we'll take away from the last few minutes of the meet and greet with amy klobuchar to the center of new american security. the live conversation with will roper about to start for acquisition technology and logistics. designing fighter aircraft and acquisitions underway by the air force. [inaudible conversations] >> thank you very much, everyone, for joining us here today. apologies that we're a little behind schedule, but joining me today at my virtual fireside is dr. will roper, assistant

secretary of the air force for acquisition logistics and technology and i've invited will here today because he has a new idea for how to develop and produce aircraft, fighter aircraft. and i think that it's really easy to get distracted or fixated on incremental technology or pointy, shiny new systems, but if will has found a way, a better way, more efficient way to iterate and produce weapons systems, it's potentially more game changing in the military competition with china. so that's what we're here to talk about today. a new concept, so what's it all about? >> i want to say, it's a pleasure being here with you. we did some budget fights back in the day and i just appreciate all of the energy and enthusiasm that you've brought. i also want to give you big

props to discuss a digital series, you have a digital fireplace. it's a great leadoff. look, this is going to be a complicated issue for us, but i think the general idea is pretty easy to pick up. we're already a service that uses digital learning to make real world impacts for our missions, all right. we do it in simulations. we have tons in the air force. we put pilots in them. we try to make them so equivalent to flying in the real world, when you're in the simulator we believe you're learning and getting better and that learning transfers from the digital world to the physical world. what we want to do in military aviation is what's already happened in the automotive industry, is to bring digital modeling, digital representations, not just simulating the way something performs, but simulating the way it's designed and assembled, because what we want to do is start real world transfer of learning before we've ever made the first article. and so we've watched this

happen in the automotive industry where for the longest time it looked very similar to the large companies, had a lockdown on the market, you had to have huge production facilities, huge work forces, very expensive tooling in order to make automobiles unless you're signing a few exotic or expensive cars. t tps -- companies like tesla have been able to flip the script on this because they can't make it like a toyota and price point doesn't come down like toyota, but they're superior designers, the car is not unlike an aircraft. if we look at the air force, the t-x, now t-7 program. the program started and there are two planes flying in the real world. gdsb currently going through competition and it's designed with full threat upfront. when you look at the

opportunities, they change the way you'll do acquisition. i hope that's what we'll talk about today. it's much, much more than bringing in digital design, it really changes everything about how you all approach acquisition and really, of all the technology that you have seen and you know, the swarming drones and the-- >> please, sir, we should do this. >> and all of those technologies were about the pointy end of the spear and i do love that pointy end, but this is a technology that would change how you build the spear itself. and i'm learning as i do this air force job, that the technologies that change how you build things, the speed, the flexibility, the adaptability, that those are going to be the most important technologies for this century. so, i am extremely stoked that we have this opportunity to do this on the insider and extremely envious that i don't get to run the program myself. >> so let's dive a little deeper into what the technologies are that are enabling the new method of

design and production for weapons systems. you've called them the holy trinity, what are they and what are they to do this thing? >> i called them that because i don't want them to be separated up. you don't get a silver metal if you get two out of three, you need all of the trinity. no doubt, you should be doing that. let's hit them and talk about how we ought to use them for effect. the first one is open system architecture which we've talked about for years and never really done because there's no business case that closes for industry. when you're designing a platform for us, and you know that the successor of the platform is 20, 30 years away, what incentive do you have to open it up so that other people, not your company, can develop on top of it. so, the model that we've been in the cold war, and the end of the cold war, stretches out and decades in between, the reasons for that and we discuss the interest, they've stretched out, it's created this buy-in

model with industry where the competitions became so fierce that industry would have to buy in at a loss for production and sustainment. we shifted from being for design than that paid to sustain old things. i can't think of a worse way to be a cutting age air force if you're not giving industry profit for design. well, what that did, it killed off any chance to have the equivalent of an app store or a flexible modular upgrade for us. one of the things we're going to have to do in the digital series, to push the programs together. if they're decades apart, i don't expect any different behavior from industry. if you push them together. you might imagine something that feels more like apple's business model emerge, we'll never get there completely because they're not doing any awes -- awes sustainment. they design a platform, it's a,

let's say a premium price and they get revenue back in just the initial sale. they open it up for third party developers and apple benefits from that. i think in 2018, 34 billion dollars in revenue just from the app store, and apple's model with their developers is 15 to 30% depending how long you've been working with them. so that provides steady cash flow for apple, which you might think of that for us, coming from sustainment, and then of course, we all know the phone is timed to kind of live about the time it takes apple to replace it. so they keep one-upping their product. they're focused on superior design for the next platform and they benefit from third party developers. i could imagine doing that if we pushed the refresh rate for airplanes closer together and satellites closer together that you could eventually open up the design and have true open architecture because there's a business case for our defense companies to close. that's number one of the trinity. number two, no-brainer, it's

just agile deck op software development. you can't keep up with the pace of development, digitally driven, you're already out of the fight. what i'm worried about in the pentagon, digital software terminology is becoming buzz words everywhere. people will use things like lean, agile, all interchangeably and they're not. they're different technologies underneath that helps that software be developed faster and safer and i'm super stoked for open source development, it's hardened container development that's orchestrated and this solves one of the toughest challenges we had in the air force. how do you know your software will run the same way on your jet? well, the container approach, the hardened containers, it mirrors the running of the code bit for bit. you know it will run the same way. we've got to get really good at coding because if we can deploy

from our development environment to the jet knowing there is no risk it won't run the way we want it to, how you can imagine opening up the door for more intelligence type things, and a real war against the adversary, we may have to change our code every flight. that's a real possibility if the threat at that we're facing has a lot of software defined features, then we're going to have to change at softwear defined speeds. and agile development. simply having a high tolerance design, and being able to model not just the design, but the assembly and in many cases, even the sustainment of the program. you put those three things together and think of it this way and let's go backwards through the trinity. you design the thing to be -- to be digital upfront and if you do it right, you shouldn't design the way you would build in the previous century. you want to tighten all of the tolerances up on your supply chain so that you can leggo

together an airplane and we think that's possible, that you can make airplanes again with land tools just assembling because the tolerances are there so that things go together. if you think that like all of our f-16's, f-35's are the same, they are not. it's kind of like a snowflake. if you're back far from it they're the same, but when you zoom in and you get down to where like holes align, joints align, they're not. and so what that does to you on an assembly line is you've got to do a lot of artisanship every time they go together. imagine they're like legos and they go together every time? imagine you're faster and don't have the huge tooling. but you can put that airplane together with a smaller, less skilled work force. the digital is huge if we want to build a plane with different model than mass production on an assembly line.

