 So, there's quite a bit happening in the world of acquisition today, and that's always true because it's a tremendously complex and important undertaking. And I always like to remind people that if you go read the strategy documents of the Department of Defense, they're very explicit that technology and technological superiority is a foundational aspect of the strategy. All of our plans depend on that. And acquisition, the world of acquisition, is where that strategy is turned into practice and operationalized. And so it's an amazing responsibility for those who have to manage that system, and we're lucky enough to have one of the premier leaders in that world with us this morning. It's also, in addition to the fact that it's always an important topic for the reason that I just mentioned, it's a particularly important topic this year because it's a matter of great debate right now between Capitol Hill and the Department of Defense about how to manage acquisition, how the chain of commands should be structured, and how do we move forward on those issues. This is an area that's been somewhat settled for about the last 30 years since the Packard Commission recommended a construct but is now being debated again. These events, however, is not focused on that. We're going to focus on Air Force acquisition, the service side of the business, which is really where program execution happens. And at the end of the day, program execution is when the theory turns into practice. And that's very much in the world of the military services, always has been and continues to be. And as I mentioned, Bill LaPlante is one of the premier leaders in that effort. He manages an acquisition portfolio of over $32 billion annually for the United States Air Force. That includes research, development, test, production, and modernization programs for the entire range of Air Force systems and all the support that the Air Force provides to the other services. Dr. LaPlante has more than 29 years of experience in defense technology, including positions at MITRE and Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. He's also served on the Defense Science Board, the U.S. Strategic Command Senior Advisory Group, and Naval Research Advisory Committee. So he's got a lot of experience with all of the services that were blue. And he's also taught as an adjunct lecturer in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Catholic University of America. Bill stepped in. The Air Force acquisition has gone through a series of changes over a number of years, and he really came in and brought tremendous leadership to the organization, and we're very lucky to have him in service. And without further ado, Bill, please come. Thanks, Andrew, for the nice introduction. Can you all hear me from here? Okay. I see a lot of friends in the audience and folks that have seen me brief before, and then there's people that I don't know if you've seen me brief before. So it's always hard to put together something to hit the people that maybe have not seen the general pitch of what's going on here for the acquisition, but also provide enough new content for Amy Butler and for John and for Jim and for Jack and stuff. So we'll see if I succeed at that. If I don't in my prepared remarks, then we will hopefully get a chance to get to any topic you want in the Q&A. So that's the intent this morning. I also try to put together briefings that I would like to see. So it doesn't mean that my background makes me the right judge, but I always imagine myself, do I have time to go to this talk? I don't. Maybe this one's worth it. And so I try to make it worth it for you guys to come to the talk. I'm not saying I'm going to succeed at that, but I'm telling you my philosophy. My philosophy also is I'm not a PowerPoint person. But occasionally I'll say, you know what? There's no way to talk about this thing without PowerPoint. PowerPoint helps me talk about this thing. So after back and forth and talking to Andrew and a few others, I thought, okay, this is what I'm going to do. We'll see. It has PowerPoint in it, so please forgive me. But then hopefully it'll help and not hinder the discussion. So that's the spirit of the talk. There's obviously a lot going on right now in acquisition and acquisition reform. So I'm sure, well, I didn't put it in my talk. I'd be happy, and I'm sure I'm going to get questions about that afterwards. So without further ado, let me get started. The thing I always do whenever I talk is I always start with the five Air Force acquisition priorities. I do this everywhere I go. And I've been doing this consistently now for over two years. Because I want people to see the consistency of it, the alignment of it, and to show what we're doing actually fits, the content fits into each one of these. So what I always do is I try to say, okay, if I'm going to give this talk, and I start with my five priorities, which is the one or two, I've once did three that I want to dig into for that audience. So my plan today is to dig more into the second priority. But I can talk about any of these. I've given talks before where I've dug into the other ones, too. So I can talk to any of them. But let me go through all five and just explain what they are. Hopefully it's pretty self-evident. The first is our daily operations. It's getting the big programs, important programs right, and keep them on track. If you don't do the first bullet, the rest doesn't matter. And we always talk about the three priority programs, and then the new starts. The three priority programs are KC46A, JSF, F35, and LRSB. All three of them are in different phases of acquisition. I'm not going to get prepared remarks about those, but I'm sure as soon as I'm done I'll get questions about those. But that's what I spend most of my time on, by the way. The other thing that I spend a lot of my time on, and our whole acquisition enterprise does, is setting up the new programs right. Because that's really key. A lot of hard work done to set up a new program. Think of it even before milestone A. What I mean by that is, once you have requirements from the warfighter and they finally validate them, then that's actually when the work begins. Because then you have to take those requirements and actually translate them. Some people call it systems engineering flow down into what it actually means technically. And then, of course, you discover, wow, that's going to cost this much. Then you iterate back with the requirements people. All that activity has to be done robustly. And it takes sometimes two to three years to do it. And it's before milestone A. So we are doing that in several areas right now, and I'm spending a lot of time on it. Replacement for Air Force One. We're doing that on the replacement for Minuteman Three, called Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent. We're doing it on JSTAR's recapitalization. And we're doing it on the TX trainer, okay? So that is where the most, it's the most important work that we can do is get those programs set up and set up right. And I always say to people, if you want to go fast, start slow. And that's where the, if you mess up the beginning, that beginning of the program, there's very little that can be done later. Okay, so that's where we spend a lot of our energy in that first bullet. I'm not going to say any more about it in this talk, but I can take questions. The second bullet is why I'm here. As Andrew said, there was a lot of churn in Air Force Acquisition. In general, there was a lot of churn in Acquisition. And what I