 Well, that's a really good crowd. How was, well, happy new year. Okay. And it's a, we'll get off to a quick start. How about that? An exercise you get to grade yourself. Anybody watched last year's version of my speech online? Okay, good. Okay, well, I've got a different exercise for you this time. There is a black dog in the middle of an intersection. The street light at the intersection is burned out. There are two cars headed towards each other and the dog. How do they avoid, oh, their headlights are off. How do they avoid hitting each other and the dog? The answer is it's daytime. Okay, now, if you're like me, you sat there and you took the cue of a black dog, street light being burned out, headlights off, and added the rule that it was nighttime. And that's one of those dangerous, dangerous, subconscious things that we do when we think. And we do it on a minute by minute basis. What I wanna share with you today, as I thought about this challenge of diversity and innovation, I wanted to share with you an experience that I had when I was about 10 years into my career. So I spent a lot of time at the Lockheed Skunk Works and it was a place I'd wanted to work at since I was in college. Matter of fact, had a poster of the black bird up on my wall and I said I'm gonna work there and I got to do it. One of the things that was very different about this experience was the fact that it wasn't just a Skunk Works effort. It involved bringing in people of different cultures, different mindsets, different ways of doing things, different leadership styles, and was a real challenge to me. I started off in this industry as an engineer and found myself having to be a counselor, a negotiator, a salesperson. You guys know the difference between an introvert engineer and an extrovert engineer? Yeah, introvert engineer looks at his shoes when he walks, extrovert engineer looks at other people's shoes when he walks. So I started off as an engineer and then got wrestled into these other positions. And so hopefully today through this presentation, and I did not grab the clicker, where is the clicker? So I'll assume somebody heard me say that, is gonna run get it real quick. Okay, I'm gonna have you guys change the slides for me, okay? Oh, thank you, it's okay. Hopefully through this it will give you an idea of what to look for. To where you do not add rules that are not there, that you have a raised level of awareness and an raised level of sensitivity as to what to look for and what to drag in around you and what to try to push away. And that is a very, very, very delicate balance. So let's go through some things you may not know, a little bit of a little history here. Navy had a requirement for an attack fighter. This was a little bit different than the normal acquisition. These two airplanes came in from different paths but ended up competing for a single contract. You guys ever seen the one on the left, the F-8U-3 by Vought? Awesome airplane. Lost out to what became the F-4H-1, known as the F-4 Phantom, which served the Navy and Air Force very well for many, many, many years, over 5,000 of them built. There was a competition for what became the Blackbird. On the left is Convair's Kingfish, and on the right, Lockheed's entry. There was a competition for the A-10, flying prototypes, okay? The YA-9 on the left by Northrop and the YA-10 on the right. Had a buddy that was a test pilot for the A-10. Actually, what his favorite airplane to fly was, and he flew Phantoms and F-117s and that kind of stuff. He said the A-10 because that gun in the front, going up and just unloading an entire magazine during flight tests was just an absolute blast. Competition for the lightweight fighter, okay? YF-17 from Northrop versus the YF-16 from General Dynamics, which is now part of Lockheed Martin. And for the Joint Strike Fighter. Now, one of the things I want you to notice here is that designed to the same requirements, the two airplanes that you've seen in each case do not look the same. Same requirements, very different answers. That should be your first clue that there can be a different process applied, a different mindset, and that there's more than one answer to a problem. And that's one of the things that was always tough for some of the young people had coming in straight out of college that were used to close form solutions, two plus two equals four, was the fact that there was more than one answer to a problem. And generally, that answer was the lesser of the evils, not the optimum solution. What I wanna talk to you about today was this competition. For the Advanced Tactical Fighter, which became the F-22 Raptor in service today. On the left is the YF-23 from Northrop, and on the right, the YF-22 from Lockheed Martin. I was part of the YF-22 configuration development team. I was in there for a very narrow window, and so what you're gonna get are my personal perspectives over about a seven month period. Lockheed had won the competition and was marching along, doing configuration development. I was over in the Skunk Works working on a special program, I was the chief engineer on a program. The chief engineer for the Skunk Works pulled me in one day and said, go over there, it was called the J program for the designator on our badge. Okay, what do you want me to do? Find out what is going on. You got it, boss, no problem. The F-22 DIMVAL program had a lot of challenges. I don't know if you know much about the requirements for DIMVAL, but the airplane had to fly. It was a best effort. It was up to the contractors to decide what to do. Think about the ambiguity and uncertainty associated with that. You had to decide, the contractors had to decide what to do to win. In addition to that, you had some other challenges. It