if you could update it quickly and update the software quickly and open up to third party developers and come back and have an open architecture that allowed the third party developers in, you've now made your airplane more like an iphone. we won't get there overnight, but i think the first step has to happen on our next generation air dominant sixth generation system because it's the closest horse to the door. >> and so, opens systems architecture, engineering-- let's flash forward to 25 years in the future and everything worked, it's all worked. what does the air force look like? >> i don't know if i could ever imagine 25 years. let me say what i hope this does. what the changed future looks like whenever we achieve it. i would like there to be a way for industry to work with us between x-planes and mass production. i'd like a superior designer that could make things at a

very low rate. kind of like the old school, you know, lockheed martin, in a small facility and put together an airplane with a small design hand tools. i would like to get back to that. i'd like to work with companies who would work there. similar to the automotive industry, there are companies who would grow up saying i want to design real cool airplanes and airplanes are cool and want to work with the air force and i don't have to grow into a huge production, and we would try to keep programs continue actually in that between house and mass production until the nation or the war fighter needs us to go buy a lot of one airplane in quantity. i hope when they ask that, we can do that much faster and my biggest hope, i can't prove to you today, it's just a hope. that we might eventually get airplanes designed in a way where if we did have to go to

war, heaven forbid we did, we'd go to industrial capacity to do part of the assembly which i think right now we couldn't. so, that world war ii greatest generation, i'm not sure we could recreate that today. in fact, i doubt we could, but maybe by making airplanes and automobiles more similar by using common design approaches, we could open up that industrial capacity. that's the future beyond the future. the next should be a different business model. >> you've hit on something that i think is interesting and that i wrote about in the report we released last week. sorry, i had to plug it -- that you know, the materials for world war ii was built by big heavy industry conglomerates. ford was producing a done of military equipment, for example, that's just not the model that we have today. we have a much smaller number of pretty highly specialized defense or defense and/or

defense air no space companies. he so,ing is that kind of kept me up at night in the pentagon and does today is our ability for industrial capacity should we have to because it's so holly specialized, it's very, very difficult in the current kind of mode of weapon systems production. digital series has the ability to change that. could you talk more about that aspect? >> yeah, i think, i mean, it's something i worry about. i worry every day about the fact that we've got our military industrial base that's separating from our u.s. industrial base, which go back in time to world war ii airplane and automobile weren't that different. so if we're going to think strategically about the future we probably need to change more to be like commercial innovators, to bring at least in a design level, the two halves of our nation's great industrial base. those doing commercial development and we'd like more of the commercial developers to

work with us, too, a lot we need to do. if we need to do if if we get surge capacity. i'm not sure you can design everything this way for commonalty, but we're lucky in the air force that airplanes and i think satellites are amenable and i think that weapons are amenable to this because they're physically small and the assembly doesn't require a lot of, like, large equipment to do it. so, we should think ahead and not, because we've started a first initiative, right? we've got a vision and we've got reasons to believe we can achieve it because of what's happened in the commercial automotive industry, but a vision is simply that. so i worry about this program every day, but i'll be excited about it every day, too. >> yeah, that's a good segue because you've painted a positive encouraging picture about the future and now i want to point out things that could go wrong. what do you see as the major

sources of risk. what do you worry about not working as envisioned. >> believe me i'm an optimist, you have to be to to do this job and a lot could go wrong. we've put extremely smart people from the work force and an office dedicated to this. i'd say it's the macro levels. the biggest risk we have is that this has to be a closed eco system. similar to those like hydroponic, where everything has to be balanced. we've got to have a business case with industry that rewards design. we've got to make sure we ensure commonalty, especially if we have more than one vendor building airplanes at the same time and similar to the original century series. i don't think that one and only one airplane can be our future. i don't think we can bank on that. similar to the 1950's when air power was in flux with supersonic flux by everyday pilots, faster and faster

achieved. there are a lot of technologies that we can bear in aviation and to say there's one and only one plane in the future i think is too short-sighted. we need to be mindful if we've got multiple vendors that are billing, there has to be shared components. we can't do sustainment in a mixed fleet as this is completely independent. those have to be ground rules for supplying the pipeline. and the other thing i worry about, how donning do we inspect these airplanes for? it's hard to require airplanes, every time you want to get rid of them. you've got a congressional delegation that rightfully cares about their district and supplying the war fighter. if you look at our business case with industry, 70% of what we offer to companies is production sustainment opportunities. if we were, i guess to mirror something, we probably mirror a

florida hospital where there's a really big geriatric ward and a small pediatric ward. you'd like to be the other way around. mainly focused on these things. i know if we design these airplanes to last too long and when the next plane comes out, ready to come out, iphone style. if we can't retire the previous one and we end up just keeping more and more airplanes, now we're charging the air force money. so it's timing the retirement with the new onset so we really care about like initial operational capability. we know those dates for every program. when is the ioc date? every program manager knows that and we need to start caring about the end date and make this eco system closed. we only have hoch money, a few billion to put at this. better do it the right the first time. if it doesn't work for industry, then it's not going to work for us.

