Forward Power Projection in the 21st Century, 2019 Air Space & Cyber Conference | Panel at the at 2019 Air, Space & Cyber Conference
Moderator: Lt. Gen. (Ret) Bruce “Orville” Wright
Participants: Gen. James Holmes (ACC/CC), Gen. Jeffrey Harrigian (USAFE/CC), Gen. Charles Q. Brown (PACAF/CC), Lt. Gen. James Slife (AFSOC/CC), Lt. Gen. Richard Scobee.
Transcript
Well good afternoon everybody. Here we are at the end of another great convention, about to have some of our last sessions. We’re glad you stuck around for it. Extend our welcome out to the wing commanders who brought their airman from all over the air force, and to the people who traveled on buses, and to the folks who came here from this area. Thanks for making the trip, and thanks for the things that you do that make it a great convention. I’ll introduce the members of the panel here in just a minute, but as we get started, you’ve heard a lot of talk this week about the National Defense Strategy. That’s been central to most of the things that we’ve talked about. And we’ve talked about the fact that we’re reentering a period where our job is to compete, or deter, or fight, if we have to, great powers. And the chief, in his brief, he laid out the four things that he thinks the air force we need has to be able to do. We have to connect the force. We have to dominate space. We have to project combat power. And we have to be able to move to win. We had a great panel with our cyber and information warfare and ISR leaders in the previous hour, and we’ll talk in this panel about, kind of about those last two, projecting combat power and moving to win. So the threat that’s changed, and the threat that we’re having to react to on the battlefield, I’d simplify down to a couple of things. One of them is, the proliferation of sophisticated ISR tools. So whether you’re getting information by commercial sources, whether you’re getting publicly available information, or whether you’re a pure adversary with your own national, technical means to do that, it means that those things that used to belong only to us belong to the world. And then you match that with what my army brothers and sisters call the ubiquity of long range fires, that everybody has invested in some kind of long range fire system, whether that’s a ballistic missile or a cruise missile, or long range artillery. When you put those two together where everybody can see, and everybody can reach, then the battlefield has changed into a battlefield with no boundaries. You can shoot anywhere from anywhere. No hiding places, because of that ISR, and no sanctuaries where you can stay out of the fight until you’re ready to come into it. The fight starts before you deploy. So we look at concepts, we look at multi-domain ops. The experiment we’ll do with the joint staff in joint all domain, command and control, and what that’s about is trying to drive tempo. Trying to operate faster than the enemy can operate, and make them keep up with us. And one of the tools we have to do that are the things that our MAJCOM commanders and their assigned forces have been experimenting with in agility. So the National Defense Strategy calls for presence forces that are there around the world, to be able to compete with peer adversaries every day. We’re a blunt force that can move forward quickly and defeat their objectives. Make ’em believe that they can accomplish the thing they set out to do, and then surge forces that would come on board to defeat those forces that they presented. And as we think through that, that means we’ve gotta revisit some ideas from our past, and we’ve gotta rebalance some things that we’ve done. Long and short range capabilities. We’ll have a chance to talk about that. Stand off and penetrating capabilities. Offensive and defensive capabilities. Efficiency in the way we support and sustain our forces, and effectiveness of those forces in combat. Ops and training. To compete, we wanna get as much of our force forward as we can, and be out there operating with the enemy, but we also have to keep the time it takes to train to be good enough to defeat ’em in conflict, if we have to. And so that’s led to the talk of agility, and agility will change the way we sustain our forces. It’ll change the way we command and control those forces, and I think it will also drive some other changes for us in just about everything that we do. Multiple lines of effort are coming together around the air force. We’ve done some reorganization experiments. In air combat command, that’s been in mountain home. A3 and A4, on the head quarters air force, have been doing force presentation sprints to think about, how do we change the way we present forces, and how we talk about it. We’ve done exercises, you’ve heard talked about this week rapid forge, agile combat, employment exercises, but I want to tell you that I believe that our changes will go beyond that, right? They’ll go to things like officer competitive categories, and how does that allow us to build the force that we’ll need, and to reorganize in ways that we haven’t, because we haven’t had those categories. Realignment of NAFs, we’ve just talked about. So I think the powerful connecting thread through all these is agility. And so with that, I’ll turn it over to your mass com commanders. Joining me on the stage today, we have Lieutenant General Jim Slife, the Commander of Air Force Special Operations Command. General Jeff Harrigian, the Commander of USAFE and AF Africa. General CQ Brown, the Commander of Pacific Air Forces. And General Tim Ray, the Commander of Global Strike Command. My brothers, I’m glad to share the stage with them, and proud of all that they do. You know, we could have had more Mass Com Commanders up here, right? It’s not just these four that are gonna win this fight or do agility. We certainly could have had Mary-Anne up here with us from Air Mobility Command. We certainly could have had Arnie Bunch up here with us on the sustainment side. But we only had four stools. (everyone laughing) So here we go. Jim, over to you.
