 Oh, say can you see what's so proud at the twilight's last gleaming? Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the worst so gallantly streaming? Let's give this talented group one more round of applause. Okay, before I introduce General Brown, president, CEO of AUSA and our host, I do have a few administrative announcements. I'd like to start by thanking Northrop Grumman for sponsoring today's session. This new sponsorship is being offered for the first time here at AUSA, so we're extremely grateful that Northrop Grumman is the first to take advantage of it. When you have an opportunity, please take some time, stop by their booth, and visit with the Northrop Grumman team. They're located in the South Hall booth 303. Again, a big thank you to Northrop Grumman. Let's give them a big round of applause for being today's general session sponsor. Okay, badges. Everyone in this room received our new digital access pass. This great new innovative option provided a quicker way to access these educational forms today without having to wait in line for a printed badge. We are testing this new option for the first time at this year's event, so for those of you that used it, we hope you like it. For networking purposes, though, please note that you do still need a printed badge to access the exhibit halls. So if you came in here with your digital access pass, please make sure you go and get a printed badge at the break or during lunch, and that'll provide access into our exhibit halls. For those of you that are using the digital access pass, we'd love to hear some feedback from you. So if you could flag down General Haley, myself, anyone from the AUSA staff, and give some feedback, good or bad, we'd love to hear it. Proceedings, handouts, slides, and videos from our presentations this week will be available about a week after the event concludes on the AUSA website. Just go to ausa.org. Look for the Meetings tab, and look under Past Events, and you'll find our proceedings and handouts. You can also email me for anything that you see during the week, and I'm happy to send them to you. App. We have a brand new app at this year's Global Force Symposium. I hope you're all taking advantage of it. It includes the latest agenda, our exhibitor lists, our floor plan, and really everything you need to access and have a successful AUSA Global Force Symposium. If you have not already downloaded the app, please do so. We've got QR codes located all throughout the Von Braun Center. It's easy to download. Question cards. I will walk around the room with question cards and take questions for our panels as time permits. I will hand out the question cards as I walk the room, so if you have a question, just raise your hand. I'll give you a card, write it down, hand it back to me. I'll get it up to the panels. For our keynote speakers, we are taking questions as time permits. For our keynotes, I'll walk around with a microphone, so please don't be shy. Start thinking about your questions now, and we'll give some tough questions to our keynote speakers. Press. We have press at the event, so our ground rules are simple. We are on record and for attribution. We have a lot of our good friends from the press that are here today, so on record and for attribution. AUSA, as you know, is a membership-based organization. Who here is a member of AUSA? Raise your hand. All right. For those of you that raised your hand, thank you for your support. For everyone else, that was a little bit of a trick question because when you registered, unless you opted out, you became a basic member of AUSA at no cost. So thank you. Now has over a million and a half members worldwide. Let's give AUSA a big round of applause for that. A million and a half members. We, of course, would like you to become a premium member of AUSA, so if you're not already a premium member, please visit with Angela Quidley at the AUSA membership booth in the South Hall foyer, just next to registration. She can review your membership plan and talk about all the great benefits that we offer at AUSA. And I think, as most of you know, by joining, you will help AUSA be an effective voice for the total army and provide support for the soldier and their families. AUSA store is also located in the South Hall foyer, not far from registration. As most of you know, we unveiled a new logo at the annual meeting, so we have a lot of great items with the new logo. We also have Duke Cannon's big-ass brick of soap in case you need something for Easter. I think really nothing says happy Easter like a big-ass brick of Duke Cannon's soap. So make sure you visit our team at the AUSA store and we'll get your Easter needs taken care of. Wi-Fi. We do have Wi-Fi throughout the building. A big thank you to our sponsor, Noblis. To access the Wi-Fi on any of your personal devices, you select attend underscore AUSA. And the password is Noblis24. Please note that is case sensitive, so it's a capital N and then Noblis24. Lunch, we will be available today and tomorrow in the exhibit halls. Today's lunch starts at 12 o'clock and is sponsored by Huntington Ingalls Industries. A big thank you to Huntington Ingalls for being our lunch sponsor today. I'd also like to thank all of the companies that are exhibiting with us. They are, without a doubt, an integral part of the learning process. This year we have more than 200 companies displaying the latest products and services in South Hall and East Hall. Please note that because of the weather, we did plan to have some outdoor exhibits. We brought them in. They are all now located in East Hall. So if you're planning to visit any of the exhibitors that were located outside, they're all in East Hall and they're eager to say hi and meet with you. And last but certainly not least, I'd like to thank our sponsors for supporting this event. Simply put, we can't do what we do without the tremendous support of our sponsors. And with that, it is now my pleasure to introduce the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Association of the United States Army. Let's give General Bob Brown a big round of applause. All right, well welcome. Before we start, I just wanted to acknowledge the tragic accident that happened early this morning. Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore. And I would just ask, please keep those involved in your thoughts and prayers. There's still search and rescue going on. So please keep those folks in our thoughts and prayers here before we begin. But welcome. Great to have everybody here. And it's going to be a great three days, I guarantee you. And so great to be back here in Huntsville, an amazing city, and really appreciate the tremendous support. We're really happy this year to theme continuous transformation to deliver combat ready formations. So there's a lot in that. And the panels will get after that. And we'll have a lot of great discussions. And I would just encourage you to participate in all those you can. And then on the exhibit hall as well, you'll see a whole bunch of exhibits that get after that continuous transformation delivering combat ready formations. You know, with the world and warfare changing rapidly, the Army must iteratively adapt. And as Chief of Staff Randy George says, build agility into our Army. So critical, building agility into our Army. And Army must always be ready, set priorities and power leaders and reduce the complexities. And these are all exactly the areas we'll cover this week in our tremendous lineup of keynote speakers, educational panels, and fireside chats, as well as the Warriors Corner, which is at the Army exhibit on the exhibit floor. Warriors Corner, always popular and great discussions going on there for sure. But before we start, I would like to recognize a lot of hard work was put in to pull this together. And I wanted to recognize the City of Huntsville and the Huntsville Convention Center. It's tremendous support. It looks fantastic this year. A lot of construction finished in time. We really appreciate all those efforts and making this just absolutely top notch here for the show. Also, the AUSA Redstone Huntsville chapter, an award-winning best chapter. Thank them for their tremendous support. Volunteers that did so much for us. We really appreciate that. And of course, we can't do this without the coordination of the Army leadership. AMC appreciate the tremendous support and Army Futures Command. Just amazing support. For example, this will be the first time ever we'll have all cross-functional teams here from Army Futures Command, and that's incredible. We'll have all the cross-functional teams here. I just look forward to so much getting done in those areas. And again, thanks to our sponsors, Northrop Grumman, for sponsoring this morning's event and the general session. I really appreciate it. Can't do it without the sponsorship, that's for sure. So please take advantage of the networking time. We built in networking time to get out on the exhibit floor. Fantastic exhibits. And I was just talking to some individuals before coming in. You can see more. If you travel two years going to all these companies, you wouldn't even see as much as you'll see in a couple of days right here and the ideas and great discussions and educational programs. So take advantage of that on the exhibit floor for sure. And as Alex said, the outdoor exhibits have moved inside, so you don't have to deal with the rain. So that's a good thing. And I apologize. I know it's made things a little bit tougher this morning. So now I'd like to, you know, we're really fortunate to kick off with our keynote speaker. No better way to start than with the Honorable Gabe Camarillo, the 35th Undersecretary of the Army. Really grateful he's here to kick it off. He's a senior, the Secretary of the Army's senior civilian assistant and principal advisor on matters related to management and operation of the Army. He is also the Chief Management Officer for the Army. He's a small task, all those in that sense there. Prior to this, Mr. Camarillo served as the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Manpower and Reserve Affairs and Principal Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology. Before entering government service, Mr. Camarillo's career included significant experience in law, government, national security, and private industry. And he received a Bachelor of Arts in Government from Georgetown University and a law degree from Stanford University. So please join me in welcoming our opening keynote speaker, the 35th Undersecretary of the Army, the Honorable Gabe Camarillo. Well good morning. I see from the number of folks in the audience that we probably still have some folks that are getting through parking. But all kidding aside, it's great to be back here with all of you one more time at AUSA. I want to thank General Brown and the rest of the AUSA team for doing such a fantastic job of putting together this conference every year. And I want to thank the City of Huntsville that always does such an amazing job of hosting us. I want to also just mention upfront that, you know, the reason why these events are so important is because the dialogue that the Army has with industry is critically important. It provides a great opportunity for all of you to hear where we're headed, where we're placing emphasis in our modernization, what investments we're making, and it also provides, I think, very crucially an opportunity for the Army to hear from all of you. Hear from you about your capabilities, what challenges you face, and also, you know, where you all are placing bets for the future. I think what's great is, as General Brown said, is we bring so many folks together from all over the country to the conference, so you have an opportunity to hear from us in one place and we have an opportunity to learn from you in one place. So all to say that this is a fantastic opportunity. But I do want to spend some time today talking about what's at the heart of this event, which is the two-way dialogue that the Army has with our industrial base. It's a dialogue that's been running for quite some time, and it's a conversation that's important to remember is always focused on maintaining a key pillar of our national security, really since World War II. It's a conversation about ensuring that we retain our technological advantage over other peers or near-peer states, and it's also about ensuring that we have the capacity to surge as needed over time. This conversation, which is reflected in the audience here, are not just the traditional defense primes. You all also represent systems integrators, small businesses, commercial companies with a growing share of defense-related work, and not to mention, of course, the vast network of suppliers and vendors that come together to create our tanks, helicopters, advanced missile systems, and so much more. So the reason I wanted to discuss this relationship today, and to talk a little bit about how we can continue to work together, is because I think that we have a tremendous legacy of success, and I think an important focus on how we move forward. I do believe that the conversations about the defense industrial base are poised to take a new turn. Just consider what we've observed over the past three years. First, there's a culmination of a 10-year period of emphasis on disruption and acquisition reform, focused on bringing in nontraditional suppliers in defense, getting speed in our path to production from prototyping, and in recognizing that we need new processes to deal with software and software-defined systems that change too quickly for our traditional processes to work. We also witnessed a COVID pandemic that stressed our supply chains and highlighted the need for resilience in our manufacturing capacity. And then, of course, when I started this job, or about two weeks afterwards, was the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which ushered in a new period of security assistance in which our industrial base and the capabilities that it produces would take the lead to a response to this act of aggression. And with the bipartisan support of Congress, we have greatly accelerated our investments in production capacity amid a resurgence in global demand for U.S. Army systems. Just consider alone that U.S. Army Security Corporation went from about $14 billion in fiscal year 22 to $35.8 billion in FY23. That's a two-and-a-half-time increase that attests to the value of our systems and how well they perform. And as the conflict now extends into its third year, America's arsenal of democracy is once more making its presence felt in global security. So, in light of these challenges, though, it's important to take stock of what we have accomplished together. First, working with the Congress, we succeeded in making key investments in manufacturing and production capacity in areas like our critical munitions. And this is followed by investments of about $3 billion in prior supplementals in FY23 that supported not only our defense industrial-based partners but our Army organic industrial base as well. Second, we've leveraged new authorities given to us by Congress. Middle-tier acquisition, rapid acquisition authority and software pathway as well as other acquisition pathways have been leveraged to enable capabilities like the mid-range capability to go from an MTA prototyping effort to an actual capability that we are feeling with soldiers this next year. We've used rapid acquisition authority to buy counter-UAS interceptors on an urgent and expedited basis to get them to the point of need anywhere we need them around the world. And I think it's also really important to remember that we've done all of this while maintaining momentum on one of the most ambitious modernization efforts that the Army has ever undertaken. Modernizing several platforms across key war-fighting portfolios and actually getting success in fielding them. Examples like the next generation squad weapon, the aforementioned mid-range capability that provides the ability to engage maritime targets from land. The AMPV the M10 Booker all of these systems are getting to the point where they are being fielded or they are in full-rate production and we are delivering on that promise. Of course, we can't do any of this without the funding and support from Congress. And I do want to thank our supporters on Capitol Hill for passing appropriation this last weekend. Where's General Brown? General Brown. I bet you never thought that both AUSA conventions would come down to the wire the threat of a shutdown. Yet here we are. If for no other reason, we have to pass appropriations on time to make sure that this man's blood pressure can be stabilized. But all kidding aside, the FY24 appropriations will provide critical funding to areas that will allow the Army to continue to invest in key capabilities. $23.7 billion in procurement. $17.1 billion overall in Army RDT&E. It will sustain Army modernization with key investments that I would point out include our multi-year authority for Gimlers in PAC-3 over a billion dollars for Patriot in PAC-3 at MSC Interceptors almost a billion dollars for Gimlers over a billion dollars in continued development of the long-range hypersonic weapon procurement of the MRC and a little shy of four billion dollars in the appropriation for combat vehicle programs including over a billion dollars for Abrams, Striker vehicles, Hercules, Bradley, the Joint Assault Bridge and other critical investments in that portfolio. Looking ahead I was very pleased earlier this month to be able to roll out the Army's FY25 budget submission and it builds on the 24 budget in some critical ways. It will continue our focus on modernization with a combined request of $38.5 billion in RDT&E and procurement. It will enable us to buy new counter-UAS systems, continue to buy the multi-year procurement of Patriot and Gimlers and deliver increment one of the precision strike missile which is our ATACM's replacement and it sends a strong demand signal to industry on critical munitions requesting new production funding for CH-47 Block II a new multi-year for UH-60 and a new compound emphasis on tactical UAVs. The reason I bring this up on the heels of enactment of 24 is because we need Congress to pass this 25 budget in a timely fashion. As we have learned this last year without the budget we will not have the ability to start key programs and we will not be able to implement changes and shifts that are required by changing conditions on the battlefield and the future of the country. We will not be able to implement changes and shifts that are required by the U.S. and the U.S. and the U.S. and the U.S. and the U.S. and the U.S. and the U.S. and the U.S. and the U.S. and the U.S. and the U.S. and the U.S. and the U.S. and the U.S. and the U.S. and the U.S. and the U.S. and the U.S. and the U.S. and the U.S. and the U.S. and the U.S. and the U.S. and the U.S. and the U.S. One good example of this, we all know that the threat of small UAVs is real. The need to be able to procure and adapt counter-UAS systems on an ongoing basis is vital. With the supplemental, we would need to get another $150 million in that legislation to be able to procure additional interceptors to be able to meet those requirements urgently on the battlefield today. So I know I don't need to explain all of this to the people in this room, but these investments are not only vital for us, but they are really vital to all of you as well. They will create demand for U.S. systems. It will provide resources, revenue, and most importantly create jobs across the network of all of our domestic suppliers here in the United States. That's everyone from large traditional defense primes to small businesses and non-traditionals. And clearly it will provide the Army upgraded capabilities through those replenishment funds. So I hope that Congress will act quickly to give the Army and provide the capabilities that we need. This is why Under Secretary of Defense Bill LaPlante referred to production as deterrence recently. Because winning the conflict is not just about what you have on day one of the conflict, it's about what you can bring to the battlefield at the end of the first month, into the first year, into the second year, and beyond as we've learned. So we've made tremendous progress in increasing our production capacity across the Army and achieved success in showing that we can develop and field new systems. But the landscape continues to evolve and shift as quickly as technology does, at an increasing pace, and our adversaries continue to innovate as well. So I mentioned earlier that we come off of about a 10-year period of acquisition reform that really focused on two things. Getting it easier for the department to buy commercial technology and getting from prototyping to production a lot more quickly. All of the reforms have enabled us to do this and it's translated into a significant amount of success. I would argue that we have had more change in the way that Army acquisition works in the last five years than we did in the prior 25 years. But in order to retain our competitive advantage, we have to focus on what we need to do over the next five years. And ensuring that the Army and our industry partners can deliver for our nation will require answering a new set of challenges. And the questions I think have evolved. For an example, it's no longer just a question of whether we can do business with commercial or non-traditional vendors. It's how do we integrate the innovation that they provide in an ongoing way. The challenge now isn't just getting access to innovative technology. It's a challenge of how do we adapt our processes to ensure that we can continue to receive the benefit of those ongoing innovation cycles well after we start procuring new systems. All of what I'm talking about will put pressure on our current incentive structure. Vendors, both new and established ones, rely on the certainty of production contracts to offset investment costs in the development of new warfighting technologies. This is where that development in R&D pays off, and it allows the industrial base to plan for sustained revenue and high-margin returns over time. At the same time, the iterative technology refresh cycles, particularly in areas where there are strong commercial markets, think software, small UAVs, make it very hard to ensure that the Army keeps on buying the best stuff. In some of these cases, new market players and new solutions appear more quickly than our processes can keep up with. One example I'll point out is IVAS, our integrated visual augmentation system. We initially planned several years ago on fielding a capability to the entire Army at once, but we needed to account for continued improvements in both the software and the hardware integrated into that capability. So we restructured the program. It will now field in waves with soldier feedback continuously incorporated and enabling rapidly iterated designs. It's one example where you have to think not just how do you get to production. It is what happens after that. How do you continue to adopt and embrace innovation well after those production cycles have started? And the threats that are posed by near-peer competitors and lessons learned from Ukraine show that accelerating our buying cycles isn't just an opportunity that is born by technology. It's actually now a necessity in order to remain competitive. Now let me be clear. There are still large systems that we will still buy and field incrementally across the entire Army in the traditional pattern. But for some capabilities that we need, those buying models will not get us what we need quickly enough. But the good news is that we started changing some of our approach and innovating the way that we acquire them in critical areas. I always like to point out this started out several years ago with our tactical network where we began developing a tranche buy approach through capability set feeling where vendors would compete for successive lots of production and we would enable those team of vendors to be able to continue to iterate and upgrade capabilities over time. And we had about a two-year cycle. Another example is small commercial UAV systems. We've innovated the buying models there to keep pace with the rapid rate of innovation. For example, using more capability-based requirements and multiple award task order contracts to ensure that multiple vendors can keep innovating and compete for task orders. But at the same time, for example, on the UAV side, we recognized that some of our lower-level units needed some ability to start experimenting with small UAVs to inform their TTPs and we wanted to encourage that and make it easier. So we added some of the COTS-level UAVs to our contracts and created an easy pathway for units to buy UAVs that are NDAA compliant. We refer to that as the blue list to be able to get them in the hands of these soldiers for experimentation much more quickly without having to do a whole full competition. We're exploring ways to drive adoption of these systems much more iteratively and adapt our processes to be able to match the pace of need. All of this shows, though, that our innovation challenges aren't technical. They really are institutional. We need to work with all of you as we both learn how to adapt our processes and become much more creative in how we structure our approach. I always like to point out that the reality is that our processes are designed around two relatively fixed constraints. The first is the two-year appropriations process. And second, the limits of how long it takes to run the competitive contracting process, which is required by law. We can work on flexibility in both of these, but in reality we have to design strategies for a subset of the capabilities that we need that utilizes creative approaches around both of these hard constraints. I know that most of our industry partners that rely on traditional buying models might think that some of this is a big shift. Some programs may only be profitable once you achieve a large run of production over several years. But if the Army is going to keep changing its technologies, and if it's going to adopt new innovation, we need to ensure that there is incentives in place to continue to invest in the new generation of capabilities that we need. Changing our buying models is really not just a luxury. It's actually an imperative in order to deliver the warfighter what they need. And we understand that as we look ahead to the future, we have to be good partners with all of you to ensure that industry can make an appropriate profit and remain resilient. And it's a two-way street and a conversation we are continuing to have to ensure that we find creative ways to allocate incentives to achieve the outcomes that we both rely on. And we'll do a lot of market research, have a lot of dialogue with industry in those particular areas where this need is most acute. And don't get me wrong, there will be changes on our part as well. I mentioned before that there's a quiet revolution in the Army when we realize that for some of our capabilities, we don't have to field it to the entire Army. We can field different capabilities to different types of units and different formations over time. I also think that as we look at smaller production quantities of certain items, we have to be willing to accept higher costs in order to keep pace with the investment required to upgrade them. All of this for some could be new and it could be uncomfortable, but I think it can definitely work. And there are significant upsides, I think, both for industry and certainly for the Army to adapting our buying models to keep pace with the changes that I've described. So before I take your questions, I wanted to highlight just a couple of examples of how we're changing ourselves to adopt that innovation and how we're learning from best practices from industry. On some of our key platforms, we are now separating both the hardware and the software baseline of our programs and competing them separately. A good example of that is our recent award for Titan. The RCB would be another example where we're looking at those refresh cycles differently. Secondly, we're changing our policies to adapt to this pace of technological change. Secretary Wormuth announced earlier this month a new software development policy that comprehensively changes our approach in the Army to buying software and software-defined products. It promotes faster, more flexible acquisition processes that include everything from requirements generation to sustainment. And some of the key tenets of the policy include establishing, for example, a new contracting center of excellence for digital capabilities at Aberdeen with expertise in the types of contracts that are needed for software. Reciprocity of industry test data so that we don't recreate it at significant cost in time. And my favorite is authorities to operate. ATOs, as they're known in the industry, promoting much more reciprocity within the Army. So the idea is you don't have to get authority to operate from one part of the Army and then go seek it again for several months from another one. And requesting that kind of reciprocity across DOD. And changing the way we buy. For example, utilizing more vendor demos in source selection, not just relying on written and oral submissions. And also, of course, bringing in more software development expertise in the Army. We can only be as good of a buyer as we have expertise in those particular capabilities. And then, of course, I wanna also point out that we will continue to work with industry on doing market research and exploring alternate ways of getting where we need to go. As-a-service buying models is one I've talked quite a bit about. And we'll continue to do research on radio as-a-service, looking at our mission command capabilities, modeling what we've done already on the SATCOM terminal side where we're no longer buying individual terminals, we're paying for it on an as-a-service basis. And we're experimenting with similar models in other areas like counter UAS on for fixed sites where we're thinking about that as another area where we'll look at as-a-service buying construct. We're going to keep building on the successes we've had and we're gonna implement and change policy as needed to