discovered, and I continue to discover every day, that there's a lot of miscommunication that goes on. And not deliberate, but it's accidental. It's partially because we talk very bureaucratically. We talk, use the same words and mean something different. And part of it is because we inside Acquisition don't actually engage enough and get out and talk and listen and go back and forth. And so I found so many misconceptions, both good and bad, when I came into the job that really came down to relationships and transparency. It's not, this doesn't mean spin. This doesn't mean say everything's going great. This means actually communicating back and forth. Because there are always things that are not going great and there's always things that are going great. I mean, I always say this. Truth of the matter is when you get past all the clutter, the data shows in Air Force Acquisition, for example, our costs continue to come down every year for the last three years. We're doing well in cost in our programs. We're doing well on performance when you look at the key KPPs and your measure, and we've got all these metrics. The one area that still is not where it needs to be, and this is net, by the way, this is net. There's always a program that's going up in cost. I'm saying the net costs are coming down. Okay, but the one area that we still aren't getting right, and this is true with the other services, and the data shows this, is the time it takes to do development. Think of it from milestone B, which is when we decide to do a development program, to when we plan to do milestone C, which is when the full-rate production decision is being made. I mean, we're not the full-rate, we're ready for production. If you measure that time and you say, what do we plan that time to be? On average, it's five years. For a new program, on average, that plan is five years, and they fund it. On average, it takes seven. On average, it takes seven, and I've been looking into this, and this is true for the other services as well. And it's a fascinating thing to look at, because when you look into it, what you find, it's not the bureaucracy. That's causing five years to become seven. It's not. People want to believe that. And I'm not saying we don't do bureaucracy. It's one of our core competencies. I mean, we're really good at it. We've got it down to a science. And I'm not saying the bureaucracy isn't bad and cause harmful effect. It absolutely does, and I can talk about that in the Q&A. But that's not causing the five years to become seven. You know what it is? Software. It's not doing the systems engineering flow down. It's fighting, doing flight tests of the missile and finding out that the IMU of the sub made by this subcontractor didn't work right. It worked on the last missile program, but they just said, oh, it's a form fit function replacement, and it doesn't work, and you find it's a quality escape. That's what's happening. And so I can talk in my Q&A about what we're going to do to get at that. But that's an example of what I'm talking about in terms of transparency. Having those dialogues, showing you all the data, because we have all that data. So there's always going to be the chatter about acquisition, and I think it's like, how often do the locusts come to DC? So there must be an acquisition locust, because it's about every 15 years that crawls up out of the ground and it's all over the place. So the locusts are out right now. And so, you know, that's always going on, and so it's good. It's good, and I joke about it, but it's really good. But you also have to get to actual data. So I'm going to talk more in the second bullet, is one of the rest of my talk is about another thing we're doing, which is the Secretary's initiative on Call of Bet and the Cost Curve. Think of it very simply as working together with industry on common problems and trying to solve them. That's what it's all about, because what we found is that the only time we really were talking with industry at the leadership of the Air Force, other than like an AFA conference, is in office calls, half an hour. You know, how are you doing? Good. What's going on? How's, you know, what's going on with ISIL? Gee, we got a big program coming up. Yeah, we can't talk about that. Okay, it's great to see you again, Bob. Okay, that's an office call. That's one thing. Second thing we talk, we opportunity down, is we have a very difficult situation with protest. Well, those two kind of forums don't do it, right? We want to have another forum where we work with industry. So we set up this whole set of projects using NDIA and AFA and AFSEA to collaborate on a whole bunch of things that we commonly with industry say, yeah, God, if we can fix that, that would be cool. Let's work on this, and I'll show you that. That's what I'm going to talk about in this talk. That's what I picked for you, and you'll decide whether or not I picked right for you. Third is something very important, is we've got to get back in the program offices in the Air Force to what I call owning the technical baseline. There's, I wrote an article that's on the DAU, or at AT&L Magazine this month. If you read it, you'll see what I'm talking about. But long story short, it's to go back where the government has the wherewithal to run the technical models of the system, have the integrated master schedule independently assess the performance of the system. In other words, have the prime contractor do their own thing, but the government on its own has all those competencies. And one way to think about it is return to where we were before we decimated the acquisition workforces in the 97, 98 timeframe. They're making a mistake, particularly in the Air Force. Remember the Tisper era? We outsourced a lot of things we should not have outsourced. And so we're building this back and we're doing it with industry. And we just finished a National Academy study and we've got a whole systemic effort to bring back owning the technical baseline. Fourth bullet is self-explanatory. We're all in with Frank Kendall's 3.0 better buying power. Huge, having huge impacts in certain areas that should cost savings we're finding in going back to 1.0 are in the billions. Real savings, real savings, not cost avoidance. But I can talk about that for a whole talk but I don't have that material here. And the fifth is another area I like to talk about which is how we're building in to the strategic agility concept. Jack Ansler's here. Jack was on a study we did back in 2010 looking at adaptability. And there's a lot of aspects of adaptability and agility that we can use in acquisition. And that's aligning with where the Air Force needs to be. Just think of it just to be way oversimplified. Think of it this way. The metric for agility is speed. You want to be faster than the adversary. You want to be fast enough to keep up with technology and you want to be fast enough to take advantage of the warfighter as they learn how to use the stuff. So if you can do things fast, do it fast. And as we always say, if you want to fail, at least fail fast so you can try something else. When you can't do something really fast, build the next generation of bomber, it's still going to be a five or a seven year development program. Then build in hooks and open architectures. We call them pivot points to allow you to adjust the system as the technology changes as you learn. That's how we're doing the bomber. That's how we're doing, that's why we're going to open systems. I'm going to talk about that. That's what open systems allows you to do. And