Hey sir, thanks very much for the opportunity. So I think over the course of AFSOC’s history, most people have tended to put the emphasis on the SOC part of AFSOC. They tend to identify us as the air force component of USSOCOM. But frankly, service components are always best for their combatant command when they’re closest to their parent service. And so at AFSOC, one of the things that I want to do is put the emphasis on AF. I think as you talk about fighting in a contested environment, power projection forward, there are places where AFSOC can contribute capabilities to theater air component commanders and joint force commanders that would be useful based on our experience and our organizational competencies. AFSOC has a lot of experience operating with small forces, with a very, very light logistics food print in very austere areas, and moving around quickly on the battlefield. This is something we do on a day to day basis as it is. It’s something we would like to contribute to our fellow air force components across the air force. AFSOC also has forces that operate across the spectrum of visibility and attribution. And as you think about competing in a contested environment, the ability to provide placement and access to air component commanders across the spectrum, visibility and attribution are institutional competencies that I think AFSOC airmen can bring to bear. So as we continue this conversation, I will just tell you that our forces are already exercising routinely with air combat command, USAFE FF, and PACAF, strengthening organizational ties among airmen in our air force.
[General Holmes] Thanks Jim. Cobra?
Good afternoon, and thanks General Holmes for the opportunity to be here. So as General Holmes highlighted, the world as we have been operating over the last several years has changed. In Europe 2014 and what happened in Crimea drove us to rethink how we approach the threat. As we view it, particularly inside of Europe, it’s a 360 threat from Arctic, to the Baltics, round through the Atlantic, down to southern Europe, and then clearly into Africa, and from my perspective, all the way over to Israel. So something that we’re clearly working through every day in terms of understanding the context of the environment. Job one for us is to turn Russia, and we’ve talked about competing, allowing us to deter. For us in Africa, we’re still working against violent extremists down there every day, and the vastness of the continent drives us to solve some very difficult problems in terms of allocating our resources. The important other part that we’ve got to highlight down in Africa or really our competition with China, and how we do that given the resources that we have. So to do this, we focused in a couple of key areas. First has been highlighted over the course of the conference, starts with our people and ensuring they’ve got the resources and equipment to go what we have asked them to do in these operations. The second piece is important, is the readiness portion, and for us, particularly in Europe, we focused supporting General Guastella in Afcent, and then getting them back and leveraging every training opportunity we have to get after this requirement to compete and deter. And using different exercises to increase our readiness across our force. And I’m not only talking about aircraft but also our folks logically to be able to support the agility that General Holmes highlighted here a little bit earlier. The second key piece that we’re focused on is our posture. That forward posture required to be able to blunt, to be able to react with speed, and to be in the right place at the right time to deliver a punch, if required, allowing us then to drive into a broader conflict, if required, that allows us to compete and win that fight. One of the key exercises we did this past summer was rapid forge, that really gave us fantastic insight into how we are postured, how we’re able to move the force across Europe. We sent F35s to 18 different countries. We worked with General Slife’s team, General Holme’s team, and every other month we’re working with General Ray’s team as we flow the bomber task force in and out of Europe. And I find that to be genuinely effective in how the Russians view our activities. The last piece clearly important to us is partnerships, and it is key members of NATO, and our work with our NATO partners across Europe, we find that that alliance remains strong, and they want to be part of this agility that we’ve discussed today. The other part that rolls into this, of course, is our work with Africa. And we just had an African air chief symposium down in Kenya, that again facilitated an opportunity to develop and refine, strengthen the relationships that are so key to our ability to compete with China down there. So I look forward to your questions, thank you.
