1970 to over 10,000 today. that is the voting rights act. afterwards, sarah explores the political history of tobacco book "the cigarette." >> smoking was considered something almost un-american. it was a vice of the foreigner. the anti-smoking rode a wave of nativism and thought about what type of behavior is appropriate for healthy americans. >> watch an extended version of book tv this weekend and every weekend on c-span two.

>> will rubber talked about the future acquisition strategy and airpower capabilities. he spoke at the center for new american security for just over an hour. >> thank you very much, everyone for joining us here today. apologies that we're a butle behind schedule 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. if will has found a way, a better way, more efficient way with more opportunities 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 -- concept called the digital sentry series. 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 sentry 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. 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 is designed and assembled. 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. 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. of all the technology that you have seen and you know, the

swarming drones and the-- please, sir, we should do this. all of those technologies were about the pointy end of the spear and i do love that pointy end. 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. >> susanna: 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? what are they to do this thing? william 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. that is something 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

-- cutting edge air force if you're not giving industry profit for design. one of the things we will have to do is push the program opportunities back together. if they are decades apart, i don't expect any different behavior from the industry. if we can push them together, you might think -- you much is something that looks a little bit more similar to apple's business model. we'll never get there completely because they're not doing any awe 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.

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. 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 relevance, 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 -- theed to, now you can way we want it to, now 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. be design the thing to 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 go 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 -- build an airplane, updated quickly and update the software and havehen come back open architecture to third party

developers 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 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 lockheed martin stunt planes 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 entity. we would try to keep programs continually in that halfway house between 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 for bed 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. 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 aerospace companies. that 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 -- highly 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? william 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, -- work with us as well. there is a lot we need to do to work with that. i am much or you can design everything this way for commonality 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. 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. 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 air force and created a whole

program 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 -- hard to retire airplanes in this town. 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 expiration date. it will be just as important as making 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 -- 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 future is too much info 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. 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. susanna: 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 -- fleets 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 airplanes? william there's a good reason : small fleites aren't worked for a long time and maybe early air force where planes are

simple, mechanically. 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 maintenance perspective. 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 -- similar to 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 another airplane if we could? a better one? we want to push that part of this and charred. --m aware that our operators carl carlyle would not want to have radically different training. i am sure that he would want 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 -- for us in the individual century series. 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 of collapsing 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 in test. it's about to go through a modernization with a five year window we can take risk, try -- a little 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

s that come 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 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 ed in many commercial industries. 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 into. 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 -- if they have shareholders whom they're responsible at a lot of different forces who expect certain things from those companies. how do you envision this change occurring? suddenly? slowly? with great consternation? william: it won't be as fast as i would like because you can't really sprinkle the holy trinity on legacy systems. you have to concede the program fully digitally, , fully open come 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 not build weapons this way or build satellites this way. 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 , we won't get to attempt it again. 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. 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. those 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 handed 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. also, that new model would be beneficial for everyone engaging in every sense. 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. it may be a helicopter this year, it may be an airplane the next year, it may be a tank 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 -- touted by affordability will just want to build cool airplanes. up the door for companies to be able to specialize and the excellent at one. i hope that will bring specialization back in. >> you think congress will be cool with writing the checks for

design that may or may not be built in quantity? >> well -- >> i didn't mean speedy may be a change. >> no, i'm trying to talk with as many members of congress as i can. classification is a big one but the big -- they liked that there is an ally for this in the commercial industry. they understand what tesla did. something get behind like that for defense. they like that there will be lots of things that you can observe and oversee along the way. it is that in the supply chain that will allow you. when you build the first one, you have learned a lot before you ever commit to the large cost of the program. they like that.

they like that there is a window of opportunity. or don't have to be poor dependent on an existing platform. is itk the last thing goes back to a romantic. of the country. i just don't believe that we can't get back to design being more frequent. i understand why it is 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 -- hand it off to the airplane person or the settlor person. we -- satellite person. we successfully did that but because that was challenging, technology slowdown which means programs slow down. we are seeing all my goodness, now

seeing, oh my goodness, --ther computers are easy, now that 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. -- i turn it over to the audience. 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. i wonder if you're talking to your counterparts in those organizations about how you can provide the right incentives to