so that's what's behind the fifth bullet. And there's also a lot of innovation and experimentation we're doing in the fifth bullet. So those are our priorities. And if I stopped right now, you could say, okay, I kind of know, hopefully you know what the big rocks that we're doing. So let me then dig into the second bullet and just give you more information. And then finish the talk. So we have a series of projects. I think the total between this slide, and could you click to the next slide and go back again? So however that adds up, I think it's like 13 of them. These are all projects. These are projects that we put together with industry over the last year. And I'm going to call out a few of them. They're not all going to work. I don't know what our batting average is going to be. But you can see what they are and I'll highlight a few of them. Matchmaker. That's one where we have a very successful acquisition with one part of a company. And we in the Air Force and one part of a company, we figure out say a whole new way to do bundling of quantities and get a lot of should cost savings. Well, then you talk to the CEO of the company and you say, how come we were able to do it with this part of your company and yet these guys over here like don't even know anything about it. And then the CEO rightfully says, well, it's same with us as you in the Air Force. Why can't your Air Force people be the same? So we said, okay, this is Ellen Polakowsky's idea. Let's take a success in one part of a company and put it in another. So the first one we did was with Lockheed. Lockheed's space when John Polakowsky was SMC did some incredible stuff in saving money and how they did the contracting and how they eliminated bureaucracy and streamlined the contracting and some of the work breakdown structure on the Sibbers program. Rick Ambrose is the vice president of that part of Lockheed. The CEO is Marilyn Houston, that Lockheed Arrow is Orlando Carbella. We said Orlando, we said Orlando, can we take the team, Ellen's team and your team that did the thing over there in space and can we move it over to the C-130 part of Lockheed Arrow? And we did that, see what we could learn and they're incorporating it because the whole thing is you guys all know the best competition sometimes is inside organizations both inside the Air Force in this example or inside Lockheed. We're opening it up, obviously we just did that first one with Lockheed because they volunteered but we're doing it now with other companies. And so that's one example, I won't go through all of these. So why don't I do this? Why don't I go to the first bolded one on there of cost capability analysis? Okay, this is something we're piloting right now on four programs. Okay, think of it this way. Think of it as, you know, you often, as I said earlier, you get the requirements done. You get the requirements done to a level of what's called even threshold requirement. Think of that as the minimum you'll accept and then objective, which is your stretch requirement. But that's not enough actually. You still don't really know in a lot of cases if you don't do the work, what really means more to you and you're willing to pay more money for or what are you willing to award in the RFP? You know, what do you value in the RFP? There's analytical ways to do this. Remember when I said the work to be done when you set up a program? This is when you do it. So I thought, okay, let me show an example. And some of you may have seen this because I've used this maybe one other time publicly. I apologize if you've seen it already. Okay, this is one, a real one. It's a defensive system being put to upgrade the F-15 called E-Pause. Okay, it's very important actually. It's very important for the new threats, the new ground, eye ads, et cetera. So the first thing we did there, the analysts did, was they took four mission tasks that the F-15 had to do. Think of the, and we stripped some of the stuff off because it's to make it unclassified. But think of mission task one in the lower left as being could be air to air defense. Mission task two could be air to ground. Mission task three could be something else could be, I don't know, providing some minimal type of ISR or support. And mission task four is something else. I actually don't even remember what mission task four is. Okay, and you see the dots on there? The Y axis is utility. That's a metric that says the warfighter, what the warfighter cares about. In this case, the warfighter is ACC, air combat command. The X axis is life cycle cost. That's an estimate of how much this capability will cost, not just to develop and install it, but through the life cycle. Okay, and then the dots on each of the charts are various technical solutions evaluated by the analysts and plotted there against the metric of utility. And so the warfighter has helped us with the utility and telling us what they care about. And we have a common metric. And then the cost analysts do the life cycle cost on the X axis. And then the various solution sets are put as cost estimators and those are the dots. Hit the change. Then they're pulled up and rolled up together. So you have an overall, pulling them together, operational utility or capability and life cycle cost. And what you see is the dots that are connected by the line is what is called the most efficient frontier. Pareto front is the term, one of the technical terms. What it means basically is if you're on that curve, you can operate anywhere on that curve, you're the most efficient you can be. So the first thing you learn is the dots that aren't on those curves, you can just get rid of them because they're suboptimal. Okay, so that's what we're gonna do. We're gonna get rid of the dots on the lower part of the curve. So now we're left with this Pareto curve. And remember, each one of the dots is a specific solution set to do this E-pause mission. This is real data. Like I said, all it's been taken off of this is on the axis. And I wanna give a shout out to Jack Hanson. The guy who did this got his masters in your program at University of Maryland. He's a brilliant guy. He's a captain. And he just got into Harvard Business School. So this is one guy that did this basically. So we're teaching it to everybody. I gotta tell you, I'll give you his name, he's something else. Okay, so next is what you do. You then go back to the warfighter and you say, what can you afford? And you take off the stuff in the upper right. You say, you know what? That doesn't give me stuff that's capable beyond what I'm willing to pay for. And then the lower one is you just get rid of it because the warfighter says, ah, that's not enough. And then you have those four dots in the middle and that then is your trade space. And it shows you what we are willing to pay more for and what the warfighter cares about. So now you're pretty smart. You're pretty smart. Here's what we're doing with this. We're piloting on those programs up there, this, but we're doing it with industry. So we're not doing this just behind the closed door. We're showing them this. And we're showing them this two years ahead of time. So if you're trying to get ready for the RFP that's gonna come out for TX in about two years, you're seeing this result and you're seeing this. So you see, oh, I see what they're gonna do. The Air Force cares more and is willing to pay more even for this extra capability. And so it's a very transparent way to do acquisition. But the other thing it does is it forces us and the warfighter to get down and really talk and