Thanks, thanks, it’s a real pleasure to be here with you, and all of you airmen here today. And when I look at the Indo-Pacific, and really looking at the defense strategy for the five problem sets are in the INDOPACOM AOR. Of course we’re paying attention to North Korea, we’re paying attention to Russia, but the big one I really pay attention to is China and how they think and operate. And so part of that is one of our operational concepts that many of you have probably heard of, agile combat employment. And it’s really how we are lighter, leaner and able to move around and do things. And it’s really a mindset of how we might do things a bit different. And the way I’ve been describing it recently, all I need is a runway, a ramp, a fuel bladder, a fuel weapons trailer and a pal at MREs. And of the 25,000 islands in the Indo-Pacific, we should be able to operate from at least some of those, if not most of them. And the real goal here is actually to make sure that we actually provide a dilemma for our adversary that we can operate from any location within the region that they have to think about. Second part of that is when we look at multi-demand command and control. It’s not just the systems that allow us to do that, as the chief counter described yesterday, but it’s the mindset of our commanders, and it starts with me. To be able to provide commanders intent beyond a 72 hour ATO cycle, actually to bring commanders intent that’ll last over a couple of weeks because I know the counts will be contested, and that’s the way we should plan. A matter of fact, we should be surprised if the coms work perfectly. That should be the contingency. The last pieces are multi-functional airmen, and what they’re able to do, and it’s really taking our airmen and allow them to expand beyond our job description so we can have a lighter, leaner, more agile team, four in different locations to create challenges for our adversary. And so I’m really looking forward to the questions, but it’s really about the concept. And I think across the air force we’ve got some synergy now. We’re all kind of on the same page moving forward to do this, not only in the Indo-Pacific. We’ve seen it in USAFE AF Africa, as well as in AFCENT and with the other, really the joint team as well. And so again, looking forward to your questions.
Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, it’s a pleasure to be here with ya. Let me say one thing up front, as the long-range strike guy in here. For all of us in the air force, it’s really, really important for us to think about air and space power not as a stand in or stand off. You know General Holmes described the problem as ubiquitous in terms of seeing and shooting. At the end of the day, our partners and allies need to know we’re there, and after spending time in Europe. So I think really best for all of us here is to make sure, you know, and across the room, since it’s professional development, any debate about stand off versus stand is really immaterial. So for the global strike dimension of it, when I came into the job, General Hyten looked at me and said “I need you “to be the JFAC and the air component commander “for your strategic command.” And what that did is it set in motion a pretty interesting set of relationships. So I’ve worked with all these guys on the stage before, and certainly these two guys to my immediate right in the more recent future. And thinking through the problem sets we’ve been under. We took the time to go walk through all the formal JFAC authorities, and remove the things that don’t apply. But what it put us in a position to be able to do is to think about the entire globe. So daily we run through the Iranian problem set, the North Korean problem set, the China problem set, and the Russian problem set, and certainly the strat com problem set. And so as the head airman for General Hyton, we run an apportionment on how we distribute that power, how we balance the risk. And certainly the bomber task forces have been very, very effective for us. So as we think about that problem set, there’s a lot of overlap between what we would do in the States and what we would do in the Pacific, or what we’d do in Europe. You know I’m really proud of the team that got the phone call at Barksdale at 7:30 on a Monday morning. 51 hours later, the first B52s landing in Al Udeid. And folks, they had no idea that phone call was coming until it came. And so the ability to pick up bombers and move, and portion those across the planet, and position them in a timely manner has been incredibly effective for us. Here’s what we’re thinking, knowing what General Holmes talked about with hypersonics, with cruise, ballistic missiles, and with the ISR, we know that what we bring is that cornerstone for the security structure for the free world, that that is going to be something of great interest. And so applying the thinking that we would do if we went to a BTF, we would think about projecting that kind of power from the United States, for all the mission sets and the ability to think about all those threats. I’m with General Brown in that you need certain things. The one thing I think I do need to bring in there a little bit more is the calm, and the connectivity. But like he said, it’s weapons, it’s gas, it’s food and it’s some calm and some self defense. That plays for us everywhere, and so what we’re trying to really drive our team into do is refinement of those BTFs, those bomber task forces. The more successful ones, and General Holmes will echo this with the Mountain Home experiment. When we put field grade officers in charge of a cross functional team, we give ’em clear commanders intent, and we give ’em the authority to go do what they have to do, just like the chief’s talking about. I have never been disappointed, and it’s an amazing, amazing accomplishment. So we just gotta be able to replicate that and think about the context that we’re in. That’s all I add per to your questions.