ultimately industry will want to do this. i'm pleased with the response that we have. there's a lot of fear, a lot of concerns with the details, but the idea of the department turning to the idea of new airplanes every five years is a romantic one. and you walk the halls where there's a date on the airplane and they're not far apart. and then as you walk down, they're further and further. we need to have designers always designing in the air force. future is too much in flux to have periods of design. we need to do continual design, if we do that, you can imagine, you know, something that's better than an x-plane, something that you could go into production on and not committing to the mass production, but staying in that very low rate assembly, a couple of airplanes per month level, that you could afford to

sustain that and keep designing, but then, think back to the digital tools. they allow you to design, but they also allow you to modernize. if you were designing something today and there was a different radar, a different weapon, i would believe that designers could derisk, using the digital tools they used in the first place. >> there are like six things in there i want to dive deep around. in the interest of time, i'll pick two, the first is small fleet size, predicated on fewer numbers of more types of airplanes and we have a lot of data that tells us that small fleites are really hard to deal with from a sustainment perspective. there are operational challenges and training challenges. you mentioned needing rules of the road for different aircraft in this series and i wonder if you could talk more about that. how different are these planes really going to be from each other? how are you, you know,

mitigating the risk of, you know, ballooning sustainment costs for a variety of the same planes, those questions. >> there's a good reason small fleites aren't worked for a long time and maybe early air force where planes are simply mechanically, there's a reason why. so it goes in the list of things that we could get wrong. things that have to be true to make it affordable. the planes have to be identical from a maintenance and assembly. holes line up. not having large numbers of artisans available to deal with the aircraft. thing two we need to own, we're going to pay more per unit because we're paying for design. right now the per unit prices are know the per unit price, it's the per unit buy-in over the lifetime of the program price. so we get a lower per unit rate for that long-term commitment with the industry.

similar for the iphone, we need to pay for design, that means higher prices than we pay for today. the hope would be to take 70% that we pay vendors to do increasingly difficult sustainment on planes. we take them down to the part and redo the parts and put them all the way together and it's inspiring that we can do that. wouldn't we rather build a plane, a better one? ... he's not going to want to have radically different training if we have like two or three airplanes we're doing. i'm sure he wrote to have some

commonality in the simulators or the cockpits. but yes, there are many, many devils in the details. what i'd use it and with when someone is skeptical, everything we should be skeptical of, but should we try to build the next airplane the way we are building current ones? we had 13 companies who could build a fighter force individual secretary azar's and we're down to two today. we are at risk in this nation because of how few and far between our advanced aircraft building opportunities are and the random forces that determine who builds them is based on lots of things inside the company and inside the government. we are in danger could collapse to one. i do not want to have -- i want new companies in. we have to try something different. let's face it one of the reasons this is a good time to do is is doing great contest. it's about to go through a modernization with a five year

window we can take risk, try something new. same thing is true, the fact of hotlines going to modernization opens up our aperture to take risk. we will have our eye on it. all the risk that come out, but if that fails commit to go back to traditional acquisition, we will do with the somber knowledge the random forces can have a bad effect under industry. >> at a minimum you will have learned something. >> that's the thing i like is these tools go pretty fast. you are tried to simplify a lot of the learning curve. even if we get it wrong the first time, we will get it wrong so we will get it right. it's not like this hypothetical thing. it is happen commercial industries, and it's just having the insights that our industry is not that different from any of these commercials from a design perspective. we have to change the business model so it is profitable. >> that's a great segue to the second thing i wanted to go

deeper onto which is what you're proposing is a pretty radical change to the economics. and defense industry, currently a lot of companies take a loss on that side face and make that money back into statement, and so that's a huge shift alone right there in addition to the fact you are trying, based on what you just said, change the ratio cost to own pretty dramatically. you said you've heard a lot of positive feedback from industry. i'm just wondering they have shareholders whom they're responsible at a lot of different forces who expect certain things from those companies, but how do you envision this change occurring, suddenly, slowly, with great consternation? >> i won't be a legal is alike because you can't really sprinkle the holy trinity on legacy systems. you have to concede the program

fully digitally, , fully open ce fully agile. it's very difficult to do after the fact. if an airplane, if you don't have high integrity in your supply chain, you can't say don't. you're going to have to deal with that. it's going to be very difficult to change. this will come into play new program by new program. don't see any reason we could see weapons this way or build satellite this way. the past i gave every from executive office is identify your first program. at my request to offer industry ceos who were with me last week was to find the first thing that they want to do fully digitally conceived. i have kept an open door with industry because i am very aware that the first companies that go on this path with us, if they don't benefit from it, right, that we won't get to attempted again. they care it has to be more than dollars and cents. they should make profit and have steady cash flow they need to

keep their business up a foot. as would bring on a new business model we can't just say we have a new business model. it's got to change from the old, but the bigger carrot for industry is just a return to decide focus your design and innovation will always end up happening so the idea we could re-energize the design apparatus of our large companies has an appeal that is bigger than the dog and said. >> dollars and cents i would say are a necessary but not sufficient function of making this work. >> do you envision a future where there are new entrance into the aircraft design space, the design and headed over to someone else to build? >> the dreamworld that i don't to get to live in that we have new entrance in the military aviation at some point, and that we could separate design and production, that we could walk down production lines for multiple things are being built

on the same line and you could flexibly change between them, and that new model would be beneficial for everyone engaging in defense. because the model we have now, it really forces such a diversification in industry, you have to be good at nearly everything to be a large company because it may be a helicopter this year, and may be an airplane the next two, it may be a take the next year. you need to be good at all of it and that diversification has really bad to lack of specialization. i don't think we'll have -- maybe a company that is touted by a ford building at the once to build cool and punches because and knows if they're the best designer that they can keep the company afloat forever, because we will be able to give them proper profit for doing good design here that would open up the door for companies that are better at production to not have to try to be excellent at

both. you can be specialized an excellent at one, and work with us. i hope that will bring specialization back in. >> and you think our goods would be cool with writing the checks for design aircraft that may or may not be built in quantity? >> well -- >> i didn't mean speedy may be an error change. no, i'm trying to talk with as many members of congress as i can. classification is a big one but the big a. >> translator: with numbers is i can share with been done and what is being done. that's helpful. generally what have gotten his good support. they like a couple of things. they like there's an analog for this in commercial industry. they understand what tesla did break into the automotive market. they can upload a something lie that could happen for defense. they like it would be lots of things you can observe and oversee along the way. when you're done with your digital twin you know a lot about your airplane.