say, you know, what really matters to us? You always want everything, but what really matters to you? So this is an example of what we're doing cost capability analysis, but we're doing it in a transparent way. So I just, I go through this just to show this, but this is real. This is a real example. Next chart. Okay, so I thought about something else. I've been out there enough to get enough questions on open architectures and agility that I thought maybe I should talk about a little bit more. My friends in the community I grew up in, we all talk to each other like everybody knows and I found out they don't actually. There's actually still a lot of confusion out there where there shouldn't be, so I thought, well maybe I'll do an attempt to help. So let's talk about both open architectures first and then we'll talk about experiments we're trying to use them. Remember for this thing called agility, right? Okay, so first, open architectures. This is the first page of Appendix C of the report that Jack Gansler and I and a lot of other really great people worked on in 2010 that says there's no mystery behind what open architectures are, guys. There's very specific definitions and you can just look at this. I call out something very specific. Here's one way to test whether you have an open architecture. Who owns the interface? Is the interface something that is an open standard or that the government provides to everybody? Or does the company own the interface? Well, a simple analogy can be, it's probably a bad analogy, but I've got to come up with a better one, is imagine you buy your house from a builder. Maybe 20 years ago you bought it from the builder and all the AC plugs in the house are proprietary to that builder. So you want to put any appliances in there? You got to go to the builder. Can you go to the store and order a different appliance and plug it in? No. Can you put an adapter on it? Well, you have the adapters but they don't really work that well and the adapters are kind of expensive. That's the equivalent of the situation we have in a lot of our military systems. All open architectures is to say no. No, you're going to use, is that Bill Johnson right there? That man right there is who I learned a lot of this from. Is ARCI, the program that Bill Johnson was one of three people founded in the 1990s, it's an acoustic rapid cot insertion, went to this and blew away everybody in the submarine combat and sonar world. Nobody thought it could be done, right? And you guys did it and so people say, well you can't do this with airplanes, sure you can. I heard that, somebody told me that and I was like, what? Of course you can do it with airplanes. Does the contractor want to do it? Probably not. But what's happening, what's happened is that we have a consortium now in the Air Force and the Navy's got it too where we've rallied commonly around the standards. We call it OMS in the Air Force. We've rallied around a type of plug that everybody has to use and every one of the major companies, some of you are here, are in that consortium. So if one part of a company comes to us and says I don't know what an open architecture is or I'm confused or I don't want to do it, say well your own company knows exactly what it is, go talk to this person and go to the books on it. There's no excuse. That's what an open architecture does for you. Next chart. So what's the issue here, right? Well open architecture allows you to more rapidly update stuff. In the program that Bill Johnson helped start, we went from, I forget, did we get to 18 months? Every 18 months we were sending up new algorithms? Every year. Every year the submarine force got new algorithms. And it allowed totally non-traditional people to get into it. So professors from universities who had kind of given up on working for the Navy in the 80s came back and they said oh you actually will use my algorithm if it wins. And I'll actually be able to see when the submarine comes back, the results after its deployment, that's what you can do with this. Okay so look at the bottom there, downloading an app. But if we still, if we set this up and we still take two years to procure it and then we have to do the accreditation, think of it as cyber, another two years, the bad analogy, might as well just buy a new damn phone. So that's not enough just to set this thing up. So what we're trying is we're trying experiment. Now this is a tie to the acquisition reforms. There's a lot of really good things in commercialization and fast rapid acquisition that are in both bills. I'm getting the hand so I'll speed up here a little bit. One of them is other transactional authority. Think of that as a fast way to acquire prototypes where you don't have to go through the FAR or the 5,000. So we're saying okay, there's people that think other transactional authority is the savior of acquisitions, other people think that it's the cause of every massive failure and then there's a lot of people in between that don't know about it. We said well fine, let's see if this thing really works. So we're doing something called PlugFest Plus. A PlugFest is something in the IT community where typically it's like an industry day where vendors come in and plug their app in or plug whatever their product is and show it off, fine. But if we can use consortias that have been set up for other transactional authority, if we're impressed enough in a PlugFest, why don't we just fund these guys, get these guys under contract and see if we can do it in a couple of weeks. That's why we call it PlugFest Plus, okay? The plus part says let's try to do it. We just did it. We just did it for the first time with DCGS. It's a ground system for the Intel community and the Air Force. What we did is we, down at this was about a month ago, down at Langley, 14 of 19 companies that came in and participated were nontraditional. We gave them data ahead of time, access to the product, the sample data, we got them on the Hanson Mill Cloud. I can talk to you what the app was we were doing and we're hopefully gonna get at least one, couple of these guys under contract within a few weeks. We're very close to doing it. And now we're looking at a way to speed this up faster because we borrowed a consortium that the Army had set up. We're now setting up our own consortium to customize to us and AFRL, next chart. AFRL just released a draft RFP for it and it's used for software and hardware and we're gonna do this thing. We're gonna do this thing. And we were already having other program offices in the Air Force saying, oh, I'm gonna try it too. We say, yeah, why don't you try it? And we're gonna learn, we're gonna learn what works and what doesn't. One of the things people bring up is open architectures. Wow, how do you do open architectures with cyber problem? Oh, you think only open architectures have a cyber problem? How do you do fill in the blank with a cyber problem? How do you drive a car? How do you fly an airplane? We all have cyber problems. So one of the things we're doing is we're in gate, we brought in DIA to help us because they're very interested in this too and they've been working on doing fast accreditation and security because they see this as very helpful with them. So we're also gonna take that on. And we're moving to these other programs, space control, we've got a space control pilot we're gonna do. We're gonna try it with the AOC 10.2. Remember, all of that, so open architectures are gonna go to a lot of our systems. So this is an example of something we're trying under bending the cost