keep pace with change. But it will require a strong partnership and continued collaboration from all of you. There's many things that have to be figured out. I think there are a lot of questions at this point and only a few answers. But the important thing is that we're gonna do this in a dialogue with industry. And we look forward to meeting that challenge head-on. Of course, if we don't succeed, the challenge is that we will not be able to give our soldiers the capabilities that they need at the moment that they need it. And the reason we're here talking with all of you and the reason that this relationship has been so successful is for decades, we have never faltered in that task. I look forward to continuing that legacy of success. And I now look forward to your questions. Thank you. Okay. Mr. Secretary. Yes. Dave Lockhart, really appreciate your remarks and comments. It covers a lot of ground. And as you cover this gigantic space that's army and all the challenges, and then we will often ask a question about something it almost in some cases seems inconsequential, right? But the one I would like to ask relates to something that you talked about, about policy changes. And I noticed that we've got policy changes associated with innovation, policy changes associated with working with allies. As a matter of fact, Army Futures Command recently put something out on FedBizOps to leverage foreign investment, foreign technology and sharing of information. And so policies that happen at a level, how do we as we engage at both the higher levels and the lower levels, when we identify disconnects between policy and execution, how do we get at those in a way that doesn't necessarily negatively impact the folks that are executing because they're just trying to do their jobs and bring that full circle, if you will. How do you create a pathway to clean those out such that policy and execution are a little bit better aligned? Thanks, Dave. It's always a challenge, especially with an institution as large and as diverse as the United States Army. There's always gonna be a challenge in getting policy changes to get down to the execution level. I think that it requires two things. I think first, we really do need to hear from industry about acute challenges, sticking points, barriers that you all encounter, and I think we need to hear it at every level, not just from the contracting officer all the way up to the more senior folks to include Secretary Bush, who's sitting here in front, myself, other folks that have the opportunity to effect the policy changes that are required. I think the second thing is, and I've really tried to do this, for example, in the area that we just talked about in terms of software, is to align domain expertise at the point where you're actually executing this. It's one thing to understand how to do software contracting a little bit better, but have it be done all over the Army by every contracting organization would be very challenging because there are some organizations that their expertise is in contracting and combat vehicles or in installation services, for example. So having, for example, a digital contracting center of excellence in Aberdeen, where you can concentrate that expertise of what's required by that vendor base, I think is a good step in that direction. So we'll look at other areas to make sure that we have the requisite expertise dealing with those types of execution challenges. So hopefully that will set us up for success. Sir, this is some first class elements. Yes. So I'm all into AI and thinking deep into rabbit holes and one of the things that you're talking about makes me ask this question. At what point in time do you have individuals that are in a mathematical professional trader mindset to do the projections of this is gonna be the high point based off of, let's say, Elliott Wave or the Pippa Knotts, your whatever pattern analysis system that they use along with based off of, hey, we now have this new system that we can do like quantum computing, whatever to basically come to say to the conclusion, at this time frame, this will be the high point and then we gotta figure out how to adjust from the high point and then figure out what the new low points can be after that. And based off of the budgeting and the pricing of the incentives for the research and development to see how from the military side to compensate for the low, to compensate for the high and to find an equilibrium, if you have any professional financial advisors, I think maybe the best way to say it in terms of how that would be forecasted, sir. No, I thank you very much for your question. It's a compelling argument. How do we follow the technology cycles effectively, especially when we have limited resources in order to place bets? I'm a believer in the fact that certainly I'm not in a position to be able to pick what those technologies are. There are many better expert people in the army who are empowered and trained to do that. But I think one of the great things about what I'm talking about is it should be fairly obvious in what subsets of our weapons systems and our capabilities lend themselves to that type of analysis. And the good news is a lot of that technology is mature. It's extant today. And the only thing slowing us down is our ability to put the resources on the right contract and be able to make those pivots and shift as quickly as we need to. So I think identifying the technology won't be the challenge. It is, again, just getting our processes to work very effectively in order to get us there. And we are very much open to full and open competition from every vendor, every source. So I think that as mature technologies come to bear, they should make themselves pretty much available to the army. We should know where those right bets are to place. Next question. Yes, sir, William King back up here in the back, straight front of the area. Yes, sir, as you pointed out, this is a technology-driven world. And the reliance on data and access to data is driving a lot of the innovation where we see going today. How is the armies embracing that from an institutional perspective and taking advantage of the innovation labs that are in the industry, as well as what Army Futures Command is doing in creating their innovation labs to bring warfighters into those environments for brief periods of time, one, to get exposure to what's in the realm of the possible, but two, to get that direct feedback and then get it back out into the force, since, like I said, that is what's driving our future capabilities. Yeah, it's a great question that I'll actually expand it a little bit further. I go back to maybe about 10, 12 years ago, there was a very rigid set of relationships between the Army and industry. I was here in ASOL at the time. We felt that the conversations had to exist primarily in the context of industry days, kind of through the contracting process. And now I think you'll see that the conversations and the dialogues are much more free-flowing and I think much more diverse. Part of that has been the emphasis the last several years on involving our soldiers and our formations into the experimentation with technology. I think that's played a very valuable role in helping us to get things right. I think it is a standard way that we're gonna do business moving forward. I think the other part of it is doing a better job of understanding what investments industry is making. And I think that the way that we have worked across the Army between ASOL and Army Futures Command with the CFTs has done a tremendous job of that. And I know you're gonna hear a lot from General Rainey over the course of this conference about human machine integrated formations. But it's a lot about doing exactly what we just talked about, which is bringing the best of breed of what industry has, putting it in the hands of soldiers, letting us figure out how to employ it, how to use it. Not only will that help us to figure out how to place our bets and place our investments, I think what's great is, because I've also been on the industry side, it is understanding how is the Army gonna utilize this technology in what particular connobs? What are the constraints with the way it's currently configured or designed? That feedback for all of you as an industrial base will be incredibly valuable as well. Because the thought here is that it's not a static one or two-way transaction. It is an ongoing set of relationships. And as I've said many times, a set of technology refresh cycles that we need to work on together. Sir, thank you for being here. Thank you. Let's give Secretary Camarillo a big round of applause. Thank you. Thank you, guys. What a great way to start and encourage. And thank you, Mr. Secretary. Tremendous words and it makes me realize we're really getting closer never before to getting our soldiers exactly what they need. The technology, the equipment, better than ever before. So they're prepared for whatever they may face and that's absolutely critical. So thanks, Mr. Secretary, for those opening remarks. For all the credentialed media here, there'll be a media roundtable with the Under Secretary in section one right after this. So the exhibit hall is now open and I would encourage you to take advantage. Again, tremendous technology, great networking that will go on there and take advantage of that and get out to the exhibit hall for sure. We're gonna grab a quick cup of coffee, come back here for the first panel at 9.45 and special thanks again to our sponsor, Tritium for the refreshment break outside. So we'll see you back here at 9.45 for the first panel. Thanks. Good morning and welcome to the first panel of this conference, delivering precision sustainment in support of ready combat formations. I am Susan Hawkins, Director of Strategy and Mission Solutions at Northwick Grumman and I'm honored to be with you today. Northwick Grumman has been a proud sponsor of AUSA for over 20 years. We value the relationship building and communication these forms provide and we are stronger as a nation because of this. We have an ongoing partnership with the Army in solving the hardest operational problems, whether it be providing space-based intel at the tactical edge, building an integrated missile defense framework or making the aviation fleet simultaneously lethal and survivable. We at Northwick Grumman are intensely proud of the capabilities that our partnership has created and we continue to build with you into the future, including in areas of sustainment. The words that call out to me in this panel title are precision and ready. The synonym for precision is exactness and you have to ask yourself how can one be exact with a sustainment in a vast AOR? Precision sustainment to support readiness requires a full lifecycle view of the capability across all phases of implementation. Who, how, and when sustainment can be performed is dependent on decisions made in each phase of the lifecycle, not simply at the end. I look forward to hearing what our esteemed panel members will share with us today. It's my honor to introduce Major General Retired Clark Lamasters. Major General Retired Lamasters is a consulting employee and former Vice President and Managing Director for the LIDOS UK Logistics Division, responsible for a six and a half billion pound logistics commodities and services transformation program within the UK Ministry of Defense. Prior to joining industry, Major General Retired Lamasters held many leadership roles in the US Army. He retired in 2018 from commanding the US Army Tank, Automotive and Armament Lifecycle Management Command. And prior to that was the Logistics Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations and Logistics US Army Materiel Command. Major General Retired Lamasters served our country overseas in Germany, Iraq, Qatar, and Afghanistan during his career. But before the panel begins, I would like to welcome Lieutenant General Chris Mohan, Deputy Commanding General, United States Army Materiel Command to the podium for a few words. Well, good morning, everyone. And I would say welcome to sunny Alabama. Not so much. So I really want to say thanks for joining us in this very important discussion on how our Army, along with our industry partners will continue to deliver precision sustainment in support of ready combat formations. Before I share brief thoughts, I want to thank our panelists, and I know all of them very well, and we're gonna have a great panel. Major General Michelle Donahue, the Honorable Sean Manasco, Dr. Chris Hill, teammate from AMC, Shane Upton, my neighbor, and of course my moderator, and at one point, mentor Lieutenant General Retired Lamasters. We shared a lot of good time out at NTC together, and I think both of us probably flinched on some of those memories, but they were good memories. This is a phenomenal panel with decades of experience in both leadership and sustainment. And I know that they have some very valuable information to share about our ongoing transformation efforts and our efforts to develop a lean, agile, and resilient logistics capability. But to frame this very specific discussion within the larger scope, I want to share a few comments that the Chief made a few weeks ago when he met with the Defense Writers Group. He opened up his talk by saying that the battlefield is no longer local. The interconnection between everything that we do from space to cyberspace has already transformed how we will fight the next large-scale ground combat operation. You've heard us often talk about the Joint Strategic Support Area. That that's everything back here where we generate, project, and sustain combat power. This area is, as we all know, is a key center of gravity for our nation's military forces. But the battlefield is no longer local. It stretches from the Joint Strategic Support Area all the way down to the tactical edge. And so we know that the Joint Strategic Support Area is going to be under pressure. It's going to be under pressure from our own adversaries, from benign characters, from criminal enterprises. And so over the past 20, 30 years, we have had the exceptional ability to move in and out of theater almost at will. And we have to ask ourselves, is that the way it's going to be in a future combat scenario, in a future combat contested, or in a future combat scenario? But then the chief also said that no matter what, this is going to be a contested environment. So we know that sustainment in the future is going to be definitely contested. And it's going to be contested, as I said, across every stage and every domain, land, sea, air, cyber, and space. We should expect that our operations, our facilities, and all of our activities will be targeted, detected, disrupted, whether here in the homeland, in transit, or in theater. So how are we going to remain successful in such an environment? And that means we must transform the sustainment warfighting function. And modernization is more about weapons, more than about weapons systems. We must transform and modernize the sustainment warfighting function, including infrastructure, training, processes, and skill sets necessary to support next generation warfighter capabilities. Part of this is translating battlefield lessons learned into actionable innovation now. We must work closely with our industry partners to ensure that the defense industrial base remains postured to be responsive, capable, and can maintain pace with our efforts. Think about this. If our adversary or us can fly a UAS with a precision munition, we should be able to fly a UAS with precision sustainment, either a critical repair part that is necessary to generate a combat sortie or a critical load of munitions that is necessary to prosecute a high value target. We must also operationalize data so that we can predict what our forces will need and then provide it with precision on the battlefield. And we must exploit advanced manufacturing capabilities, autonomous capabilities, robotics, and new methods of storing and using energy. All of these efforts combined to reduce our overall logistics tail while increasing the speed and accuracy of sustainment. That is how we'll remain successful in a contested environment well into the future. We've come a long way in those endeavors, but we've got a long way to go. But with your help and our continued partnership, I have no doubt that we will continue to deliver precision sustainment in support of ready combat formations. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your time and thank you for your continued support of our great profession of arms. And now I'm going to turn it over to our panel. Thank you. Well, great, gentlemen, and thank you for those very appropriate comments and what a great setup to this panel that I hope you're always excited to hear and learn about as I am. So just some administration, we'll do a quick introduction to our panel members. Our panel members will each have some brief opening remarks and then we'll open it up for questions and answers and I know that'll be the exciting part of the panel where we're really going to learn some new things. So without further ado, let's get on to the most important part. Sitted to my right are our great panel members, Major General Michelle Donahue, the current commander of the Combined Arms Support Command, Sustainment Center of Excellence in Fort Gregg Adams. She took command December 14th of last year during more than 27 years of service. Major General Donahue has held many key command and staff positions and provided sustainment support to at the tactical operation and strategic level, affording her many unique opportunities and experiences in the area of sustainment. As you all know, Cascom in the Sustainment Center of Excellence is dedicated to educating, training, developing adaptive sustainment professionals for the total force while generating, synchronizing and integrative innovation for both the Army and Joint Sustainment capabilities, concepts and doctrines. That's a mouthful. Cascom is also helping to ensure that the Army can sustain large scale operations and multi-domain operations is key to the discussion on precision logistics and the contested logistics and the support to joint and multinational partners in 2030 and beyond. General Donahue, welcome to the panel. Our next panel member is Dr. Chris Hill. Dr. Chris Hill is the chief of data and analytics at the Army Materiel Command. Dr. Hill was appointed in May, 2017. And as the director of the Army Materiel Command Analysis Group, Dr. Hill is the principal assistant to the commanding general for analysis and study and is responsible for ensuring credible, timely and independent strategic level analysis of material life cycles, logistics, systems, modeling and simulation and data support, equipping, sustainment and war fighting decisions. Dr. Hill also serves as the command chief data and analytics officer and is responsible for execution of data and analytics activities across the entire command. I also wanna mention that he has had a team forward in Europe since the summer of 2022, providing predictive logistics support to the security assistance group, Ukraine and Ukrainian military. Dr. Hill, welcome. Many of you know our next panel member. He's your best friend when it comes to congested logistics, Colonel Shane Upton, the director of the Contested Logistics Cross Functional Team located here at Redstone Arsenal. The Contested Logistics Cross Functional Team was formed in 2023 to address the need to sustain the force and equipment quickly on the future battlefields, including those disparate and dispersed across multiple domains and closed critical sustainment capability gaps. During an interview, General Rainey stated that the team will be focused on the division and below aspects of all things that have to do with contested logistics. And inside his portfolio are four major areas, precision sustainments, human machine, integrated supply and distribution systems, advanced power, leveraging new technologies and demand reduction utilizing many capabilities that we'll talk about today. Colonel Upton has also recently been nominated for and approved for appointment to Brigadier General. So congratulations, Shane, to that. Well earned. And last but absolutely not least, the honorable Shane Mancuso. Currently a senior consultant and counselor for Palantir Technologies, focused on advancing leading edge software to meet US government involving in complex needs. Mr. Mancuso is a former acting undersecretary of the Air Force, former assistant secretary of the Air Force for manpower and reserve affairs. He is also a co-founder of a product design and engineering startup after having served as an executive vice president at one of America's largest and leading financial services company. Throughout his career in the private sector, he has held executive leadership roles in retail, investment banking, insurance, and the energy industry. He has also led global teams across functional areas to include technology, digital design, cyber security, corporate development, sales, human resources, and many, many other things. I might mention that he is also a US Army veteran, serving in numerous staff and leadership positions in support of worldwide operational activities for joint special operations. So welcome, sir, to the panel. And with that, let's get started, please. General Donahue, you wouldn't start with your opening comments, please. I can't see the green light here because I'm being blinded by these lights. It's working. It's working, it does. So, sir, thanks so much for that introduction. I have fond memories of our service together almost a decade ago when we were the 13th ESC commander at then Fort Hood and now Fort Cavassos. And thank you to AUSA as well for allowing me to participate here this morning. So you heard that CASCOM and the Sustainment Center of Excellence work every day to deliver effective sustainment solutions to ensure we'll win on the future battlefield. Solutions to what, you might ask. In conjunction with many teammates, we work closely to identify sustainment gaps, develop concepts, conduct experimentation, and then transform our sustainment capabilities to keep pace with maneuver force modernization. The Army's MDO challenges, specifically, sustainment gaps are a current threat to the Army's ability to open and set theaters at the speed of relevance. We have to think differently about how we generate readiness and sustain large scale combat operations tomorrow, next year, and over the next decade. As the sustainment force modernization proponent, it is my job to develop and integrate solutions for sustainment doctrine, organizations, material, training, leader development, and personnel, all while influencing facilities and policies to set conditions for Army transformation. While each of these categories involves its own processes, developments in each category have a ripple effect across the spectrum. Frankly, this is where I spend 70% of my time ensuring sustainment and the Army are postured to win. We don't do this in isolation and we're tied at the hip with Army Futures Command, Army Material Command, the Army G4, CAC, and all of our TRADOC COE commanders. While we develop solutions that will sustain future combat formations, we also train and educate soldiers, thousands of soldiers to fight and win. Each year, nearly a third of the military and civilian personnel who attend TRADOC courses are taught by a CASCOM instructor on Fort Greg Adams, Fort Jackson, Fort Moore, Fort Sill, Fort Eisenhower, Eglin Air Force Base, and across our reserve component, one Army school systems. Fortunately, I inherited and now command an all-star team of leaders, educators, developers, trainers, and analysts who understand not only those processes within their own lane, but also work with partners across the spectrum to provide the Army with synchronized solutions. With a slew of capability gaps to address, my team and I have a full plate, but we're not tackling these challenges in a vacuum. We work on a daily basis to not only identify and prioritize issues, but also to build and resource effective solutions. I'd like to spend a few minutes to talk about one of those gaps and the journey that we've been on to field predictive logistics capabilities, improving the sensor to shooter to sustainer loop, and getting this cornerstone technology into the hands of our soldiers. As defined in our soon-to-be-updated and released DEFIN4O, predictive logistics is a system of sensors, communications, and data support tools, and data visualization applications that will enable faster and more accurate sustainment decision-making. Predictive logistics enables decision dominance, greater precision and speed with running estimates and course of action development providing options for our commanders. Our work has evolved from what started as CBM Plus to PPMX to now what we describe as predictive logistics. We are leveraging the CBM Plus work and the substantial progress that is already taking place across multiples PEOs with the digitization of our maintenance processes to improving onboard diagnostic consumption on individual platforms such as the Abrams and the Paladin, improving supply point data consumption, and ultimately improving our strategic ability to manage our combat and tactical vehicle fleets. In early February, our predictive logistics ACDD was approved by General Rainey at the AROC with emphasis and priority on the Abrams and Paladin platforms. We are working closely with PEO C3T, the OPR for PL, and Colonel Shane Upton and the Contested Logistics CFT for this implementation. Last year, our Tredoc Proponency Office for Sustainment Mission Command, led by Colonel Matt Western, started to facilitate quarterly PL summits where stakeholders from around the Army and the Enterprise gathered to synchronize and operationalize our PL efforts. Our next PL summit is scheduled for later this week here at Redstone Arsenal and will be facilitated by the CLCFT with participation from across the Enterprise as we are now laser focused on transitioning from an ACDD to a CDD. Additionally, we are ensuring that PL is fully integrated into both our Enterprise Business System Convergence efforts and network modernization efforts such as C2 Fix and C2 Next. We've also made significant progress with PEO C3T and our PM for Mission Command, Colonel Matt Paul, to develop sustainment applications within the common operating environment and specifically the command post computing environment. Following the divestment of BCS-3 almost eight years ago, our Army senior leaders directed that sustainment move its Mission Command equities into the common operating environment versus developing a separate standalone system. Through the leadership of then Major General Fogg and Major General Simmerly, now Lieutenant General Simmerly, and Colonel Justin Herberman who is now our sustainment seated director, CASCOM developed multiple operational need statements to include the automated log stat, sustainment running estimate, asset visibility, and in transit visibility capabilities. These four ons were approved by the Mission Command Configuration Steering Board. Software development of the automated log stat began in October of 22 and has been conducted by the US Army Weapon and Software Engineering Center up at Picatinny Arsenal. The development of the sustainment running estimate also started in October of 22 and is being led by the US Army Engineering Research and Development Center ERDIC up at Fort Belvoir. Last month, we conducted testing with the first CAV division and received valuable feedback on the min viable solutions for both the automated log stat and the sustainment running estimate. The AV and ITV capabilities will be developed and tested next year. CASCOM has also been working closely with PEOC-3T, the Network CFT, Mission Command COE, and other stakeholders on the C2FIX network modernization effort with regards to sustainment. We participated in the C2FIX TTX at Fort Leavenworth and will be at Fort Campbell next month during the operational assessment. Finally, I can't leave out our invaluable partnerships with AFC Software Factory and their Artificial Intelligence Center. We have multiple AI ML projects ongoing such as Projects Mercury, Griffin, and Pangea that will improve our sustainment running estimates and our logistics common operating picture at Ashelon. Near term, PL will have a significant impact on our ASCCs, our cores, our divisions, our brigade combat teams by 2030. Although better visibility, predictability, and velocity will enhance the entire sustainment enterprise's ability to support the warfighter, it is really setting conditions for precision sustainment by 2040. PL isn't a sustainment capability. It's a warfighting capability that builds combat readiness. At the Sustainment Center of Excellence, we don't have the monopoly on great ideas. Instead, we are counting on your input and your feedback to help us develop those sustainment capabilities necessary to support our warfighting formations. That's why conversations like this one and throughout this week are so important. Last month, Major General Smith commented at the AUSA Hot Topics panel, and I quote, We the Army cannot resolve our problems without our partners and stakeholders in industry, government, and academia. The risks are high and success depends on collaboration, communication, and cooperation, end quote. I open with the depth and breadth of our MDO challenges, but the solutions that are being developed across all our various partners are truly cutting edge and being developed at the speed of relevance. Thank you to all of you, and thank you to your teams of teams, and I look forward to your questions this morning and throughout the rest of this week. Chris, over to you. Great, thank you. Colonel Upton, please, comments from you. I don't have the green light, but I can hear myself, so I think we're good. First of all, sir, thank you, one for inviting me to be on the panel, and really thanks to AUSA. These events are great because it is truly like General Donahue said, a partnership between our national industrial base, our organic industrial base, our military partners, and industry as a whole. So I want to expound a little bit on what General Donahue said. First of all, this