that and the supply chain is going to enable you to a softer you know about before you build. when you build the first one, if you don't, you learned a lot. before you ever commit to the large cost of the program which is operationalized and fielding it here so you like that. they like there's a window of opportunity given our existing fighters that you don't have to be for or against this, depending on an existing platform. the existing platform creates a window of opportunity to try something. the last thing is just goes back to a romantic period of the country. i just don't believe that we can't get back to designing more frequent. i understand what it's not. it's very trained in the pentagon, people will say the acquisition system is broken, or the cold war acquisition system was bad. we did win the cold war and that was a typical period will be computerized our systems before the rest of the world.

computers were hard and expensive, you had to be a genius to build a computer and headed off to the airplane person or the settlor person. we successfully did that but because that was challenging, technology slowdown which means programs slow down. we are seeing all my goodness, now computers are easy, the fact we can bring computers into design is simply itself to remove the encumbrance of waiting on technology to put new airplanes. if the technology exists in the world today, the question should be from the war fighters, why don't i have it? why dfu create a new program? why can't you answered in my system i could commercial innovator or commercial iot company can do their system? that's the right question. we should be able to but we have to adopt the religion of digital. >> i have two last class question before turn over. dr. roper has agreed to stay longer with us so that will be time for audience questions, but some of things your talk about particularly digital engineering

and design financing in programs from your sister services as well, you're in a helicopter, edition the army is running and i'm wondering if you are talking to your counterparts in those organizations about how to get you can provide the right incentives to industry to move in this direction? is there a coordinated joint approach? >> its summer to what i think it's good to begin, which is you keep each other informed and you just explore things you think makes sense for your program. no guarantee there's a one-size-fits-all. i doubt that there will be. i think, for instance, like what i see in a digital sentry series for aircraft, the appeal is having a positive business model and a very low rate of production between the points and a big bass direction of 1000 or for a weapons program in any the simple point is simply so you can build more into you would be focusing on that i don't think there's a

one-size-fits-all but the best analog i can give you is that if you're in acquisition, the tech side of the fence, you heard fly before you buy any meeting. we don't do that very often but we say it a lot, that we should fly exactly what we want to buy exactly is a key. if we do that on the whole will get acquisition right and we will not have the big programmatic blowups that occur when you have a flaw design ando production and i have to fix something in december. almost every cautionary tale. that fly before you buy is almost religion. that's what you do, i do think this design will be just as religious in nature. the would become a document that we just say do it because it's a tide that raises all boats. hopefully as we do, our sisters of his do it will be able to share lessons learned and probably have a core set of things you should do but still enable the program managers to find their peculiar thread or benefit. we need to get the first

programs right because the one thing i deathly know is once there's a big train wreck, to ask the next person to get on the train and expect different results is a a hard ask. >> okay. agree there. one last question for me which is tangentially related to the concept here the digital century series. there's a lot of activity happening and all the services as was the joint staff around multi-domain, , joint, all doma, everybody it it has its own acronym for it, and i'm wondering how do those developing concepts impact what is you as the head weapons buyer for the air force i think about procuring, designing now and into the future and how does this again holy trinity of digital design technologies plug into that? >> suzanne, i'm really glad you asked that question because the

thing that is been quoted the most is the multi-domain aspect of or corporate that's one poit because that's a operational reality, but the technical reality is what i think is equally exciting and it dovetails very nicely. the thing we're trying to do in our advanced battle management program, the first demonstration is a month away what we will connect f-22s, , f-35s, space x, satellites, navy ships, army soldiers. we will connect them in an internet like style. what we are really doing to enable multi-domain is finally building the internet and the air force. it's all the stuff that you know. there are no nose showstoppers. it's tilting one could software capability. developing a platform to write it on, the cloud to host it on. what most people don't know is already il-4 credited, that's like unclassified top level

security and it has a continuous authority to operate. it's not a business system. it's the dekoven system to an aide were fighting. the secret, top secret and then higher classifications, so code can float up and get out to the edge. the things we have to do is bring software defined radio and networking across the board, edge compute. the way this will work if you think about it we will have big cloud, big dod cloud, and if you're a system may be like lia sixth generation or fourth-generation ownership or anything, if you're connected to big cloud, very summer to the app, pick your favorite, we have a user profile for you based on your mission. the data that hits are clad we can recognize this is something that susanna should see because she is driving that ship. we collected that threat and we can push it to in way that's vy summer in ways these to engage with and as you respond to it we get better at recognizing it. but, of course, we have to do

more. we have an adversary who will do everything to disconnect from the cloud pics of the real secret sauce will be when the disconnect happens, how much are we able to locally store and process? cannot inform you how long you will have digital superiority, digital stealth so that when you connect back up, because i don't think any adversary would be obligate us disconnected forever, we can refresh your data almost like we're kind of resetting the clock. to do that we are going on the same internet journey that iot companies went on. i would say the what difference is where probably focus a lot more at digital at the edge. if we get those right, i think the benefit will be that finally for once, for once if the government has a piece of data that can help the war fighter, we can get it to them, and it's crazy in the world we live in where you retina with your personal devices are connected

to the entire world. think about how much ability to understand come to use our term command and control to control things, you can control everything. we live in that world. our operators go home with that capability and they come into military with things can't talk to each other. so the final think josé, i will give a big shot up to the air force for going big after digital. it's a huge risk to put billions of dollars into the digital transformation you can't take a picture of it, right? but you know behind your phone is an amazing powerful architecture that allows that phone to be so much more than a platform. so the vision we have come you have lots of programs for us, cloud one, clapper one, gateway one, data one, the whole internet company in air force. the reason we put that one at the end is it makes it easy to remember but we want our military to act as one. we want to finally have the same connective tissue we all