curve. We're also trying challenge-based acquisition. We're putting out a prize, I think it's a $2 million prize to the first team that can successfully demonstrate this sweet spot for turbine engine efficiency. And we've given them the goal, this was picked by AFRL as a lot, as exactly an area that if this works, go to the next chart. We have huge applications. Think of it as giving us the endurance we need for the smaller UAVs. It's something that doesn't exist right now, this class of engine. So that's another thing we're trying, next chart. Okay, let me back one. Final one we're doing, this one sometimes gets chuckles. This is a little whimsical, but not really. We're thinking about, well, cognitive engineering and automation has come a pretty far away. People think about the Watson experiment, next chart, where it basically, Watson, IBM did it, where Watson beat the Jeopardy leads. There's a lot of these kind of techniques are being tried of sorting through data. Well, we know the situation in acquisition is pretty hard, right? Slow and cumbersome, that's an understatement. Okay, well, AQ Prime, Acquisition Prime, is to see, well, let's see if we can use any of these tools. Next chart. So no kidding, we're about ready to do award. One of them probably will involve a Watson-like technology to see how these tools could help us navigate basic questions. Next chart. These are the data sources we're using. Just like Watson had to go through all the data sources when they trained it for Jeopardy, these are the data sources. And what we're gonna do is we're gonna see if we can build a simple tool that can navigate through all the myriad of stuff and give pointers, it's not gonna do the acquisition job for you, but it'll tell you, hey, this is how you can do something like that, try this or go to this place. I mean, we are in the, I always joke with each other, we're gonna bring ourselves into the early 2000s, or in some cases I say into the 90s. So this is something where we should have been trying this about five years ago. Next chart. So there's a lot of other things I could have talked about in many cost curve. I didn't, I picked a few that I thought might be interesting to you guys. Some of them are quite serious. We have about four new ones that we're doing now, one of which is on IP, all this issue of IP. We're working with industry and saying, okay, how can we address this issue with the constant concern about IP? We've got that going on, we've got a lot of analytics going on with industry. We've got a systemic effort to shorten the timeline from RFP to award with industry. Average is 17 months in the Air Force, we wanna bring it down to single digits. We're doing that with industry. So there's a whole bunch of things that have been in cost curve. But I'll stop at this point and go to the next chart and just remind everybody, that's just one piece of one of the priorities we're working on. So I picked that one because I thought maybe that might be interesting you guys. I don't know if I picked the right one, but at least I like talking about it. So but I can talk about anything else on here with the Q and A or answer any other questions. So why don't I stop at that point? Well thanks, Bill. That was a fascinating discussion and notwithstanding the fact that I just this second learned that my job is gonna be taken by a robot thanks to the United States Air Force because we spent a lot of time analyzing FPDS which now computers will do but I for one embrace our new robot over here. Siri, Siri should LRSP be fixed price incentive or fixed price, firm fixed price in the seventh lot. Tell me Siri. All data is good data. So thank you, thank you for a fascinating discussion and certainly I learned a lot. I think there's a lot there and I know I'm sure, I know for sure I'll just say it now that everyone's gonna say can we get those slides after this is over so. Look as far as I don't care but I'm told it's whoever my master's in university. So we want to ask that question for all of you who's wondering. Can I get the slides and talk about transparency? No. A lot of great stuff there. Well let me just, I'm gonna ask just one or two questions and then we'll throw it open to the audience. And you know, you talked about convening with stakeholders and transparency. And one of the conversations that I continually run into in my time here at CSIS both in talking to industry what you might think of as the traditional US industry but also in talking with a lot of partners and allies who come through CSIS is the question of, you know historically I'm gonna just throw this out there the Department of Defense maybe has been a bit inward looking and that has been true because the world was such that that was easy to do. The world has changed a little bit. It's a more global economy and the security environment has changed and we're working much more closely with allies and partners all around the world. And so a lot of this communication that you're having and this optimization and clarity of requirements, how does that translate with allies and partners with foreign military sales? How can you be or how open can you be on that front? It's a great question, Andrew. And there was, I didn't talk about it but there was one of the line items up there was FMS Efficiencies that was one of our PTCC. So there's a whole set of challenges under, let's just talk about, we'll talk about there's multiple categories of foreign sales, right? There's direct military sale, there's FMS and then some other things in between that. What we wanna do generally in the Department of Defense is we want, of course, our allies and partners to have great capability because we're gonna have to fight next to them when the balloon goes up. That's by the way, that's one of the advantages of having all the partners in the F-35 program. I mean, we want our partners to have a pretty darn good airplane, okay? What we also want is we want our industrial base to be helped. We don't wanna drive people out. So by and large, foreign sales are the best thing, are very good for us, generally. I mean, there's always exceptions, you have to look at each case. But, you know, it's a laborious process. I use humor to make my point, so please don't take more than this, but there's a humorous line that says if it wasn't for our products, there's no way anybody would do business with the United States. We just happen to have the best products because our processes are hard. They're hard for good reasons, but they're not necessarily efficient. For example, obviously you have security issues, you have export issues. You have approvals that go across agency and it may be a State Department issue. Okay, so that process takes a long time. And so one of the things we were looking at is what pieces of that process are taking the longest time? And I could go into the details of a few that I think they are and we're attacking. Let me give you one example of another thing we're trying in that same vein. One of the things that people tell us in industry is they say, you know, if we develop a product that we think may be useful overseas, sometimes it's easier to sell it or get them interested in overseas and buying it than it is to go to you guys because we'll bring it to you and you'll say some combination of things like, well, that's really interesting. Have you shown it to Phil in the blank? DARPA, they funded it or whatever. Or you'll say, I don't have a requirement. Or you'll say, well, yeah, the RFP for X will come out in six months, you can look at that. There's