrated force. But folks, this has gotta go to an entirely different level. Lastly, our organizations and our people. When I hear the Chief talk today about squadrons and the culture, I could not be more radically aligned. The ability of that squadron commander to shape the culture and the climate of that organization, to have the authorities and the tools is absolutely paramount. Because when you take a squadron that goes and it deploys, they are tight, they are focused and they are together. Regrettably sometimes we take some of those airmen away from their home unit, and they come back in, and now they have to integrate back in the home. And so if the culture and the climate’s not right, then I worry. And I asked some of our leaders, hey, how are we doing at training? How are we doing at making SEVLOfs? How are we doing at our skills at diagnosing maintenance issues? And they said, boss, we’re too busy. And so I said, all right, we’re gonna slow down. Because I believe the organizations have to have well trained NCOs, well trained people. And we gotta focus on leadership so that that organization, and like I said I’ve commanded three times in combat, it has to have margin. And I don’t think that we have margin in those organizations, and I certainly don’t believe, if suicide is the issue that we’re dealing with, that we have margin at the individual level. And so when I think about the full dimension of margin, it is absolutely paramount, I think, to enter into our particular dialogue on a daily basis how we build margin. Because I can make a change, and I can do stuff. But if it’s a fleeting dynamic then I have a challenge. It calls into question the next piece, and that’s pace. Simon Sinek talks about infinite and finite. And if you’ve read his book, or any of his work, he talks about how the Mujahidin took an infinite approach to the Russians, and the Russians took a finite. And it was a question of outlasting them. And fighting in a way that they knew they could sustain. Folks, I think if we’re not very smart about this we might follow the Russian model, where I have to win every little competition, every single day. Folks, you gotta win the ones that count most, and we have to think about the pace. And I believe if you get the pace, and certainly I think there’s ways we can do this, and I’m looking at my acquisition friends, to create much more velocity in the way we rebuild our Air Force. And I think if you have the right margin, then I think you become an incredibly competitive entity. And so when I look at our force right now, at the Global Strike, there’s not a ton of margin there. But I look at where we’re going, and I believe that’s the right formula for where we gotta go. Okay, so where’s that gonna take us? At the end of the day I believe you have to be mindful of the competitive environment. You gotta be mindful of the long term strategic competition. You gotta be mindful of what role we play, and what the enemies theory of victory, and how that matches up very clearly to who we are. And we have to think about how we work our way through this next five to ten years. To think about how we improve the relationships with industry, how we think through better ways to acquire. We think about the organizations that we have, and certainly to make sure that we continue down the path of modernization. But I believe we’ve also gotta spend a lot more time thinking about bringing parts of industry, and parts of DOD, FFRDCs, and the UARCs and the labs to a place that we’re just really not looking at. I believe if we’re not mindful of the competitive space then I think we will miss that chance to really build in the resilience that would inevitably come if there was some kind of strategic surprise. If we fail at that, ladies and gentlemen, then I think the way we do business in the free world will radically change. So I want to say thank you for your time and attention. And at this time I’ll go ahead and take some questions.
[Presenter] Let’s give a big hand.
Thank you, General Ray. We will now open the discussion to questions from the audience. So please, I have this trusty iPad for any questions you wanna forward. Any JTACs in the audience, please send me the four line, not the nine line. So we got a first question to tee up right off the bat. It says we just heard from the Acting Secretary that the Air Force is too small for the Air Force that we need. Global Strike and Long Range Strike, specifically bombers will grow. It appears there’s a conflict in what we’re hearing in the media between the structural issues and where the US Air Force, and specifically Global Strike Command, is going with the B-1 bomber. Can you provide the audience some insights where the Air Force is now with the B-1 program?
Yeah, thank you for that question. So when I got the CSR, and the incredible pace that the B-1 community was keeping, the B-1, like every other weapons system is an ecosystem, and so there’s lots of factors, and I didn’t see a healthy organization. I think we’re really fortunate as well to see a change in the way things are going on in CENTCOM. Talking to the JFAC, and certainly the guidance we’ve been given to focus on the high end fight, it was time to get them back home, and to really rethink about resetting ’em. These guys have been the roving linebacker of RC North, and the roving linebacker of the Merv. But as the Chief had said earlier we’re just flying the airplane in a way we shouldn’t of been flying it. And we did it for far too long. The good news is we’re resetting that entire team, and what we thought was a very sizeable load of structural issues, we had some data that we thought was gonna have to really work its way through the entire fleet, so I will tell you it’s become a fraction of that particular load. And I’m pleased to say that all those TCTOs, the time compliance tech orders, that put us on the ground, to include a reevaluation of the egress system, to where we now have total confidence in that. All that is supposed to be done now by the end of October. Which is much faster than we thought. Right now the leadership at each of those wings has taken advantage of this break. At Dyess we had about 1,400 delay discrepancies on that 20+ airplane fleet. We’re down now just right at 400, and on a path to 200. So they’re doing the right things, and we’re putting this ecosystem back into shape. The depot level work required for structures is not as extensive as we thought. As we really dove into that. Now we do need to go into full scale fatigue testing to go validate the platform, but the good news is, where we’re gonna operate, and how we’re gonna operate is gonna be different than what we were doing in Iraq and Afghanistan, in that we’re gonna be operating like we’re designed to operate. Part of the things that I think have become a conflict is if we have structural issues or challenges, you know, the conversation we’re having now about moving the bulkhead and the bomb bay forward and putting a rotary launcher, both of those things are normal designs for the bomber. It was designed to do that way. But also to open up the hard points. The conversation we’re having now is how do we take that bomb bay, or that rotary launcher, and we put four, or potentially eight large hypersonic weapons in there. And certainly the ability to put more JASSM (ER), or LRASM externally, on the hard points as we open those up. So there’s a lot more we can do, and so what I told the Chief is, this is about moving from being the roving linebacker of RC North and the Merv, to being the roving linebacker of the Pacific, and the roving linebacker of the North Atlantic. And so we’re turning our hand to that. I think we’ll have a pretty good flying season for about the next six to nine months, we’ll get back into full scale fatigue testing, and I think if you’re not operating the fleet in a broken way, then your chances of having a much more viable fleet are good. So we’re working our way through. We got great, great teamwork from the folks at AFMC and LCMC, and the depots across the board.