interpersonally. the great news is similar to like the automotive trend, this exists, right, we just have to be able to clone it and probably put a a little more security it but it's not unachievable to. i don't buy that. but it is going to be different to become a digital service, a digital department. i think the our challenge, the biggest risk is whose congressional district is digital? how many are you making? how many are at my base? how do we get this to be bought, and this is this is a voice ca, and if you've got an f-16 that you should be thinking of how do i make it lightning one, aegis one, how do i have my thing, my favorite platform join the one family so that the government has a piece of data, that platform acid in a seamless, easy to engage with aspect. every time i drive home i'm

thinking of how is is working on the battlefield? what's critical pretty cool ist of internet type gurus who joined our team as pioneers. they are the designers. we are not designing this in a traditional defense passion pit where designing this with champions of commercial internet technology were willing out of patriotism to be contracted designers to make sure that we don't get outside of what worked for the internet. so you can imagine, i like -- i'm excited about this, i'm also disappointed i don't get to manage the program because it would be so much fun to do but it would be to believe we can do it if we keep the funding. this is our window of opportunity. >> great. they give very much. i'm going to open to the audience about. we have microphones circulating in the room so please wait for the mic to get to you. yes, i see you. and then please introduce yourself and let us know where you're coming from. >> you should've let him wave his hand a lot more. [laughing] see how far he's willing to go.

>> i tried not to be ostentatious about that. extraordinary plan. i think everybody who is been indispensable while understand that's the kind of future where to go to among commonality, sustainability and driving the design process. the problem or the challenge is how do you overcome this mechanically? because when you go to this digital design threat it's cheaper to think the problem through carefully than it is to do it we are now, which is good for contractors because every single piece of this there is costs associated over the very long-term, right? how do you engineer this in a way that the folks who are doing this let go? because i see potential for no reason for them to want to let go. you have got new competitors in as you did in space. there was once upon a time when everybody said there would be no new competitors and ultimately that changed in part because of

billionaires who watched the moon landing and wanted to make a change in the world. ultimately, how to drive the change across the ecosystem? this will be highly disruptive on virtually every single account, exceptionally good for national security and military capability but potentially really problematic for somebody who has a 300 $80 share price. >> that's a good question. the good news is we'll have to change everything about how we do acquisition. would have to decide which part. the biggest thing to get right to create some industry confidence is getting the number of flight hours right. because it seems like how could that be so important? let's decompose it a bit. so one, if it's a 10,000 flight our plane, i'm already into a place where you need unique expense to that, to be able to sustain that airplane. that's a unique skill.

aerospace you want to keep building new things. if we can keep systems too long, for companies to work with us they will not be able to bring their a game design. they will need to know how to do sustain the. that's the deep level sustain his peculiar to our business. it's important for for a compay that is thinking about building airplanes for us to say i just need to be great at design because i'm really great at design, and assembly, working for supply chain and i have a team that can put a couple of points to get a month, we can just roll with that for years and keep doing tech modernization, not commit to the 5000 people we needed. when we do with the best possible technology we could have, if we're super. >> not give it up that michael production team either. are you doing mass brushing, never be at a society if the technologies come into play, be putting it on airplane. it will be super import for the defense department working with us now because if we're asking them to put the focus back on

design, the design opportunities have to be more frequent. when we hit 2500 flight hours, the airplane the airplane, they are done. you i'm not going to an overall. we are going to bring on the next step and that's the biggest. i have gotten in all this. there's so many elements out of control what i'd look at how the acquisition system has changed the industry base from the late cold war and after we did different. i hope by keeping people informed that we can show that either we succeed and shifting more opportunity to design, or we failed miserably but we get insights to do it, but microlevel if we don't ship a profit into design, i cannot imagine keeping our defense industrial base comparable with the commercial one in terms of the creativity and innovation it brings to bear. it's a must succeed mission. >> admiral haney? >> dr. roper --

>> admiral haney, good to see you. >> really as a board director at cnas. i want to thank you for being part of this fireside chat. as you look at this future fighting as you described, et cetera, can you also talk about what changes are necessary in order to implement regarding the ot any operational test and evaluation part of the business? it seems to be that's the lethargic part of the business it seems needs to change. >> it's great to see you. i sense of appreciate all the time he spent with me in my last job i learned a lot from you, sir. i promised i did not ask the good apple to ask the question but it's really good question to ask, sir. yes, test is not as fast as it next week but it hasn't had to be. where are the opportunities? being an air force test pilot has not been as exciting in recent years as it was in the early air force. one of the things we're getting

right, we change our program from being a prototype to being a full program executive office. if you're not familiar with that that's our highest level of acquisition leadership if you have the full trading soup to nuts to design all the way to retirement. we have put someone at that level in charge of this program because exotica for that reason, sir. so dale white who is a program manager for the b21 went on to become special operating forces just really creative thinker, is now our pel. of course which his first task is not to just simply do prototyping. it's to get the business case. one of the first things he's having to do is bring in a test pilot to think of how can these digital spend not to like quit doing tests but to reduce the amount of test i have to do because i trust the digital twin. a test pilot in future is really anchor that digital twitter

against really. they will make that model even better. the good news is we have a little bit of time to figure the details but we've got some excited test pilots. because the idea of airplanes choice act up in field to fly again is exciting and it will be more than that. it will be safety and airworthiness. everything has to be able to sit in this digital regime. the question will be what are you willing as authority or what are you willing to shift into the digital world and trust that the digital learning is good enough for real-world learning? everyone will have to answer that question. if anyone can't, since i can't, then you can have this chain with one bad link and the whole thing can't pull at the pace we want. so i don't want to undersell the challenges, and it's much, much more than acquisition. it's the whole air force. [inaudible]