panel, remember, we truly all are a team, and have been a team. I was working with Chris Hill two and a half years ago, sitting in another job, so it's good to be up here with familiar faces, but it's also good to see some really familiar faces in the audience. So why the CFT? I think General Donahue hit the nail on the head. We have to develop solutions at the speed of relevance, and quite frankly, our adversaries are not on our timeline. And I think that's an obvious statement, but I think it needs to be stated here in this group because this is a team that's gonna solve these problems, as I said before, our industry partners and those here in uniform and in our civilian workforce. So our portfolio, and General Lamaster mentioned it, PL, precision, sustainment, it is an army. So when you think the past language of core army modernization efforts, PL is now one of those. For our secretary and our chief, and I'm glad to be partnered with, was General Simmerly, now Lieutenant General Simmerly, and now Major General Donahue on that effort moving forward because it is an absolute priority to bring readiness to our combat formations and make decisions at the speed of relevance. It's quite frankly, precision is a must because in the largest force theater where you look at combat forces that may be dispersed of thousands of miles, say Indo-Pacom, you're gonna have to be precise with where we put those assets and we'll need to be able to see that ahead of time as we project power. In a contested environment like General Mohan opened up with that's gonna be contested from our homeland to the Foxhole or in reverse from the Foxhole back to that factory. What are we doing and what do we need industries help with in that place? First of all, PPMX, CBN+, the look at material health and maintenance of our systems, critically important, but I would say also critically important is looking from end to end Foxhole to factory to our ammunition when we consume it and then giving that signature to industry in our organic industrial base when they need to resupply it. Also fuel, things we're thinking about these censored items in the past, we have not censored those. Little reflection on my own career. We were still putting wood sticks and fuel tankers just a couple of years ago in Europe. We need your help. For a lot of our history, the defense industrial base along with our partners was an innovative leader. It's really now corporations are leading innovation and we have to be your partner. Developing sensors to look at fuel consumption, ammo consumption at platform, all the way back to the strategic edge, they have to be low cost. A men viable product. The exquisite solution is good, but I will tell you as needing to develop this at the speed of relevance, we need products that will get to that ability to see ourselves better. You know General Donahue and I talked about an example in fuel just a few months ago and it was really general similarly and I started this topic. I just came from the National Training Center. We just executed what we call Project Converged Capstone 4, which is one of our premier series of experiments and a persistent experimentation outcome that the Army has developed over the last few years to develop and test with our industry partners these emerging technologies and fuel came to the forefront. And I harkened again back to probably some sins of Upton's past of how much fuel we would backhaul in a rotation just at the National Training Center supporting the brigade combat team. It's eye-opening. We will not be able to afford to that when it's contested and we need to be able to disperse those forces just as a vignette. So we need your help. You know, that's why I kind of put this. I know this audience is full of our industry partners. We've got to look how to censor that quickly, how to do it quite frankly and expensively. I think that technology I know is out there and then that data feeds back. AMO is another piece of that. We maintain effects right now in the battlefield with some pretty exquisite munitions. But we're also looking as General Mohan meant, if we can drop something that's low cost from a drone, you've got to resupply that. And we've got to be able to show you that signature as we consume it because quite frankly, we're going to need that at time of need and ahead of time of need. Some other things we're looking at in the CFT, human machine integration. Now, General Rainey will talk later this week about it in depth as we go forward in some of these concepts. But here's a paraphrase. Offsetting risk to machines to enable humans to do what humans do best. What do I mean by that? That's a pretty nebulous statement. Humans will make ethical decisions. I think it's a pretty common opinion or maybe just my opinion that we'll probably not get to where machines have kind of ethic, a decision to make inability. But we need the humans to do that. But they're our task, absolutely in the sustainment war fighting function as we build readiness and deliver readiness that can be offloaded on machines. I'll talk about just a few of them and kind of as a collaborative environment with our partners in industry and our other partners in this fueling. A lot of times we will refuel critical combat platforms very far forward on the battlefield. It's a high risk operation. We're looking for the technology solutions. General Donahue and again, Dr. Hill's team and AMC, it's an enterprise approach to figure out how we do some of those tasks with the human there but also offsetting some of that risk with the machine. Robotic refueling. Looking at how we rearm combat platforms with robots or that technology. When you talk human machine integration, think a concept of multi-domain resupply. So you put an autonomous watercraft on the water. You fly a drone. We did this at Capstone 4. It was a lot of great effort led by Justin Herberman's team in the sustainment seated and our CASCON teammates. And for the first time, the Army and the Marine Corps went out over the beach, out over to the water and used resupply of critical repair parts, small mounts of ammunition and even 3D printed parts from added manufacturing and flew them with drones onto the shore. So what? The so what is, drones are really good over land but we have not really seen when your terrain you're navigating over is just all blue. That was a pretty significant thing. And when I look at the industry partners in the room, we have to not only maintain that momentum and that technology but for logistics, there are tiered approaches as we always have. And that's something I don't think is going to morph away. At the forward tactical edge, absolutely smaller resupply runs, smaller resupply pounds and cube. But as you move closer back to that joint security area, we are going to need capabilities of some of these unmanned platforms to quite frankly have greater range, have a greater payload capability and be able to loiter and turn as we need to redirect that critical sustainment at point of need that ties back to that precision piece. The third thing, advanced power solutions. We, and all this as I talk about it, advanced power and the last one that General LaMasters mentioned the demand reduction, those are interwoven. Really when you talk a contested environment for logistics, we have got to bring to the point where we reduce the demand on our distribution systems because if they are truly contested, we are only going to get windows potentially opened up by our maneuver and combat enabling forces that will be able to move those critical supplies. We experimented that in a joint fashion at Camp Pendleton, California during convergence with the United States Marine Corps Navy. Using simulated joint effects and fires, opening up what they call a multi-domain corridor to move those sustainment assets in. Well, if we can reduce the amount of fuel burned by hybrid technology, advanced power technologies like hydrogen, fuel cells, those technologies a lot of you are working on, then you reduce that point of need at tactical demand and the resupply then can quite frankly occur either less frequently or the combat formation forward can go in a longer combat in an operational endurance before we would need to resupply. Also think hybrid technology of drive systems. If the physical combat platforms consuming less of certain things, same concept. And then demand reduction, but I want to pull just a simple thread on that. Point of need production of commodities. Now as General Rainey, my boss from Futures Command told me and I had these discussions with General Severly and General Donahue, what focus? Well, it's really a fundamental focus. We've all as logisticians been focused on for most of our careers, ammo, fuel, medical and maintenance or as a term goes, and I hate to bore with acronyms, three, five, mic, mic. The ammo and fuel I talked about, the medical is imperative as well. We are fully nested with the medical seated and Colonel James Jones and his team on how we'll also look at critical class eight and bring that to bear on the battlefield moving blood, plasma and those critical class eight and then the maintenance piece of it. But reducing those demands, we need to partner with you all, the team here from our defense industrial base and our partners and across the DOD on how we produce items, think repair parts. Quite frankly, think low cost munitions at point of need. And we've seen a lot of lessons observed from the current conflicts in the Ukraine. Quite frankly, lessons observed from Gaza. How some of that technology is in morphing itself on a very rapid, very lethal battlefield. Hopefully that's helpful. I really again, appreciate being on this panel and being able to speak to you and I look forward to your questions. Thank you very much. Thanks Colonel Upton, I appreciate that. Dr. Hill, please. Thank you, General LeMaster. I appreciate the invitation by you and AUSA to be on this panel. And I can tell you it would be impossible to overstate the honor I feel being associated with this group of fine leaders from the Sustainment and Technology Enterprise. Yogi Berra once said, the future ain't what it used to be. And I can't think of a better quote that better represents the data and analytics space. In our space, it is characterized by constant change. We get change on the way data streams. We find new challenges with what we call non-standard data every day. Technology develops at a rate so fast in this space that it seems like it's just a constant evolution. And on top of that, we have to evolve algorithms to keep up with that. And most notably the artificial intelligence advancements. So it's a very challenging place to live and work. That said, I can tell you today, the Sustainment Enterprise is well on its way to becoming the data-centric part of the Army that the Secretary has envisioned for us. And that we in the Sustainment Enterprise are executing predictive and precision sustainment operations with data and analytics today. We've been doing advanced analytics in the Sustainment Enterprise for a really long time, even including artificial intelligence. But what I would tell you is we've done pretty well at operationalizing it, but we're well short of our objective. That really became obvious to us two years ago when we were asked to support the operations in Europe and we realized what a difference the speed and scale, the volume and the dynamics of large-scale combat operations has on the Sustainment Enterprise and the resulting data and analytics. So it's been for us almost like building an airplane while in flight, figuring out how to adjust our approach to this while operations were going on. And the benefit of that has been, it's forced us to do a lot of learning very quickly and it's allowed us to do a lot of innovation. So what I thought I would do is share a few examples of some of the use cases that we've applied over in Europe to give you some example of where we are today in the data and analytics space. So first of all, we've leveraged forecasting techniques and algorithms to forecast repair parts and ammunition well out into the future. We've augmented this with simulation capabilities that allow us to put some degree of uncertainty on deliveries. This is a very complex coalition in Europe and so deliveries are coming from all corners of the globe and so we have to be able to look far enough out that we can influence the read on whether or not logistics will become a constraining factor to desired operations. We've built simulations that represent the integration of force structure and the development of new units so we could tell if the Ukrainian objectives were gonna be met on time or when problems would occur before they occurred. And then we've morphed that into a dynamic task organization type tool that allows them to not only make changes to task organization, but for us to see what the effects of those changes are in terms of requirements for commodities and supply and also in terms of our forecast for where they will be in the future. We've specifically spent a lot of time forecasting readiness, not just of systems, but of units and as units are conducting combat operations we can see that in forecast their capabilities as they go through time. We have mapped the transportation network from as far this reaches in the joint strategic support area all the way through the transportation network to the point of delivery to the Ukrainians. And this has enabled a lot of things but not the least of which is we can see where things are in that network, in the supply chain and forecast when things should show up on the other end. These impacts have been pretty substantial for us. So first of all, what it's allowed the logistics leaders to do is change their plan of support when we forecast that something's not gonna be there when the operator needs it. It also enables that commander to make decisions. So if we have a mode of transportation that's not gonna deliver something we need in time, he can affect the change in mode of transportation before that becomes a problem. One of our biggest advantages is we've been able to work through the typical challenges of adoption as the security assistance group Ukraine headquarters has adopted these advanced technologies. And I can tell you, culture is always a problem and what we learned in this particular use case is the perfect antidote for culture is the commander. When the commander embraces this technology in these advanced analytics and starts demanding them in his daily battle update briefs, then the staff comes along for the ride. And when you know you've really turned the corner when the staff starts asking you to develop specific capabilities for them. And we certainly got there pretty fast in Europe. We've enabled all this with a system we call the AMC Predictive Analysis Suite or APAS. What APAS does for us is it gives us a platform in which we can integrate the data and analytic tools. It gives us a thread from the tactical to the strategic level. So while all three of those levels have different uses for the data, it shares common data. So at the tactical level, we can see when a specific system is forecast to go down, where parts that would enable it to meet its operational readiness requirements, where they are in supply chain, when it will come up. At the operational level, it's enabled us to have a partnership with the theater sustainment commands to make sure that our stockages are right well forward and allows us to again, consider the entire coalition. So it's been a huge challenge for us as coalition. You know, there's a lot of historical partners there, but there's some new ones too. And bringing all that data to bear and integrating it in the analytic space has certainly been a challenge. At the strategic level, we use that information to make forecasts at the national level to set our supply chain. And as many of you know, sometimes that takes 18 to 24 months to cycle. So it lets us get well ahead of problems and it allows us to optimize our supply chain. I would say we've had some setbacks along the way, but I would classify our work there as a huge success. I think part of our keys to success lie in the fact that we took a strategy based on use cases. So Commander had a specific problem. We used data and analytics to solve that problem. But the real secret sauce to our success is our workforce. Our great soldiers and our resilient civilians who have moved forward to support this, their skills are unmatched. Their ingenuity and ability to innovate is quite impressive. And when you can take a functional logistician who's an expert in the data and pair them with a data scientist or an operations research analyst who understands the analytic side, you definitely have the recipe for success. We could not have achieved this success without a strong partnership with industry. And I can tell you going in that we could not do this alone. Generally we rely on industry for three things. When we don't have the capacity and we need to augment our workforce. When we don't have specific capabilities and then when we need to innovate, a lot of the innovation that we have applied there has come straight from our industry partners. And we've learned a lot in our support. First of all, we have a very distributed and federated approach which allows us to push analytics to the edge and bring multiple vendors into the solution space. We've had a very good hybrid support model where we have organic assets and industry partners developing side by side. And we've even leveraged industry for training of our organic workforce on use cases. So when there's a specific problem, a contractor can help teach an organic analyst and then we can move forward together. This has all been enabled by a very decentralized governance in our APAS system again to push analytics at the edge. So where do we need your help? Well industry, we always need your help on the innovation side. There's no question about that. But the one category I would say we need more help in right now than anywhere else is the advancement of artificial intelligence and specifically generative artificial intelligence. We're doing our best to balance those risks and understand the policy implications that are coming out from the Department of Defense and the Army. And industry is key in helping us negotiate that and still have the trust in those applications when we field them. So I think the industry is a group for your partnership. We could not have done it without you. I appreciate your time today and I look forward to your questions. Thanks, Dr. Hill, appreciate it. To our final panelists, Mr. Minasco, over to you for your comments, please. Well, I promise I will keep it brief here but I would like just to share a few thoughts. The first is Dr. Hill and I and our teams have spent a lot of time together over the last couple of years and so as Michelle, you were talking in chain, I wrote down a quote from my favorite philosopher, Yogi Berra, which was the future isn't what it used to be. So we have that in common. A few things that I would just highlight, I think we all are in agreement that in this world of constrained and contested logistics and supply chains that precision and sustainment is gonna be a real key to deter and if we have to fight and win our nation's wars. The conflict in Europe today for us as a partner to AMC and to what's happening at SAGU has been really interesting to watch. So for those of you that have been in that environment, it's really powerful for the nightly brief for you to see with live data the fusion of intel, operations and sustainment. There's not a PowerPoint slide to be found and I agree with Chris, the anecdote to a culture that might be a little stayed is the commander and so I give the SAGU commander both present and past the highest of accolades for ensuring that the teams on the ground are doing what they can to actually use live information. So and we're proud to be a part of that effort. I would also say that if we're gonna realize our C-JADC2 vision, then what we really need to be able to do is to be able to integrate and our sustainment enterprise and think about it holistically across not only the US and the joint force but also with coalition partners and that's been one of those complexities that we've had to work through in Europe and it's something that we are definitely learning quickly and we're anxious to be able to support and export those learnings across wherever conflict arises. But it's true that software can knit all of this together and that's where I think we as industry oh the United States Army and the joint force are very best in collective thinking in terms of how do you do that and do that well. Because the technology exists today not five years, 10 years in the future for you to get a sensor off of a munition that was expended from a gun tube for that to flow through the warfighter, the echelons and chains of command, to the TSC, to inventories that are managed in the CONUS and all the way back to the manufacturing organizations whether that be manufacturing that we do here in the United States Army or in our arsenals or even in industry. And it actually extends beyond that because industry can leverage these same set of tools to actually see themselves clearly and see their supply chain so that you can look at this really from an end to end perspective and when we can get to that place then I think we're gonna be in a much better place. The emphasis that I would place on that though is it really is a capability that exists today and so there's real progress being made across the joint force and as I look across and have experiences and seeing what other services are doing it's those services that are actually leveraging the highly skilled personnel that they have to develop capabilities on really strong platforms that are highly configurable and highly extensible. All too often we develop point solutions that don't scale and I think that's where we as an industry set of industry partners can and should be doing more to support that effort. We're obviously committed to working alongside Dr. Hill, Andrew Mohan and the AMC team and just as they were there from the beginning of the conflict in Europe so was Palantir and so we're very proud of that work and look forward to that continuing but the bold vision that what we have for this needs to be resourced and if it can be resourced then I think we can make really extraordinary progress and I'll leave you with this as I reflect on this idea that the capability does exist now. Half of our business is not just serving the Department of Defense and other governments around the Western world but half of it is in the commercial space and in the commercial context I would offer that there is inspiration to be found. One particular longstanding customer of ours Airbus does this and does this exceedingly well and so as an example they had an issue with their A350 delivery times. We were able to help them really see their supply chains clearly understand where their bottlenecks were and the results were really powerful. They increased production by 33%. They drove $850 million more in revenue. They avoided $1.7 billion in cost and what I think is really interesting is they have 25,000 users on these platforms and they're developing new capabilities. They don't need us to do that through no code and low code capabilities. They're making really great strides and so as we step back and think about the future I just would say if we can leverage those experiences in the commercial sector we'll be better off and it'll allow us to get to where we wanted to get much faster than we otherwise would be. Great, thank you sir, great comments. So now we're very fortunate we've got about 40 minutes for questions and answers and I've already got a bunch lined up here on the desks that are pouring in. They may be specifically addressed to a certain panel member. Of course the panel, everybody on the panel have opportunity to make a comment because most of them are relative across the board. We'll also have an opportunity to discuss it so if someone in the audience there's a point that comes out on that question please stand and get recognized. You might have to come forward so we can hear you if there's additional point we need to clarify on a specific question. So I'll start with one question from the audience and this is really directed to the entire panel and it deals specifically with contested logistics and the thoughts that the panel has about resupply using recycled parts, locally sourced feedstock, scrap, construction materials, cardboard, et cetera. And he makes a comment specifically that there's been a lot of lessons learned here from Ukraine. So the way I'd like to shape it if we could please is give General Donahue and Colonel Upton an opportunity maybe to talk about some thought work that's going on in that area and then maybe Dr. Hill, you and Mr. Minasco, you could talk a little bit about some realities that we may have seen out of the assistance group for Ukraine because they reference Ukraine here. So please, General Donahue, any thoughts on that question? So we've got a ton of effort right now and partnerships. I'll hit on a couple. We like to innovate with DARPA because they're really kind of 15, 20 years ahead from a technology perspective. They've got great partnerships with academia as well. And so right now we've got a couple of efforts from a demand reduction perspective for both water and fuel as well as food. And so you talked about using things at the point of need. And so right now they've got a project called Project Cornucopia that from a food perspective, our supply chain for food is rather large. So is our water supply chain. Actually, water is probably our greatest supply chain when it comes to requirements for trucks on the battlefield. And so Project Cornucopia is looking specifically at how they use natural organisms in the environment. I'm sure our soldiers will be really ecstatic to be able to drink like a protein, locally produced shake, so to speak. But at the end of the day, we're trying to get after using organic substances. The same with Erdick. Erdick right now is working a lot of things from an engineering perspective, concrete, right? We don't want to move concrete and all of the things that it takes to build and repair runways. And so they're looking at also products out there that can get after that. So those are just a couple of things. I can't speak. Great, crop it. Yeah, Shane over here. Yes ma'am, so just kind of to off of Sean's point. So predictive logistics, kind of the in-state that we see this, and we've talked about this, I've talked with Dr. Hill, I've talked with General Donahue, is prescriptive. And when you talk about that specific question, prescriptive is I'm gonna harken you back to what we do now. So go to Europe. We have line hauled vehicles that are commercially, they're commercial vehicles. And when we have a repair parts thing, we look across our enterprise to include civilian sources based on the question, maybe even locally sourced at a dealership, depending on the piece of equipment. You fast forward that into technology that's already here and what we're looking at and partnering and thinking about is in a PL tool, as we write that capabilities development document, not only be able to see our DOD, our DLA partner stocks, but see stocks worldwide of partners in theater. I'll pull a couple threads. Ukraine lessons observed aptly, but I think they apply globally. If you deployed forces into the Pacific, you may need repair parts and equipment that come from a distributor that's in Guam or the Philippines or somewhere in that area. You go to Europe, same thing. These are first world large economies and being able to see that. So what's to so what? The thinking we're thinking is in a predictive logistics tool, a capability, you offer that war fighting commander, the ability for his logisticians or her logisticians to also see those industry partners source of supply or their supply chain. And Sean made a very good point and kind of pulled that thread. That's a end to end DOD wise, but then you expand that into the defense industrial base. And I think that's one of the things we're looking at that. And that's absolutely off a lesson observed from the Ukraine. Sometimes it's quite faster. In that point of need, sometimes the point of need resupply is something that's already there but it's just in the commercial market. So we've got to look at that. And I call it prescriptive, because that tool, these suites of technology and Dr. Hill's team has done it with the SAG-U, give you a prescriptive matter of the second and third order effects of what making that decision will do to you in time. And then providing that operational endurance to those commanders so they can continue their operations. Just some thoughts that were kind of in that thought space for that question, hopefully. Dr. Hill, Mr. Reynastka, any comments about SAG-U and some great examples of this being applied? In general, I would say what struck me as I started working on this was the nature of what contested logistics means. Because you have kind of in your mind, somebody's attacking your stockpile of some sort of commodity that you have. But when you think about a theater, the entire theater is not at war. So you have to move things through that theater to get it to the point of need. And to General Brown's point this morning about reform of institutions, many of those institutions are the ones that are slowing you down. So it's the challenge of the logistician and their supporting analysts to try to figure out, hey, what's a demand signal? How many do I need to have there without having too many that adds a different kind of risk? And I think where some of these locally sourced stocks really help us is when we get that wrong. Because the penalty from time, if you're getting that repair part in Guam, it's not showing up overnight, particularly if it's on a ship. So that's where I think in the Ukrainian's approach to things with some of the local work they've done has really allowed them to mitigate unforeseen challenges and do it in a much quicker way. Mr. Menasco, thoughts? The only thing that I might add, this is another place where I think we can and should seek inspiration from the private