Thanks, and questions are rolling in, keep ’em coming. We’ll get to as many of them as we can. To start off here, Tim, I’d like to, you know, start back on your end. “How does the DOD in a resource constrained “environment continue to focus “and resource the priorities “in the National Defense Strategy “while balancing the current administration’s priorities.” And I’d read that as the things that keep happening in the world. “Like Venezuela, the south western border and Iran.” And I know this has been a problem for you as you try to manage a bomber force, that we don’t have enough to do the job.
You know, thanks. I come back to the idea of being the JFAC, and we all know this. We’ll never have enough air and space power. And if we’re really smart about the application of it, we prioritize where we put that. And so it’s a zero sum gain, and that’s where our ability to run an apportionment, whatever the scenario might be, and that even includes a small EMD that let’s us think about the tanker part, and then where we tie in with our team. But you know, at the end of the day, you’ve gotta step back and look at the strategic risk, then the operational risk, and understand how those moves play, and then we serve up our options, and of course we’re able to do that and clarify what the regret is. And always thinking about the readiness of the force, but the great thing about the BTFs and these short brief deployment, they are absolute readiness builders. And so while we had rotations to the AOR that were very steady, we did great work. Those teams had to come back and rebuild. The beauty is we don’t lose as much readiness by doing this, so we can keep up a little bit of the pace.
Thanks. General Slife, Jim. I think AFSOC is kind of famous, and SOCOM in general, for pushing authorities down, and managing risk, and having well trained operators operating. This question, “We hear a lot about going fast “and taking risk, however in everyday life “within air force capability, development “and implementation, many of us “do not see a walk matching the talk. “How can we incentivize and protect “smart risk taking to encourage “wider adoption of the philosophies “we know we need to succeed.”
Thanks sir. So in a previous assignment, I had the opportunity to serve as the Vice Commander of US Special Operations Command, and in that role I kind of had oversight of the programming, budgeting, acquisition, requirements, generations, processes, and as the department contemplated the stand up of US cyber command and US space command. There were a lot of people asking the question, “Hey, how do we build this like SOCOM?” You know, “What’s the secret sauce? “What are your secret acquisition authorities “that allow SOCOM to move quickly?” And the dirty little secret is SOCOM has less authority than the services do. It’s really more about the mindset, and the way I would describe it is really, when we, we generally don’t start with a big R requirement. If you ask me what my requirement is, I would tell you I need a Binford 3200 teleportation machine. It’s gotta be equipped with an integral invisibility cloak, and it’s gotta be able to sequence DNA from lower Earth orbit. But at the end of the day, we’re gonna spend the next 20 years chasing that thing, and what I would really rather do is field whatever’s available now and put it in the hands of operators. As much as I respect the gentlemen on the stage with me, we are precisely the wrong people to tell the force what we need for the future. We need to give the force something to operate with, let them go out there and lead us forward. The captains and the tech sergeants in our formation are the ones that have the institutional expertise required to lead us forward. So sir, I think what I would say about how do we go faster, I think we need to really push down the requirements definition to the very lowest possible level. Do more experimentation and prototyping, and give our force the opportunity to lead us forward.
General Holmes, can I add?
Sure Cobra.
I think as General Brown brought up, agile combat employment provides us a real opportunity to push down authorities, to whether you call it a detachment level, and squadron level, but that smaller unit to make the appropriate decisions that encourage the type of decisions that we need to make at speed in a contested environment. So going forward, that will be our opportunity at our level to push down and trust those, assuming we’ve given them the right guidance and intent, to go out and execute in a training environment that should seamlessly then flow into how we would operate in combat. So that would be my approach to that.
Okay, thanks. General Brown, this one, I think, we may have multiple opinions on, and this question showed up in four or five forms. And it goes to “One of the major issues we have “in a global integrated environment “is the boundaries, both geographically “and with authorities between co-COMS. “From a component and service perspective, “how are you, as COM or air force, “working together to enable resource sharing “and seamless tasking for cross co-COM assets, “and for the forces that you own across boundaries?”