>> i think so. i mean, i think so, sir. they seek to with the complexity of multivitamin warfare might be hard to say we have one for one twin with the real world but i see a lot of ability to bring in digital simulation where you're playing the war and if it happened just to provide some insights. but i think that's going to be a little harder than just building a physical system but we will see. >> red shirt, second row, and then the first row. >> how come you didn't release a public rfp or your intent to procure? >> let me follow up with that. it's a question about be to go in but of what you the right details on that. >> okay. >> first row right here. >> dr. roper, i wanted to ask you about how what you doing any

air force, which is essentially overhauling acquisition any air force, is linked to what dod is doing at elven lords level because she's also working on acquisition reform issues also talked about open system architecture moving away from plan traditional leaving the contractor i think it is called -- in charge. can you talk about how your linking in to that overarching effort and whether you guys are doing the same things or she's country on something different? >> no, she's very much a partner in this and i really appreciate the focus that she's brought that really it's the people that you acquisition. it's not the process. it's imagine creating a process that could by hospital blankets and stealth bombers with precision efficiency is crazy. the person who does that. we are working very closely with

her. one of her biggest initiatives is rewriting the departments acquisition process called dod 5000.02. edwin acquisition is it. very few people like it because it is generic in many cases prescriptive. when congress shifted most of the programs back to the services, ms. lord took on revitalizing one, how do we train people at her acquisition of processes which is super important because of training regime is so old and antiquated. no one would leave point how to do digital anything or software anything. she is energizing making training relevant which is super important for the services because you're only as good as a person, the person makes the call. the second is changing the process so much, much more flexible. you need to do software differently than you do hardware. you need to buy service is different, so she's putting in a lot of different pathways that allow the program manager to pick the way that's best your

site think that's exactly the right way to go and we have been providing a lot of input to or from our programs about what's working and donatelli, empowering works across the board. that's the change are seeing any air force acquisition, simply giving power back to the program managers, trusting them and empowering them. the thing we do in the operational air force, we talk about -- you need to delegate decisions to those level so you're more responsive. if that works well in operational air force why would the working acquisition? it does. we are creating that empowered lowest level chain of command as and the results are fantastic. i could not be prouder of our people. >> all the way in the back in the blue tie. >> thanks very much for coming up talking to us, dr. roper. wanted to ask if any particular contractor has been leaning forward on helping you with your

search for this design, giving up their intellectual property maybe experimenting if you want to call someone out being some whose lean in on that for you? >> in general, i'm happy hour both our companies that are working on platforms as well as technology. i, probably is not fair for me to say what i think the different industry partners are. i just think, you know, i need to kind of be fair and open any need to give them time to get their head around this. the thing i've been very pleased as i see them investing internally. they see the imperative to get digital designers, , digital engineers to do it. i think we will have a bright future and pretty good competition. i i can give a shout out to the7 program which we have airplanes,

they've been built, they are flying. i think boeing was awarded the game changer award by aviation weekly which i think that's the second time that's been done. that program we are getting to see managed by different part of the air force but we're beginning to see the digital tools, just amazing things up acquisition, helpdesk and start thinking about the lifecycle earlier. but we don't have the first program yet that brings the full holy church together and change the acquisition strategy because that's the difference between like what we hope to achieve a next generation air dominance and a program like t7, is that you made the digital design which are going into a large production for a static design base. maybe that makes sense for a traitor. maybe don't want to keep changing because your training pilots to fly but would like to transcend that model and have more flexibility. >> in the middle side over here.

>> erin simpson from northrop grumman said analysis center. you about a couple different dreams for the future or future visions of the air force and also the romance associate with returning to both liquid design, frequent task and frequent feeling. i'm wondering if that romance applies to unmanned fleet as well? if there's a future of that air force where there are more unmanned systems than man in the air force fleet. >> probably, and we just need to say that. i think we're getting more comfortable saying that. that comfort probably comes from a couple different points is that if were going to start thinking about at peter competitor sisley, we can't be air force where everything that takes all needs to come back in land. it's just too hard to imagine with all the technology in the world that you can design a defensible airplane. when i say we need to think sentries series and its things being in flux. i do what the right one airplane

is i need to start diversifying options. i definitely think many of the systems will be unmanned. we have started a program called skype or which means we intend to get over the goal line of transition into fielding a we very much hope the platforms like f-15ex and f-35 will be able to be the first trailblazers with how to fly a plane and have team of system support you. it's important we get good at it because the second we create r2-d2 in the sky we will try to beat r2-d2 in the sky and start this back-and-forth countermeasure counter countermeasure. [inaudible] >> very good copilot i would love to hit that. i'd be happy with our 0d0 to start, lesser cousin. we have to get started on that because the one thing that truly clear about machine learning and i also coming on buzzwords but when you dig into them and a very grateful to mit who partnered with us on an aix elevator. now we have partnership with a

leading university that is bringing ai into systems that were fighters can use but bringing expertise we desperately need. they will be the first to tell you that, that machine learning is very fragile in the face of an adversary. i think it's too powerful a capability cannot have have but to fragile to just trust the machine will not before i think this man unmanned team paradigm will be her for a while until someone has a breakthrough in machine learning where r2-d2 says wait a second, you're trying to fool me. went r2-d2 can do that then of course the first thing is will try to go a generation beyond. i think we're going to be in this phase for a while. the thing assiduity what are pilots that is to have to fly into uncertain airspace, that they have the option to push their scout or their forward based jammer or for space sensor

so they are either confusing the enemy first, seemed in a first, disrupting the enemy first. if we have to lose systems in the fight, shame on us -- a word that needs to mean something. it's not expendable. set something we expect will only go on a one-way flight. we're designing systems like sky board to that kind of company. the right number of takeoff and landing for roughly 50 is a good number. that means you can reuse it but you will not keep it forever. he almost think of it as a reusable weapon than an airplane. it's a pretty cool design challenge because your kind of put another dollar into design and get better keep build out. you don't want to get too far so you don't want to lose. we're kind of figure the right inflection point with industry but i think having an escort secondary weapon such as, jammers, come back in land, if we lose some not that way because there were not that expensive, could be a huge game changer. finally with something we can take risk with in a way we will

need to in air power. >> i think have time for three more questions. i'm going to go here, second row first. >> i'm a reporter from radio free asia. dr. roper, used to be acting chief architect of defense agency. given that bakken can you tell me assess the current missile-defense strategic -- against north korean threat? >> i am always mindful it's been a while since i've been in that job, so it's been a lot of work in the civil defense. i was very confident in the capabilities during the time i i worked there. i learned a lot about defense working there. but in terms of where the state of what is now i have to leave that for the agency to answer. but i'm very grateful to them. don't let me cut my chops on defense working there early on.