was 50,000 pounds, gross weight, not a pound for air to ground. The problem was the engines that had been sized were a little too big to create a 50,000 pound airplane. Instead it was looking more like 62,000 pounds. I was causing great angst because weight was dollars and there was a dollar target that they were trying to hit a unit cost for the airplane as well. And so the airplane was out of bed and that's the reason that the boss sent me over was to go help with the configuration development. One of the things about my background that made me a little bit unique was that I started my career at General Dynamics and came forth on the F-16 and F-11 programs in 1978 and came to the Skunk Works in 1984. So I knew a lot of these people on the General Dynamics side. They were my friends. As a matter of fact, one of their top designers, we was, I went to college with them, we were in each other's weddings and knew them very well. I also knew what the cultural differences were because I had spent a number of years inside the Skunk Works having left General Dynamics. Let me give you just a little bit of background here so you can understand the build up towards what happened here and what created what was three very different cultures coming together. The RFIs that the Air Force led for the 8, what became the ATF program studied an incredible range of missions. Some of the original designs that were submitted were Mach 3 interceptors. It was a pure intercept of the bombers coming over the pole kind of thing. All the way down to pure air to ground missions and everything in between. Finally, well one of the things they noticed very early on in the Supercruise was really important as you started dealing with the surface to air threats. You needed to have that sustained speed up there. Later on, as in the black world, Stealth became, holy cow, we could really do this. Stealth became an requirement but it became a requirement as an amendment just only a few months before proposals were submitted and I will tell you on a proposal of this magnitude you will have been working it for a year. So to have a major requirement come through that affected the design like low observables was a huge impact to all the contractors except for Lockheed at Northrop. Lockheed had the F-117 going on in the black world, Northrop had the B2 going on in the black world that caused a real shuffle and a delay. There was then an amendment saying we're gonna prototype and I will tell you the Air Force took tremendous heat for this. There was another program going in the background we'll talk about in just a minute that was going straight into development. I think they were in FSD, EMD, I forget which one it was called back then. And then after all of that came out an RFP amendment saying, you know, this is gonna be really expensive, we're gonna encourage teaming. Didn't define it, didn't say what it was but encourage teaming. You started to see consortiums being built out there. Sherm Mullen got together with Dick Hardy and Randy Kent from Boeing and General Dynamics respectively. Sherm was the general manager for the ATF program at Lockheed. And they said, you know what, let's start thinking about working together here. What work splits would be and that kind of stuff. So the idea was we'll submit our proposals blind and whoever wins becomes the leader of the program. If General Dynamics wins their prime, Boeing wins their prime, Lockheed wins their prime. So the split 34, 33, 33 and each one worked out the work splits, you know, how do we, what do we think we're best at? What do we bring to the table? And I will tell you the final work split that was kind of decided is pretty much what exists still today on the program. It's lasted that long. Northrop and McDonnell Douglas announced their teaming about two weeks after Lockheed, GD and Boeing did theirs. I remember when the teaming came out, it almost seemed reactionary to me. May not have been, I'm sure they had to have a lot of planning and work and stuff, but it was even seen by a lot of people in the industry as reactionary. And I think that's a bit unfair, but there's a caution in there for you, okay. One of the first cautions, perception, optics. Very often, optics drives what's going on, not reality. Okay, you see it in social media like crazy today. The program that was going on exactly at the same time was the General Dynamics, McDonnell Douglas A-12 program. They were going straight into EMD, they were building multiple aircraft. The Air Force was really blasted for putting in this prototyping phase, which was going to increase cost. It was going to delay the program, which added further cost, and really praise the Navy for creating this launch of getting this stealth fighter on the deck as quickly as possible. What was different about this arrangement, General Dynamics and McDonnell Douglas each had 50% of the contract, no clear leader. In addition to that, they were competing for being prime in production. So here you have a collaborative effort going on to develop an airplane knowing you're competing. Think about the dichotomy that it sets up its side there, the stress that that sets up inside of a program. There were some tremendous breakthroughs in there. I wonder how it really affected what could have been, we'll say competitive advantages, how you set yourself up for your proposal. You know, there's a lot of questions in my head, whereas the ATF program, one that I went over to be a part of for about seven or eight months, had a very clear leader, a structure that was defined for the full extent of the program, dim valve through production. So I thought that was very, very wise and in retrospect, I think it proved very wise. So the three proposals that were submitted