sector, because as an example, when the war kicked off in the Ukraine, there were companies that were able to see themselves and their supply chains pretty clearly, and they were able to reroute their supply chains because they knew that they had parts flowing into those regions. And it's that work that they did upfront that allowed them in the crisis to actually perform or outperform their competitors. And I would argue, I think that's a great opportunity for us and has been mentioned. The situation in Europe is vastly different than that in the Pacific for obvious reasons. And so I think we have to get even, we probably have to do more work in the Pacific candidly than we would have to in Europe since just the proximity is so much better. As the panel discussed, several of them talked about challenges to industry. So I've got two similarly related questions about bringing capabilities to the government. The first one, Dr. Hill, to you, is how do we bring analytic capabilities, tools and things that we have that may be working for our industry or other services to you so that the government can take a look at it? So first of all, forums like this are absolutely key to our collective success. So because of all that dynamic change in this side of the world I mentioned earlier, we have to know what industry is doing. And when you have an innovation in this space, you have to get to us to tell us what that is. I think we've done a good job of implementing our systems with open architectures and having that federated approach I mentioned earlier where we can bring multiple vendors in. You know, there's a lot of complexities in doing that in terms of how you set your contract up, what the organic side can do, what the contractors can do, but all that's workable. So I think the first key I would say is it's our communication to make sure we understand what it is you're doing. And the second is it's on us to set up a system and architecture that enables that kind of collaboration. This one, Colonel Upton, really is specifically geared to you, but it deals with any material solution inside your portfolio. And it's basically the same type of question. You know, what are the opportunities that are upcoming or how do we bring technology to the CFT to take a look at how it may support your objectives and goals? No, that's a great question. So I want to pull something that's really developed in the last year or less than a year with the Chief General George, General Rainey, and then also the CASCOM, CG and the Service Center of Excellence. So what it is is these three time horizons. And I want to talk about them really quickly to answer the question, because the way we're looking at transformation is really in three time horizons. But I'll go to the middle of one first. The Army's been focused and really have been pretty successful in the last five to 10 years on focusing on the goal of 2030 and delivering some signature modernization efforts in that time band. That's major weapons platforms. Some of them are already out there. I'm sure Ed, some of the other things that you're all very familiar, some of you may have worked that. There's a focus also on what we can bring to 2040, but the new kind of thinking that came very recently is this concept of transforming and contacting. That's the one I want to pull on on that question. In this 18 to 24 month space, one, like Dr. Hill said, have the conversations with us now. Tell us what you're working on. So first, we see if it aligns with where the Army's going. So now up then answer where the Army's going. We're going towards stuff that is men viable product. And we'll set that as kind of that threshold. You come, you talk to us about it. And there's impets to that. You sponsor, I'll tell you, a great means is partner with a lab. Partner with a DevCom or a partner that's an Army lab and you partner, then it's common goal. But we're taking the innovation ability a lot of you hold, some of the capabilities in the DoD that those labs hold, and it's a partnership. General Donahue and the team, selectively the CEDA, the CFT now are sponsoring newer emerging technologies. That sponsorship is just to get that conversation started. And it finally, it emanates from conversations like this, panels like this, AUSAs, other forms where we have that professional dialogue. But that's looking at that quicker timeframe to get stuff into soldiers' hands. General Mohan mentioned it up front, General Rainey will talk about it, so I won't steal his thunder, but I will say, we want to put those technologies that are already there into the hand of soldiers. It's a great example of what AMC's done in Europe and what our collective industry partners have done in Europe. But Doc, you'll hit it. You put it in the hand of a staff soldier or commander and have them work on it and learn from it. That's how you get, I think, into that conversation. Hopefully that helps, and I'll turn it over to them. Sir, just a foot stomp that too. So we've got a couple of opportunities here over the next couple of months. One, we've got a great partnership with AUSA later this fall before the big October convention, where we'll hold an industry week at Fort Gregg Adams. And so there's a great opportunity to come participate, show us what you're working on, challenge us to explain to you what we're looking at. In addition to that, we love when you bring us technology and we can integrate that into our own experimentation efforts. So we've got experimentation efforts that are hosted by the Futures and Concepts Center inside of AFC. But we also have, and just as Shane mentioned, the Chief is really hitting on this transformation in contact. And so we've got brigades right now in 25th ID, 101st 10th Mountain right now, that are experimenting with various sustainment technology. Now in some cases, some of that is Army Program of Record, kind of an ACDD approach. We already have experimentation dollars out there to get after that. But also in some cases, that is industry sponsored and funded in some cases, your own investment dollars to come show us what you have. So we are all in on one, again, just like Shane said, partnering with Ertick, DevCom, any of the Futures Command's labs. They're, you know, we don't have a monopoly on great ideas, like I said before. So come be a partner with us. And the best feedback you'll get is when that young non-commissioned officer tells you how you can make your product better and then informs us about what we need to do to craft our requirements documents better for you. Great. Mr. Manasko, I'll put you on the spot. We had an interesting discussion during one of our prep sessions. You know, as the government has challenged industry, you've made a couple of comments to us about, you know, some cautions to government to get away from old think that makes it easier for contractors in the industry to bring in ideas. I don't know, I know I'm putting you on your spot, but you remember those comments of you and mine sharing that, you know, to our government ears that are also- Did what I say, was it palatable or was it too spicy? It was great. No, it was spot on. I thought it was right on the money. So, look, one of the things I have the benefit of doing is I used to spend a lot of time in the Pentagon, and so I saw, and by the way, it's great to be with my Army team, even though I did spend a couple of years in the Air Force, they're great too, but I saw the team spend a lot of money on someone who was a really good salesperson and they had a really good PowerPoint presentation and convinced, you know, the services that they could actually do something in the future. And I saw, all too often, I saw them not be successful on a spend a lot of money. And resourcing right now when, like, FLAT is the new up from a budgetary standpoint, I think those are just risks that we collectively can't afford to take. And so I do think that it's important for, and I mentioned this earlier, it's important, I think, for our teams to be able to develop on top of an infrastructure and platforms that you know are scalable. And we have to do that today and that are proven. And I think that's the piece where if we can get oriented around that, I think you can fully leverage all of what industry can bring and we can fully leverage all of what our men and women in uniform or DA civilians can bring because what I used to see was frustration who someone was writing code and they were on a platform that just, they couldn't fully deploy, it was great, they couldn't fully deploy it. And it's been said, and this might be, you know, a little spicy for the group, but it's been said that here in the very near future that the predominant coding language in the world is gonna be the English language. So what does that mean? Right, and how do we take advantage of these new tools that exist, right, to be able to help us move more quickly? Great. General Donahue, this one's a little bit broader and it gets into the broader aspects of .mil-pf, but the question is, you know, how in this era of diminishing resources do we ensure the capabilities to generate and project ready combat forces? We're here to talk about in the panel. To generate these forces into at a modernization pace with operational force and what potential changes do you see it's critical to enable this ability to sustain war fighting function in the JSSA, just potentially some thoughts between you probably, Colonel Upton, you may have some thoughts on that as well. That's a big one that's like, disguised my whole job. It is, explain the theory, you know what I'm saying. So I guess what I would offer is sustainment can't be a growth industry, can't continue to be a growth industry for the United States Army. Under the leadership of General Simmerly, the team took a look at sort of how we see demand and how demand has grown over the last five decades or so. They took current formations, they went back over again really since the 1970s and they basically swapped out all of our combat platforms over time and what we saw was this massive increase in one fuel. Almost, and I think I said this in shocks and folks back last month when we were up in Arlington at the AUSA Hot Topic Panel Series, almost a 394% growth in fuel. We've seen from a mechanic's perspective from our technicians out there, almost a 37% growth in just how do we, basically our growth of our mechanic forest structure because systems are getting much more complicated and they take a lot longer to repair based on the complexity of the systems. So from a Dottmall PF perspective, we are absolutely laser focused in and across all of our various teammates. I don't know if Jeff Norman's out here right now from Next Gen Combat Vehicle CFT but really worked closely with his team along with Shane and Shane worked really closely with his team when it came to PL too but also just from a hybridization of that vehicle. Every vehicle and I think Shane hit it when he talked about the advanced power has got to roll off the assembly line and be a net power producer. We've got to curb that demand curve when it comes to fuel. So what keeps me up at light is simply the fact that from a sustainment perspective, we are costing the Army a lot of money because of how our platforms have considered or have just continued to require much more when it comes to really three, five mic mic writ large. Maybe not the medical piece but definitely on the other pieces. So Shane. Just a couple of thoughts. So I think part of the contested environment and Doc Hill mentioned it and we see it here in the United States is just how do you move stuff with freedom of movement? I mean it's pretty big development when you talk the coalition piece because this is absolutely a DOD, a joint and a coalition partner but establishing the Schengen zone for movement now in Europe and three of our core partners, that's a huge piece of that. I say and I pull that thread because that's one of the things as we could develop these dialogues with industry with our, I see our joint coalition partners out there. I see German officers, I see officers from the UK. These are partners. We will never, I think go alone into any conflict of the future. It's not doable as nations and allies. That's one piece of it but to that question of that contested environment, how do we ensure that? We've also got to give options and we've got a lot of exquisite options but you'll see a lot of dialogue and I'm looking forward to that dialogue with industry on the less exquisite options that we can mass. And when you look at something like China, they absolutely are exceeding our magazine depth right now. And General Flynn talk about it and use her pack but how do you offset that? That's a contested piece as well when our adversary has an overmatch. We have to be precise. We have to be precise where we put things. We're gonna have, we've had some big discussions at AMC, the Army and stuff on how we position things. Those are all discussions we've got to continue to have and General Donny made some great points about how we partner with our modernization teammates but that's back to industry joint coalition because I think it's a cumulative effect. If we get our partners to open up that freedom of maneuver on a land-based domain, when, if you look at AI or tools, machine learning, our large language models that we can see that environment from CONUS forward and have options of how we deploy and maybe we deploy, and that's also ties back to the human machine integrated piece of this. There's a phrase there that the chief and General Rain now use that we should not shed American blood with soldiers in first contact anymore. Logisticians are soldiers. We should be putting some of this as we're contested from homeland forward and using modern technology to move some of that. Maybe they're vessels that have different capabilities. Maybe they're projection of aircraft in different means. So just some thoughts about that but I just kind of put, that's a great question but it's a big one. Like General Donahue and I said, that's kind of our day jobs. And you handle any thoughts, anything you'd like to add before we move on to the next question. I might pull the thread on the constrained resources and the resourcing piece of it because what you find in the space I operated in most of the contracts we enter in with industry or service type contracts. And so it's really easy to screw that up from the government side. You have to have flexible contracting vehicles that allow you to respond to the way the operations are changing. So I mean it's been just astounding as they go from a defensive posture to try to blunt an attack to a local counter attack to a large scale offense what the requirements changes were for us and our industry partners. So you have to be able to adjust that contract in a way that doesn't have you paying for something you no longer need because it's not relevant to the battle anymore. And you also have to write those requirements broad enough to let industry innovate and let them wow you. And then I would tell you on top of that, you have to have, I mean this just sounds like standard blocking and tackling but it's absolutely true. You have to have rigorous program management. You have to see who's using it, where you're spending your money and stay on top of that almost daily to make sure you can free those resources up to go back to other parts of the fight. Great, thanks. So the fuel comment has hit, got a bunch of questions on fuel stuff. This one specifically, Shane to you, it's a material related one. You talked a little bit about this and it deals more with generators and reducing demand and less generators on the battlefield. What is the Army's vision plan to incorporate onboard power into new production combat vehicles versus material developer incorporating these post-production, any thoughts? And then General Donahue, you've got some probably input into that as well. Oh absolutely, I'll take a stab and then I'll pass it over to my teammate from General Donahue. First of all, mobile think secure tactical advanced mobile power. And that's a concept but it's also things we've been exercising convergence. And what is that? That's reducing generators on the battlefield because the vehicle system combat platform or resupply platform has on board power generative capability. And as we move our formations because it's absolutely plays with lessons learned in the Ukraine, lessons we're seeing from a peer adversary when you look towards end of paycom, we are going to have to displace very rapidly as formations and that's logistics formations, sustainment formations, combat formations, gone are the days of these large command control nodes and we'll have to move them. And one of those is generating power. We saw some very recent experimentation out at Capstone with some very good results on fuel reduction, being able to move very quickly and having rapid setup times when you did displace and move and set back up to command and control make logistics decisions, make operational decisions. I think that's the first thing. There's a lot of partnership there with industry right now but I think we've got to look at we're already writing into our capabilities documents for our new systems that that would be part of that system. But I will tell you that's probably what you wanted to hear going forward with new systems. We will always fight an army of three or four groups. What we have, what we're modernizing to the undersecretary mentioned it, we're gonna give capabilities of certain formations and certain formations will have different capabilities. We've got to look at those suite of solutions. Some of it, we're gonna have to go back to systems and put that technology on it. And that's the partnership that I look forward to the dialogue on how we do that. Absolutely, we just make sense to do it as we go forward with new developing systems and more acquisitions. But some of the systems we exercise in General Donahue's team was out there with me at Capstone and the seated was there, their legacy systems but the fuel savings, the maneuverability, being able to power a division main with two vehicles. That takes 11 generators off the battlefield, just as an example and I'll turn it over to General Donahue for any other comments. Absolutely great question but that's where we're headed, I think, in the newspaper. So two things, when I worked for General Simmerly before and I was the quartermaster commandant, I used to joke about being the commandant that was gonna essentially wipe out a couple of MOS's that we had based off of some of the technologies that we were pursuing. And so, but then I also like to be known as the person who likes to go find other people's money as well to be able to pursue innovation. And so in this case, really a fan of some of the work that DevCom has been doing with OSD and a joint capability tech demo over the last couple years and that's really what reference, or what Shane referenced that happened out of project convergence in a project that we called Stamp. And so essentially what this was, and it was actually really cool, I was walking actually the floor yesterday as all the construction was still happening here and actually saw a vendor that had an ACDC power converter. And essentially that's really all that we were able to do was to be able to convert power from a truck, eliminate generators and allow a command post on the move to basically be able to power itself and not have to set up its 11 generators. Having just spent some time with the PM last week when we were at Fort Greig Adams, he always reminds me that generators absolutely have a place on the battlefield, just like water production has a place on the battlefield. But at the point of need, when we're seeing what we're seeing from operations in Ukraine and having to continuing to move our command posts at the speed of relevance to ensure that they're protected, we don't have time to set up 11 generators. So there's some great technology out there, lots of, I mean, obviously reduces fuel but also from a survivability perspective and a protection requirement absolutely critical that we see some of that capability cut into our current programs as well as even future programs as well. Great, thank you. I've been digging hard for a maintenance question here and I found one. So good question again, back to General Donahue and Colonel Upton. Historical system performance data is a critical piece of PPMX and predictive logistics. How will the Army compensate with and utilize with vehicles in the field the transmission of this health, system health data? What's the plan? What's the network structure? How do you see that working? Maybe you've got some examples of some things you've discussed already to talk about what the future looks like for transmission of that data. Dr. Hill, you may have some examples too. Yeah, I'm gonna phone a friend here with Chris Hill in a second real quick, immediately. That was my first thought. We absolutely, so General Donahue mentioned that there was some great work, absolutely phenomenal work. It's a first for the Army. I'm in the first but it was an absolute first. So Colonel Matt Western and the team at the TPO ACCOM, the Sustainment Mission Command that's part of the Sustainment Center of Excellence got an abbreviated capabilities document approved by the Army leaders to do exactly what General Masters just talked. Start moving, first focused on Abrams and some of our larger platforms. That maintenance data off platform and then how we move that into things what you call a data broker and then quite frankly then into an open architecture is the way we are looking at that. And that is absolutely tied also, and General Donahue mentioned this earlier with Army Futures Command and the Army's efforts on how they pivot the network to what we call Command and Control or C2 Next. It's absolutely gonna have to operate on a common network. I'm not a signal guy but I'm gonna quote a quote that somebody way smarter than me said. Shane, you know what server stacks are? If you have a bunch of clouds out there that don't talk to each other, it's just like server stacks that are not connected. It was this guy, but anyway. But that's where we're looking at on how to transfer that maintenance data off the platform. The sensors are there. So when I look at my industry partners and the smart people in the room, the technology is there. We, the Army, have to be partners with you all and communicating that clearly what we need. And what I mean is, and there's the effort that General Donahue's actually leading us through, is deciding what commanders are gonna need to make decisions. Because at the bottom end of this, at the end of this, for a commander on the battlefield, that data needs to drive a decision. Or maybe we don't need to be collecting it. That's Upton's opinion, that is not, I know this is on the record, that's my opinion, but we've gotta keep the commander at the center of that. And I'll turn it over to my teammates. But that's where we're looking at, and that will absolutely be written into the capability development document for the PL efforts that were started at this SMC, the Sustainable Mission Command, and continued in a partnership now with the CFT as teammates. So I'll just turn it over to you. So two things, I'm always of, Dr. Hill and I've been partnered for a long time, and really impressed with, again, all of the efforts that they've done with APAS and industry help as well. And I'm always reminded over the fact that he told me that this was maybe about 18 months ago when the cab that was in Europe was directed to go support the humanitarian relief operations in Turkey. And they used APAS to select all the tail numbers for those birds that were gonna fly from, from, I hope they flew from out of Greece or out of Poland, I forget which one, but 100% OR rate never broke down all because of the analytic efforts that they have done. I've been reminded about all the work that we've also done, TACOM, and the leadership at TACOM have done with experimenting down with 3ID, with the brigade down there. A lot of that work actually helped to inform the writing of our ACDD. Really happy to report General Dean and team inside of the Striker community, inside of PEO ground systems. They've done a lot of work to digitize the maintenance flow of data inside the Striker platform. And so again, there's just, there's a tremendous amount of efforts. It's almost like the data piece that Sean, you mentioned about decentralization. This is essentially what we've seen across the Army from a PL perspective. And so, I think we've taken a lot of really good lessons learned and with Shane and the team, we will actually get the actual requirements document from, you know, transition from an ACDD to a CDD. And we're hopeful that we've got some money across multiple pegs right now, but through Shane's efforts to centralize some of those resources, we'll be able to see this come to a fruition, so. So I would say we've done a good job of moving the football on predictive maintenance over the last several years. Our tank automotive and armaments command on the ground side and our aviation missile command on the air. I mean, the things they can do with that data, as General Donahue mentioned, predicting failure by a tail number in specific amounts of time. Looking at their supply chain, their authorized stockage list to say, the parts we think they're gonna drive the failure, do we have enough for this upcoming operation? And then feeding all that back into the national supply chain is really powerful. That was a great question because I think it hit on the part of the technology that's limiting us the most and this is where we can use industry's help. It's how do we get that data off of those platforms in an efficient way that's secure, that's not gonna compromise that unit in a combat environment. So a lot of the advances we've made, we've leveraged peacetime operations, being able to pull things off of vehicles directly or going to the motor pool, that sort of thing. But that's not the solution we need. We need that solution that's gonna pull it from that vehicle in a secure and efficient way and provide that data back into the enterprise for us to use. And just one more. So most, sorry, real quick, Sean. So most of our components are censored but I guess what I would also challenge industry is to take a look at the subcomponents. That's actually, I think, where we see challenges, where we can isolate some of those failures when it comes to the subcomponents within those major systems. I was just gonna add an editorial comment. Actually, I think it's kudos to the Army. I think you guys are ahead of the services and how you're thinking about it. And I say that only to encourage us to move more quickly because I think you're paving a trail that others are looking at and saying, okay, we need to be doing some of the same activities. So it's encouraging. We're gonna only have time for maybe two more questions. I'm gonna hit one. We haven't used the word cyber in our discussion but I thought this one would be, kind of get us off the original train. So we all know cyber is part of a contested environment no matter where we are. We deal with it in personal life. This question really deals about to what extent do you see cyber warfare as an operational risk inside the contested environment and just some quick ideas about some things that are going on. Realize there's a lot of people out there working on the cyber aspect, particularly when you get down in the tactical space. What's going on in that environment just a little bit for the audience, please. Shane, I'll look at you. Start off. I'll take a stab at that. So really it's a partnership with AMC and I'll use a quote that I've heard General Moyan say and I've seen it published. A lot of our sustainment enterprise, that's partnership with the Defense Industrial Base, the OIB and our tactical formations operate quite frankly not even on controlled open internet but open internet. And we've got to look at how we do that going forward. I think it's the first thing. We can't but we can't use that and go so secretive because I'll tell you that's again up in its opinion, potentially sometimes we overclassify stuff so that impedes the partnership with the industry but we're absolutely looking at as we go to any capabilities document how does a cyber contested environment play in that and sustainment that's huge. That's from projecting from our factories or in that joint security support area into the Foxhole. A lot of that is partnership because in general a master said it the charter of the CFT is tactical and below but one of the reasons we're closely partnering with the CASCOM obviously and then with AMC is because that's got to tie into the strategic base and cyber is a huge piece of that. We're working on this PL initiative. I know I'm keep pulling that thread but that's huge in the cyber domain because any open architecture if not protected opens up a lot of that information. When you start talking about the centering discussion we just had on platforms and Dr. Hill said it very well. We've got to look at protecting that because I'll just tell you recently in convergence one of the big you have those aha moments during when you're experimenting in our cyber EM folks came in one day and briefed the leaders at the table and showed the peaks of transmission of data when these HMI solutions the PL type solutions were transmitting. They were enormous. Obviously we've seen from lessons observed in Ukraine and stuff the minute that happens you become a target. But I think that's the way we're approaching and looking at it. We'll absolutely put it in our requirements documents. You know I just said recent is a newer CFT and with the fellow CFTs I've been a lot of phone of friends on how we're doing that because some of that has to be matrixed and that's a reach out will do the industry as well because I'll tell you truth and lending the CLCFT doesn't have a cyber expert on the team but we'll absolutely reach out to our industry partners and have that dialogue with people that are in that professional space but I'll turn it over to the rest of the team but that's kind of where we're looking at and some of the ideas. Any comments? I know Pat said