Odysseus spacecraft landing on the moon. This is about one hour. Im the director of the Defense Industrial group. I am delighted to be able to welcome you to this event. Delivering for the war fighter, the importance of executing Space Acquisition programs. It is a true privilege to be able to introduce the honorable frank cavelli. He serves as a Service Acquisition executive for Space Systems and programs within the department of the air force and as the chair of the Space Acquisition council. Before his current role, he served as the Principal Deputy director of the National Reconnaissance offer. Officer. Of always been complex the standup of the United States space force in 2019 over the opportunity to develop a clean sheet approach for Space Acquisition. Before the discussion begins, it is worth noting the multiple lines of effort secretary cavelli has undertaken. He issued new Space Acquisition tenets in 2022, a bill for going fast and he recently released a memo covering Space AcquisitionProgram Management skills in december 2023. All offer pragmatic principles and steps gained from experience both successes and failures in delivering space capabilities. Secretary cavelli thank you to coming thank you for coming to csis and we look forward to opening remarks. It is such a pleasure to work with cynthia and her Defense Industry initiatives initiatives group. And to benefit from the term and his knowledge she has not only in Space Acquisition but the Defense Industrial base at large. I also share her welcome to the arvo frank cavelli, assistant secretary of the air force for Space Acquisition and integration. I was fortune to meet him when he was the Deputy Director of the natural National Reconnaissance office years ago and what really stuck out to me was how he pushed to do the Mission Better and break down barriers. He was one of those folks that would not settle for the answer of thats how weve always done things in a really pushed in a way that works medically beneficial in the war fighter benefits from today. I was pleased when i heard you were nominated for this air force position. I knew you would bring that same mentality to the department of defense. With that, i wanted to turn the floor over to secretary cavalli for opening thoughts and then we will have a few questions. For the audience in person and online, in person, we have a qr code so we will open up the end for bastions. Click on the qr code and that will take you to an online submission and provokes online, there is a button on the event page that you can click to ask a question. Questions i get through as many as i can. Welcome. Thank you, it is all about the big push in space and going fast. One of the key factors in that is program execution. It is really about delivering programs on schedule and that work. Every time we Delay Program or we overrun a program, basically, we use funds from future investments and modernization or future investments in r d to cover the overruns. That takes away the essence of speed. Three memos, and i am done with memo writing. I wanted to get out there in terms of guides so that the formula for going fast is insured and there is some professionals and i want them to have. It comes down to executing. It is easier said than done. The government needs to get it and their strategy and in their source election plans of a warning contract of awarding contracts that are realistic in terms of schedule, costs, and organizations that can do the job technically. Once under contract we have awarded a realistic contract, managing the baseline day today and deliver the program on cost and on schedule, a key element of speed. We need industries because there is a historic precedent where Industries Like to low bid programs. The government likes to award to the low bid and the government has to fix the program down the road. That has to stop. We need to have situations where industries submit to us realistic costs and schedules and have the skills to do the job and the government needs to manage the baseline and deliver on cost and schedule. We cannot afford to rob our future to pay for the past. That has been a big theme of mine, i wrote the third memo, it is all throughout the nine tenants i put together back in october 2022 and it is what i am pushing forward over the course of the next year or so. On that, in the last few years you have issued Space Acquisition tenets, a formula for going fast, and this memo on execution and recommendations for Program Managers on how to successfully execute a program. I guess my question is, why did you do all of this . Reading those memos, they seem like such common sense, solid items. Why did you need to do it . I am fortunate that i have an Amazing Organization supporting me in terms of the basic commands and other agencies as well as my own staff at the pentagon. I think congress is branding and separating out the roles because i think there is such a small part of the air force and i am not quite sure how much attention they would actually get from the sab4. By having me in this role they may be able to streamline things dramatically. My program and oversight has access to me 24 7, there is no prebriefs or staffing of packages or huge bureaucracy. The reason for hiding the memos is the commander intent, this is how i want you all to behave. We need to go fast and we have threats against our system in space and architecture grew up in a time where things were really expensive and we have a large a satellite over many years of development and but them all in, that is the predominant air force architecture, gps is down in medium absorbency. We need to transform the big, juicy targets at geo, too much more diverse orbits of our system. We need to do that with speed given the threats we face with folks