the industry to move in this direction? is there a coordinated approach? to where i want to begin. you keep each other informed and you just explore things you think makes sense for your program. guarantee, there is no 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 of smaller and a big mass production. youbest analog i can give is if you are in acquisitions, the tech side of the fence, you buy inard fly before you 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, we will get acquisition right and we will not have the big programmatic blowups that occur when you have a flaw design and to 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 -- it will become a dogma that we just do it because it's a tide that raises all boats. hopefully as we do, our sisters in this will do it and be able to share lessons learned and probably a core set of things . we need to get the first programs right because the one

thing i 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 domain, 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? how does this again holy trinity of digital design technologies plug into that? william i'm really glad you : asked that question because the thing that is been quoted the most is the multi-domain aspects of war. an operational reality. 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. we will try to connect f-22's, f-35's, spacex, 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. what most people don't know is that it 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 development system to aid in war 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 , maybe a sixth generation or fourth-generation ownership or anything, if you're connected to the cloud. this is very similar to an app. pick your favorite. we have a user profile for you based on your mission. the data that hits our cloud. we can recognize this as 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 very 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 -- we are probably focused 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. 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 -- where things can't talk to

each other. so the final think -- a big shout out to the air force. they went 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 enjoy personally. the great news is similar to like the automotive trend, this exists. we just have to be able to clone it and probably put a a little -- put a little more security in it.

it is not unachievable. i don't buy that. but it is going to be different to become a digital service, a digital department. i think the our -- that our challenge, the many are youis how making? how many are at my base russian marc --? how do we get this to be bought, how do i have my platform joining that one family? every time i drive home with waze, i think about how this could work on the battlefield. i get very inspired by her. -- by it. inare not designing this traditional defense fashion. we are designing this with

commercial -- 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. you can imagine, 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. we can do it if we can keep the funding. this is our window of opportunity. >> great. they give very much. -- thank you very much. i'm going to open to the audience. we have microphones circulating in the room. please wait for the microphone to get to you. >> extraordinary plan. i think that that is the future that we have to go to about commonalities and finding the design process forward. the problem, the challenge is

how do you overcome this mechanically russian marc it is cheaper to think the problem through carefully than it is to do where we are now. that is good for contractors because every single piece of this, there is costs associated over the very long term. how do you engineer this in a way that the people who are doing this let go? i see potentially no reason for them to want to let go. there was once upon a time and everyone said that was it, there would be no new competitors. they were 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.

380$ share price. >> we don't have to decide which parts to keep. 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? if it is a 10,000 flight our 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 that.

that's the deep level sustain level, to sustain this part of our business. it's important for for a company 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 a 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 -- could have, it will be super important. if we're asking them to put the focus back on design, design opportunity has to be more frequent area when we hit 2500 flight hours, the airplane the -- the airplanes are done. that is the biggest fear i have been all of this. there is so many elements out of

control. when i think about how the changedion system has the industry base from the late cold war and after we did -- after, what we do different. i hope by keeping people informed that we can show that either we succeed and shifting more opportunity to design. i can't imagine keeping our industrial level this. it is a must succeed mission. i want to thank you for being a part of this. that youhis future described. can you also talk about what changes are necessary?

--a letter to this seems like a lethargic part of the business. >> it is great to see you. sincerely appreciate all the time that you spent with me at my last job. i did not ask the admiral to ask that question. it is a great question to ask. the tests are not as fast as they need to be but they haven't had to be. being in air force test pilot has not been as excited -- exciting in recent years as it was in the early air force. we have changed our program from this from a full certified. you get the full training, soup to nuts from design although it to retirement. at that level in

charge of this program for that reason. he was a program manager for be 21. he worked for special operating forces. he is a really creative thinker. our pel. his first task is not to do prototyping. the first thing he has had to do is bring in a test pilot to figure out how to reduce the amount of tests he has to do because i trust the digital twin. a test pilot in the future is to anchor that digital twin. the good news is we have a little bit of time to figure out the details but we've got some excited test pilots. because the idea of airplanes choice act up -- airplanes and showing backup

in the field to fly is exciting to them. 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 to shift into the digital world to trust that the digital learning is good enough for the real-world learning? everyone will have to answer that question. if anyone can't, since i can't, you can have this chain with the one badly. i don't want to undersell the challenges. it is the whole air force. >> for digital c-2 multi-dimension. is it the same? >> i think. it might be hard to say that we have a one for one twin with the real world. i see a lot of ability to bring in digital simulation over live