Well I’ve seen this in several different jobs, you know, from being the CFAF, from being a Deputy Commander at cent com, and now the Air Component for INDOPACOM. And the way I look at the unified command plan and the lines that we draw for our combatant commands, I really treat them as dash lines versus solid lines. Instability that we’re about to work across those lines with our joint partners, and with our various air components. And having set in areas of CFAC, and having General Ray as a third air force commander, we spend a lot of time talking back and forth, particularly about operations coming out of Turkey, and to the cent com AOR. And so you gotta be able to do that. I think the other aspect of this, and this is something I talk about quite often is, yes I have a requirement for the forces that my combatant commander asks for, and my job is to actually advocate for those requirements and that capability. And for whatever we do not get, or goes to another combatant command, another air component, that’s risk, and my job is to figure out how to mitigate that risk, and articulate that risk back up the chain through how we’re gonna execute. That’s something that’s a broad conversation that we need to be having about when you don’t have everything you need, there is risk associated with that and how we share that up the chain so we go in with our eyes wide open about how we do this. And the last piece of that is, we have the flexibility to move things back and forth pretty quickly as an air force. And so that’s why I don’t worry about it, I can usually get it back, if I need to, fairly quickly with the right conversation about risk.
Thanks. General Harrigian, “When we talk about the new concepts “in agility, projecting combat power, “move in to win, what does that do to our training? “How do we train our forces to be agile, “and how do we train them to bring in “multi-domain options to their training?”
That’s a great question, and it’s actually one that General Brown and I have been working on together, because from our perspective we believe it starts with the war fighters providing a concept of operation, that then drives itself into an order that we provide to the force to go out and train and exercise, in not a persistent but an episodic manner that allows us to capture the lessons, talk with each other, share across the force what we’re doing. Because our perspective is that we should develop that com of such that we feed that back to air combat command, to AFSOC, to the broader force to ensure they understand our concept of operation, which would then enhance training for everyone moving forward as we better prepare ourself to actually execute those types of operations. So I think we both would acknowledge we have work to do. This is a journey we’re all on together. It’s not gonna happen fast, but as we start to put more meat on the bones on what those pro-active measures are, what the reactive measures are, those will give us opportunities to train using order based approach to be able to go out and then gain increased readiness from it.
Thanks. If you’ll let me, I’ll come back to you again, CQ. “The PACAF has been working on the concept “of agile combat employment, and working to complicate “the adversaries targeting problem. “How does the sustainment issue work, “and what are the sustainment problems, “and what are we doing as an air force “to try to address the sustainment issues “posed by agile combat employment?”
Well I’ll just say it’s gonna be a challenge. I already kind of know that. For me, the key aspect is changing our construct and our model. And some of that for me is actually, how do you build a lighter, leaner package that you can deploy forward and pre-position? And those are the things I’m thinking about. How do I not take the big war reserve material machine for a 5000 person base and break it into something smaller, get a second port, a three shipper bombers, six shipment fighters, a debt of tankers in different locations, and then spread those throughout the region. And so it’s really a different model, and it’s not just spreading throughout the region, but actually using on a regular basis, and when we go to exercises, so that adversary sees us doing that. A thing I think about is instead of just pulling and moving our tip fed over a 90 to 180 day period, how about we do it over a five gap, or a five year period? Putting certain things in certain locations to better posture, that way we can maybe deter our adversary, thinking they were gonna be able to do things quick. So it takes, it’s gonna be challenging, but it’s also, we gotta break the paradigm of how we’ve actually moved stuff in the past. And so army water craft is an option. Under water vehicles that can move things back and forth, and using advancing technology to move capability back and forth, I think it’s gonna be important in the future.
[General Holmes] Thanks.
And if add—
Sure.
Clearly this is another partnership for us, because CQ’s got a challenging problem, and then you say Europe is gonna be on the ground, and I would offer both of us are thinking through how do we best leverage our partners to help us with that? And building those relationships, recognizing there’s gonna be customs and tariffs, there’s all kinds of issues associated that we need to build that trust and confidence now with the partners to be able to sort through it, to be able to deliver logistics we need.
Speaking of logistics, General Ray, “As the primary proponent of our long range “strike force is gonna be used “in any of these conflicts, do you think, “do we have enough of the weapons we need? “And do we have the right weapons we need? “And what should we be doing differently?”