out there. The tenants really were in the form of here is how we can behave she fast and then the memo was here are the skills i expect you to learn as professionals. It is all tied towards going fast and setting the commander intent. I have been really impressed with the, i like keeping things short and nobody likes to read, it is not like reading stuff really long. I think three pages would be the longest memo. Im not writing those sorts of things, i am making it easy to read. So far, something simple like delivering the ground before launch, i have had such a positive response to the team on that and i think it is something no one has ever said to me before. We knew that was always the case, we were not always perfect but we always strived to make reforms. Why do you want a satellite that you cannot use . Or the life of the vehicle and that point of time . Im not sure anybody has ever said to the great folks out at the sea and they have responded and they are opening things accordingly now. It has really changed. I will tell you why i think that. I happened to be on the 2004 breach on servers. Somebody picked me to help undo out beyond that. We were talking to the contractor and we went to the ground pieces and we were predicting at the time that the first death would be in 2000 nine, the thing the irg came up with it. They said they would not have ground before they launched it. How could you not have ground inflation for your watch . That was the culture, that was not a priority for them. That really stuck with me my whole time at the inner robe. The ground needs to be there. Sometimes we use the word Space Acquisition very monolithically but there is much nuance and there is a different type of space capability that we are acquiring on a big, exquisite to the smaller systems to ground at all etc. Can you give me a sense of what these memos and what this particular recent memo on execution, how do you make this tangible . You have got the train has left the station on the big programs and challenges with the gps ground station and spaceman and control. How do you day today in the pentagon bring those tenants to life when you have programs where trains have already left the station . For the Traditional Programs who already left the station, the best thing to do is manage them. Get them over the finish line and get them finished. For my trouble program, atlas, and goe, what we do is, i need biweekly with every epo, they are allowed to tell me anything they want to talk about. For those three trouble programs, the Program Managers meet with me every two weeks separately and walk through statuses of the program. I think having a dedicated individual learning about the program and they have been able to really put a focus on these things, we are not over the hump yet of the programs and alice has made some significant progress. All their really nice job of it. Ocx keeps having challenges. I think we just moved down a bit further than i had hoped, we hope it will be further out. Just meeting with the team and having a dedicated individual who is focused on the Space Acquisition itself i think is making a difference. For those programs we started nexgen gl and polar, stuff that was already well in acquisition like ocx, i think the trick is just to keep a focus on and deliver on schedule and put the emphasis out there that the program managed to deliver on schedule, that is the expectation that i have. What is on the Space Development agency, there is an example of this approach and the emphasis on speed. What has been most challenging there in terms of execution and what lessons are you learning they are feeding back into inconsistent . You cannot build big fast. You cannot. I got that experience. Sea has shown if you build a smaller systems you can build fast. When you use commercial buses, lockheed is using the trans orbital bus. Northrop is using an arrow bus with airbus. When you build smaller and you take advantage of a commercial bus and you take advantage of existing technology, not reinventing the wheel, waiting antennas on, you can go fast. People are starting to take note of that and see that, speed can come from that kind of formula. Let us shift the gears here, reauthorization, last week at the air force Association Warfare symposium, the secretary announced 24 key decisions to optimize the department of the air force for great power competition. Some of the things that stuck out to me on the space front where the space futures command and an officer Training Course which i thought was interesting. We have yet to see the details about the space future command, can you share some insights on how you would expect the new futures command to impact Space Acquisition . I loved everything we do with the great power of competition. I think the country is fortunate to have secretary kendall in that role because he has done amazing things. You noticed that there was not much note on the space side because that we have been working it since the day i arrived. I like the thought of the space futures command a lot. Their roles, it will be to help us prioritize on the investments. We have not done a good job in terms of optimizing our r d pipelines to go from what do we need as a space force to getting these things into basic r d and demonstrations. And into operations. Space futures commands will help prioritize what we should be going after. I will have a role from the perspective making sure that we execute those things and that we do demos that will lead to real operation abilities as opposed to demos for the sick of doing demos. That is one of the key things. The secondary kendall has said that the u. S. Must be ready for a kind of war that we have no modern experience with. That urgency and a security picture, do you see