where you are playing the war ahead of it happening just to provide some insights. but i think that is going to be harder than building a different system. we will see. >> how come you didn't release public r.f.p. for your intent to procure at-6? >> let me follow up with that. it is a question i am happy to go in, but i want to get you the right details on that. >> first row here. >> i wanted to ask you about how what you are doing in the air force, which is essentially overhauling acquisition or trying to overhaul acquisition in the air force, is linked to ellen o.d. is doing at lord's level? she is always working on acquisition reform and talked

about open system market check and moving away the traditional leaving the contract kisper in charge. can you talk about how you are linking into that overarching effort and whether you guys are doing the same things or if she is concentrating on something different? >> no, she is very much a partner in this. i really appreciate the focus that she has brought. it is the people that do acquisition. it is not the process. imagine creating a process that could buy hospital blankets and stealth bombers with precision efficiency is crazy. it is the person that does that. we are working very closely with her. one of her big initiatives is rewriting the department as acquisition process. it is called 500.02. very few people dislike it because it is generic and in many cases pro scriptive.

when congress shifted the programs back to the services, she took on revitalizing one, how do we train people at acquisition universities? that is super important. our training regime is so old and antiquated, for one would leave knowing how to do digital anything that is super important for the services. you are only as good as the person. the person makes the calm. the second point is changing the process so it is much, much more flexible. you need to do software differently than hardware. you need to buy services different. she is put negligence a lot of different pathways that empower the program manager to pick the way that is best. so i think that is exactly the right way to go, and we have been just providing a lot of input to her from our programs about what is working. empowering works across the board. that is the change you are seeing in air force acquisition, is simply giving power back to the program

managers, trusting them and empowering them the same way we go in the operational air force. e talk about the loop, act. e, orient decide and why wouldn't that work in acquisition? it does. we are finally creating that empowered lowest level chain of command, and the results have been fantastic. couldn't be prouder of our people. >> all the way in the back. >> thanks very much for coming in and talking with us, dr. roper. i 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, someone who is leaning in on that for you? >> in general i am happy with both our companies that are

working more on platforms as well as technology. so it probably is not fair for me to say where i think the different industry partners are. i need to kind of be fair and open, and i need to give them time to get their head around this. the thing that i have been very pleased is i see them investing internally. they see the imperative to get digital designers, digital engineers to do it. so i think that we are going to have a bright future and pretty good competition on next gen ration air dominance. i can definitely give a shout out to the t-7 program, which you know have airplanes. they have been built and are flying. i think boeing was given the game-changer award. that is the second time that has been done. that part of the program is manage the by a different part of the air force, but we are getting to see in digital tools

help tests, start thinking about the life cycle earlier. but we don't have that first program yet that brings the full holy trinity together and change the acquisition strategy because of it. that is the difference between what we hope to achieve on next gen ration airdom nation, sixth gen fighter versus a t-fighter. you are going into large production for a static design base. maybe that makes sense for a trainer. maybe you don't want to keep changing it balls you are training pilots to fly, but we would like to transcend that model and have more flexibility. > the middle side over here? >> hi. dr. roper, you have talked about a couple of different dreams for the future or future visions of the air force and also the romance associated with returning to frequent design, frequent tests and

fielding. i am wondering if that romance applies to the unmanned fleet as well, and if there is a future air force where there are more unmanned systems than manned? >> probably. we just need to say that. i think we are getting more comfortable saying that. that comfort probably comes from a couple of different points. if we are going to start thinking about a peer competitor seriously, we can't be an air force for everything that needs to take off, come back and land. it is just too hard with all the technology in the world that you can design invincible airplanes. things are in flux. i don't know what the right one airplane is, so i need to start diversifying options. we have started a program escalonaed skyworg. we intend to get it over the goal line and into fielding. we hope that platforms like

f-15 ex and f-35 will be the first trail belizers in how to flight a plane and have a team of assistants support you. en we will try to beat r 2 d 2 in the sky. >> a very good co-pilot. 0 ould be happy with r 0 d to start, lesser cousins. so we have to get started on that. one thing that is clear about machine learning and a.i., on buzz words, but when you dig into them -- and i am grateful to m.i.t. who partnered with us on an affirm i. accelerator. we are bringing affirm i. into systems that more fighters can use. they need them. they will be the first to tell you that machine learning that lives on the internet is very fragile in the face after an adversary. i think it is too powerful a

