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 were 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 ive invited will here today because he has a new idea for how to develop and produce aircraft, fighter aircraft. And i think that its 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, its potentially more Game Changing in the military competition with china. So thats what were here to talk about today. A new concept, so concept called the digital sentry series. Whats it all about . I want to say, its 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 youve brought. I also want to give you big props to discuss a digital sentry series. You have a digital fireplace. Its 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. Were 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 youre in the simulator we believe youre 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 whats 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 weve ever made the first article. And so weve 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 youre signing a few exotic or expensive cars. Companies like tesla have been able to flip the script on this because they cant make it like a toyota and price point doesnt come down like toyota, but theyre superior designers, the car is not unlike an aircraft. If we look at the air force, the tx, now t7 program. The program started and there are two planes flying in the real world. Gdsb currently going through competition and its designed with full threat upfront. When you look at the opportunities, they change the way youll do acquisition. I hope thats what well talk about today. Its 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 im 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 dont get to run the program myself. Susanna so lets dive a little deeper into what the technologies are that are enabling the new method of design and production for weapons systems. Youve called them the holy trinity, what are they . What are they to do this thing . William i called them that because i dont want them to be separated up. You dont get a silver metal if you get two out of three, you need all of the trinity. No doubt, you should be doing that. Lets hit them and talk about how we ought to use them for effect. The first one is open system architecture. That is something weve talked about for years and never really done because theres no Business Case that closes for industry. When youre 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 weve 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, theyve stretched out, its created this buyin 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 cant think of a worse way to be a cutting age air cutting edge air force if youre 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 dont 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 apples Business Model. Well never get there completely because theyre not doing any awe sustainment. They design a platform, its a, lets 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. Apples model with their developers is 15 to 30 depending how long youve 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 oneupping their product. Theyre 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 theres a Business Case for our Defense Companies to close. Thats number one of the trinity. Number two, nobrainer, its just agile deck op software development. You cant keep up with the pace of relevance, digitally driven youre already , out of the fight. What im worried about in the pentagon, Digital Software terminology is becoming buzz words everywhere. People will use things like lean, agile, all interchangeably and theyre not. Theyre different technologies underneath that helps that software be developed faster and safer and im super stoked for open source development, its hardened Container Development thats 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. Weve 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 wont 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. Thats a real possibility if the threat at that were facing has a lot of Software Defined features, then were 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 lets go backwards through the trinity. Be design the thing to digital upfront and if you do it right, you shouldnt 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 thats 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 f16s, f35s are the same, they are not. Its kind of like a snowflake. If youre back far from it theyre the same, but when you zoom in and you get down to where like holes align, joints align, theyre not. And so what that does to you on an Assembly Line is youve got to do a lot of artisanship every time they go together. Imagine theyre like legos and they go together every time . Imagine youre faster and dont 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 youve now made your , airplane more like an iphone. We wont get there overnight, but i think the first step has to happen on our next Generation Air dominant sixth Generation System because its the closest horse to the door. And so, opens systems architecture, engineering lets Flash Forward to 25 years in the future and everything worked, its all worked. What does the air force look like . I dont 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 xplanes and mass production. Id 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. Id 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 dont 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 cant prove to you today, its 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 wed go to , industrial capacity to do part of the assembly which i think right now we couldnt. So, that world war ii greatest generation, im 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. Thats the future beyond the future. The next should be a different Business Model. Youve 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, thats 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 its so holly highly specialized. Its 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, its something i worry about. I worry every day about the fact that weve got our military Industrial Base thats separating from our u. S. Industrial base, which go back in time to world war ii airplane and automobile werent that different. So if were 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 nations great Industrial Base. Those doing commercial development and wed 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 were lucky in the air force that airplanes and i think satellites are amenable and i think that weapons are amenable to this because theyre physically small and the assembly doesnt require a lot of, like, large equipment to do it. So, we should think ahead and not because weve started a first initiative. Weve got a vision and weve got reasons to believe we can achieve it because of whats happened in the commercial Automotive Industry, but a vision is simply that. So i worry about this Program Every day, but ill be excited about it every day, too. Yeah, thats a good segue because youve painted a positive encouraging picture , about the future and now i want to point out things that could go wrong. Im an optimist, you have to be to to do this job and a lot could go wrong. Weve put extremely smart people from the air force and created a whole Program Office dedicated to this. Id say its 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. Weve got to have a Business Case with industry that rewards design. Weve 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 dont think that one and only one airplane can be our future. I dont think we can bank on that. Similar to the 1950s 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 theres one and only one plane in the future i think is too shortsighted. We need to be mindful if weve got multiple vendors that are billing, there has to be shared components. We cant 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 . Its hard to require airplanes, every time you want to get rid of them. Youve got a hard to retire airplanes in this town. Every time you want to get rid of them. Youve 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 theres a really big geriatric ward and a small pediatric ward. Youd 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 cant retire the previous one and we end up just keeping more and more airplanes, now were charging the air force money. So its 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 doesnt work for industry, then its not going to work for us. Ultimately industry will ultimately industry will want , to do this. Im pleased with the response that we have. Theres 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 theres a date on the airplane and theyre not far apart. And then as you walk down, theyre 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 thats better than an xplane, 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, ill 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 perspecti