we had a little bit more than the time allotted so please. I would just say to Shane's point there and I agree with them that we should pay very close attention to what's happening in Ukraine right now because the cat and mouse game that's being played today in the EW space is really, really interesting and our opportunity has to be that we understand what the new modification is to the procedure that they're using and us to be able to actually understand what's going on and then react to that more quickly than we do today is gonna be something that's gonna be really important and you overlay that with the complexity of the supply chain itself and you can see if you can't figure out what they're doing and be able to react quickly then suddenly your supply chain is gonna be really compromised. Great, I am gonna squeeze one more quick one in here because this looks like probably it's Dr. Hill's review but it seems like it might be a quick one answer. It's a question about how can an industry representative get access to representative data sets and access to APAS to validate and align future integrated solutions? Any comment to the? So as I mentioned our architecture is very open and we are very federated so the key is you gotta find me in the next two days and I will get you linked up to the right folks. So whoever asked that question, take a picture, track him down. Panel, thank you very much and I apologize to the audience. I mean, you were very active in your question and I tried to order these and spread them around a little bit so I apologize if I didn't get to your question but that's the opportunity you may have. A great thanks again to our panel members for their time and effort preparing for any information that they've shared with all that. I hope you all took away as much from this panel discussion as I did and thanks again AUSA for giving us the opportunity to talk. Thanks very much. You are a great American, well maybe an American. So I guess everybody has taken off because they figured it was gonna take me too long to make it across the stage. So we'll get this fireside chat underway. My name is Doug Morrison, I work for Susie Defense as their lead for their composite rubber track business here in the US. But I'm also the vice president for the George Washington AUSA chapter in Northern Virginia on their executive committee for family affairs. And I'd like to take an opportunity to introduce our first fireside chat. Focused on integrating partnership in posture. It's my honor to introduce the moderator for this fireside chat with Lieutenant General retired Mick Benderick. General Benderick is a consummate warfighter. Currently he's the vice president of defense for floor mission solutions. He directs the group's defense business line providing scalable rapid response, contingency logistics, life support services, construction for military, humanitarian and disaster response missions. He spent nearly 40 years of service in the US, Europe, Middle East and Indo-Paycom. General Benderick retired from the army in 2015. He served as a commander at every level from company to army level, including CG of the 25th Infantry Division of Schofield Barracks, Hawaii and CG First Army headquartered of Rock Island Arsenal. For his last military assignment he served 26 months as the senior defense official in Iraq and the chief of the Office of Security Cooperation in Baghdad. Sir, over to you. No, hey thanks, I appreciate that. Listen, this fireside chat panel is the last thing before a lunch. Some of them went out to go grab a sandwich or probably kind of eat back in here against the house rules, but that's okay. And General Brown, sir, thanks to you and Les for giving me a few extra minutes here. Maybe we'll get a little bit of Q and A so we kind of started a little bit ago. And we are blessed with a couple great war fighters here to my left, steam logisticians that really are leading our army formations across the spectrum of combat. And hopefully we'll get some questions from the audience although both of these from Lieutenant General Mark Simmerly now the Director of Defense Logistics Agency just a few months ago and Major General Eric Shirley commander of First Theater Sustainment Command. Responsible as everybody here knows for the depth, breadth and scope and support of ComR-Sent Lieutenant General Pat Frank and obviously a SENTCOM commander, Eric Carrilla. Talk about both professionals that got their damn hands full on everything going on around the planet. Most of us in here have been to a carnival or a circus and are pretty familiar with the man that you see with a big stick spinning a bunch of plates. These two individuals got a hell of a lot of plates spinning in their cargo pocket. But again, we could talk for a long time just on what is in their portfolio of not only how they're doing what they're doing but as this AUSA Global Force Symposium is titled in support of combat ready formations of our war fighters around the planet. We only have about 30, 40 minutes so we're gonna try to keep us a little bit tighten. Eric, I wanna start with you if I could. And as I mentioned, you could talk an hour just of all the stuff that you have going on across the SENTCOM area of responsibility. Everything from your headquarters there at Fort Knox to Ford and Eriph John. I know you just got back as you and I were talking earlier from Jordan and all points in the Cardinal Compass. But coming up on a one year in command and leading the first TSC, multi-compo team of a lot of our readiness and statement challenges in support of a SENTCOM and SENTCOM commander. But given the Chief of Staff of the Army, Randy George's and his focus of constant transformation and contact and General Carilla's focus there in SENTCOM of innovation, what opportunities are you seeing and how have you seen in current ops across the AOR to be innovative and kind of working through those challenges? And again, that's a heck of a lot. And I know you could talk all day just on that but if you could walk us through that framework a little bit for the audience, thanks Eric. Yeah, sir, thanks very much. And I'd like to say first and foremost, I appreciate this opportunity, the forum for collaboration that AUSA allows us, everyone that I need to talk to to support our troops in contact, everyone that I need to coordinate with to enhance the operational reach and endurance of our joint task forces is here right now. So General Simmerly, the SDDC commander, of course I'll see General Mohan this afternoon and the list goes on and on. All the leaders that enable our joint logistics enterprise are here to talk to. So it's just a great opportunity to be here and see the team. I appreciate again the opportunity to recognize all those great, strong soldiers, strong sergeants in the R-SENT team and what First TSC is doing to support those troops in contact each and every day as well as our joint partners. And then of course, as you said and as the title of the fireside chat gets to, our partners in theater really enable our posture. So we've got, as you mentioned, sir, a great rotational team, seven brigades in theater, many of them from Compo two and three and like a snake that is constantly shedding its skin, we have force generation that we have to look at upstream, back to the left as I see sustainment brigades, ESCs from all compos, all the way down to the smallest personnel detachment, finance detachment, postal detachment to enable our support to our great forces. We have to start thinking about how we transform that force generation model. So what we've had some great success with recently is having the culminating training event for these units there at Fort Knox, Kentucky. Partnered with First Army allowed us to bring in from multi-escalant training opportunities, the current sustainment brigade that's on the ground now, the upcoming 364th ESC that's come out of Compo three from Marysville, Washington state, they'll come in and backfill Brigadier General Sean Davis's great team from 13th ACSE Fort Cavassos. That team has really had a historic rotation, right? They ripped in right around September 1st and then October 7th we were off to the races. So the expectation on our teammates that are coming into theater is just really phenomenal. They're gonna have to jump onto a moving train. The way we've adjusted those CTEs for our deploying units so that we can provide them good insight from the main command post at Knox. We sent some people back from theater to inform the training audience. It enables us to have more ready formations as they hit the ground. So then I look at what is our purpose as the theater sustainment command? And it is to synchronize, integrate and deliver world-class logistic solutions for our supported commanders and most importantly our troops in contact. And that really is reliant not only on all the great support we get from the Department of the Army but from the Joint Logistics Enterprise and partners like US Transcom, DLA, Army Material Command of course. So some things that we've done to write the theater, to get after the chief's intent, leveraging the opportunity of our changing operational environment in the context of Israeli's war against Hamas. We looked at how our C2 was arrayed last September before we undertook these support operations for the fight that's going on in Israel. What we found is we had several of our logistics icons consolidated in accordance with our legacy posture. So a BSB, two CSSBs all located within Kuwait. And what we undertook rapidly under General Davis' leadership forward in mind from the main command post was to move the BSB up north to Arbil so they can better support OIR. Move a CSSB out west to support our evolving Western Access Network. All of these changes put more leadership forward. They give us the opportunity to synchronize, integrate and deliver in the backyard of the supported commanders and closer to our partners that enable our posture. So we made those adjustments and by operationalizing the Western Access Network through a series of our sent leaders, recon and communications exercises, we found ourselves better posture to support not only army but our joint forces. And we are now conducting in support of NAVSENT reload operations for destroyers that are obviously operating in support of Operation Prosperity Guardian in the counter-hoothy fight in the Bab Al-Mandeb. But because we had the foresight to project out a sustainment brigade attack to PSAB in Saudi Arabia and then Sean Davis' attack to seaports on the Western coast of Saudi Arabia, we were ready when called upon to support that joint force. And that was just a great example, I think, of how we changed in contact. Some of the innovation that we're getting after in the CENTCOM AOR, of course, General Carillo's focus is on people, partners and innovation. I'll just mention a couple of examples along three lines of effort. The first being material. This is something that the panel alluded to a little bit earlier. How do we enable production forward for critical parts? Additive manufacturing, subtractive manufacturing. We have taken systems like the Army's MWMSS, their metalworking multiple shop sets and placed them with that BSB up in Arbil. Allowing them to do critical fabrication forward for brackets for NVGs to enable man-pad counter-UAS systems. Just very opportune critical parts that we can now produce at point of need. We're also under the leadership of our CENT's Task Force 39, the innovation element of our CENT. Making plans for employing a additive manufacturing campus in Kuwait. And we'll do that co-located with the support units that still remain in Kuwait, because that is our main point for projecting forces north in support of both Operation Spartan Shield as well as Inherent Resolve. From a technology perspective, we're innovating by using autonomous transport vehicles. Those ATVS systems, we've pursued a very aggressive crawl-walk-run system. Proofing and training crews at the Udari Range Complex. Taking those systems down into the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for the Red Sands exercises, counter-UAS and BDOC training that we did with partner nations. We lengthened the legs, made a little bit more demands on the technology as they were used in conjunction with those exercises. And then we're looking out for our run phase for a near-term exercise where we will move ATVS systems with soldiers in the cab, of course, for safety. But in conjunction with Marcent elements as they transit the totality of the Trans-Arabian network, we'll really put these systems through their paces and I think give a ton of enterprise-level feedback to Shane CFTs and the enterprise. Very, very ideal terrain to use these systems. Using them in a large-scale theater security cooperation exercise with our partners I think just helps us to continue to be the partner of choice and offer technology solutions for our partner nations that they're really not gonna find anywhere else. Finally, I would say on a third line of effort, data. Obviously, we're all desperately working against the clock to leverage and enhance how we collaborate using our data so that we can enable predictive logistics so they can enable predictive maintenance. I'll give you one of the real-world experiences we had post-October 7th. We flowed into theater several 88 units, both Patriot and THAAD systems. A real commitment of national-level resources with some 200-odd C-17 aircraft flowing in, landing around the clock in theater. Understanding that, describing it and helping make decisions and recommendations for senior leaders at the speed of relevance, the speed of war, was a challenge. As we had to query multiple systems of record, see the status of munitions and units, whether that be Advana, Tamas, SAS Mod, G-Army, you picked the system, we were moving from system to system. What we've done since then is working with CASCOM, G4, and others, identify the challenges that we saw across the dot-mil-p-f-p perspective, and then work to get to that common single-panic glass for logistics collaboration, at least in CENTCOM, that's done with the MAVEN system. And so now what we're able to do is multi-ash along collaboration on a single reference point for our sustainment planning and decision support. I think it's been very productive. We went from, in September and October timeframe, having very few authorized users to now a great level of competency using MAVEN all of my commander's update briefs, all of our ONIs, all of our coordination with our CENTCOM is now done on that MAVEN solution. I think as professional logisticians, we're agnostic to which technology solution we use, but I would tell you now is that we look at the emerging humanitarian assistance mission into Gaza. I think everybody's tracking, we're already doing aerial delivery. We're about to enable joint logistics over the shore, and as we look at the geography, we have inherent cross-COCOM coordination. So Ron Reagan at 21st TSC, a great teammate, helped us out with the airdrop resupply, but now we're at a place where we're gonna project humanitarian assistance over the shore from locations in the Med, which are inherently COCOM, UCOM to CENTCOM. I need to be able to collaborate in a similar space with my TSC partners and my joint logistics enterprise partners. So that's one that we have started to take those steps on. I think MAVEN is a great innovation that we're using for data dominance, and it's one that's allowing us to speak in common terms of reference with our supporting joint logistics enterprise partners. And so beyond technical innovation, I would say that focusing on people and partners in CENTCOM, really beyond our joint forces, we have to understand that our purpose is in part to do our level best, to generate opportunities for interoperability with our partners, so that we remain the partner choice across the AOR, because partners in the region enable our posture. ABO, our ability to work with some level of autonomy, is always gonna be conditioned by the sovereign interests of the nations that we work with. And now, as everybody knows, within the arsenal where there's not a NATO structure that allows for common terms of reference for dip clearance and movement across national borders. But we have to do that on a daily basis, whether moving from Kuwait through Saudi Arabia to Jordan or back UAE and other partners in the region, all critical, but all with their own unique requirements for processing movement requests and dip clearance. So one of the things that we've done, and I think it's paid great dividends is CENTCOM's approach to theater security cooperation exercises with multilateral engagements like the SANS exercises that provide common reference for counter-UAS and BDOC to enhance force protection, not only for U.S. forces, but for our regional partners. And a place where we saw that be very, very successful was in November with the Houthis one-way attack UAS and land attack cruise missiles. The work that was put in in the counter-UAS space through the Red Sands exercises and the regional security construct where all of the nations collaborate on these technologies allowed them to defeat a massive launch by the Houthis of those systems. And subsequent to that, those TTPs have continued to be very, very successful, again, because of a partnership, because of the posture and the advances that it allows us. And then finally, I think as we talk about partnerships for the TSC perspective, certainly from our main command post at Fort Knox, I've got to project up and out and talk to not only the Department of the Army, but the Joint Logistics Enterprise partners. And we've done just a great, great job, I think, of one, being good teammates, not surprising and identifying requirements ahead of time, and then DLA, AMC, US Transcom can make those adjustments with our industry partners to better support the troops and the Joint Service members across CENTCOM's AOR. So just a couple of examples from Transcom, AMC, and DLA. I mentioned the massive lift that Transcom enabled moving ADA assets into theater in the October and November timeframe last year. That is now matched by their commitment of aircraft to support the aerial resupply of humanitarian assistance. AFSENT has been critical in delivering hundreds of thousands of meals and with the joint partners that are also operating in theater, that's well over the million. We're going to vastly increase that and we start multimodal humanitarian assistance going through JLOTs and ideally, ultimately, through ground lines of communication. In working with our AMC partners, of course, AMCOM has just criticaled everything we do from a air defense perspective and keeping our aviation systems in the fight. I look forward to talking to General Conner here tomorrow. We've also got the counter UAS focus for all things force protection. We really, not only with AMCOM and AMC, but rely on DLA, DLA Aviation, and then of course our industry partners. We have seen just great success with counter UAS systems in theater with novel approaches to new technology, everything from the man-packable drone buster systems, the FS lids and M lids, and then the very successful Coyote counter UAS system. We watched that production rate from the Raytheon facility in Arizona like Hawks and they immediately moved from the production line to the flight line to rotary wing support for distribution across the OIR footprint so that we can protect our forces. You've got some history there in Arizona. Absolutely, yeah, so that's home. When they said go to the Tucson plant and engage with the industry, I raised my hand, but other leaders got to take that on. And then finally, sir, I would say for our partnerships, there's none more important to what we're doing in the CENTCOM AOR than the Fence Logistics Agency. And I had the great benefit as did General Semerle of command and DLA troop up in Philadelphia. And those great teammates provide everything from the class one that we're dropping on a every other day basis for humanitarian assistance. Every bit of subsistence goes to every joint member, medical supplies, construction and equipment that provides for our force protection enhancements, constantly pressing from the headquarters. We're in constant collaboration with the DLA J3 and the MSC commanders so that we don't surprise and that we can also leverage industry's capacity to quickly bring those resources to bear. But as you said, sir, I could talk for an hour. I need to stop so that I can turn it over to the real subject matter expert for DLA, Lieutenant General Semerle. Yeah, no, Eric, I appreciate it. You highlighted a couple things. I'll try to get back to it here with time available because I know we had some, there's people up there in the $1 section that kind of came in after we started here, but you highlighted multiple examples of my analogy of the circus guy with sticks spinning a bunch of plates, whether that is the capability in Erbil, what's going on in Gaza, your recent visit to Jordan, on and on and on. You also highlighted a couple things of your multi-compo, our Compo 2 and Compo 3 teammates, our Guard and Reserve and General Brand. We've got some former state agit and generals that are here in this audience, so that absolutely resonates with the readiness of the total force and the total army as you kind of highlighted. And the other acronym I kind of scribbled down the Joint Interagency Intergovernmental Multinational Capability, but now also, and we'll get to this, was one of the reasons that we're here is the full spectrum of the Defense Industrial Base, which is part of that JIIM acronym that we used to use as a matter of routine, but it's Eric, you're spot on, and again, could have taken another hour. Hey, Mark, let me turn to you for a little bit. General Simile, as I mentioned, recently took the helm as a director of the Defense Logistics Agency, and you, although as Eric kind of highlighted, combat and command focus, they're in the cent-com area of responsibility. There's more going on there than Dones has bills, but from the DLA perspective, bottom line it is they broader global focus, all combat and commands and everything that not only our army, but all of the joint force and our nation touches. End-to-end global supply chain activities that impacts all of us, and the sheer magnitude of the Defense Logistics Agency is daunting, and Eric, you kind of highlighted, old team, they say they're a DLA troop support there in Philly, and Mark, you know this, well, DLA aviation, Richmond, Virginia, and land and maritime up in Ohio, even the energy team you have there with you at Fort Belvoir, and we talked a little bit earlier about the DLA's focus of continuous transformation and people, precision, posture, and partnership. So here's the question for you, is you're kind of taking over the helm there at the Defense Logistics Agency, how does DLA calibrate and synchronize that posture that you spoke of earlier in concert with the combat and commands that Eric kind of walked out and the service components and the broad spectrum in terms of setting the theaters, we kind of looked to the long-term. Talk to us a little bit about that if you could, Mark. Sir, thanks for the question, and I'd like to begin by thanking General Brown and the AUSA team for inviting me to participate. It's not often at AUSA we get the Defense Logistics Agency director participate, so I'm grateful for that, but I'm also grateful for the forum and in addition to what I learned, listen to Eric today and the other panel members and other speakers, the questions and engagement we'll have with industry will be very informative to us and my team and DLA all together as we look at the way the Army's talking about transformation and the way the industry is looking at how they can provide solutions to that. Certainly all applicable questions and solutions to DLA as we look at our mission set. And most of you know that DLA's charter is to be the nation's combat logistic support agency. And I would focus on that word combat within that realm. We were born out of lessons learned from combat during World War II on how we could gain efficiency and effectiveness and sustaining the force. And we really see our responsibility as providing readiness to the services and then endurance and resilience to the COCOMs. And there's a lot of other mission sets within that and you described some of our major subordinate commands I would add to them as well, our DLA distribution team has a global mission and also our disposition services which helps on the back end of operations so we can continue that support. So not only supply chains, eight major supply chains but also services that we provide to the combatant commands and the services as well. And the scope of mission is global as you said and it's a truism but it's worth repeating that the sun never sets on DLA just like the sun never sets on DOD as well, right? So where the DOD exists, the DLA has to be as well. And I was very fortunate in about my six week of my tenure as a director, which was like last week I got a chance to travel with the service fours. The joint staff J4 led the team along with Arnold Lohman from OSDS out into Indo Paycom and we went to Japan, the Philippines, Australia and I had a chance to cap it off in Hawaii to meet with some of the Indo Paycom leadership to look at some of the challenges we have there. And one of the takeaways, and Eric really highlighted this in his comments, is that none of our supply chains, none of our support exists within a single cocom. They're all interrelated. And so when we make a decision in one portion of the world there's a prioritization and an impact on another part of the world that we have to consider. And I will tell you the recent relationship we have with Transcom and the management of bulk fuel is a really good example of how we can manage this from a prioritization standpoint that we look at and weigh the balance of requirements in one cocom for bulk fuel versus another. Some of the things we've done in the Red Sea recently are pretty good example of that. We brought in assets for distribution of fuel from another cocom so we could enable our naval assets not to have to go to an assure facility for fuel, continue their operations and also allow them to operate more securely. The provision of class one as mentioned as a good example as well, taking stocks from one cocom to another free humanitarian aid in Gaza and being able to generate the supply chain from a production standpoint in CONUS so it could sustain that without any concerns from the combatant commander about restrictions on available supply. So as you mentioned, we are very concerned about this transformative period and what DLA's role is within that to enable the services in the cocoms. And we very much understand our responsibility inherent within that, our relationships in supporting the cocoms, but also the benefit we have from the relationships with each of the services and cocoms. And not only is it a transformative era for the Army, it's a transformative area for the entire DOD. And if you listen to the language and the concepts of all the services and their focus on transformation, there's very many common touch points but also there's some nuances that it pays dividends for us to note and share with others. So that's part of what we can do is share some of those lessons, learn some of those TTPs that we're picking up not only from our US war fighting partners but also a lot of the allies and partners in whose country we operate as well. So as you mentioned, we do have a framework for the way we're looking at transformation within the Defense Logistics Agency. It's people, it's precision, it's posture and it's partnerships. And I'll start off with people because as we know, culture always precedes performance. And if you look at within the Defense Logistics Agency 98% severe and about 45% having served in uniform before but throughout the agency, this war fighting spirit in the sense of the war fighters. But how do we inform that so it's relevant not only to the challenges today but the challenges of the future so we can understand our decisions and our actions from the lens of the contested logistics environment. And it is a shift for us as we understand that from the lens of the COCOMs and of the services as they prepare to face those threats. So we have to ensure that that's built into our acumen, that war fighting acumen. We can understand that where we've had to operate in some cases in the past based upon an efficiency model especially in the post-Cold War era. We also now have to account for the resiliency that's gonna be required in any given theater. And that has to be part of our culture as well. And then there's also acumen that we have to achieve within our culture. And the acumen that we have and as one of our traditional strengths is our ties to industry. Our ability to speak with them, to translate our requirements, war fighting requirements to them in ways that are actionable. So that's something that's gonna be an enduring capability that we have to maintain. But also now this data acumen where we can employ data effectively and we can use it for decision making. We can use it for the way we design our tools to help us make decisions and also the way that we visualize requirements. So this data acumen is something that we have to achieve not only from a recruiting standpoint but also from a developmental standpoint within our existing teams. And then a final thing I'll say about people, it's this cultural acumen in terms of cross-cultural relationships we have to have certainly within our joint forces and then also with our allies and partners where we can understand where we're operating, the conditions under which they're operating and what their view of requirements are, responsibilities are. Last week in the Philippines, it was really remarkable to me to see their motivation increase for collaboration with the US. And we could say that relationship is on hyperdrive right now. So what does that mean for DLA? And especially as we look at the specific things that we provide from food, fuel, the other commodities from a distribution standpoint, how do we have to tailor and adjust our approach to them from a people standpoint? Yes, good point on the cultural