were very different, and I'll show you each of the configurations here in just a second, but they came from very different cultures. Lockheed had the focus on system engineering for their solution. That was their big thing. It wasn't a point design that they submitted. They did lots of trades, system engineering, program planning work. They also had the knowledge of the stealth programs going on. The F-117, they had done Have Blue and the F-117 was in production, and so they were dealing with what fielding stealth was really like. In addition to that, you had the Skunk Works prototyping mentality inside there. General Dynamics came in with the legacy of the F-16. How do you do fighter production? How do you manage cost on such a program, you know, a high rate production program? And they came in with an extremely mature design, including a lot of detailed design of structure, subsystems, weapons integration. They had a full-scale mock-up of their airplane, and then they had kind of a unique sensor integration on it, the infrared sensor was actually in the nose and the radar was back kind of in the straits itself. So they looked at the problem very differently. Boeing had a point design that really emphasized speed, so it was a bit larger than the competitors. Had a better finance ratio for better supersonic performance, and they also were very interested in stealth. They were an LO contractor, or they were a contractor on the B2, having to build structure, LO structure for that aircraft, as well as work, a lot of mission systems work. So they had that kind of mentality coming in there. In addition to that, they did a lot of advanced materials work in thermoplastics and that kind of thing. When you look at the leadership, Lockheed's leader, Sherm Mullen, was extremely dynamic. Sherm is still, to this day, a very dynamic person. He's a very powerful personality, very tall, very, very, very tall man, so a very imposing figure, not quiet, speaks his mind. Dick Hardy from Boeing came in with a very intellectual approach to things, very, very different than Sherm. Randy Kent from General Dynamics was, I'll say more in the conservative mindset. Let's make sure that this stuff is gonna work. Let's not arbitrarily reach for the stars on this. Where as Sherm was very technology focused and really reaching out there, having been in the skunk work. So you saw differences in not only the engineering group that came to work, but in the leadership styles themselves. So the cultures were very, very different. When Lockheed was announced as the winner, the following, that was on a Friday, I believe the following Monday, representatives from all three contractors were in Burbank to look at each other's proposals. For the team that got to sit down and look at those proposals, it was the first time they had ever seen a competitor's proposal before. As a matter of fact, they got up and briefed their proposals, each team had two hours to brief their proposal. Imagine what that must have been like to see what your competitor's solutions were and what drove their thought process and their kind of competitive approach to the problem. In addition to that, the Air Force briefed the scoring. What were the strengths and weaknesses of each of the proposals? Because the Air Force wanted to make sure that the team understood that there were merits to all three proposals. It wasn't just because this one won, did not mean there was not merit in the other two. And so this stimulated a thought process we needed to kind of get on with the configuration work now. Now, Sherm came in with this idea and it was at the time the chief engineer was Bart Osborne. Let's look at this again in a very system engineering approach thing that's not a point design yet, which was frustrating for the two teams that had point designs. It seemed slow to them. They were ready to launch off and do an airplane. Obviously, since Lockheed won, theirs became kind of the central point for what's our starting point for this. And was ripped to shreds. You've got these people mashed into Burbank. They came in with different tool sets. Everybody used different CAD systems. So you didn't even have connectivity of databases to start with. Everything was disjointed and you had to now start mashing these things together. All aspects of it. How decisions were made, technical progress or technical approach, technologies, crown jewels within corporations. It created a really interesting environment. Here are the three configurations and you can see some things look alike, some things don't. Lockheed's configuration was a foretail configuration with a trapezoidal wing, a rotary weapons bay on it and still had some facets from the earliest designs that were pure faceted design, building off of what they had learned on the F117. Those were dog airplanes. They were absolutely terrible from a performance standpoint but they met the signature requirements and then very slowly as the computers increased their computing power and they could start computing blended surfaces, they transitioned to blended surfaces but you still see some residual facets on the airplane, the big flat bottom on it, the flat sides down it. Boeing, as I said, was a point design, emphasizing speed, had a V tail on it due to a number of things but one of the considerations was stealth. They were trying to work all aspects stealth as well. General Dynamics was really looking at a lot of maneuverability. The stealth thing forced him to go back or a stealth requirement that was added onto the RFP caused him to go back and have to do a lot of configuration development work and you see that manifested in kind of the scallop trailing edge on the bird and they tried desperately to get twin tails to work