gotta be other ways to get people to bring in. And so one of the things we're doing is setting up a whole prototype and experimentation program before we even have a requirement. So that's one thing to do. But the second thing we're trying to do is help companies sell their stuff overseas in a fair way, an equitable way. So what specific example we're just doing? We're doing right now. Airworthiness. When countries buy US airplanes or parts of airplanes, getting the US stamp of approval, whatever they think that means, it's very important for them. That's one of the reasons FMS helps. Now, usually in FMS for an airplane, we certify, we don't call it certification, we can do something called attestation. Basically saying the product, the airplane is safe to fly, but then we don't take liability for it for another country because they have to certify their pilots and do all that, but we'll at least do that first part. But we only do it for the products that are in FMS case. What if a company wants to try, doesn't have the FMS sale yet? So we're setting up a fee for service for Airworthiness where if, and it's a similar thing of a test range, if a company has a test product that they wanna show off and they're willing to pay a price, an appropriate price, we do a fee for service and they can come onto our test ranges and fly it or do whatever. If they have a UAV, you gotta fly it and test it. It's the same idea. And so we put an RFI out last month to see, we knew one company was interested in it, but we said, well, we're not gonna only do it for one company, let's see if there's anyone else. We had like eight companies say, yeah, we'd love it. So we're going through the process right now. I think we're gonna do a first industry day for that and I'll tell you what we do and say, okay, we've got this set up. We're trying to get it done by September or October. And what we wanna do is set up the industry day where we show the process, answer any questions from industry and actually bring in some foreign partners who they can also look at the process and say, okay, does this work for you? How does this go? So that's an example of things we're trying, but there is much to be done there. And I do think that it has to be a lot faster in FMS. But FMS in foreign sales is really critical to us and I think we can do a lot more. So it's a long answer to your questions. Well, thank you. A great answer, not too long, but I'm gonna defer any more of my questions so that we can get some audience questions in. So I always like folks to sit on the front row, so I always pick a first person from the front row. And the microphone's coming. Thank you. Amy Butler with Aviation Week. I'd like to ask about one of your specific examples. You are using for the cost capability analysis. The four pilots, you mean? Yeah, four pilots. One of which is maps. I'd like to ask specifically, and some of this may not be specific to acquisition yet, but it's quite interesting because it seems like there's a lot of talk about maps and a fifth to fourth capability at the top levels of the Air Force. The chief of staff has briefed it at bay. You've highlighted it numerous times as has Secretary James. However, I'm hearing at the lower levels, talent hates not working. That is supposed to inform the requirements for maps and from what I'm hearing from the majors and Lieutenant-Colonels that are tasked with coming up with requirements, they don't even know how to spec this thing out. So it sounds like you have a great process but maybe not the juice to put through the system. And I'm wondering how do you fix something like that? How does this help? So I think what you're, I'll just, for the audience here, I'll maybe phrase the question broadly, because there's a very specific example that Amy's talking about that you may not be familiar with. The broader question I think Amy's asking is, this is an area, this is a fourth to fifth comms thing, fourth gen to fifth. And it's something that we got to get it right. There's a program called talent hate which is kind of a prototype thing. But it's not the long-term answer to it. So the long-term answer to it, to get it right when we get F-35 out there and to get these upgrades, like the F-15 E-pause thing, that's an example of a fourth gen thing where we're trying to get it up, is to put together the program that will make sure the fourth to fifth is transparent. But we're so early in that process, right? I don't even think I have a, I don't even think it's a real acquisition program. So think about, the reason we picked those four pilots is we picked TX, it was interesting, we picked TX because we knew that's gonna happen, it's in the budget, and it's real, and we're gonna do the RFP in about two years. In fact, what people said to us is they said, oh, I wouldn't do TX, why? Well, you know, that's gonna be sensitive because we're about, we're gonna do the RFP. They said, oh, so we like the pilot things but not on anything important, right? I mean, we don't wanna try it on something that we're actually can help. Or what I used to say, and my friends and my Harry Cox rejected for excessive relevancy. So we picked that one, and it's a little high wire act, right, with that one, people are nervous about it. We picked some of the other ones and maps as an example of it because it was so early as before we even, I think, even had the requirements done. And so you hear the churn that Amy's talking about, which I'm sure is true, and that's what happens in the very beginning before you even have a program is you have a lot of debate and issues on how are we gonna do this? Are we gonna use something that's gonna look like this prototype talent hate that we have now that some people like and some people don't? How are we gonna set this up? This is the churn that happens before milestone A. Well, that's the whole point of introducing analytic tools into it. As you say, let's get out of the opinion business because they're war fighters, they're experts. And let's start putting some analytics of some costs next to this stuff so you can have structured debate as you hone the requirements. And so we picked them in different phases deliberately for that reason. We actually picked maps exactly for that reason to see if it can help with all the things that Amy's talking about. And by the way, fourth to fifth is a real important issue. I mean, it's a great question Amy has and I'm sure what you're hearing is true. So I hopefully that helps answer your question. Okay. Morning, Sir. Marina Malenek with James. Hi. Hi, how are you? Couple of simple questions. Are you still on track for a down select on LRSB in the next couple of months? Yeah, I get this question every day and I've got a theory guys. I'm just teasing my people. I'm always trying to tease people and then I take it personally, so don't take it personally. I'm friends with all you guys. I always say, here's what I would do to help you guys. We have software that can take every statement that I and the secretary say and run a change detection on it and then give you the headlines so you can get it right out after the talk. Because we always have to think, okay, what did we say last time? And then I have another joke I make. It's a joke to Tony. Tony Carpaccio's here when he always presses me. He goes, come on, why don't you tell me? I said, all right, just you, Tony. August 11th, 10 p.m., Nats Park, Pitchers Mountain, be there. Well, it's on track. I've been saying for a couple of months it's one to two or three months away. And there's really