 I'm Maar and Leed, I'm a senior advisor here at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and we are having this event this morning as part of our security dialogues and specifically a series of events focused on future rotorcraft, generously supported by Ball and Textron. We're very grateful to them for making us able to do this more focused look at where rotorcraft is going. We've had a couple of different events on future vertical lift and this is the latest in that series. We wanted to have a conversation about as the FEL effort gets more robust over time, what kinds of challenges and opportunities are out there, how does it take best advantage of the plethora of lessons learned from past efforts, none of which are identical to what FEL is envisioned to become, but many of which have salient experiences that might help guide the effort as it goes forward. To that end, I'm really honored to be joined by a great panel here. First is my colleague and mentor and generally all around smart guy, David Burto. He's the Senior Vice President and the Director of our National Security Program on Industry and Resources, also known as Inspire. To leave it to David to figure out how to make industry and resources inspiring. He's been at CSIS since 2008. He has a long career both as an educator and as a practitioner in the Department of Defense in industry as a professor, excuse me, and is extremely knowledgeable about acquisition and in particular. He's going to offer some thoughts on some work that his program has done related to complex acquisition and some of the historical lessons that they've been able to derive. Also, Vice Admiral David VanLet retired, was a Naval Aviator turned career acquisition professional whose career culminated as the Program Executive Officer for Joint Strike Fighter and he I think is widely regarded as having taken over a program with some degree of difficulty and challenge and making pretty substantial changes and getting it back on track. So very honored and excited to have him here with us. Betsy Schmid is the, I got to get your title right, Betsy, sorry, it's long. She's the Vice President for National Security and Acquisition Policy at Aerospace Industries Association. Before coming to AIA recently, Betsy spent 12 years on the Senate Defense Appropriations Committee to include most recently as the staff director or sort of the clerk and she's also has started her career as a Presidential Manager Fellow in the Department of Defense so she's going to offer some thoughts on in particular some things that the FVL effort might want to keep in mind as it tries to work with the Congress a challenge under any circumstances, I think most would argue. And finally Lieutenant Colonel Allison Thompson, Colonel Thompson is the Rotorcraft Special Military Assistant in the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Acquisition Technology and Logistics. She is a Marine Aviator who has commanded a squadron during a tour in Afghanistan also served for 13 months in an operational tour in multiple positions with Marine Air Group 29. She's had both operational assignments and headquarters assignments and is sort of providing advice and insight to AT&L from a variety of different perspectives going forward so I think she's going to provide some perspective on some things that they are potentially thinking about and try to ground some of what could be construed as either cautionary or pessimistic and talk about how they're going to try to take some of that on board. So a couple of admin notes to start if people could turn off their ringers, that would be much appreciated. Second, if for people who are watching on the web if you'd like to send us questions by Twitter you can do so at csissecdialogues and also if you would prefer the old fashioned way you can email questions to me at mleedmed at csis.org. And finally when we get to the Q&A if people could raise their hands we'll come around with a mic if you can be first identify yourself and second be concise it would be greatly appreciated. So with that David we'll start with you and again David's going to offer some thoughts on some of the work that they've done about complex acquisitions in general. Thanks, thanks Martin. I think I'm the only speaker with slides so once you're done with mine you'll be able to actually focus on the discussion itself. My group does a lot of research work. This particular project was under some funding as part of the acquisition research program from the Naval Postgraduate School. We received the funding in 2012 and we completed the project earlier this year and had a fairly long, it's a kind of more academic study and academic paper, a long presentation and a long report posted on the NPS website. I think we'll have the slides here linked to this website and to the presentation here after it goes up this morning. So you'll be able to access the slides and download them. I'm really just going to summarize our work and give you a few of the examples that we found. Let me go to the next slide. I have to see out of the upper left hand side of my head here. We're looking at challenges and root causes. We've done a lot of work on managing complex systems. We took out about five years ago. We've had a series of follow-on projects. This particular one was looking at governance in the acquisition process for systems of systems, mostly from a DOD perspective, entirely from a national security perspective. We had already developed a system of eight attributes that we use as a filtering mechanism for applying. I'm really sounding like an academic here but bear with me because there's relevance to it here, that we apply to the governance analysis process if you will. And we put up a couple of definitions of complex systems and system systems simply because they mean different things to different