Thanks. No, no and no, and so I think at the end of the day, the conversation for us is how many can we bring, and how can we get access to ’em? I think we’ve done a very good job with the JASSM ER and I think we’ve done a great job with the LRASM. There’s good progress, and if you just watch the hyper sonics, we’re getting to a place, and I think industry’s about to the spot where they really want us to start figuring out our game plan. And I think, you know, we get really good at all those variants of the hyper sonics, and think about that kill chain on the front end, that gets us what we need to, and that is such an elemental part. But I think there’s an expansion of the delivery platforms. I think there’s an expansion of the weapons themselves. I think there’s a lot of really good ideas out there, but you know as you transition, you know, from what we’ve been doing, it’s a big lift. And certainly you know more than all of us how long it takes to get those pipelines going. But I think we’re heading in the right direction, it’s just going to take three to five years, and you know, much of like you were saying there Cobra, and what we’re able to do with cent com and with PACAF. As we roll these BTFs around, you know, that we just improve our position by, you know, putting this stuff in place that we need to have it. And certainly leaning into the old plan process for each of these combatant commands, and what they are, and what our requirements are. I am very pleased, watching our team now, integrate AOC to AOC, and air component to air component to talk about what’s going on. You know, we’re a small team, but you know, we do the planning and the SMAC. So it’s the standoff mission application center. It is with our JGSOC there. So we’re tied in, we’re tied into the cent com strikes, and the things that they’re doing. So it’s a growth industry, and we’re just going to have to keep after it.
I’ll take one real quick here. There’s one that says “Based on what we’re doing “overseas and in our geographic areas, “what’s ACC doing to try to help “prepare airmen to how down range “and fight in INDOPACOM?” And you know my quick answer to that would be is that we’re partnering with both of those mass comms, and certainly with our AFSEN headquarters, to try to help work though what ideas we’ll follow, and what the mission essential tasks are. So we’re meeting together, mass comms, our deputy commanders are running a working group that’s pulling it together, with the goal of identifying the things that are common, and all the of the agile concepts we’re looking at, defining those mission essential tasks, and then we’ll bring those back to our wing commanders in air combat command, and I’m sure in AFSOC and in Global Strike Command with the organized training equip roles to drive our exercise schedule and our training schedule to reflect how we’ll use ’em when they’re deployed down range. General Slife, most of the airmen in the air force join the air force since September 11th. You know, if you just work through the math and our size. Those airmen and a lot of us are used to the idea that AFSOC does counter terrorism work. That’s, you know, the focus of what they do and why we have ’em, and we know that there’s a great role for AFSOC in competition with great powers, and in conflict with great powers. Can you talk about that for a second, and can you discuss any new systems or new equipment that you’ll need to be able to move back into that role?
Yes sir. So I talked about the ability to operate across the spectrum of attribution invisibility. And so if you kind of think through what that might mean in terms of access and placement, it’s all about competition. This is something that, while it has utility in the counter VEO fight, it’s really more applicable to competing with great states. And so I would say that’s an area where AFSOC is already involved, and really what we need to do is open the curtain a little bit on that to the war fighters like these gentlemen on the stage, so that they understand what capabilities are available to ’em through the forces that AFSOC provides. In terms of going forward, and what are we doing in terms of equipment, I would just double down on General Ray’s comment about the ability to provide high capacity, long range precision fires. You know, if only we had a badge comm somewhere in the air force with some organizational experience putting munitions on cargo airplanes. Hm. And you know, when I think about the things we’ve done with some of the C130 platforms in our inventory, you know, we’ve built an open architecture battle management system that allows us to add any munition, any sensor onto the platform to employ lethal fires from that. And so it’s not a big step to go from where we are today, to go to ideas like palletized munitions, and other abilities to use a very large cargo box to provide high capacity precision fires. So this is something that I’m very interested in pursuing. I think AFSOC can provide, we can learn the lessons, we can take advantage of some of the SOCOM requirements process, and you know, middle tier of acquisition authorities that we have within AFSOC in order to kind of be the pathfinder for the air force, and then scale it out to the rest of the MAJCOMs as industrial strength providers of air power. AFSOC’s good for being a path finder, but we’re not the industrial strength United States air force. And so if we can develop some concepts for the rest of the MAJCOMs to employ, we’re happy to do that.