but couldn't with the arrangement that they had for the wing and forebody and stuff and ended up going with a single vertical tail. As each of the configurations was briefed, what was, as I sat down and looked at them I found really interesting elements and inside of each of them. Boeing had some really interesting manufacturing and productivity approaches, some material approaches, some systems integration approaches. General Dynamics had some interesting sensor integration, weapons integration approaches. Had a really sophisticated set of airplane design tools that they brought to bear inside there and Lockheed's advantage was obviously the kind of understanding the stealth integration aspect of it. Now when you mash together it had to have this unit cost associated with it fit in with this weight category. It wasn't closing and that's about the time that I came on board. It resulted in something called the great configuration search. How do we come to a conclusion and answer as to getting all this stuff into one configuration that actually works that beat some maneuverability requirements, the cost targets, range requirements. And I'll tell you, one of the really tough, tough, tough requirements was a high altitude turn point. That was a tough one. What reflected through my mind as we were going through this was some of the words of Kelly Johnson in the Skunk Works, the guy that founded the Skunk Works about what it took for success. And the third one, I used this slide last year when I was here. The third one up there was the one that was most important to me at that particular time which was listening. You never learn anything by talking because these other companies had a lot to say. And I will tell you, I was initially dismissive when my friend from General Dynamics kept saying this is messed up, this is messed up. I was very dismissive. And then I was over on the program and found a lot of good stuff. I found a lot of weaknesses and started working the weaknesses. The challenge was that you had not a single entity as a team as you would have as if it were kind of a single company working this. It was a blend of arm in arm, collaboration, knife fights, arguments, vicious arguments because of differing opinions about how something ought to be done. You saw alliances form, kind of like on the TV show Survivor. And as people kind of positioned for different areas of the airplane and what they thought the right answers were gonna be at an integrated context, there was a couple of people that I think tremendously for helping apply focus. And it's Paul Martin and Jerry Murph. Paul was kind of a chief engineer for technology on the Lockheed side. Jerry Murph was the chief engineer on the General Dynamics side. And they said, guys, we're not building a stealth airplane. That's a fighter. We're building a fighter that is stealthy. And that may not sound like a big difference, but it is. It is a huge, huge difference because it sets priorities inside there. And without those priorities being set, it was hard to make a lot of decisions. And so you saw compromises being made in there to make sure that it was a fighter plane first. And then you saw the groups working really hard to get stealth on it. And when you go and look at, for instance, the F-117, the aerodynamicists were not, they did not have their hands on the steering wheel. The propulsion guys did not have their hands on the steering wheel. The maneuverability guys did not have their hands on the steering wheel. The stealth guys firmly had their hands on the steering wheel of that airplane. You couldn't allow that to be the case for this airplane. The performance points were so demanding, so incredibly demanding. The range was demanding on the aircraft. The amount of sensors that it had to have, the situational awareness, the amount of communications it had to have, you couldn't allow that mentality to take place. But you couldn't ignore it. So setting that priority was absolutely critical. And in the background is one of the pieces of artwork that was used to talk about this great configuration search. It was finally decided that the whittling away at the Lockheed configuration was not going to work. So they had to make some fundamental changes. And this opened up the design space tremendously to different wing shapes, different impenage arrangements, different forebodies, different weapon bays, different nozzle integration. And so you can see the string across the bottom there. I think it's about eight or nine configurations that were down selected to about five that went to one. Now, this may not seem like a big deal, but when you win the contract in October of 86, decide in May. That it just, the configuration just isn't gonna work. And you have a flight date sitting out there. That pressure is enormous. I remember a big sign up on the wall saying, you know, number of days to first flight. So every time you walked into the program area, you had that reminder. And you didn't have an airplane yet. Set up tremendous internal pressures to get decisions made. The, I remember walking in one day and they finally decided, you know, we need to kind of get some focus here. And they split the configuration developers off and put them in this little bitty room where we all sat together in there. Kind of the badges came off and there was a real integration at that point which was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun. You know, you go in there, you make a lot of decisions very, very quickly then you bring it out for review. I remember one of the gigantic debates being the high altitude to turn point fighting range. The high altitude to turn point wanted aspect ratio like a trapezoidal wing, but you didn't have enough fuel volume in