piece but even some of our coalition partners and allies, the national caveats that they have to, some of those are constraints that they have to work with and then from all of us got to understand us. You're right Mark. Absolutely and I think it factors in the posture as well but I wanna talk about precision first. So the second element of our framework for transformation is we know that precision is gonna allow us to afford sustainment. It's gonna allow us to achieve mass, it's going to allow us to achieve precision and as mentioned before on one of the previous panels, we cannot afford to be imprecise in where we decide to stock things, how we decide to move things and what we stock. So we have to be able to partner with the services, the co-coms to have a very precise view of requirements and then translate those with precision to industry. We can't afford to have vague ambiguous requirements if we wanna have specific performance on their part that's tied to a specific time, a specific place and a specific way that it's gotta be provided. So a lot of that precision is focused upon our ability to develop and utilize information systems and we're in the middle of a transformational era in our own information systems. It's the digital business transformation is our program that's underway and we're delivering a new weapon system or warehouse management system to all of our distribution and disposition sites right now. So a major information system transition that's taken place and many other tools that we're using that we're developing in many cases and in partnership with the army and all the other services. So a best of breed approach that we can take and we see a responsibility we have there to enable precision on the services standpoint where in many cases, the services will be focused on the tactical fight like our CLCFT focused on the division and below. We can see the nexus of our networks with industry in the government networks and we can also see then the opportunities from the strategic lens down to the operational and tactical level. So I think we have a unique responsibility to ensure that we are able to embed precision into our capabilities. And then from a posture standpoint and I really look at posture in three categories presence, position and stance. And so one of the things that DLA is able to do is have a physical presence in many parts of the world where we can have our subject matter expertise in fuel and food, name of commodity and distribution as well. Ford located with either key leaders, for instance, in a DDoC, certainly in ASCCs and other combat and command posts. But also in those different nations where we can help to influence decisions, we can help manage access and ensure that we can deliver it at the time of need. So I would say that presence is not only about having people there but also understanding how we can get there. And so Eric mentioned the access, the basing, the overflight, the permissions which especially if you're not operating in a coalition environment is different in every single nation, every international border that you cross. It takes time to work. That presence gives us the expertise so we know how to get in and how to get commodities in. But it also gives us the relationship. So as we see in CENTCOM, UCOM, Indo Paycom this campaigning approach gives us the benefit of that presence. So that we have those relationships. We know how to negotiate the means to provide material and to operate in a given theater. The positioning piece I think is where we, most of the time we think about posture, where we put stuff, where we put commodities across the world. And certainly that's always something that we're weighing. For instance, in the Indo Paycom AOR, we've got over 65 defense fuel supply points and they are strategically located but are they sufficient for what we think we're going to need? No, they're not. We don't have access to bulk fuel in every place that we know we're going to need it and the combatant command is going to need it. So we're constantly reviewing opportunities to have a better position. And this is by the way where precision comes in. So we can be very precise about what we need to put into a place and where it needs to be and then how we can afford it in a competition standpoint, how it makes sense for our material enterprise. We know that posture has a price and we know that resources are very limited. So how can we go about using some of the unique abilities within DLA to establish the prepositioning of material in an affordable way? And as you and I spoke about earlier, being able to do that from a campaigning context where we can have a presence there that supports current operations that will also give us greater capability during contingency. For the long term. Perfect segue both of you. We got just a couple of minutes left. But one of the questions I got from the audience are a few that we got in the time remaining. A vast majority of people that are here at this conference represent what? Well, they represent the defense industrial base. So a question they got is what should our defense partners across the industry, primes, vendors, small businesses, et cetera. What should they be doing as they kind of look to 2025 and beyond now that, you know, budget's been released, et cetera. But as they kind of look to the future, how can they better anticipate future requirements to support you? Eric, one minute, one second, a couple of thoughts? Sure. So all things force protection, obviously. Force pro. In the subsequent to October 7th, you know, unfortunately we lost three soldiers January 28th to a one way attack UAS. Force pro had always been top of mind and now it has just picked up the pace. So everything that deals with counter UAS systems hardening positions in a joint expeditionary environment that protects our soldiers from that UAS threat that we're seeing. Certainly something to make sure that's being forecast back to both our sent and sent comms so that we can bring it into those innovation labs at task force 39, task force 59 for the maritime component. But I would tell you that sent comm is an ideal place to innovate and experiment with these new technologies. So us being able to see what industry has to offer through forums like this allows us to reach out, partner with industry that might have something unique, novel, might not be ready to scale but get it into an exercise in the sent comm ALR. Our partners are hungry for it. They love the opportunity to go out with our theater security cooperation exercises, those that are already planned and then embed into it a new facet for innovation. And in some cases humanitarian assistance, how we better deliver that and distribute that and how we can communicate with the intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations, that'll be important not only in Gaza but I think going forward into the future. So a couple of opportunities in the sent comm. Mark, closing comment. Thank you. That question allows me to talk about partnerships which is the last component of DLA transformation and our partnerships with industry are critical. Last week the Deputy Secretary of Defense had a speech she said that production is deterrence. So, and we know from our history that the only way that America can prepare for war is through American private industry and in the private enterprise. So our reliance upon private industry is profound. You know, here's what I would recommend. Number one, as I mentioned before, within your own culture, have an embedded understanding of what combat means what the contested logistics environment means as well as you shape your solutions. Number two, take an eye towards your own data acumen and I know in many cases it's much stronger on the private side than it is on the government side but how can you develop tools and best practices from the commercial realm that are tailored and customized for defense logistics use and also for the entire department. And the final thing is interoperability. As you design solutions, we really need solutions that can partner with other solutions and other capabilities, not ones that are exquisite, that are isolated but ones that can be employed from an open architecture standpoint. Perfect, perfect way to end because without industry, there is no defense. Ladies and gentlemen, please give a warm thanks to our panel up here. That's over to you, sir. Thanks so much, gentlemen. Let's give them another round of applause. It's time for our networking break and lunch in the south and east hall sponsored by Huntington Ingalls. Please be back here and you'll see us by 2.15 as we start off our afternoon session with the senior enlisted leader panel. Thank you. You ready? All right, good afternoon. My name is Ronda Sutton. I am the third region president for AUSA. Thank you. I previously served as the chapter president for the Redstone Huntsville chapter. So welcome to my hometown. I'm proud to introduce the moderator for this afternoon's panel. Command Sergeant Major retired Julie Jarrah. Julie entered the army in 1994. She held various key roles during her career of over 30 years. Julie is currently serving as the director of NCO and soldier programs for AUSA. Managing the support for chapters across the region, leader development, life skills training, publications, website management, moderator, event management, podcast moderator, and social media content manager, while continuously educating and connecting young leaders with their community and AUSA. Ladies and gentlemen, Command Sergeant Major retired Julie Jarrah. Yeah, Julie. Good afternoon. I just had to make sure. Thank you, Rhonda. I appreciate that intro. As she said, I'm retired Sergeant Major Julie Jarrah. I am the director of NCO and soldier programs at AUSA. Today I have the distinct pleasure of moderating four senior sergeants major on the topic of transforming contact and precision sustainment. To my right is Sergeant Major Brian Hester at Army Futures Command, Command Sergeant Major Jimmy Sellers at Army Materiel Command, Command Sergeant Major Ray Harris at Training and Doctrine Command, and Command Sergeant Major Dusty Jones of the West Virginia National Guard. We will now start with opening comments. Sergeant Major Hester, over to you. Is it working? It is. All right. Fantastic. Well, a little green light didn't come on. So Julie has nine jobs that she's doing. So she's doing a fantastic job. So hey, everybody, good afternoon. Really, really happy to be here. Excited to sit on this panel with these gentlemen to my right and with Julie. So focusing on continuous transformation and I kind of posed the question of why. So the character of war is changing. So innovation, technology, weapons proliferation, integrated economies are all changing the character of war. But the nature of war remains consistent. So for the Army, that means we have to be consistent as a dominant land force. We have to be able to seize control and provide options for our nation. And we may just have to stab somebody in the neck and set some things on fire along the way. So we got to be ready and we got to continue to transform. So our Army has always been innovative, always modernized and always transformed, but we have to continue to do that. And really, we have to continue to do that at 10X to our adversary. So what are the challenges to maintain this dominant? So I'd just like to give you five. I think General Rainey talks about these just about everywhere he goes, but we have to be able to employ a formation-based approach to lethality and survivability. We have to increase the lethality and survivability of our light formations, decrease the weight and sustainment of our heavy formations. And I'm sure Jimmy will talk a little bit about that. We have to be able to integrate humans and machines. And then we have to be able to field a data-centric Army. So when we think about how we're gonna transform in contact, we think about it really in three periods of time. But before we talk about the three periods of time, I'd like to just give you a couple of the first principles that we'd like to think about with regard to continuous transformation. The first is it has to be threat-driven. It has to focus on specific technologies for the disciplined information or innovation and broad adoption. We have to execute within our existing budget, as you can imagine. We got a defest of legacy systems to create assets for investment and new technologies. And then we have to reduce the complexities for our staffs at the brigade and below level. But as I described, we think about it in three periods of time, and I'm gonna really quickly go over those three periods of time and then I'm gonna pass it over to Jimmy. So the first period of time really is transformation in contact. And that is innovating new, bringing new capabilities to our formations within 18 to 24 months with very little .mil PFP wraparound. The second period of time that we think about is deliberate transformation. And that's really focused on the first five-depth. That's two to seven years. And for everybody in the audience, that's really just focused on our six modernization priorities, which have been consistent really for about the last five to six years. And then the third period of time, which is concept-driven transformation, and that's really investment in future capabilities. That's the second and the third five-depth, really, you know, seven to 15 years. And that's focusing on delivering those new and innovative ways to maintain our land dominance, which is where I really started. So I'm excited to be here and I look forward to answering any questions you have. Jimmy, over to you, my friend. Hey, thanks, Brian. Hey, so a couple of things right out the bat. As we talk about this holistically, AMC is really clearly focused on delivering ready combat formations. And as the Chief of Staff of the Army, the Sergeant-Mangered Army, really laid that out for us, beginning last year at the October AUSA, I think our commanders have done a phenomenal job at identifying key tasks, which help us focus on delivering ready combat formations, continuous transformations, strengthen the profession, and then the most important one in everybody's mind should be war fighting, because that's why we exist. So what is AMC's role in that? As we make things better in the Joint Strategic Support Area, or the Garrison, all the way to the tactical edge. And as we talk about precision sustainment and everything that involves, I think gone are the days in which, you know, we have 10 operating days of supply and equipment on hand, really just stacked up in the back of the FOV or the BSA, just waiting to be used, and sometimes it gets expired. Now we're looking at how do we get that to the point of need, all the way from the factory to the foxhole, and then from the foxhole to the factory, understanding that there's sensors along the way that's helping us analyze and put together those data points to where we can make sure that we're getting the right days of supply and equipment on hand to the right unit location so that we can be more precise with our resources that we're managing. So I think that's kind of very important. But before we even get to, you know, the warfighting function of that, we have to get better at making sure that our barracks and modernization efforts are really improved. Everything that our soldier touches, we have to make sure it's sustained within the Joint Strategic Support Area. The barracks, the diner facilities, modernization efforts when we test that, and it's that whole food ecosystem that's gonna help us produce great warriors so when they get on the battlefield, they can survive. The next thing I think that we have to take a good strong look at is how are we gonna move in a dynamic area of multi-domain operations and make sure that we have sustainment on the move through large-scale combat operations. Being able to fix arm and fuel forward and making sure that we are not the stagnant organization that is really just standing still because there are gonna be things out there through innovation that was gonna make us known to the enemy. So as we get out there and start looking at that, how are we gonna be able to provide that multifunctional logistician, non-commissioned officer that is able to read data, understand data, and then get those requirements to the commander as required. There's an issue that we're looking at as we talk about deliver ready combat formations. You can't do that while in the garrison environment, effectively and efficiently, if we don't have trained and ready unit-level supply sergeants, clerks, and things of that nature that are accounting for commander's property. And where we've found some excess property at, we establish our rapidly redistributed excess of equipment, R2E as we divest in absolute equipment, unburdening company commanders and supply sergeants from all the excess equipment they've been carrying around. And sometimes you can take a look at property books. There's probably about 16 to 20 pages of property and 50% of that is excess in some cases. So how do we use and leverage technology to get rid of the excess, redistribute that property into the hands of other commanders that can actually use it? It may not be in the wrong spots. And then the last thing is, before I pass it over to the trade-offs of our major, as we're taking a look at multi-functional logistics, NCOs, as we go through several troop analysis cuts through TAA, through our total arm analysis, how do we expand on the capabilities and capacity that we have in our single NCOs by educating them in the PME, making sure that they got the right level of education so that when they graduate, they go back to the commanders and the leaders and they're basically force multipliers within the organizations. So training, educating, certifying, and then delivering back to the organization so that it can be able to form in a multifaceted organization and effectively out there in the battlefield. One of those things that we're taking a look at is project warrior, right? So if you got a non-commissioned officer, for example, that's out in the CTC, that's doing the CTC rotation for two years, they've got some sets and reps on how things should be in the operational environment. They understand task conditions, standards, they're trained to proficient, and then you might want to take that same non-commissioned officer and put them in a trade-off environment and take the operational experience and put that onto the institutional domain and just make that non-commissioned officer better. And I think a complimentary of both of those skill sets within one NCO will help us develop the multifunctional piece that we're trying to get codified and cultivated throughout our core. So without further ado, I'll pass it over to Sergeant Major Harris. I'm gonna talk to you a little bit about the trade-off aspect of this. Yeah, thanks Jimmy. And thanks for everybody being here and listening to us and really looking forward to the questions because I think the meat and potatoes of what all of us have is really in the questions. But for trade-off's role really to underpin the point of this conference too with continuous transformation to deliver combat-ready forces is really the institutional domain of how do we get there. The doctrine, the training, the leader development and education are the things that we take a look at. You just heard Sergeant Major Sellers, Jimmy, really talk about a multifunctional logistician or sustainment NCO. We gotta owe that in the training domain to say this is how we're able to deliver this capability to you that's trained, validated, certified, educated to go out there and lead those forces. And so we do that through, like I said, the DTLE process and we stay nested. And so our core focus area based off the Chief of Staff of the Army is strengthen the Army profession. And with that comes our standards of disciplines and our promise to deliver on trained, validated, educated leaders to go back out to the operational force that's reinforced by unit training education and training management. And so as we take a look at continuous transformation, so does our education and institutional foundry, training and functional schools, we gotta be able to transform PME and education in contact. And to do that, we gotta make sure that all the education we provide to the Army is adaptable, flexible and builds readiness for commanders in order to deploy and win when asked to do so. And so we're gonna take a look at that in order to support the continuous transformation focus area and able to deliver combat-ready forces to trained capable non-commissioned officers that are able to lead these small uniformations to go fight and win. And we'll do this through sequential and progressive training like we always have as we look at the soldierization continuum from private basic training all the way till it's time to you to hang the suit up and retire from the Army and give back with your knowledge and experience back to the force so we could continue to educate. So just wanna drop a little bit of that right there and then I'm really looking forward to the question. So, Dustin. Good afternoon, everyone. It's my honor to be up here on this stage with my distinguished colleagues here, but especially to represent the 336,000 Army National Guardsmen out there across our 54 states, territories in the District of Columbia. Transformation in contact is something that's really, for obvious reasons, the National Guard provides around 50% of combat power for the United States Army. So it's exceptionally important so that we can remain relevant when it comes to multi-demain operations. But there's a significant of, there's significant other challenges when you talk modernization in the National Guard. Number one, being time and two, being money. So the Army of 2030, we have one priority division that's in the first wave of modernization. They'll transfer right along with their Compo-1 counterparts to make them at the essential effective area for multi-demain operations. But the greatest amount of our forces in the National Guard are gonna remain ready and relevant through cascading modernization. So as equipment starts to be replaced, as it's still relevant, it rolls down. Essentially, we'll only have around 10% of our power, of our combat power that will be on initial wave, level with our Compo-1 counterparts. But it's really important for us to stay tied in because interoperability and compatibility in multi-demain operations is exceptionally important. And it can't be just in time readiness, especially when you're talking C2 elements with C2 fix and communications. If it's not intuitive enough, then a Guardsman can learn it really quickly over a couple of days. It has to be a more deliberate process as we have limited time to train up on equipment. And generally, your fielding initiatives only provide a base level of functionality. You have to get out and get reps and sets with that equipment in a simulated combat environment to build true readiness. So working really closely is an enterprise from Compo-1, Compo-2, and Compo-3 to make sure that the strategy is unified and moving forward together so that we can provide the best product for the American taxpayers. Looking forward to questions. Thank you. Great. So I'm gonna pull the thread a little bit about something that both Sergeant Major Sellers and Sergeant Major Harris mentioned. And that's the multifunctional logistics NCO. So for those that have never heard of this, what exactly is it? How are these NCOs managed? And why is this a result of Army structure changes? Yeah, I'm gonna talk a little bit about how we got after this and why. And then I guess Sergeant Major Harris can kind of hit out there the execution piece of it. But if you think about multifunctional logistics NCOs from where we've been thinking about it, we've been doing this for quite some time. I mean, if you take a look at Compo-2 and 3, they got a number of MOSs after their name tag, right? 2, 3, 4, just like what Julie had. She had five or six different jobs as we talked about it this morning on the bio, right? But it's kind of really simple. When I talk about from a multifunctional NCO perspective, it is, and I wanna be clear when we say this, right? Cause people really get confused that they don't understand it. It is not every NCO at every gay level cause we really wanna maintain that technical expertise at the Sergeant and Staff Sergeant level. That's really important. What we think we can get into the multifunctional aspect of this within the sustainment community is train them at the Sergeant First Class level, really certifying and validating them at SLC, revamping the education, making sure that they understand support operations, operations aspect of it, and just how to be a leader within the sustainment community. So foundationally, that's what they'll get. And then given the experience when they graduate there to do another job outside of their career field, managing a commodity. And there's MOS immaterial positions out there, you can do that then. First Sergeant being one, support operations being the second one, the S3 operations job, the echelon being another one. So there's clear examples of where that always happens. You don't have to be a certain MOS to go out and effectively lead soldiers. So those positions would be coded as such. And we talent manage based off the skill set of that individual. And then I think Ray will talk a little bit about how we're gonna get after that too from a doctrine perspective. Yeah, thanks Jimmy. Just to dovetail on that too. And part of that is, one, it's opportunity building. And two, part of that is self development alone, right? The institutional domain about what we're gonna teach and the POI that we'll train for multifunctional NCO is not the end all of be alls of the training of what that multifunctional NCO is gonna get. So the self development unit development is gonna matter. The good thing about this is that we've had the POI, or been developing the POI for a little bit in the training that we're gonna do in SLC. And so, you know, SLC, this won't be another class that we now create a whole new class. We're going to revamp the POI into the existing structure that we currently have in order to develop the multifunctional commission officer at the Sergeant First Class level for the sustainment community, for Sergeant Major Sellers and the team. So we are well on the way. We're getting that approved and through the wickets now. And then once it goes through the proper board approvals for the POI, we will start implementing that. And we're looking at maybe end of this year, early beginning of next year to really start getting after that to provide the community, the multifunctional non-commission officer in order to, you know, lead these troopers. Julie, if I could just pull in the string just a tad bit. So in the very beginning, she talked about TAA and the cuts that we have according to TAA. I think everybody knows that TAA is really the pacing item for the army, ebbs and flows. And so that as TAA cuts occur, we really got to put ourselves in the position to where we can respond to that appropriately without having to do a lot of movement around. And we already have those non-commission officers that we can kind of really plug and play because they've been educating and trained through the PME to be effectively do their jobs. So. Okay, great. Sergeant Major Hester. You talked about the critical required capabilities for 2040, the concept that AFC is developing. Can you expand on that a little bit more for us? Certainly, Julie. So there's, you know, concept required capabilities. We've developed really about 31 concept required capabilities that we think the army of 2040 has to happen. I will say I don't want to get out in front of General Rainey on these 31 critical capabilities, but you can, I mean, you can think about it from, you know, autonomous systems. You can talk about it, you can think about it from human machine integrated formations. You can think about it from the ability to sense deeper, understand faster, deliver the right payload when needed, and then understand the sustainment tail that has to follow that so that we can regenerate and then move on to the next objective. So, you know, fully integrated with regard to technology, fully integrated with regard to dot mill PFP and understanding all the requirements associated with being able to deliver that from a concept driven perspective in 2040, 2030 and beyond, but really into 2040. So, and then of course it's also driven to a certain degree by the modernization priorities. You can think about long range precision fires. You can think about the ability to do deep sensing, the ability to change the way we fight from a maneuver and fires perspective. So, these are all driven by concept. They all have a required set of capabilities and we're working to develop those capabilities and to deliver those capabilities on time because only delivering a capability doesn't necessarily give us the capacity to do that from a systems of systems perspective. No, 100%, I agree with that. Sergeant Major Jones, the predictive logistics in capabilities uses network sensors that automatically feed data from platforms into a common operating environment. Enabling sustainers, much like we've been talking about, to monitor, anticipate and distribute at the point of need. How does predictive logistics work just fundamentally within the National Guard? I really appreciate the softball right up front, Julie. I'm here for it. That was a really good one. No, so predictive logistics across the National Guard is, you know, one advantage we have, we learn to operate in a very decentralized manner from birth, right? Every company is basically scattered around the state. You may only be around, you're actually battalion, two, maybe three times a year. So, getting it, so a lot of our logistics NCOs get into that predictive logistics pretty early, but our systems are not where they need to be as Sergeant Major Sellers was talking about. There's a lot of improvements when it comes to actual automated systems that are gonna report, you know, AFATADs did a great job of sending back logistics reports if you've hand jammed all