Great. And I know that those ideas are being looked at by General Fig, Generan Fantini and our team at the Air Force War Fighting Integration Center. For General Brown, and perhaps General Harrigian. “We watched the chief’s briefing on multi-domain ops, “and how we’ll pull all that together. “We know we’re gonna do an experiment starting soon “with joint all domain command and control. “How do you think that’s gonna change “your air operation centers as we go forward? “And will they even still be air operation centers “when we get to the end?”
I’d say the big change is the ability to connect to all the domains. Right now I think we have a comfort hold on air space and cyber, to an extent, but now I actually look at the, you know, land, maritime, undersea information and how all those kind of come together, and then how we’re connect to our joint partners. And then the other aspect of that is being able to have multi level security. So I can look at things at the highest classification level, down to the lowest classification level, and then be able to share it with our partners. And that’s an area that we’ve gotta continue to work on. If we can build a very exquisite way to control networks. I’m learning more about the data information that we push, and how we get that to the right place, so that you can actually build your own common operational picture by being able to pull data in different ways, however you wanna look at it, and then be able to execute from that aspect at the same time. And then a good way to make sure we de-conflict from each other. What I mean by that is that once we say a target, we’re not all shooting at the same target at the same time, whether it’s kinetic or not kinetic, or having mid airs, or having conflicts where we’re canceling each other out. So the dynamic for the AOC will change, but I think it’ll be operation centers for all the joint players will have some level of the same type of capability.
I guess the other point I’d add to this is it’ll be important, at least from my perspective, that we continue to incrementally bring capabilities into the op centers to sort out how they work, how our airmen will utilize them both, because there’ll probably be some feedback we’ll have to those that would be developing in the industry. And as you know General Holmes, I’m a huge fan of dev ops, and iterating in a fashion that our airmen are invested in the product that they’re gonna use, and that we bring our partners along with us. And I mean that not only from a joint perspective, but those partners that will actually have skin in the game with us. And I think that’ll be an important part of helping us understand what does this op center turn into. And I think it would be presumptuous at this point to say that’s going away. We’re gonna have something there that’s gonna require us to synchronize and operate at speed, and what that looks like I think we’ll learn over time together on how that develops.
If I could pitch in on that one, just one quick point, you know, and it’ll tie back to the question you asked me. You know, back in the old days when we came up with the ATO, it was based on thinking and decision making, and building a plan, and not long to integrate it. I think you can make the case in the future, and we can probably come up with about 10 plans in 10 minutes, and the ability to execute that. I think one of the more important ties that’s gonna be in ACO, to a degree, is your logistical capacity, which is still the art of the reality of where you are. It’s gonna define the pace that you can actually keep, if you really just step back. You can probably think through more problem sets to sign more targets, and put more things in play than you can actually probably fuel, launch, fly to, and shoot with enough ordinance. So I think that’s that magazine is gonna have to be broadly one of the things that enables that, and how you look at that and connect it together.
Thanks. I’ve got several force development questions coming in. You know they revolve around “How will we better prepare ourselves “as airmen for this world that we’re moving into?” There are questions about, you know, what should we change in PME? Cross functional airmen, multi functional airmen, and the things we’re doing in agile basing, as we work forward, and then ultimately the question of, as we develop our officer force for the future, how does competitive categories help or hinder that effort? Does anybody wanna weigh in on force development?
Yeah sure, I’ll jump in. I think the key part is, how do we build leaders that are not risk averse? And the challenge we have there, and having been a commander of several levels, what I get frustrated by is the various restrictions we put on ourselves, because we don’t trust ourselves. I realize when we allow our leaders to actually expand the range of things they’re able to do, we’re going to have some “Aw shucks” moments where things don’t quite go right. We gotta be okay with that, and we can’t talk about innovation if we’re afraid that we’re gonna fail, or we’re gonna have a misstep. Because I really believe in conflict, if we don’t train for this day to day, and this really goes to our commanders where we lay in AFIs, all the things they should do. What I talk about is, those are written by functionals, and if it goes wrong, who gets fired? Not the functional, the commander. So we ought to let the commander and the leaders actually own the risk on how we do things, and give them some broad guidance, and then let them, they’ll surprise us what they’re able to do. And it’s a different way of thinking, and I think we’re on the right path, but in order to be successful in conflict, we gotta do this day to day as well.