>> so in order for the u.s. to move forward with the program like him get the needs to be -- the air force leadership, it will need to retire some from. >> there's been reports the global hawk will be one of them. first off, can you confirm that for secular, hypothetically, even if you can't, hypothetically, if you were to cut that i would acquisition proposal in that gap new platforms modification? could use some sort of a program structure like digital sentry series to help fill that? >> so valerie, i guess i could either answer question really specifically as the last act as a service acquisition executive, or i could answer more generically. you you know i can confirm the r force and rightly so went through its portfolio and as the silvery honestly what can affect into the contested cycle?

we need to do that. if you think the work in the contested, it will work in uncontested. we do plan to retire systems that can't go worldwide. just start freeing up more budget to do the future. even talk about space here. i would love to have sentry series in space to build the first satellite is a prebuilt whenever i think that could be huge. we need to free up money. we talked about were fighting in space. we need the systems capable of doing that and doing well. the air force to do that so i can't confirm or deny what's in the budget of the we have made moves and fantasy what osd and congress are willing to let us do. if you look at something like high altitude isr is perfect for either like, you could modify existing systems -- [background sounds] >> tell us, what is in the ring tone? okay. [laughing]

maybe we should have a thing for we have to sing it. what do you think? [laughing] i often feel like acquisition is -- old street, old things. i think i is i would be perfect for something like this. it's a pretty simple profile. when a type of things with ig. i hate when we retire something is what is going to do with the capex i hope are gaps in the futures building these things. more to follow on our budget, but just expect from me that when a new program comes in, i'm telling everyone, , you got to o a digital competition. and then how does that change the way you're going to buy it? similar to having hotline all the time for fighters. i think we have to do that for isr and every other mission. if there's a new technology for our intelligence, why do i have to create a new program to have

it? why can't i inserted into something i have? very minimal and i think that missionary will benefit us, to. >> i will take two more. all the way in the back on the isle and sorry, she was first. >> thanks for your remarks today. i wanted to ask part of the apple model relies on aftermarket for hardware fly wasn't sure how you envisioned that factoring in, in this case with the potential be aftermarket potential with allies or others for the hardware or you just have to build that cost even more on the front end because you're not getting it on the back and? >> that's a great point. there are a lot of opportunities for us to do things differently in things like aftermarket in app store. yes, it will depend on the details. like our premier generation fighter we probably would not be going to put out on the market to just anyone.

if it's still leading edge paragraph technology. that would be allies and partners i'm sure we would consider. i think there are interesting opportunities and to do think we'll have to have some scheme with our platform builders so that they benefit from third-party people with. i don't know if it's the same percentages that apple uses but we will need to explore them with our defense industry. because again, it's stuff like, this isn't saying i don't want defense industry updating your system. i just know there's a lot that only our defense industry can do now and there are a lot of software data presented things that a lot of industry can do a virtual interest can do. i want to open up the opportunities to a broader set of commercial industry base so that our defense industry can really focus when we need them. i hope you've seen from the air force we've tried to do like herculean things to work with commercial tech startups like doing accelerators, where you

can pitch and i directly to us, which on contract and pay you that day and we are about to do some pretty cool things with public-private investment matching with venture capitalists. the more come his second work for us and bring a in private equity to get the benefit from that. there's a lot of things we we'e seeing from the ideas coming in, data, satellite things. but they can't build the cutting edge by the force. maybe in will change that. this isn't an either/or trying to create more of a symbiotic where there's more opportunities to work with us that just mass production and lifetime to statement. it's too thin and fragile a model to be robust in the face of technology change them have. we have to diversify. >> and last question. >> you talked about board of billionaires and possibly designing fighter jets.

would you want to see jeff basis are elon musk, spacex and blue origin get into that? or like what of the billionaires would you like to see get involved? [laughing] >> i probably shouldn't call -- it's an example of like right now to start a really innovative defense company and break-in, right, you have to have a lot of upfront capital, really good capital raising skill. i would just hope in future that if someone has done really well in business, now we have for the do in future and if thinking about the next thing they need to do to avoid being bored, building really cool airplanes are set let's might the list. at our air force cessation event this year, richard branson hope talk to all the cool innovations is going on across the country, it's amazing. you could just imagine how energized those teams are. the thing you get from richard

is this joy of pushing the envelope and doing these things, just keeping him, keeping focus, keeping them engaged. i would love in the future some like that thought my goodness, i ought to go be pushing the envelope on aircraft because we've got great designers with great ideas. i also had the opportunity when we did space pitch days a couple weeks ago and awarded over 40 million contracts, just a great event we got to cut all the bureaucracy out for space innovators, pitching directly to air force acquisition and war fighters. we had elon musk speak at come talk about what it's like to be a small company and get big and just really fascinating insight. i was able to talk with him at length about just generally how the approach, if you're a new company company how do you approach a market where you've got big companies that have lots of overhead and infrastructure that you've got to compete against? there's a lot we can learn from talking with people who have done this and will just have to

hope somewhere in the future when someone has finished their great pursuit and try to feel what they can do next, and we are building hypersonic aircraft or whatever the next thing is, they will say i want to do that just because it sounds cool. innovators love heart problems. the great thing about airspace, aside from the fact airplanes and solid circle, that the problems are hard. they will always inspire engineers and scientists want to up their game and be able to say they did something that never been done for, just like in the days of explained of the sentry series. every crippling broke a new barrier. a new boundary. time to get back to that. maybe if i'm long pass this job maybe i can work for one of those companies, finally do something good again. maybe i will try to seek an inch the base, provincial i could work in and push boundaries personally against. >> on that note thank you very

much for being so generous with your time and joining us here today. thank you all for coming. appreciate it. [applause] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