that wing. How do you do that? And there was actually a wing that I was familiar with from another program inside the Skunk Works. And so I brought it forward and it had increased fuel volume. It was gonna allow the high altitude to turn point. It turned out it aligned with a wing that General Dynamics had. And so there was kind of an alliance inside there that said, hey, this looks like a good wing to go do this. It was inserted into the trade study and you can see it as one of the diamond wing configurations that ultimately ended up on the final configuration of the aircraft there. So that was one of the alliances that formed. The thing is, there were many alliances and this is where the first time they'd ever heard the term competitive mates or frenemies. You had to put your best out on the table to do this because we were in a competition still up against Northrop and McDonnell Douglas that represented a formidable talent and past performance history between Northrop's understanding of stealth and having built inexpensive fighters and McDonnell Douglas, who was the fighter manufacturer. And so we had to figure out how to work together in this environment, even though in an adjacent building I was working on a program where we were directly competing with both General Dynamics and Boeing. So I had to shift my head fundamentally when I went into the ATF or J program area. So alliances formed. And here's an example of just a few of the technical alliances and I'll walk through some of these with you so you can get an idea of what they look like. But I want you to realize, alliances were formed at a programmatic level as well. How the airplane should be built, what it should be built out of, where it should be built, what was the, what were the right political answers for where it should be built? Those kinds of things were going on in addition to the technical product. One of the things always, given the admonition to my teams during a competition, is that the great technical solution will not win you a program, but a poor one will lose it for you. It's that some total of what you offer that's absolutely critical, the programmatic as well as the technical is absolutely critical. So let's walk around this thing. On the top left, you have the wing configuration. I talked about it for a minute there. You can see the original trapezoidal wing on the Lockheed Offering and the Delta Wing on the General Dynamics Offering. This was an interesting one because it forced us to go into a room and have a different set of briefings and that kind of stuff to be able to show each other exactly what we had. But the Air Force was very accommodating and letting that happen. It allowed a discussion to take place that could not take place out in an open area. The open area being the ATF program, which was still a SAP area. And that discussion opened up not only the high altitude turn performance meeting that point and the range, but also the structural benefit of having more root length, root cord length to attach the wing for bending moment. The structure was more efficient, which actually had a weight benefit on the aircraft, which everybody loved. The inlet configuration was a giant debate. Boeing had a very large forward-mounted inlet on the aircraft. The idea there was to be as, you know, to, for signature, a diverter-less. Have a minimum aerodynamic run ahead of where you close off the aperture shape to minimize the boundary layer buildup before you actually form the duct. Lockheed had some tricks up its sleeve about how you could do a diverter inlet, a supersonic diverter inlet. Working with general dynamics, there was a way to do it in a near-fixed mode for the aperture. Instead of having ramps like the F-15 had, we could have a fixed geometry up there and control it with bypass, with the air being dumped downstream. So you saw an alliance form there. The vertical tail configuration was a fascinating, fascinating controversy because this is where stealth came in. The single vertical tail was a great answer from an aerodynamic standpoint and a weight standpoint and a cost standpoint because there was only one of them, first of all. You only had to build one, so you only had the weight of one. The flow field coming off the forebody of the airplane was extremely complex and a lot of separated flow and stuff in the single vertical tail reached up high enough to reach up into a lot of really good flow. But we did find a few problems with some shedding border season, that kind of stuff, and found some areas where the twin tail was better, but the twin tail was far better from a signature standpoint. And this is where I saw Boeing and Lockheed align on it, general dynamics being very much in favor of all the benefits of the single vertical tail at the more the expense of the side sector scattering that came from the single vertical, as well as the clear drag weighted and cost benefits. But the signature case was overwhelming for twin vertical tails. And I will say, twin vertical tails was not easy. If you look at the front view of the YF-22, you'll see that the vertical tails are not at the same slope as the side walls on the lower side. They found that by raising them up two or three degrees from the side walls, that they actually improved the signature and improved the lateral directional characteristics at high angle of attack. Initially that was a huge resistance to making anything other than parallel to the side walls. And so you had these micro debates that went on inside there in addition to the macro debates about what the answer really needed to be. On the bottom right, this is what happens when you get to be mind you need glasses that don't work at any particular range. Okay, the four body geometry, high