that permeating within the Space Acquisition portfolio . They are fond of saying that it is china, china, china, i like to say it is speed, speed, and speed. The tenants and the former are designed to change our culture to go faster. We build bigger systems, sevenyear, 10 Year Development cycles, it is really we cannot do that anymore. We are fortunate that the march environment has changed so much you can go smaller and much more positively and today. We even have been driving from my arrival on speed across the whole acquisition space portfolio. Part of that speed needs to be applied to the front end of the acquisition process which is requirements and i will say forced design. We have an Organization Called the swac. They are designing and then leading requirements and what we should build. My question for you is are we actually seeing different Acquisition Strategies emerging from that work . Or vice versa . Are your acquisition tenants being fused into what the swac is doing . It is a fabulous organization and doing some really great work and we work closely with them. If you look at where swac pushed for this layer for Missile Warning as our future is beyond the traditional kind of processes that we are building with nexgen polar, that is a great system. Swac has done a fantastic job understanding the technical trends and actually driving proliferation, something that we are going to do on our side, they are due on their end. I think it has worked really nicely. That does go into their forced designs. Your tenants as well, does that go into their foresight . Ok, fixed price, that has been a hot topic among our Industry Partners and you have advocated in your memos discussing fixedprice contracting as an area of emphasis. It has received mixed reaction from industry, you are trying to move faster and shift to these architectures, the existing systems, you are also still developing new complex systems, nextgeneration or Strategic Communications by be examples of that, can you add a bit of nuance to this topic . When you used fixedprice contracts . How you think about risk . How do you think about incentivizing industry . The formula we wrote was specific. Build smaller, low nre< use existing technology low nre, use existing technology, the low nre and using existing technology, use it to drive speed and when you are fixing prices you are not doing the first of a kind, something new. I am confused by some of the bigger groups who say they are against that. I have not said im going to go build the next generation battle star galactica has never been built before base price. What i said was smaller, existing technology, fixedprice , ready to launch. I think that depending on situations that if you have a high nre, there are different strategies. I think the space force has done a nice job with the middle tier acquisition stories where they may actually be bringing on things and building stuff and designing and move on to an action beyond that. We look at each acquisition individually and we try to marry it up with the best strategy. We are doing smaller systems and using technology, fixedprice works just fine. We look to replenish our nuclear control systems, there is a higher degree of radiation, hardening that will be needed and we have seen in the past couple weeks or so acutely, the capabilities that we needed. That will require designs that may not fit the contracting mold. That program which is the evolved strategic start, program, the strategic stat com program. The military acquisition reducing egg prototype, it seems like we spent a lot of time doing tech Risk Reduction or Technology Maturity and it is not as far along as i would like for us to use fixedprice, having built a real payload or going to the prototype of the satellite and maybe it is time to go off and do something fixedprice. Given the amount of nre that is on the program, as we revise the strategy, we are looking at going more towards the traditional model or Something Like that. We were talking about this earlier, there is appetite suppressants that is required both on the government side and setting requirements as well as on the industry aside being realistic about what they can offer at a certain cost. How do you think about that . I want industry to make a fair profit and i want the government to get a capability that it once on call and on schedule. I see industries properly. Do not low bid me i think we are going to awarded it and then fix it later. Im at the point where i cannot afford to keep paying for poorly awarded contracts. I would rather cancel stuff and start over. I need the industry to get out of the mode of low bidding and government in to the mode of awarding proposals we can actually execute. I want to jump to commercial as well, this is another hot topic, commercial data and services, the department of defense and leadership are saying the right thing on commercials, but that the program and budgets do not necessarily match that rhetoric. They are critiquing the dod acquisition models and funding models are not well aligned with purchasing commercial services or perhaps can take full advantage of efficiencies within commercial operations. What do you think needs to change to enable greater acquisitions of commercial space data and services . What i have seen is in the past is we look at every program as a stovepipe. You might have multiple programs that are in the space. Each one is a separate program with a separate set of requirements. Until recently, you were not looking at them as a mission area. There are some amazing individuals who are now changing the way that we do business and looking at requirements from a mission perspective. Satellite communications as an example, when you get programs like space awareness and telecommunic