nothing new. I mean, it's nothing new. It's gonna be done when it's done. It's like asking, as I used to say when I used to ride submarines, when's the submarine gonna get underway? Well, it's planning to get underway at one o'clock tomorrow but it's gonna get underway when it gets underway. It's more important that it gets underway at the right time and it's more important that we do this right. I mean, it is fair and I'm trying to help you guys. It is fair to say we're in the closing parts of it but it's in the closing parts when you go back and check one more time this, one more time that. And if somebody comes to me and say, can we wanna do one more thing or one more thing? How long, I'm not gonna say, nope, nope, you can't. It's gotta be done tomorrow. I'm not gonna do that. This is something that's gonna be with us for 50 years and we're gonna do, remember I said at the very beginning to go fast, you gotta go slow. This is what I mean. So, and I know, I recognize that there's a lot of people that wanna know and you'll be the first to know. Maybe I'll be the first to know and then right away you'll know. It's much more interesting, I understand why it's much more interesting to you actually than it is to me. I think it's very interesting to industry because they're on pins and needles, I get that but we're in the closing parts of it. The closing parts, that's all I can say and so I don't think I just made a headline in anything I just said but you can try the software part and see what I did. And again, I'm teasing, I just mean that. I respect what you guys do. I'm just giving you a hard time. Over here with a hand up. Hi sir, I'm James Drew, Fly Global. Hello. I'm tossing up between a bomber and a JSTARS question but I think I'm gonna go JSTARS. Say that again, I'm sorry. I'm tossing up between whether I should ask you a bomber or a JSTARS question, so. Well, talk to you. Over at the Paris Air Show, we had all the JSTARS teams kind of make their announcements. You're due, I think in August is what I heard to down select to either two or three industry teams to carry it through to then another down select to one contractor team. Could you give us an update on where you're heading with that when you expect a down select to a single contractor? Sure, I'll answer the specific question but first remind the audience here who aren't into all the acquisition terminology where we are. So, Milestone B is essentially the point in the program where, if it's a big program, it's where the AT&L as Milestone Session Authority commits the government to really know, kid, and go out and develop this thing. As Frank Kendall says, that's the huge step. Everything that happens for Milestone B is risk reduction work, it's important work, it's important because of the reasons I said, remember I was talking about up front, but that's the real point where you commit. So, where we are in JSTARS recapitalization is we're coming up on Milestone A, okay? A is gonna happen, I think the latest I heard is it's the last week, the meeting itself will be the last week of August beginning of September. That's where the government commits to pursuing a material solution, just pursuing it. So, what our plan is, now I'm answering your question, our plan is to put, and this is kind of the standard thing we're doing these days, is we like to do this risk reduction work before we get to deciding whether, how to do the real program. So, we like to put, if we have the money, as many as three teams under contract in a program, and get them working on risk reduction activities. That's where they actually are funded by the government to continue the systems engineering flow down that I talked about earlier, they're funded now, and identifying the high risk items that they're gonna continue to retire. And usually at the end of it, you tie it up to about at a milestone B, and our ideal is to have, let's say, three different companies at that point, and they don't have to be companies, they can be consortias, that have brought solutions to it, have brought it up to about a preliminary design review, maybe have even put their own money in a prototype. And now, when we're ready, if we're ready to do the real program and when we're ready, we have something really good to start with, and then we can do, then you do the competitive RFP, and then you down select in the RFP at that point, usually, and pick the winner to start the actual development. So think of that, and where we are in JSTAR's recap is to begin, no kidding, that first part, because up till now, it's just been studies and companies doing their own research, and AOAs and stuff like that, and that's always good to do that stuff, but that doesn't mean the program's real yet. Now the only other thing I would add about JSTAR's recap is I have a series of programs that I put in a certain bucket that I always remind people. JSTAR's recap is one of those ones where it's always worrisome about the budget, because Frank, for example, I'll just speak for Frank, Frank will not do a milestone B on a program, approve it, if he doesn't, isn't assured that the service has it fully funded and can afford it. And there's always these programs, right, that are right on the edge, and you look at them and depending on how the budget goes that year, and so that's what I always warn people about with programs, particularly in this climate we're in today, that just because you start a milestone A, it means we're serious about it, but the real commitment the government's gonna have to make is in about three years, okay? And so I always remind people of that so that they're not surprised if they hear, gee, the budget may affect whether or not we do JSTAR's recap, sure, sure it could. That's what I mean by that, so I always caveat that, am I telling you that JSTAR's recap, no, no, I'm not. I'm just saying it's an example of one of those programs, just how it is, where it is in the timing, and in the budget, and it gets to sequester, not sequester, and how the Congress and the administration, how we resolve where we are in the NDAA, so that's the only thing I would add. We wanna see, I'd like to see 10 flying prototypes. I mean, I don't mean to be flip about it, but yeah, that's kind of my theme earlier, remember I was talking about prototyping experimentation. Prototyping is always a good thing, yeah. All right, I will let everyone know, because at the end of these events, we always have the rush forward. And this one, that probably won't happen. Secretary, yeah, this time will be different. Secretary LaPlante has a 10-30 engagement, so unfortunately, we won't have a lot of time after the event. We do have time, however, for one more question, and I want to come here next to the on. Thank you. Luke Lorenz Alliance for American Manufacturing. I'd like to ask, what is your opinion on domestic procurement provisions? Do you feel that requiring domestic sourcing for military equipment hinders development and advancement? Or is it essential to prevent the outsourcing of our defense industrial base to the same countries we're working to contain? You know, I think it depends on the case, actually. Unfortunately, that's the answer I have to give you. I think you have to be conscious of what it is you're buying overseas and think about it and say, does this really make sense to me? I mean, let's give you an example. Somebody made the decision, we made the decision 20 years ago, it made sense to, and I've heard all the arguments, I guess it made sense at the time, do these things called RD-180s, you know? Think