angle of attack was a real trick. And you were balancing this off against signature. The four bodies are real critical element and signature control. You can see from the Lockheed design had a big glove up there. At high angles of attack, that was terrible. I mean, perfectly honest with you. It had a lot of area moment that caused the nose to pitch up on the aircraft, which meant that you had a hard time doing high alpha work that you couldn't make the tails, the horizontal tails in the back big enough to overcome that pitch up. And so you naturally wanted to carve out the four body to get rid of that area upfront, giving that very distinctive nose with the inlets in the cells. But it came with a signature impact. And so that resulted in a series of trade studies that fed down through costs and effectiveness in the operations analysis to determine, you know, is that a good answer? And they found a great sweet spot inside there with those trade studies. But you saw general dynamics and bowing very much pushing for that very, very narrow four body up there while Lockheed was pushing for the kind of the signature bias solution of the very large four body. And you can see what the final solution ended up being. And then the weapon bay geometry. Lockheed's rotary bay was about having a very small aperture on the outside of the airplane by which to throw the missiles out. So you had these missiles up inside, rotate around, come out through this very small bay. General Dynamics had this very flat bay with all the missiles exposed. He had very large doors then on the aircraft. Bowing also had an arrangement that had the missiles very much against the outside contour. Some of their earlier configurations actually had kind of conformal weapons trying to carve volume out of the aircraft for supersonic performance. And so you saw an alliance there to go and get rid of the rotary weapons bay that had a negative volume impact that had some terrible packaging implications. And you see the flat bay show up. And this is before you had the AIM-120Cs, the C model of the AMRAM with the smaller fins. You had the very large fins in there, but everybody knew the smaller fins were kind of coming. And so going through, how do you design it to hold four of the standard AMRAMs knowing that in the future you wanna hold six. So you had to do all these extra trades to make sure you weren't unnecessarily compromising or limiting the airplane. One of the ones that's not up here is material solutions. Bowing came in with a desire to use thermoplastics on the aircraft and use composites as much as they possibly could on the aircraft. They saw a weight advantage there as well as a potential cost advantage with it. Lockheed also favored a lot of thermoplastics but with a lot of metallic structure underneath it. Unbeknownst to General Dynamics and Bowing, Lockheed had built thermoplastic vertical tails for the F-117 and put those into service to try to understand the in-service implications of thermoplastics instead of thermosets. So there was an alliance that you saw between the Lockheed structured guys and the Bowing structured guys regarding thermoplastics on the airplane. So the airplane had a lot of thermoplastics on it to go try it out and see exactly how it worked. A lot of the bulkheads that you now see that is metallic in the production airplane are actually made up of composites. They have composite webs on them with metallic fittings to transfer loads and stuff. One of the lessons they learned there is by the time they put the metal on it that was necessary to get the loads into and out of the bulkhead, the bulkhead was mostly metal. So by going through and exercising some of these things you've got with a demonstrator, you've got answers that you would have had no other way and if you had leaped directly into production, you would have found the answers out the hard way. And if you've ever seen that chart of the cost of decisions, cost of decisions very early on is very inexpensive. You can fix things very easy. The cost of changing a decision downstream is extremely expensive. And so a lot of these debates we were having, a lot of these trials we were having were really about fleshing these things out. And like I said, some of these were real knife fights. Between the culture of how things were done, the belief in what the right answer was and what was most fascinating to me was that you saw really good answers come out of this very, very quickly. The configuration was finally settled down about 18 months after a contract award. So you chewed up a huge percentage, I think it was like three and a half or four years or something in the first light, four years or so. So you chewed up a huge amount of time trying to get the configuration right. What I've read about the Northrop team, the Northrop said this is the answer and launched on at Broad McDonnell Douglas on board and wanted to get the airplane out flying as quickly as they possibly could. While the approach that Charm and Randy and Dick chose for the F-22 was painful, it was clear to me that I saw brilliance come through from this asking of questions of debating, of friction, even when it became personal, the value of it was beyond mistake. But there were a lot of problems, there was knife fights. One of the issues we hit was, don't worry about that, we solve that on another program. And I'll say Lockheed was probably the worst at this because they had the F-170 in production right down the street. I'll show you an example of that in just a minute. But after you hear that answer 50, 100 times, but you see no evidence of it, what does your belief factor do? You don't really have any confidence in the decision. It sounds like a fake answer. And so it introduced