cape ament to not have but too fragile to trust that the machine one be fooled. this man/unmanned paradigm is going to be here a while until we get a break through where r 2 d 2 says wait a minute, you are trying to fool me. when it does that, what is the first thing we are going to do? try to go a generation beyond. i think we are going to be in this phase for a while than and the thing i want our pilots to have is if they have to fly into uncertain air pace, they have the option to push the scout or the forward based jammer, so they are seeing the enemy first or disrupting the enemy first. if we have to loose systems in in a fight, shame on us if it is not the attritable first.

e are designing systems at skyborg, to have the right number of take-offs and landings. that means you are going to reuse it, but you are not going to keep it forever. you almost think of it more as a reuseable weapon. you put another dollar into design and you get better capability out, but you don't want to go too far. we are trying to find the right inflection point with industry. we have some that if they don't come back and land, it is not that big a deal. to finally have something we can take risk with in a way we will need to in air power. >> we only have time for three more questions. i am going here, second row on the aisle first. >> dr. roper, you used to be a

chief acting architect and the missile defense agency. given that background, can you on the north ke korea threat? >> it has been a while since i was in that job. i was confident in the capabilities during the time i was working there. i learned a lot about defense working there. but in terms of where the state of play is now, i have to leave that for the missile defense agency to answer. but i am grateful to them that they let me cut my chops on defense working with them early. >> i am with defense news. in order for the u.s. to move forward with a program like engad, there needs to be built pairs, and the air force leadership has been clear it is going to be pressing to retiresome platforms. there have been reports that the global hawk is going to be

one of them. first off, can you confirm that? and secondly, hypothetically, even if you can't, hypothetically, if you were to cut that, how would acquisition propose filling that gap? is it noah platform modifications? could you use a program structure like digital sentry series to help fill that? >> valerie, i guess i could answer your question specifically ags the last act as the service acquisition executive, or i could answer more generically. ic confirm. the air force, and rightfully so, went through its portfolio and asked itself very honestly what can i take into the contested fight? and we need to do that. if you have things that work in a contested fight, they will work uncontested. we asked the hard questions, and we do plan to retire systems that can't go worldwide to start freeing up more budget

to do the future. we didn't even talk about space here. i would love to have a sentry series in space. we need to free up money for space because we are talking about war fighting in space. we need new systems that can do it well. i can't confirm or deny what is in the budget other than we have made those moves and we have to see what offerman s.d. and congress are willing to let us do. if you look at high altitude i.s.r., it is perfect for -- you can modify existing systems ring tone?the

we are not talking about things that pull high g's. i hate that when we retire something, it is immediately what are you going to do with the gap? i hope the five is just building new things. are more to follow on orbudget. but just expect from me that when a new program comes in, i am telling every one of them you have to do a digital competition up front. and then thing two, how does that change the way you are going to buy it. having a hotline all the time for fighters, we should have that for every other mission that makes sense. if there something like that, why can't i insert it some something i have? very minimal there this. >> all the way back on the aisle there and then she was first.

>> thanks for your remarks today. i wanted to ask, part of the apple model relies on an after market for hardware, so i wasn't sure how you envisioned that factoring in? in this case would there potentially be after marks potentially with allies or others for the hardware, or do you have to build that cost more on the front end because you are not getting it on the back end? >> that is a great point. there are a the lead-off opportunities for us to do things differently like after market and in and stores. our premier sixth generation fighter we probably would not be willing to put out on the market to just anyone if it is still leading edge aircraft technology. but there would be allies and partners we would consider. i think there are interesting opportunities there, and i do think we are going to have to have some licensing scheme with our platform builders so that they benefit from third party

development. i don't know if it is the same percentages that apple uses, but we are going to need to explore them with our defense industry. again, this isn't saying i don't want defense industry updating their systems. i just northwest that there is a lot that only our defense industry can do right now, and there are a lot of software data related things that a lot of industry can do, commercial industry can do. i want to open up the opportunities for a prodder set of commercial strit space so our defense industry can focus where we need them. i hope you have seen from the air force, we have tried to do like herculean deep things to do commercial startups. doing pitch stays where you can pitch a an idea to us and we pay you that day. we are about to do some things with public/private venture matching. we want to bring in private equity to get the benefit from