Sure, thank you. Great question coming up from the audience, ties really to Sir Richard Branson, lot of entrepreneurial future. So the question is, in the age of artificial intelligence how will Air Force Global Strike Command posture for the future to stay mission effective?
Yes, so we’re there now. So I see Dr Sinef in the audience, thought she could hide. So one of the chores, and where’s General Djiboura, there he is. So we are in a full scale effort to underpin everything we do at the headquarters with data. We’ve taken a quick look at some of our maintenance indicators raw data from the field and in just a matter of minutes we came up with the same maintenance drivers that it took weeks to do manually. And so the roadmap we’re doing right now is to get the entire team on that particular model, and so by this time next year we should be fully functional. Some of the things we’ve been able to do with that is to create 3D risk contours. And what you can now start to do is change variables and move things around. You can understand where the yellow and the red are, and where you can make the most effect, so where there’s a steeper dimension on this 3D chart that’s where you wanna focus. And so I think if we do this correctly, we take this pretty small staff, and we get into the business now, not of admiring a problem, or gathering data, but really thinking through the solutions, and using the data to help us think through where these variables are, and I think it’s gonna be very effective.
Thanks T Ray. I think we’re gonna have time for probably one question, and if we go fast we can knock out two. Next question from the audience is are there any specific operational imperatives you see for GBSD in the future?
I tell you that we have a model for acquisition as I said, stable requirements, mature technology, modular design, digital engineering, own the tech baseline, in the ground on time. That’s playing out incredibly well in GBSD. And so to stay the course of where we are. When you use digital engineering, and normally where we would be in this particular effort, we would see maybe two design cycles in a major weapons system. Digital engineering has let us go to 10. And so when you have 10 design cycles you get beyond simply a general description. You can get more and more into the interrelated dynamics, and so your risk about actually building this becomes much, much less. And so the imperative is stay the course. We were on time with the RFP, a lot of great, great feedback from Congress for being on time with that, even though there’s a lot of folks who wanted to tweak the requirements. We stuck to our formula, and I think we’re on a good place. We just gotta let the acquisition process play out. But the bed down and swap out is gonna be where we really gotta focus our time and energy.
Okay, so your final question, and I think this is a very good one. Without a New START Treaty what do you think the competitive edge will look like for Global Strike Command and the Air Force in 2021 and beyond?
So I’ve told the team the thinking here has to be if you just focus on New START Treaty, it’s in our best interests to be in an enforceable and verifiable arms control agreement. Now I’m not saying New START Treaty is that, it has to be verifiable and enforceable. These are the entering arguments. This means world stability. And that’s in everyone’s best interest. I’ve told the team we’re gonna monitor the tape, and assume we got a New START Treaty until 2026. ‘Coz if it goes away in 21 then you could change things, but if you do it the other way around it’s putting toothpaste back in the tube. I would tell you here and now, this is really about recapitalizing the very foundational and very, very successful Triad that we have. This is not about growing beyond that. This about replacing the ALCOM. This is about replacing the B-2, and to bring on the B-21. This is about the GBSD, this is about the helicopter. This is about re engineering the B-52 to keep it to 2050. And of course, where the jokes gonna be at AFA 20 years from now, right. Most people will be gone. But this is about getting NC3 turned to NC2 over short comms. I don’t think New START Treaty changes any of that.
Well sir, unfortunately we’re out of time. But we wanna personally thank you for a great presentation. It has been a pleasure to have you with us here today. I’ll just make it simple, the future crazy socks from Air Force Association will have a B-21, probably a new missile on it, and a long range strike something system. Let’s give General Ray a big hand.
That’s brilliant, thank you much.
So everybody in the audience, this concludes day one of our conference, I’m confident you’ve had a wonderful time, we look forward to hearing…