a lot of doubt, a lot of eye rolls on the part of both Boeing and General Dynamics. And it was, I will say personally for me, it was incredibly frustrating because I could go stand there and look at the answer on an F-170 in production, walk in and my friend would go, really roll his eyes and you can't do that. We've tried that before, it didn't work. And yet you knew the answer sat right there and you couldn't transfer it over, you couldn't give any hint other than, let's not worry about that right now. I'll let the bosses say we did that on another program, that to me seemed kind of, the other one was we tried that on another program and it didn't work. This was one of my favorites because you would see where Boeing Lockheed or even some of the Lockheed white world guys that were working on the program would say we've tried that before, it didn't work and yet there were some features that were in production right down the street from the 117 and it ended up being on the B2 as well. I noticed that there were people on the Boeing team that didn't roll their eyes, that didn't go far, they just sat there very quietly because they knew it could be done from their experience. One of the other ones that was incredibly toxic was, that's not how we do that here. And that came out a lot. One of the things that the Boeing guys wanted to do was build the wing in the 1G position. That's how they built their transports in the flexed position. You know, if a fighter wing, an F-16 wing at 1G is bending what, less than an inch, it's just real no need to tool for a 1G wing and so you saw some conflicts there because Boeing was responsible for the wing. It was their right to make the decisions, they had the responsibility for it. But you would see eye rolls among other people. And that in and of itself can be really toxic, the little behind the scenes guffaws and that kind of stuff. End runs of leadership. If somebody didn't like an answer, sometimes they'd go running around leadership trying to get the answer changed. In other words, they didn't like what mom said so they went to dad. Incredibly toxic when you have three companies working together and people start working within their own chain of command because they didn't like the answer that was made to go through and try to get influence and have powerful people come back down and influence things. There were people removed from the program because of how they handled some of their decisions, how their personalities meshed with the team. You couldn't allow that stuff to fester or be there for very long. The probably one of the most toxic ones was forming hidden efforts. The guys would say, well, I don't like that answer so I'm gonna go work this one off to the side. You had to kill that stuff instantly. But it was a very common nature. I came from a culture where you went in and told your boss that they were messed up in the head. There was no problem doing that. Some of my counterparts on the other teams, that's not how their culture allowed things to happen. They had to work through a chain of command to get things done. So I had to be sensitive to that because they weren't gonna change the culture of their company and when this gigantic configuration search was over with they had to go back and work within their own companies. I'll say I learned stuff from both General Dynamics and for Worthy and I had even worked at General Dynamics before. There was stuff that was really well done, good ideas. I'll steal anybody's good idea. I don't care where it came from, it doesn't need to be mine. Here's an example of we did it on another program. They wanted to demonstrate in-flight aero refueling on the YF-22. And one day this in-flight refueling receptacle showed up on the table. Where did that come from? Doesn't matter, here it is. If you look very closely on here, you'll see this faceted shape that is blended into the surrounding area. That is a F-117 rollover door. Now imagine that you're from one of the other companies and suddenly here this piece of hardware shows up. What goes through your head? For me, it was kind of duh, finally. But what goes through your head? What else are they hiding? Your brain never goes to the positive side. I saw an example once where this person did this little study, one times seven equals nine, two times seven equals 14, three times seven equals 21, four times seven equals 28, five times seven equals 35 and yet all you concentrate on is the fact that I said one times seven equals nine. No matter how many right things I did, you concentrate on the wrong thing. Does that guy know he screwed up? You become obsessed with that stuff. And it's natural for us as humans. And so when you see these things that are very disruptive inside there, when somebody makes a mistake or something like that, you see obsession on it. And it's hard to get over because now you had questions coming in. Where did that come from? How far along is it? Is it in production? Was this off of a prototype? Questions you couldn't answer, you couldn't substantiate. It was just, it is what it is. I thought it was interesting for the people that didn't ask the questions. I thought that, I really respected that. It was, it is what it is. I'll steal that. I'll use it. Let's move on. The culture, the things that go on inside of our head is, has a number of drivers to it. Fear, assumptions, habits, rules, even complacency plays inside of our head. And complacency can come from the culture. You become confident in what you've done. You know what succeeded and what didn't succeed. And all of those factors tend to constrain your thought process. There's only one that tries to expand it and that's experience, okay? And it's coupling, actually coupling experience with the