the information of AFATADs and sent it. I think the idea being the more intuitive and more automatic request, because, you know, as we talk contested logistics, you know, from a National Guard perspective, when we talk the homeland, we're looking beyond even the post because, you know, we're looking at mission assurance and governors need and help for protecting critical infrastructure in addition to that thing. So, it's a similar, we're all basically needing the exact same assets that my colleagues are talking about working on. And I really, our guardsmen will quickly pick that up and run with it. That's one thing that is really good about the National Guard is things like, I hate to get back to this because I tell people, so during COVID, West Virginia completely exed out of the federal distribution program because we're used to running that type of thing. And we had a guardsman that ran global logistics for myelin pharmaceuticals. So there's always somebody in the system that we can rely on that really adds a whole different dynamic in building that transformation. No, that's great. I appreciate that feedback. I would, if we can just stay with the contested logistics for a little bit. Sure. And I would, for any of the panel members, we recently did a course at the headquarters on contested logistics as a career intel professional. I know the importance of securing what we need from port to port and port to port. And so I would really like your input, Sir Major Sellers and any other panel members on why contested logistics is a thing and what does that mean operationally on how you combat the threat every single time that you're trying to get equipment where it needs to be? Yeah, I think that's important because if you cannot get out of the joint strategic support area and move equipment off the installation down to the port, then we're never gonna get to the objective. So it's important that we understand data, what it's trying to tell us, how to visualize that data, how to form it and use it so that when we do see it, we know exactly what we're looking at. So there's a lot of different initiatives that we have working through our, you know, sustainment center of excellence that help us understand data and data analytics and get into the baseline so that people kind of see data the same way. And then what do we do with that data when we do it? You know, back in the day, somebody made a joke earlier today, we were eating lunch, they were talking about the early 1990s and how long ago that was. But I grew up in the 1990s of that army and what that really means. And we used to kind of have scientific wild guesses about what the law packs would be on the board before we sent the law packs out of the BSA and out to the four objective areas. Well, I think we got to do better than that because we used to take the trucks, load them up and then whatever the infantry patrols didn't need, we brought back. And I don't think that was a good use of commodities. So now as we take a look at days of supply, how do we have to use data in order to inform our decisions so that we can make sure that we got the right load going to the right place at the right time so the equipment's not being wasted? Yeah, if I can just pile on a little bit with what Sir Major Sellers was talking about. So I think gone are the days with regard to contested logistics where we can move mountains of material, we can stage mountains of material forward. I think we're gonna have to be more predictive in understanding the need at the tactical edge, right? So that's delivery on time. That's our sensors on, you know, if you drive a Tesla in here, your Tesla can tell you the computer system and I can tell you a lot of things about what your car is doing and what it's not doing. Our combat systems need to be able to do that also. And then they need to be able to send that back to the sustainment enterprise so that they can deliver sustainment on time and in the right amount. So we don't deliver 30,000 gallons of fuel and we only need 15,000 gallons of fuel as an example. They don't deliver 50,000 rounds of X when we only needed 20,000 rounds of X. That is precision sustainment. That is contested logistics. You know, we have a contested logistics CFT that's looking at these systems, looking at how we can make them more data centric, looking at how we can be more predictive. And then as we're predictive, we're going to deliver the right amount of sustainment regardless of the class supply that it is while the maneuver formation on the move needs that. And then, you know, to get away from having to move that amount in the logistics from one place to another place. Yep. I know that's critical, very important. And I think it's one thing that doesn't always get highlighted, but especially in the line of work from, you know, people expect, units expect, to get supplies when they need to and how do we collectively keep contested logistics from being a problem and then eliminate the threat as much as humanly possible. Sir Major Harris. Sure. So, you know, from... Well, I had something for you. Oh, okay. No, go ahead. I'll ask. The only thing I was going to say is, you know, really from the trade off perspective, you know, as we look at contested logistics through our G2 lens and able to see those things, that's really helping us run with how we adjust POI and lessons plans, how we inform CTCs, war fighters, and all these other things so we can train in order to get after contested logistics to make sure our people are right. And it also informs the force design, both people and equipment, right? As we look, maybe things change because this requires more or maybe less to streamline, to get the logistics to where they need to be, less people, more equipment, so on and so forth, but the force design part of the team looks at that through the doctrinal perspective to determine how do we help also deliver the force that commanders need? So I was going to add that, but good, what's your question now? Transforming contact. So we're going to pivot real quick. You recently completed two TTXs led by TRADOC about how the brigade fights and how the division fights. Can you talk about that, about transforming in contact and what that means, how TRADOC participates in that? And then I would invite any other panel members too from your perspective, what that looks like inside of your organizations. Yeah, thanks. I think really the answer to that question is kind of really what I just said of how we look at it from the G2 perspective and the force design and how we write size, you know, the kind of finding formations and the doctrine in order to get after that. From my perspective, and what my focus on is again, it's really that educational piece of that of how we transform in contact to make sure we have the right validated, educated and trained leaders to lead through that problem set. And if the problem set is contested logistics, our sustainers and our combat forces need to be able to know how to secure, they need to know how to, our sustaining forces need to know how to get equipment and people and supplies to the locations when they need to do that. And so things that we do when we train is we look at transformation in contact. One, we kind of already did that from the educational perspective and like you, not to go back to COVID, but we had to do that in COVID when we turned common core into virtual learning, synchronous training online in order to make sure that our NCOs still got their PME education. And then we went through iterations of that of how we let certain units pipe in from a deployed area through a DSAT system in order to come into the classroom to train and educate. And so with all this, no matter what we do, we can't stop our professional education in what we're doing. There's a time and place for it. And so as we transform our PME in contact, as I talked about earlier about being adaptable, flexible and building readiness, we got to be able to take a look at how can we still provide professional military education that vets and validates our non-commissioned officers, officers and warrant officers because we work on all three cohorts of how we're able to do those to make them adaptable, flexible, make them exportable. How do we bring in potentially constructive credit? We already have a constructive credit program that maybe we take a look at and say is there a way to expand that in order to give the warfighters on the ground the ability to do those kind of things. So that's from my lens of where I really hang my hat on a transforming contact. It's really how do we get our educated leaders out there? How do we continue our promise to train and educate leaders for the Army? That's great. And especially because if the leaders don't understand what transforming in contact looks like, then how are they supposed to train that next generation so that they understand their role in it at echelon? Sergeant Major Jones, how do you define precision sustainment inside of your organization? And because you don't see your subordinate units in the same manner that Compa 1 does, how does that translate inside? So really precision, wow, that's a tough word from a guy from West Virginia. You gotta slow it down. Sorry for the teleprompter that's translating my accent up here, I messed that one up. No, prison, good Lord. Sustainment in a precise way. There you go, there you go. Cheating, cheating isn't trying. Yeah, it's good the other way. No, so it's always, actually the National Guard is really exceptional in the way we sustain our equipment and the way that we provide that predictive sustainment as best we can now, because we have limited resources. Limited resources, limited time. The way we manage our sustainment processes have to be more precise all the time, that we take the best care of the equipment that we have and that we maintain it at a high level because as I talked before, most of our modernization has and will continue to be through cascading modernization. That's not a bad thing. A lot of that equipment sets are still far and above that of our adversaries and we can, as long as they stay interoperable, we can put them to good use. But the challenging thing for sustainment or precision sustainment for us is the division headquarters and the brigade headquarters. It's one thing when you talk battalions at a state level, they could be scattered across six or seven different states. So when you look at a division like 34th ID, that's our Army of 2030 priority unit, you know, those brigade combat teams are scattered all across the United States and they're subordinate battalions maybe in different states even than that. So monitoring at the division level is really all about spreadsheets, unfortunately, where if we can continue to get more automated and be able to provide that back, that would save us a lot of time as a National Guard and really is a whole Army. No, great, that's a great answer. Thank you so much. And I think it helps us, you know, the soldiers and leaders that have grown up in COMPO when understand the challenges and the significance of precise sustainment within sight of your organizations to make sure that it's done properly. So there you go, I got you. There's a couple questions from the audience and then I'll go back to some of the other areas that we're covering. Simon J. Harris, is the Army considering bringing back technical ranks? There's a couple zingers in here for you guys. That's great. Short answer, more than likely not. So you gotta take a look at what we're actually looking for. What we're looking for is soldiers and non-commission officers that are skilled, that are qualified, that are certified and, you know, they're MOS. And we have some, you know, MOSs out there, soldiers that A, they always wanna be, and I hate to, you know, I always use AFC as an example and I apologize, Brian, but if you get a data coder, sometimes a data coder just wants to be a data coder for 20 years. I think there's other ways to approach that to let a data coder be a data coder for 20 years and bring back additional ranks. There's a lot that comes with that. There's funding, there's the palming of that funding to pay for that. There's just different things that go with it. Short answer, not on the docket just yet, but it is a topic we talk about. It is something that we talk about regularly, so hopefully that answers without being too short. I didn't ask, it's someone's question. Whoever asked that, thank you. There's a really good one that I'm gonna close with from that same card, but I'm gonna move on to the next one. Along with General Rainey, Sir. Major Hester, how are you informing all you are doing with our SELs attending the joint Keystone course? First off, I don't know that we're doing that as well as we should be, so. Maybe that's why it was asked. We probably do need to improve. So I think that, I'll use Project Convergence as an example, Project Convergence Army Experiment led by Army Futures Command, but really it is a lot of joint flavor in this. This past year we had all the services took part in Project Convergence to try to figure out how we're gonna really fight as a joint force in the future, and then what capabilities do we need to be able to do that in the future? So I think what I would take away from that question is we need to take the lessons learned from Project Convergence, and then we need to boil those down to what's applicable for our senior non-commissioned officers, and then we need to make an attempt to get into, not only just Keystone, but I think we probably need to do some of that inside our own service with our nominative leaders course. So I'll seriously, or certainly take that as a do-out and see how we can take at least some of the lessons that we're learning from Project Convergence so we can deliver that at the Keystone course from a professional military education perspective across the joint force, and then frankly, the other part of this is within Project Convergence and the other services, I think that they're taking a lot of lessons learned, and so we probably need to probably be a good opportunity for the SMA to talk to the SEAC and say, hey, these are some things we've learned across the services, these are things that are applicable for each individual service, and then from a joint service and non-commissioned officers perspective. Great, thank you. Senator Sellers, our installations are power projection platforms. What is AMC doing to improve and enhance these capabilities? So I think there's a couple of things going on in that area, right? As we get out and start doing some assessments of our facilities and infrastructure, we really gotta understand where we're at and where we need to make those investments at, right? Railheads, those types of things need to be improved, where we have our project projection platforms from, the infrastructure that helps house our soldiers on the installation, where they would push out from, all those things are looked at and how we're gonna improve and make those investments through our facilities and investment plans are being analyzed constantly, right? MCOM does a phenomenal job at getting that done for us, but it's a balance in terms of resources and where we put the priorities from the commander perspective. Okay, great. This question is, precision sustainment should include the ability to reduce demand. Please discuss what and how the Army is looking at in demand reduction, and I would like to pose that question to both AFC, AMC, and the National Guard. Someone go. You said you were gonna have easy questions, Julie. These are from the crowd. Mine aren't easy. Okay. So I think from a demand reduction perspective I think what are the sensors that are out there to be able to help us see ourself, right? And then what data do we collect from those sensors and then how do we streamline that data to the appropriate level of sustainment? So it could be a company sustainment node, it could be an FSC sustainment node, or it could be a division support area that we're talking about. So we just gotta be able to continue to be able to understand the requirements as far forward as possible, and then we have to be able to deliver that data on time and inaccurately to the sustainment enterprise so that they can deliver the supplies or the commodity when needed and at the appropriate time and place. So my favorite commodity, right? Class five. And you know, you can say class three, two as well. Demand reduction on some of that. I think Sergeant Major Hester hit the nail around the head when he talked about the sensors. So we have fuel and we got sensors on fuel blivvets that's actually calculating the fuel so we want to take a stick out there and measure fuel density and longer. So we know that we can have, you know, refuel on the move as we're moving forward to contact. You know, we have our PLS's are out there carrying the hymns and the hippos. All that stuff matters in terms of the technology. The one area that I get concerned with as we start to advance technology within some of these areas that we have right now is to make sure that we have the right soldier that has the aptitude to continue to carry that system along the way. Because we don't have the right people on there with the right aptitude. We don't reassess the right people. Then the technology is gonna outpace us as the individual human. So I mean, there's a lot of sensors that are out there. I think the sensors that he talked about will help us read that back in the BSA to know how much we need to push forward when the time comes. Whether that's fuel, water, ammunition or food, there's things out there that can help us measure that through technology, through data analytics, to be precise on the objective. Can I just add two things that I didn't think about with regard to demand reduction? So as we introduced robotics, I think that there's a huge opportunity for demand reduction there as we push supplies forward on robotic vehicles. And then we retrofit casualties or other things that need to be moved back to the support area. That's a demand reduction initiative that can also work very well for us. I also think that we're looking at what industry is doing. There are a number of tools out there in industry. I can use an example, Walmart. Walmart doesn't do inventory in their stores with a person and a clipboard, right? They do it, it's all a digital inventory. And they know the commodities that they need based upon that digital inventory. So if I was hoping to predict something in the future, we sort of look at this for demand reduction perspective, why should we not be able to have a robot drive the motor pool at night and collect data that tells us all the things that we need so that when the motor sergeant comes in in the morning, he or she has that right there on their tablet, on their computer, and we've got a class three leak here. We've got a flat tire there. So these are all ways that we can reduce the demand for sustainment maintenance and other kinds of things that we're trying to do across the force. I think that's all that stuff, Brian, is making us more precise. So you talked about that, Sir Major Hester. It's really interesting. I went and visited a Procter and Gamble plant in eastern West Virginia, and there's not a soul on that floor. It's all robotics, loading pallets, stacking, inventory, and it looks like something out of the future rolling around out there. It smells like dryer sheets. It's really weird. But no, the demand, if you look at historically, we're at a really unique point in history. I was reading General Petraeus' book, Conflict, and there was a statement in there, so don't hold me to it. In five days, Russia fired more artillery rounds than in the entire UK stockpile. So when we talk about demand reduction, when we look at large-scale combat operations across potentially multiple theaters, our ability to have demand reduction and be right on those sustainment systems is important, because when you have contested logistics all the way through, we're not talking U-boats sinking transport ships in the Atlantic during World War II. We're talking about cyber attacks and everything from the United States forward. You're just layered and layered. So as we've spoken, my colleagues have articulated much better than I. We got to be right when we push things. We can't be wrong with how much ammo we got. And we grew up in an environment where you always ask for more than you needed, right? And hoped you would get less. We've got to start the culture now of not just the legit, this is not a logistics problem. This is a warfighter problem down to a squad level of understanding exactly what you need to fight a certain fight and not asking for more and expecting to get less because that's what causes all that excess. And that's something culturally, we can start training from trade-off all the way through the units and organizations up to the division level. That's a great point. Thank you so much for that reminder of being good stewards and not just continually asking for things because we always have. Sergeant Major Harris, in regards to transforming and contact, what areas do you see that require additional emphasis in time and PME? And what areas could be de-emphasized for the Army to be the premier NCO Corps that it is? Yeah, thanks. One, I think our NCO Corps and our PME is always going to be the envy of the world just because of the time and the resources and the money we put against them. The emphasis that our commands, both commanders and list of warrant officers that we put towards our professional military education. I think what we really got to take a look at and what I'm looking at right now with the team is, what are those things that we could train in trade-off that only trade-off can train? We think about 22 years of conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq. We pulled a lot of things into the institutional environment, a lot of lab-based training going on, and we took that on. And so what we got to be able to do, because one of the charges that we were given working with FORSCOM, it's our Major Holland out there, is getting back some of that time in PME. And how do we take some of those unit-owned responsibility training things that we do and give to units to manage, to assess, to validate, to certify that'll give us time and space in PME to really build reps and sets to deliver what we want our non-commissioned officers to be when they leave their PME, their resident PME course, whether you're a sergeant, staff sergeant, sergeant first class, mass sergeant, sergeant major. And then you gotta remember that, and the two phases of the Common Core and the proponency that everything that we teach within trade-off is the baseline on the echelon of the grade played about, that you're about to enter. And so for Common Cores, the baseline, all of the non-commissioned officers, the same. These things that we deem that come out of our regulations of what we want a non-commissioned officer to be at grade play. When you get to the proponency phase, we're really getting after the ICTs and your specific proponent by the MOS that you currently hold to baseline you in that and how we baseline you in that through repetition, through sets and figuring that out. So we really gotta take a look at what are those things that we're doing that's not allowing us to get after the reps and sets that we need to get after an event. There are things that may be antiquated in there that we teach, that we don't do in the operational army or is not in a commander's met anymore. And the question has to be, do we still teach that? Or is that a unit responsibility to teach where I can harness more time back, trade-off can harness more time back to get reps and sets on something different that maybe matters more to the command. Maybe that's unit training management. Maybe that's, whatever that task may be. And so as you transform in contact, really working hand-in-hand with Forrest Common and Sergeant Major Holland and the team there, really determine what can we pull out of all the phases of PME or keep or maybe add to, and we have to go back and ask for more time to be able to do this, right? To get the reps and sets that we need to promise on our delivery or deliver on our promise to really give back the validated and educated trained leaders that our commands need. I think, I know when I was at the cyber school, one thing that I ran into, excuse me, was the operational requirements and the institutional need. And so since we're on this topic, I think it's really important to you what the Army needs inside of an organization from a PME perspective versus what they want. And how do you balance that within TRADOC? And I would say any of the panel members, if you wanna jump in, please do. Yeah, and I'll definitely, it is a balance by what you want and what you need. And I will say this is that there are things that were mandated we have to teach in PME. It's outlined in the NDA, it's outlined by our Army senior leaders through Army Directives that say you will teach this in PME and there's no strain left or right, which is good because there's good things in there that we must do. And then we gotta balance and find out and say what is it you want us to teach and how long do you want it to be in an institution? If you're okay with Staff Sergeant Harris leaving your formation for five months or six months to get after an output that you want, then awesome. Give them to us for five or six months and we'll teach them. Of course, we need the money and the resources to do it. But that's a long time for a squad leader to be away from their formation. And so what we gotta understand is again, we're baselining this and we only have them in TRADOC for a finite amount of time and then what's happening when they get back to their organization in their unit? So you come to BLC, you're in BLC for 21 days and we're gonna baseline you on common core activities and topics in our POI and lesson plan. It might be three to five years till you come back to a PME institution. So what's happening in that three to five years? That's incumbent upon us, non-commissioned officers, officers and warrant officers to continue to reinforce the training of what was taught in PME at your organization. We have to be able to do that. Because then they're gonna come to ALC and we're gonna get them for 14 days of virtual synchronous training for common core and dependent on their CMF, they might go through two weeks of proponency or they might go through four weeks of proponency training. But then we're not gonna see them again in a PME till maybe five to seven years. So what's happened in that five to seven year mark of the reinforcement training that's going on? So again, the balance is teaching what are the things that you need us in TRADOC to teach to baseline and then validate when they matriculate up to the next echelon. But the real question is, is what is the emphasis that's being put back into the units to reinforce what we've taught in the POI to the soldiers and the leaders that we're teaching? So hopefully that helps. No, that did. I think it's like, okay, well I can teach all of this and you will get them in three years. And that was the challenge of, or it's the warrant officers, officers and NCOs responsibility to train at echelon. And then you send them back to me for the baseline to your point. So yeah, I think that's a really important discussion point in that everyone that hasn't really had the opportunity to work in TRADOC, which you should. Great for professional development. But that's one thing that I think the operational army doesn't always understand and gets frustrated with the institution. And so trying to balance that, I know is very difficult. For everyone on the panel, what does migrating from anticipatory to predictive logistics look like within your organizations? And we'll start with you, Sergeant Major Jones, and come down. So what does it look like now? Sure. Okay. Or what would you like it to look like, maybe? I mean, I think we've talked a lot about it. You know, I really liked what Sergeant Major Hester said about, you know, there's levels of things we haven't even imagined yet that save time and effort and ensure additional accuracy. You know, we look at AI and human machine interface and things like that. And you know, there's a little bit of, there's a little bit of hesitation across the force, 100% to integrate those things. And I don't really think it's because of the, you're taking my job away type attitude. It's more of, you know, just uncertainty and, you know, again, talking about culture. We all grew up in an environment where if you wanted it done right, you did it yourself. And I'm sure the first thing we're gonna do when we really get to those levels is have three or four checks on the output of those different systems to make sure they're accurate. But I really believe that this is the way of the future and it really just, it allows us to use those limited resources in other better suited areas. So for us in the National Guard, absolutely, any way that systems, you know, personnel are something we don't have access to very often, you know. Just 48 days a year essentially, but so anything that's automotive or intuitive and that provides more accurate data that we don't have to utilize our soldiers valuable training time is exceptional for us. Yeah, so for us, it's pretty much like set in stone, right? I mean, so, and I mean that tongue in cheek, but you know, for TRADOC, we pretty much know what we're gonna do at the ATCs and the COEs as we train. And so our, the sustain of the supplies that we need and things we do are pretty regular and we stay pretty good with that. Now how we help out with that though is really in our training of our leaders as we go through. So for those that haven't heard, and I think I talked about an AUSA at the end of last year is the launch of FORGE 2.5 that we're now teaching all of our drill sergeants and that our drill sergeants have to go through. And that's a series of events and there are three field training exercises that they go out to Hammer and Villain FORGE. And really what it does is it allows us to validate and certify our drill sergeants before they go out to the execution. And it keeps them relevant within the field