that. there are a lot of things we are seeing from things coming in, data things, satellite things. but they can't build a cutting edge fighter for us. maybe in the future we will change that. but this isn't an either/or. it is more trying to create a symbiotic ecosystem between defense and commercial where there are more opportunities to work with us other than mass production and lifetime sustainment. it is too thin and fragile a model to be robust today. we have to towers fly. -- to diversify. >> can you talk a little built about board billionaires and designing fighter jets. would you want to see jeff bazos or elon musk? what other billionaires would you like to see there? [laughter] >> i probably shouldn't call out -- i pulled it as an example of something.

right now to start an innovative defense company and break in, you have to have a lot of up front capital or good capital raising skill. i would just hope that in the future, that if someone has done really well in business, they already have or they do in the future and they are thinking about the next thing to do to keep from being bored, building airplanes and satellites should be on the list. richard branson talked about all the cool nothing villegases are happening across the company are amazing. and sir richard, you hear the joy of pushing the envelope and doing new things. it is keeping him focused than keeping him engaged. i would rough for someone like him in the future to think i would love to be pushing the envelope on aircraft.

we have great designers with great ideas. we did space pitch day. we did that a couple of weeks ago and award over $40 million in contracts. it was a great event because we cut all the barcadi e.r.a.s out for space innovators pitching directly to war fighters. we had elom musk talk about what it is like to be a small company and get big. fascinating insights. i was able to talk with him at length about zwrenl -- if you are a new company, how do you approach a market where you have big companies that have lots of overhead and infrastructure that you've got to compete against? there is a lot that we can learn from talking to people who have done this. we will just have to hope in the future that when someone has finished their great pursuit and trying to figure out what they can do next, and we are building hypersonic aircraft or whatever the next thing is, that they will say i want to do that because it sounds cool.

innovators love hard problems. great thing about aerospace, aside from the fact that they are cool, is the problems are hard. that will always inspire engineers and scientists to want to up their game and be able to say they did something that had never been done before. like in the hey days of the x-plains and others, every airplane broke a new boundary. time for get back to that. many if i am long past this job, maybe i can work two one of those companies and finally do something good again. maybe i have try to seed an industry base that i would eventually hope i could work in and push boundaries again. >> thank you for joining us here today. thank you all for coming. appreciate it. [applause]

>> the impeachment inquiry hearings continue next week when house judiciary committee chairman holds the committee's first impeachment inquiry hearing focusing on prucha, the constitution and the history of impeachment. watch our life coverage wednesday december 4 at 10:00 a.m. eastern on corey. the chairman extended an invitation to the president to appear before the committee. read the leert on our website, and follow the impeachment inquiry live on karanusic-3 or listen life on the free karanusic radio app. >> watch american history tv all week on cspan 3 and features this thanksgiving

weekend. on thursday at 10:00al eastern, historians discuss african-american migration over the past century. >> we teach the great migration. we must teach these students that a promised land really did not exist. there may have been more opportunities for african-americans in the north, but devilsed there too. >> votes for women, marking the centennial of the 19th amendment. >> she was well ahead of her time. she started her own business as a wealthy banker. they advocated for free love, which was sex outside of marriage, which was definitely outside of the norm for the 1870, and she rap for president. >> saturday at 5:30 p.m., kathleen and others talk about their experiences 40 years later. >> one of the marines said to

me. he had kate, why did you not ever say you were in solitary? he said you keep saying i was alone. my mind didn't work in those connections of this is solitary imprisonment. my mind worked to the point, my god i have been given an incredible gift of time. no appointments, no meetings, no plans. what can do i with it? >> and sunday at 6:00 eastern on oral histories from the richard nixon presidential library, hillary rod ham clinton and william weld on their experience as judiciary lawyers during the impeachment of richard nixon. >> it does fall to you while ou are in the house to examine abuses of power by the president. be as ciroc spoket and careful as john was -- as circumspect

and careful as john was. keep your self from grandstanding and holding news conferences and playing to your base. his goes way beyond whose side you are on. >> explore our nation's past on american history tv every weekend on cspa-3. >> alex rondos, the european union's representative to the horn of africa discussed aid to hat region, including, ethiopia, sudan and djibouti. his comments came in the wilson center and talked about china and the middle east's influence in the region.