willingness to take risk. One of the differences that I saw between the culture, there was groups that were willing to, the cultures that were taking place on the ATF-Dem-Val. There were cultures or groups that were willing to take enormous risk. And other groups that said, you know, we may have to actually build this thing. You know, let's not, let's not stick our necks out too far. And that's tough when you're trying to develop a jet with breakthrough capabilities. That's a tough spot to be in. And so you have to decide, am I gonna be a benefactor or a victim of that set of experiences? The thing is, it was that diversity of thought, those cultures coming together, the different way of doing things, the different things that everyone brought to the table that resulted in an amazing capability for the Air Force. I watched that airplane and air shows today and I think back to those days in the mid and late 1980s when we were wrestling with the configuration. And just about everybody involved, including leadership says it was one of the greatest configuration challenges of their career. I look upon it and I think about the number of lessons learned out there and it absolutely boggles my mind and I wish more people could read about what it was really like. There's a magazine, an online magazine that Lockheed Martin puts out called Code One. And if you look in the archive there, there's a two-part series on the development of the ATF. If you wanna read what Sherm and Dick and Randy said about the development along with some of the engineers, it's captured in there. I would strongly urge you to go in and read it and think for yourself about what that really means. How can I use that today knowing that, knowing where the value came in. How can I use that today? So as you go forward, I ask you to look for the involvement of dramatically different cultures. It's painful. It is painful. It takes more time. It costs more money. But the answer is better. My bathwater tastes great. I love it. But the answers come when someone, the better answers come when someone challenges me or calls me wrong. Especially when they come in with ideas that I go, man, why didn't I think of that? Auto-dismissal is so easy to do because you know what you've succeeded at in the past. You know what's failed in the past and you'll draw judgments based on that at the subconscious level, much like you will assign that it's nighttime with the black dog in the intersection. You'll do it subconsciously, so be very careful about that. And what I've seen repeatedly is stuff that you could not do a few years ago. Stuff that was impossible is now possible today. So, as I said, the last time I spoke, the real trick is to stand in the future and look back. You may say, what's the difference between standing in the present looking in the future versus standing in the future and looking back? In the 1970s when I was in college, there was an Air Force magazine and it talked about flying the U-2 and I saved it. Because it had an article, it had a bunch of articles in it. A few years ago I was kind of culling stuff out, I was getting ready to retire. I was culling stuff out. 1976, let's see what was going on in 1976. There was an article about this new system called GPS. And someday, if the United States really focused on electronic miniaturization, a soldier could wear a backpack that weighed 15 pounds and cost $12,000 that would tell him where he was on the face of the earth. And we laugh at that as we should. But imagine if this author had written down, the US really focused on electronic miniaturization. A soldier's gonna carry a thing in his hip pocket that can tell him exactly where he is. And by the way, you'll have one in your car that tells you turn by turn drive directions. It'll have a camera on board of extremely high resolution. You'll be able to dictate into its search for information worldwide. Communicate with other people through voice, an electronic version of mail. If you had said that, the guy would have never been allowed to print it because it would have been so ridiculous. And yet, that's exactly what we have. So one of the ways that I know I'm standing in the future and looking back is when people laugh at my ideas. And you need to be comfortable with that because that's where breakthroughs come from. That's the huge trick here. And that's what was done on the YF-22. There's people standing in the future and looking back and I've got so many stories of sitting down with guys, how do you do your job? And they're saying, Steve, for instance, on the pilot vehicle interface. Steve, the guys and the ladies who are gonna be flying this aren't born yet. They're gonna grow up with computers and computer games of a power I cannot imagine. I must make decisions now that don't unintentionally limit what they can do with the airplane because they're gonna use the airplane differently than I imagine. And that's exactly what happened. And I so respect the PVI guys and everybody else, the maintainers and everybody else that was working on that airplane way back when, having the vision to stand in the 2000s when it was in the 1980s. One last thought I'll leave you with in much the same way that this little rudder down here steers this entire ship and these control surfaces steer this airplane. What you say steers large groups. It will have a profound impact. So think very carefully here before you put a rudder input here. And it was such an incredible honor to think back and be a part of the team that created this airplane for the Air Force. It was a privilege to be invited back here this year. It's an honor to be the first speaker. Thank you for your service and we have just a few minutes for questions if anybody has one. Thank you.