and this allows us to add things like this in here. So we can put a mission plan in there that says when you go out to the FORGE, which is your final FTX, you're gonna be contested in your logistics and you have to figure out how you're going to account for your ammunition, your food, your so on and so forth. Because when the drill sergeants go out there before the FORGE, the final FTX, they are the squad leader. They are the platoon sergeant. They're not a drill sergeant at that point per se. Because we want them to model what Wright looks like to that brand new private that's about to go to the first unit of assignment. So they can see what a staff sergeant, their sergeant first class is supposed to do. And when it comes to this, we're able to put these kind of into the lesson plan and the mission planning orders to say if you're gonna go out here, this is how you do it. So we take it more from the training aspect to our leaders, our drill sergeants and our instructors as they go out and do it. I think that's a great question. So as I thought that question a little bit, I think over time, we really just kind of talked about being anticipatory, how you have that gut intuition about when something is about to go low or wrong. You kind of anticipate the requirement. We train that in our logistical cohort for quite some time, but that's not an exact science, right? That's kind of intuition. How do you train intuition? It just comes through experience. Now, I think we got to be a little bit more deliberate in that process as we cultivate that environment and that climate. We really got to talk about like what the Sergeant Major of the Army really talks about, being brilliant at the basics. And for me fundamentally, throughout the systemic community, I think it kind of goes to understanding, war fighting, that's maneuvers and fires, teaching our non-commissioned officers and soldiers, war fighting functions and making sure they understand that so they can be more precise in what the information that they give to the commanders to make those informed decisions. So I think it's an institutional change and it's gonna be a culture change throughout our profession for a while, but as more as we understand how the war fighting operates on the battlefields, whether it's through CTC rotations or have you, that's where you're gonna be a little bit more precise in delivering some of what we need to. Yeah, so I think that it's a systems approach. I don't think you can disconnect sustainment from maneuver, intel, protection, fires. I think it's a system of systems. So it looks like that to me and our multifunctional logisticians are able to provide the supplies and commodities that we need across the war fighting functions. But I also think it's, somebody wrote this down for me and I appreciate it from my team over there. It's stealthy, it's resilient, it's fast, it's distributed, it's agile, it's adaptive, it's in a constant state of motion, it's hot, you know, and most important, it's survivable. But, you know, so they wrote that for me and I'm very thankful for them because it sounds really nice, but what I would say personally, you know, what does it look like? To me, it's data-centric, it's sensor-enabled, it may be AI or machine or robotic-enabled, it's delivered on time at the right time and then it reduces the stress across all the war fighting systems. Now that's great, and I think, regardless of where you fall in the army with your combat arms and enabler as a sustainer, being able to know and having something data-driven that is anticipatory, where, you know, Sam, you talked about, you know, all of us, we grew up in the army in the 90s, I mean, anticipatory was you went to your barracks in Seattle and gave them an empty toilet paper roll so that you could get another one, whereas like now we can actually, you know, that was how we anticipated things back then and now we have data-driven ways to anticipate what we need from a sustainer perspective, which is amazing. Dusty's dying down there, he liked that analogy. So I read your Harris, one of the chief of staff of the army's priority is the profession of arms and you talked a little bit about what you're doing inside TRADOC with strengthening the profession. What is TRADOC doing to get after the precise profession of arms portion? Yeah, thanks, we're actually doing, there's a lot in the space as you would imagine. Some of it is, one of the charges that was given to us was removing ambiguity in our standards and some of the things that we do and so TRADOC, we've been charged and we're taking a look at ARDAPAM 670-1 about our grooming standards, some of these other things remove some of the ambiguity in order to provide the right answer for leaders to be able to find to say this is how we can hold people to a standard of what our regulations say. And that's an arduous task. I mean, if you take a look at it, there's been five army directives, three mil per message and a bunch of holistic, a whole bunch of other things that have kind of changed some of our standards over time. And so we just got to get those in the right place, kind of get rid of the old army directives and mil per messages and get them into the regulation and go. But part of that is also providing the top cover and the chief used those words before, but it's really empowering our officers, warrant officers and non-commissioned officers to make those on the spot corrections, knowing that their leadership will be there. Third ID general or major general nor, he has a policy that he uses in third infantry division. I talk about this everywhere I go that does exactly that for his leaders. It's a withhold policy for certain investigations or complaints that come up and he is gonna be the purview officer to say we do or we do not investigate something. And that is where he put his leadership out there to make sure that if his leaders are doing the right thing, the right way to correct a deficiency, that they're not gonna lead in fear. And that's kind of part of it, right? Lead in fear of being investigated or something else. Because we cannot have an investigative culture in our leaders. Our leaders need to lead and hold the standards and not worry about those things. So generally you can. We all can without a promise as long as you're doing it legally, morally, ethically. You don't violate somebody's safety and we're doing it the right way. There's always a right way to talk to somebody and we got to truly understand that. The other thing we're doing is we're kind of, we're starting from the ground roots as we talk about, some of you may have heard of like life skills training in IET, AIT, OSIT and our PME. Really what we're talking about is foundational training. And this isn't kind of soft skill things, but this is, how are we gonna get these young Americans that come join the military to inculcate to our values, our norms, our morals, relatively in a fast manner and understand what they may have done before they join isn't acceptable anymore when you come in. We do a very good job, our drill sergeants do a very, very good job at doing this. And when we talk about foundational training at echelon through AIT, OSIT, BCT and through levels of PME, it's getting after respect, right? It's getting after how to treat people correctly. It's getting after resiliency and how to have conflict resolution and how to speak up for yourself and have that intestinal fortitude, that moral courage to say no. In the basic training environment, we do that all the time our drill sergeants do with holiday block leave when our soldiers go home for Christmas break because we want them to have refusal skills to be able to go home if they've been training for four to five weeks, go home and tell their friends no, I'm not gonna get drunk or no, I'm not gonna go touch those drugs because I'm in the Army, like I'm training. I gotta go back and do what I said I had to do. And so to be able to have that courage, that moral courage to say no and to do some of those things. We're continuing to work that at Echelon as we go and we put that in PME. And of course as it goes in PME, you learn different things at Echelon, right? Now you're at the kind of the managerial level so you need to know how to teach that. Not let me tell you how refusal skills. And so as we work through that POI, we're gonna start doing a pilot here soon but not getting out in front of my boss. I wouldn't ever propose that you get out in front of General Brito. Nor would I advise that for any of you. I would like to sit with this for one moment. What particularly is National Guard doing initiative wise, initiatives wise to strengthen the profession that you've seen? Apparently that was still on. You're always on. What's that? You're always on. Oh okay, well that's good to know now. Now the National Guard, you know, we have the exact same issues so just less time to really resolve them. The, you know, getting people from compliance to commitment for us has gotta be a more rapid thing. So it's a really, for most organizations, the way that we try to professionalize those soldiers is really about the why. Not just as an underlying tone for the organization but as a direct training program, right? Not just understanding what they do on the war fight but everything they do below that for the citizens. And you know, because the truth of the matter is the face of the Army is the National Guard. Cause any weekend across the entire country in every community, every county, every town, there's people wearing that army uniform and they're representing everyone in this room, everyone on this panel. Whether they've ever been Compo one, Compo three, Compo two, it doesn't matter. To the American public, that is what a soldier is. And we are very mindful of that in the National Guard and very, we know that that's, we know that that's the case and everyone dealing with recruiting issues and we don't want that to be our fault essentially because of the way we represent the great soldiers across all three compo. So it's a really directive and really focused event to make sure that we build that professionalism in even if it isn't small doses so that they take that profession of arms away and know that, you know, this was really the foundation of this country was, you know, citizen soldiers standing up against the, you know, oppression to gain freedom for everyone. So once they realize that, you know, we're the oldest service as a militia, essentially, but- That's a humble flex right there. Yeah, that's a really humble one. But once they understand that, what the meaning is and how we're all working together and really building one great one army team, some of them get it, some of them don't. Right. That's the common factors for everyone. No, that's great. And I love that you brought that up, that every time that they go into the community, they are the face of the army, they're also recruiters. Yeah. And I, you know, the time that I spent in trade-off from drill sergeant to serge major at all the echelons, whenever soldiers would go home, be in uniform in the airport, I would tell them there's a community that's never seen a soldier. And so this is the first time that they've seen an American soldier in uniform in the airport and that is what they are going to attest that the United States Army is so act accordingly or I will assist and insist when you get back. Just for those that wore a drill sergeant badge, you know what that means. And so I think that this is a good pivot because there's a couple questions on here since we're talking about recruiting is what for all of you, what are we doing? What are you doing? What is the army doing to preserve the all volunteer force for the future? I'll start, Julie. Thanks. So first it's our number one priority and our chief and our secretary and our serge major, the army have been very clear to us that recruiting is our number one priority. And an all volunteer force is our number one priority. So, and it's also our asymmetric advantage, right? Our people are our advantage. It's not our tanks, all of them are fantastic. It's not our helicopters, all of them are the best in the world. It's our people. And our people bring the will to win. And if you have the will to win, then you're gonna win. We've seen that in Ukraine. The Ukrainians are probably less trained, less equipped, but they have the will to win and they've been able to resist. So the other part of it is the continuous communication that the one thing that the army does better than anybody is we build leaders, right? From the very beginning, when a young man or a young woman leaves their home and becomes part of our profession, we talk about the profession of arms, we start building them as a leader. First to lead themself, then to lead a small team and then a larger team and a larger team and so on and so forth, right? So it's really about what are we doing in our community? So from an army futures command perspective, I'll give you a recent example, South by Southwest, big tech innovation, music and theater conference in the Southeast down in Austin, Texas. The army went in as a signature sponsor this year for that event. And frankly, we brought the whole entire army to include our secretary down to Austin to talk about the army, to speak about what the army's doing and what your army, your American army is doing for you as a citizen and as a member of our society. So we're continuing to do that outreach through recruiters, through our engagements with academia, with industry from army futures commands perspective. And we tell people, hey, you should be asking everybody that you run into, are they interested in being part of our team, being a soldier in our army, the best and one of the oldest professions. And then the other thing that we're continuing to do is message that our army is innovative. And you may choose one particular job in the army, but there may be an opportunity for you to develop yourself in a number of different ways from an innovative perspective. So these are some of the things from a futures command perspective. We're supposed to be the innovators. So we do talk a lot about innovation. We do speak to industry and academia a lot and we're continuing to message that our doors are open and we're ready to take America's young men and women and turn them into leaders. Yeah, I think we've all done that pretty much the same way depending on where you located that, right? So from an AMC perspective, this patch is globally. It's all over the globe, everywhere you go. So I think our major subordinate commands do a phenomenal job at getting out in the community, talking to JROTC, talking to ROTC, colleges in general, industry, and recruiting the talent that's out there across the board. I think we've changed the way that we've gone out to the public. I'll use an example of what CCOM does up at Aberdeen Proving Grounds. They just kind of open up the community and the installation and invites the public in and allow them to see the Army firsthand. And there's things that civilians don't know about the Army. There's this whole technology side that they introduced to them that they may be interested in. And so just showing them a different side than just what they normally would see on the TV commercials, what they are starting to do holistically across the board. And if you think about AMC and where they're located at, they have some strategic points around the globe where they touch major points of the community in central locations. If I think about what TACOM, Tank and Automotive Command does, and they get out there in the community and do things on a regular basis, constant touch points is where we didn't go before. I think that's what we're doing a lot better than what we did before in the past. Before, it was just in a high school area kind of set up in the corner. You kind of waited for the kids to come to you and talk to you that they were a recruiter. But now we have more of a presence in all those areas that people are walking around and just come on to know more about the Army. And I think there's uniform right here. It does a lot. It attracts people to the uniform. They think it's neat. They like it. They think it's professional and they want to know more about it. So I think that's changed the dynamic and it's helped us a lot in that space in the recruiting round. Yeah, thanks, Jimmy. And really, from our perspective, and I'll keep it based on this question of how we retain the all volunteer force, is Future Soldier Prep Course, which Trey Dock started about 18 months ago. Future Soldier Prep Course was designed and built as we saw that we missed a sessions by X amount, which we all are tracking. And so to this date, about 18 months, we put in 17,243 soldiers, future soldiers have gone through the Future Soldier Prep Course with 15,700 about to go to their first unit of assignment. To put it in context, that's four combat brigades that we never would have had in the Army if they didn't go through the Future Soldier Prep Course. And so they go through two lanes. They go through an academic lanes to try to raise their base score so they can certify for an MOS or a CMF to serve in the military. And the other one is motivation and physical assessment to get them to meet our physical requirements. Because we're not changing any standards. We did not lower a single standard, but what we found is we had soldiers or we had volunteers that were right on the cusp of getting in, they just couldn't do it. So we give them a contract, we bring them down to Fort Jackson, South Carolina for up to 90 days and we put them through either, either one of those two programs to kind of push them through. And so we've expanded. This has been so successful, it's an NDA language. So it came out in this last NDA and it was really to all services, now we'll do a Future Soldier Prep Course or a Future Soldier Course of something that their service chief deems necessary for their department. So this has been very successful. So for us to keep that, think about that four brigade combat teams were the soldiers we never would have had if we did not train them. That's an amazing metric to continue to footstomp. It is and I appreciate it. And so the graduation rate is 96.7%. That's pretty big. We have a 23.4% point raise within six weeks of soldiers that go through. So that could be a soldier that maybe barely qualified or was on the cusp of qualifying, but even if they did, they only would have qualified for certain MOS. With a 23.4% point raise, now they could qualify for something they really wanted to come in and be in the Army. But we're teaching them good habits. We're teaching them how to learn. We're teaching them how to retain information, build the capacity so they can understand those and get physical. We average 1.4% body fat decrease per week in a soldier that goes through or a Future Soldier goes through the physical fitness program. Why? Because we're teaching them proper nutrition. They're actually getting out and exercising with physical therapists and athletic trainers that are there watching and to make sure we do it healthfully because we don't want to hurt them. And those that do a trip, the 3.3%, that's all right. We still, what we did is we put better Americans back into society. Maybe hopefully we changed their life to think about how they live their life differently or how they could be a better person for themselves and their family. So to be honest, it's a win-win situation, all 100% of them are a win-win for us. And I think that's how we took that on to make sure that we retain the all volunteer force. Great. Simons Jones? Yeah, that's been a tremendous program. I was so happy when we launched that program because I'd argued for years, we can't say that we're the premier training institution in the world and not try to help get them ready because COVID crushed academics. We have a generation there that we're gonna have to accept as kind of needs and some additional assistance to get up to the level to meet that minimum requirement. And there's some other things, ASVAB looking to get a calculator in there because that's how we do business now. But I think recruiting is a really interesting dynamic. So being in a state, I will tell you that our civilian counterparts highly value soldiers. I mean, they call our offices all the time wanting to hire every national guardsman. Do you know anybody that ever touched a uniform one time? Because they want more of that. I'll tell you where I think, so the value of what we bring to the table as an institution, I think, is known at certain points. What really I focus a lot on is how are we taking care of those soldiers when they're in uniform, right? It's straight NCO business. Not just how we train them, how we handle their day-to-day operations, but when they leave, when they go out the door through retirement or through the end of a contract or another means, the way that they leave this organization, you can have the best recruiter on the planet. You will never out recruit someone's sphere of influence. So one soldier that comes in, that gets out of the Army in any compo who gets out and does nothing but talk bad about that compo, you will not out recruit that sphere of influence. We're a family business, all the data shows that. And if we're losing that small population that we focus on, we're not gonna be able to maintain it. But I think everything data-wise that we're seeing, we're doing a great job. Everything's ramping back up. Future soldier, I sit on the rack for recruiting for the National Guard. So I think everything's moving very positively. The telling our story thing, getting more of our compo one counterparts out and demonstrating who we are as an Army to our everyday citizens and not letting that one or two people tell a story that's not an accurate portrayal of what we do as an organization, I think will keep all volunteer Army for long past all of our lifetimes. That's the goal. I agree, I think all the data that I've seen is that we're trending upward for sure. And it's important that every single person, whether you're a soldier for life or you have separated whatever that looks like. But to your point, it's telling that Army's story is incredibly important. Whatever that story is, everyone has a story that is unique. It's compelling, it's interesting and it can come from all facets of life and this business that we're all in and have been in, it's something that can change your stars. It can change your class in life. It can change your trajectory if you apply yourself. And so that part of the Army story just needs to be continuously told because it's really important to sustaining an all-volunteer course and getting past these recruiting challenges that we've had for all the reasons over the past couple of years. So this is another pivot. Back to logistics. Sir Major Sellers, can you discuss specifically how we were incorporating contested logistics in training exercises, war fighters, CTC rotations, et cetera, and Sir Major Harris, are we incorporating contested logistics into exercises within TRADOC? And how are we doing that? So I'll start with you, Sir Major Sellers. Yeah, I think a great example is that what we just saw in PC-24, where we took some things out there to NTC, straight out of PC-24 and put it into the box and challenged through technology exactly what we're probably gonna see on a modern day Army battlefield. And so all the stuff that AFC is doing in terms of the contested logistics space and then being able to incorporate that into real time and the CTC is powerful. Okay, thank you. Yeah, thanks. And definitely in our PME, right? And so when you go there, whether it's triple C or whether it's SLC or MLC, as we talked about our practical exercises when we do things, it's one of the things that we have to make sure that our war fighting function when you get into these practical exercises is one of the things that they have to account for of the contested logistics and then how are you going to do that? How are you gonna provide on time logistics when it's needed with efficiency at the right times? Absolutely. And the question was posed to Sir Major Sellers and Harris but Sir Major Jones for the National Guard, are you incorporating any contested logistics scenarios inside of exercises? And if so, how are those being exercised? I mean, it's definitely a focus but is it a prevailing focus? I doubt it, just to be frank about it because the way, last year, for example, I went to visit a unit and they were on a fob trying to do operations and we basically kicked them off and said, look, you get. So trying to get that old mindset and sort of looking at large-scale combat operations, when you've got a generation of people that have never touched it, the people obviously at this table remember, you know, pre-911 were large-scale combat operations was the primary thing. But we have to remember that our 06s and below and 07s, a lot of them came in after. You know, after we converted the war on terror. So yeah, it's moving forward. We're talking contested logistics and getting it, trying to get that mindset because everybody's still kind of stuck in that mode where, hey, you just order it and it's gonna show up and, you know, it's all about getting the order right, not worrying about how it gets there, where it's coming from. Absolutely. So in regards to large-scale combat operations, for sustainment on the move, sorry, major sellers, starting at the joint strategic support area and post-camps and stations, how are you incorporating sustainment on the move with LISCO inside of those? Yeah, I think that has a lot to do with how we're gonna change our doctrine. Okay. In terms of how we fix arm and fuel forward, rather just sitting in the BSA, there's a lot of things kind of touched on this earlier where we have to be more agile and responsive straight to the point of need upfront. And there's gonna be a lot of times where we just can't stay stagnant, right? Because the longer you stay there, the more you make yourself a target. Right. And so, sustainment on the move is gonna be one of those things where it's gonna be continuous in motion and we're doing a lot of things upfront forward of the lines. Okay, great. So, Major Hester, when we're talking about deliberate transformation, what is AFC doing with that in regards to approved MOD priorities? And if you could talk a little bit about what that is. Yeah, so with regard to deliberate transformation, so that is in line with the six modernization priorities, that's in line with our CFTs and what our CFTs are working on, whether it be next generation combat vehicle, whether it be soldier lethality or so on and so forth. Really those six priorities that have been consistent over the last six years. And frankly, with regard to deliberate transformation, we've had a lot of success here. So, probably more success than we thought we were gonna have. And then that's created some dilemmas for us also, right? So, how do you then fund that success and how do you make trades that you're going to need to be able to make with regard to the modernization priorities? And I think it sort of goes in line a little bit with what we're talking about with regard, both with regard continuous transformation and then of course, contest the logistics. So, as we're having success with regard to modernization priorities, then we have to start thinking about, as we deliver that, what are we taking out of our formation so that we optimize appropriately? So, what legacy equipment is in our formation? Jimmy talked about the war on excess, so to speak. How do we get that excess legacy equipment out of our formations? How do we optimize the enduring fleet? And because we know it's gonna be part of our go-to-war kit for at least for a minute going forward. And then how do we deliver that modernized equipment in a meaningful way where it's delivered to the appropriate formations at the appropriate time? What we don't wanna do is we don't wanna deliver modernized equipment as people are going out the door. That doesn't allow us to get after the training requirements, that doesn't allow us to get out the organizational requirements. So the leader development, it doesn't help with facilities management. There are all those things that we have to look at from a dot no PFP perspective with regard to deliberate transformation. So the message is we're having a lot of success here, but with success makes us have to think about the trades that we're going to be able to have to make hard decisions on with regard to funding. And then clearly it's in line with what is it? Legacy, is it enduring, is it modernized, and then where are we gonna go from there and how does that impact our war fighting capability? Absolutely. So audience, we got to most of the questions. There is one that a soldier from ATAC had. If you can stand by, I will get that to the panel member. Thanks again for all the participation today and to the panel members for your participation and candid conversation on so many complex topics that the Army is going through and that also the focus of this panel was, which was Transform and Contact and Precision Sustainment. Yeah, just slow it down, sorry Major, just slow it down. Enjoy the exposition, ongoing panels and fireside chats over the next three days. Registration is now open for the Army 10 Miler. AUSA is the lead sponsor for that. And please join us for AUSA's annual meeting in October in DC. Enjoy your day and be all you can be. Ladies and gentlemen, a few admin notes as we close. Again, let's give another round of applause to our NCO panel and their moderator. As Julie mentioned, this concludes the programming portion of today, but the exhibit halls will remain open until 1700 hours. So please join us there for some more networking. We will begin tomorrow morning at 0730 for coffee in the concert hall foyer on the sides where you were this morning and our first session will begin promptly at 0830. Now for all of those of you in the room who are not members of AUSA, shame on you and you can fix that by visiting our AUSA membership booth in the main floor and don't forget to stop by the AUSA store so you get a gift for your spouse at home after you return home from Global Force. Ladies and gentlemen, thanks for your attendance today and be all you can be.