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[inaudible conversations] >> their goal is to make money. we will lose money. we think in the air force the right direction to go he is let industry, commercial that is highly incentivized with large amounts of capital we have been told to solve that distribution problem which is what we think will be the first deliverable in the commercial side. we have great relationship with his companies, a great partnership with darpa. the first question we should ask is what can we do with those commercial satellite. she would be divisive and put it up ourselves, releasing bandwidth by paying the companies where the wins the race? so a very deep in what darpa and are snc teams are doing, programs like blackjack and consider. i've never gotten -- i have gotten a briefing. i don't know what they're intending sigh can't speak to

it. >> okay. >> do you have a date for when your action going to do the first expected, the f-35 experiment, an exact date? >> the exact date is february 17 or 18th. we have a two day window. >> and doing it in colorado? >> egeland. the goal test range. the very just, we're hoping that some senior leaders come down and see it so we have multiple services and try to flexibility so i vfp could fly deficit. >> your going to bounce off the constellation? >> exact. we have a very fulsome program called global lightning. it's bringing commercial, into existing platforms. f-35 is is the last inserted, kc-135 is the next but desperately needed. my biggest fear on global lightning is not what were. very confident it will, very

confident. it's making sure we put it in our com and funded. the biggest thing that is great, we haven't talked to how much money is, hopefully and if when the budget battle in the pentagon, but its sizable dollars. it's enough money to actually do real stuff and it's not tied to any platform. so a a bms will be a compositin among existing platforms, , who can ever make the platform more like an internet of things type system, you get first dibs to the pot. we would use competition inside air force and even in the joint force to get the very fullwood lane innovators in and speedy so they get the money. >> what will be the detriment, yet with the intimate details with us, have to take assistant down to install whatever need to install and put a new raid on a comp that will to probably have to take a hit in readiness to get the benefit of modernization by having the funding in a bms and up to do the work repellents

invites people to take the near-term risk to get the long-term benefits. >> and try to convince congress. >> we do. i'm hoping and i may be crazy thinking that it will be viewed well. i feel like congress has been telling us, pleading with us, talking to people like eric schmidt is been a great friend and advisor during my time both here, and pleading with us to go after digital, go after connectivity, make things work together but every budget we send his platform centric. i hope they will smile on the air force, breaking at a platform plan and putting money towards digital transformation. i have got to get this internet type capability developed. which is why we using four-month deployment cycle by traditional acquisition. the internet emerged and it didn't emerge at 100% level. you got little 15% gains over time. we want to reward people and that can demonstrate 15% gains very quickly, not the overly

biased to people with a goldplated plan that deliver sleep. that will delineate the true innovators from the pretenders. >> are you concerned shevin had everything? this post be orchestrating this to architecture. >> i believe snc has been meetings with them. i have not had everything from them so it's something that if their budget closes, i would hope we would move forward together because will have to bring it over they do into space and death, ideas and things like com and cloud and data. i we looking for partnerships,, simmons once we have with darpa. we work for darpa for years, parted with a month hypersonics and distribute leo so that works quite well. if they steal of agency works with us the way darpa does we know how to do that model. [inaudible] a briefing at her what the oh

doing? >> and maybe just their busy, having to go argue. they haven't -- maybe first you need funding to go do a program before you talk to the acquisition person who is about executing funding. >> have you been successful in attracting this venture capital matching for phase two programs you been talking about. >> is yes. like surprisingly, surprisingly successful. the first round that we had done called strategic small business innovative research brought in, if we award all of them, over $1 billion of private capital. i think that's great for our first round. we are hoping that if we are able to do some of these awards and start teaching the air force that when you put money on the table with the process that private investors believe in, you can start double and triple link your money. the best advice with gotten from d.c. is to make your process transparent and to make it clear

where your seal of approval is. so the way you will see our ventures where change is our small business innovative research program which we call program and office, we will think of it as an account. that's the money we can only spend for tech startups. in a way it's money that you shouldn't you as ability or as a private investigator because it -- investor. it's effectively available. phase one awards that will be done only on sbir, that means you got in the door. phase two when we do pitch events, we want to start moving, we did this, where we match dollars with sbr. if you the program office put your own doll on the table, we will match it to do one out of sbir. that allows the program office to triple their money but it shows private investors that the customer is willing to put money on the table so that the product

market fit and are looking for those early in the company. the strategic is what you want to go, and hopefully three private dollars. there's a big incentive to do them that the awards are bigger so those p/e owes had to think harder but incentive of the matching we hope will compel them to do it. the rubber hits the road is december 16 where our program offices and the match this will have to decide which one of these companies and concepts you want to pursue. what if we end up awarding a significant number and we show would brought a lot of private capital income that changes the game. we should do r&d complete different into use. i don't think we could go but i think we go much bigger than a billion any initial offering if we keep quality at a high point for that final award, and secondly, we make sure it's very

clear that that final award phase two and phase three really are the good housekeeping seal of approval, proper vetting, proper product market fit, higher likelihood to succeed so that a private investors as did the air force give them a phase two? i'll match it. phase three, 321, no questions asked. we have gotten great insight from private investors that we can do because the fence is new for many of them. they need us to act as the trusted arbiter. it was pretty cool i had a peo roundtable last week our tv on for strategizing about the future. we spent the entire time talking sentry series and we had a roundtable with private investors who were telling us how we need to engage with them to make the air force and investment partner that's preferred. it's a great feedback from him and the feedback we got from the my guess was that we are catching and we are gaining credibility in the amount of funding that was put forward in

the first offering speech to the. >> which technologies got matched. >> as i have to wait until the awards happen. >> all right, thanks. >> thank you all. >> thank you. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> today and discussion of china's global influence and the growing competition between china and the u.s. in the indo-pacific region. this event hosted by the hudson institute is live on c-span2 today starting at noon eastern. you can watch it online at c-span.org or listen live with the free c-span radio app. during this thanksgiving week we are showcasing booktv programs normally available weekends here on c-span2. tonight at eight eastern books on u.s. intelligence.

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