I’ll pitch in on that one. You know, your mountain home experiment has been one we’ve been watching really close, and thank you for leading that. You know we start thinking about what’s going on with each of these career fields, you know to be honest, we opened up the option to redesign ourselves, and that just, it didn’t come together, and so everything looks pretty much the same as it was. I think sometimes we should give considerations that write the concepts for operations in the vignettes, and we’ve taken that on in our command, is to show scenarios where there’s great applicability for the cross functionality to prove, not just the negatives, but the positives, and to put that into play and approve it and show that. Let that prove, then feed back into the cycle of what we write down as the word, or policies that, or rules. That’s my opinion.
Thanks, I did get a couple of questions asked about the mountain home experiment. What are we doing, why, do we think it’s working? I’ll give you a short take on that, is we had three goals. One goal was to empower squadron commanders. And so we looked at the levels that we have, and we decided to flatten the organization and see if that would help empower squadron commanders. The second goal was to look at the line between line and staff work, and were we asking our squadrons to do staff work that was coming at the expense of their focus on executing their line mission. And then the third one was right sizing squadrons. We had squadrons in air combat command wings that had 1100 people in ’em working for one squadron commander, and we had squadrons where squadron commanders raided about 20 people, and we wanted to try to balance that span of control. After a couple of years of working through the experiment, and if I was going to judge all those three things, we wanted to judge it on readiness measurement and on retention, were kind of two issues we thought we’d look at. Does it make us better, and do our airmen like it better? The jury is probably still out on the readiness part. It’s hard to carve out the impact of radar modification program and EPOS mods and other things on the airplane. But our evidence shows that it’s certainly the same, as it was, and if you compare it to Seymour, there’s no real difference. The squadron commanders do feel empowered. They feel like they’re working solutions to the wings problems themselves, and solving things at their level. And our airmen, in a snapshot of a couple of years in mountain home, it does appear the retention rates are a little higher. Again, it’s hard to isolate that from any one factor. But we like the results that we’ve seen, but we’re not in any big hurry to impose that on the rest of the air force. We expect we will go forward with some additional experimentation. I’ve told the chief I’d like to do that as an insurgency. I’d like to do it in places where leaders and teams want to go further experiment with it and go forward, and I think we’ll have the opportunity to do that. And then we’ll also look at some other things as well. The ultimate goal being to have airmen be able to train at home with the command team and leaders that they will go down range and fight with and under. And what can we do to make that a more common experience? We know that we project power by taking UTCs from multiple units and putting them together, and sending them down range. What can we do to make those UTCs fit into a squadron at home by looking at cross functional airmen, by looking at some other opportunities to see what we can do there. So we’re continuing to get input, and we’ll continue to kind of walk through it and make sure that we don’t fail at our tasks, but we’re pleased with the way it’s going so far. We’re running to the end of our time here. The last question I guess I’ll ask you guys is, Cobra, you talked on it briefly, but can you talk a little bit about the importance of allies on the agile combat employments on our sustainment challenges and on that part?
Yeah, thanks for that. I think interestingly enough, as they’ve watched the concepts that collectively, as an air force, we’ve been talking about, there’s been significant amount of interest from our allies in how they can participate, what their role would be, and then how we incorporate them into those types of operations that we would be executing together. And so I would envision, as we go forward, we’ll look for chances to roll them in, not only from using their runways or a place to put an airplane, but also those areas where, as we did this summer, we used them to turn out jets, provide those opportunities to flow them in to the actual operations that we’d be executing. And the key for that is gonna be that we rehearse this, we train with them, and do that from the beginning so they understand the comm op.
I would add really quickly, we’re already doing it with Australia and Japan, various exercises, and so it’s taken hold, and we’ll be able to work together on this, and learn from each other as we work the agile combat employment.
Okay, thanks. Thanks everybody for the great questions. I’m sorry we weren’t able to get to all of ’em.
Sir.
Go ahead Jim.
Looking at your iPad there from the side, the question that keeps getting asked that I see that you haven’t posed was General Holmes, what kind of socks are you wearing? (everyone laughing)
Well I was, thank you for bringing that up, I was gonna say that your MAJCOM commanders have decided a temporary waver to the uniform for the remainder of the conference. If you got ’em, wear ’em. (audience laughing) (audience cheering and applauding)
Thanks. (gentle music)