about that example, right? There's always, it's always the situation, right? Where your friends with somebody today and then 20 years from now, all of a sudden they're not your friend, and all of a sudden they, oh, wow. You know, and everybody always says to us, how did you let this happen? It's like, everybody let this happen. This was a good idea at the time. And you can go back and read it and it's compelling, why it's a good idea. And so you just have to play all these things out in your head and say, okay, what if this happens? What if that happens? And so that's kind of how I'd answer the question. I'd say, I think you look at the case and you say, okay, what's our hedge? If we buy something from foreign, what's our hedge if, fill-in-the-blank scenario happens? Do we have backup, are we funding, are we having a robust industrial base in this country so we're not shut out? That's what we have to do all the time. And so that's how I'd answer that question. Okay, I think actually we have time for just one more here on the other aisle. Sorry, I tricked our microphone holders by saying I wasn't gonna. Hi, Courtney Elbin with Inside the Air Force. Hi, you had talked a little bit early on about some of the software challenges and how that plays into the development timeline. And I wondered if you could just talk more specifically about some things that you're doing to address those challenges. I know that increased cybersecurity requirements probably play into some of that timeline and we've seen that play out a little bit on GPS OCX. So how long do you think it's gonna take to get this right and what are you doing to address that? GPS OCX is a great poster child for the challenges. I mean, you always have to remind people that when you talk about one case, if it's the most extreme case, it's not typical. So you don't wanna overdo it. It's the opposite of saying, let's look at the highlight film of how your baseball team did and just because they hit homeruns doesn't mean they won. And just because you look at the air film doesn't mean that they lost either. But in the case of OCX, which is probably right now, the one that I'm spending most time working on with Frank and with Joe Greaves and with the, frankly, all the way up to the CEO of Raytheon, Tom Kennedy. Here's the situation in a program like that and then here's what I think, here's how we address it. There's two things that kind of intermingle on complex software programs that didn't used to intermingle. The first is you have to do the systems engineering and the systems engineering again takes all the requirements and then does the flow down. And in complex software systems like a ground control station for a satellite, that's what OCX is. That's a lot of hard, hard work. It can take about two years. And it's not enough to do the requirements flow down at 90% because you can get killed on the last 5%. So you gotta do the whole thing. So that's systems engineering. And again, that's taking the operational requirements and doing all the translation down to the technical level. And you always find the gotchas. Oh, I didn't realize that. Then you have to go back up to the operational level and say, well, can you give on this because this is what it means? I asked you just to put this addition on my house. What's the problem? Well, the way you told me to do it, I'm gonna have to dig up this in your yard and that means it's gonna do this and this. If you just change where your addition is, it'll be better. Oh, okay, fine. You don't just sit there and say, no, don't go back to the owner of the house and say, hey, guess what? I'm gonna charge you a lot of money. So that's the first problem in software that I see not being done sufficiently is put the time in up front to do that work. That was the case in OCX. They got to about the 80% level, 90%. And it was only in the last year and a half or so that they finished to the last bit. Here's the second part that we've added to it. Build the cybersecurity in. That's new. And I tell people, the only thing worse than not building cybersecurity into your system is building cybersecurity into your system in some cases or vice versa, depending on your point of view. It's very hard because what we, and I've been on these groups that have said this, the answer to cybersecurity isn't to patch things after the things out there. You got to build it at the beginning with systems engineering. Okay, so we're doing that now. We're starting to. It's hard. It's really, really hard. An example might be what software are you allowed to use that's been previously used? I mean, it's almost like you have a trusted foundry of what chips we probably are gonna get to a point where you have a trusted app. What are you allowed to use? Those rules have changed. What we used in systems 10 years ago today, you'd say, I'm not gonna use that, right? So it's a different world. It's kind of like, you know, it's like, oh, you still have Windows XP, I feel sorry for you. Well, I know it's a slow system. It's not just that, you know? But 10 years ago, that was what you had. So we're having to design it at the very beginning. And of course, the problem is, is the threat is changing about over every five minutes. And so, in fact, what I tell people, I jokingly say to them, but I try to make a point with my joke when they say, you know, we've got this cyber requirement down in this program, we're ready to move out. I say, oh, and that's never gonna change in the next 10 years. That's the problem. So that happened in OCX. And I think OCX is a pathfinder unfortunately in that way. And so I think what we're gonna have to do is we're gonna have to start across the services, take these lessons learned and go back. And, you know, and say, okay, how do we, and I don't think there's a discipline yet. I don't think that the SEIs are the world. I mean, Jack, you would know better than me. But I don't know that there's the research and the science on how to do efficient systems engineering with cyber resiliency and complex software systems. I don't know that we have that solved in the research community. Okay, well, that's what I thought. If you went to, you know, Carnegie Mellon or went to University of Maryland where Jack works. I mean, I don't, it's not like software systems engineering as was done in the 80s where we finally got to it and figure out how to do it. This is breaking new ground and it's hard. And you all have the same, I mean, we all have it in our lives, right? You know, look at what just happened yesterday. What might have happened yesterday, you know? So it's hard and that's why cyber can be a cost-imposing strategy. We don't want it to be a missile defense thing where sometimes where the defense is so expensive that it's easy, that's why software or cyber's so hard because it's asymmetric. So I think that, I think when we get done with the OCXs and we fix and we get it finished and those other programs, I think we look at them, I mean, maybe people use them as case studies and say, okay, is this the way we really want to do things? Tom Kennedy, he was the CEO of Raytheon, a very smart guy, wrote a paper action on his views and you know, on this and how to think about it. And I know OSD-18L is looking hard at it too. It's a hard problem. Well, thank you. Thank you very much, Bill. You've been very forthcoming with us, really appreciate it. I think you're effectively executing on more conversation and transparency. We very much appreciate it here and thank you for coming today. Thank you. Thanks everybody. Thank you.