people. Next slide. So the left hand side here has the eight attributes, the level of organizational focus, decision-making authority, enforcement, which we include sort of in quotation marks auditing, meaning essentially internal oversight of the process if you will, integration of functional end-user needs all through the process, not just at the front end, knowledge ownership and sharing and access to knowledge, workforce issues, the structure of incentives and the nature of the incentives, and finally, but not certainly least, risk analysis, risk assessment, and risk mitigation. We did seven case studies, two of them followed more of a traditional linear acquisition system process. We picked five that have more of an enterprise governance process underway. We're not going to go through the details of those today. Let me have the next slide. This is really how we ended up focusing, and this is a very subjective slide. What you have across the top is the eight attributes down the left hand side of the seven case studies. And we looked within each attribute for each of the cases. We essentially did a qualitative assessment of whether or not that program was performing at a relatively high level for each of those attributes, whether it was at a satisfactory level, an unsatisfactory level, or whether we couldn't find anything that they even cared about in that particular attribute, which we referred to as no significant observations. This is a very generous assessment. I have a different version of this chart that's a very critical assessment. I don't use that except internally because it discourages a hell lot of people. So rather than make everybody feel like this is the time to give up, this is my optimist. This is the optimistic version of this chart. And we looked into each one of these and extracted from it for each of the eight attributes some critical or enabling observations, which were essentially our findings and conclusions. I'm going to go through those pretty quickly with you. Let me go to the next slide. All that does is give you more background on the attributes. Let's skip that. Go to the next one. So the first three of those eight attributes we found to be, as a result of our seven case studies, critical, highly important factors in best practices in governance. Some of these won't surprise you. Some of them are just kind of standard. You've heard every acquisition reform initiative in the last 30 years recommend these things. And so it falls into the category of these are such good ideas. Why are they so hard to do? But some of these were actually a bit surprising to me. And keep in mind, we're looking here at systems of systems where it's not just a pure linear program of record, but the potential of multiple systems interacting, which I think is exactly where future vertical lift will end up going here. The first is a multi-layered level in terms of the organizational focus. Focus at the program level, but with a strong emphasis on supplemented at enterprise level guidance and short authority chains to get to that enterprise level guidance. You may actually find this to be relevant from your experience as well. At the enterprise level, a central governance body with oversight and enforcement powers at the program level, not only given the program manager authority over the program, but over the technology insertion and subsystem decisions. And this is particularly important in a systems of systems approach. From a statutory perspective, we found and this document was published just essentially, we were able to incorporate the late November 2013 version of DoD acquisition instruction. Sorry, I keep calling it a directive, but it's now an instruction 5000.02. And our interpretation of that correlated with our findings here, which is there's enough flexibility in the acquisition guidance documents to permit management the way it ought to be done. It doesn't dictate the process, if you will. But there needs to be an enterprise level authority that pays attention to the gate decisions, particularly as subsystems evolve and as needs change over time. And then some systems specific enforcement mechanisms with reporting requirements based on technological maturity and projected development schedules. The idea of information flowing up as part of the oversight is critical to the process. We then looked at the other five, let me have the next slide. I've got a couple of slides here on the other five attributes and what we determined to be enabling best practices, if you will. A strong focus on integrating functional user needs, not only early but often. What this really, I've got several charts that I left out of here, but what this really implies is an iterative cycle of requirements to contracts to program to development and not freezing requirements, particularly when you've got integration across systems and systems. The ability to have flexibility requirements to incorporate in user needs, to incorporate developments of technology that were not anticipated at some element of the program is a very powerful factor involved. Sharing knowledge and knowledge access, all of you who have lived in this system know that the first question you get asked if you ask somebody to share their information is that what are you going to do with that? And until I know what you're going to do with it, I don't want to give it to you. And so what we found a very strong focus is that those programs in our cases that had overcome that and had clear access by everybody to the information that was relevant to them with also a recognition that not everybody has the same robust systems to allow them to see everything so that you accommodate those, particularly field activities and end users that don't have access to all the same databases that you do and it's still relevant to them, if you will. Workforce, strong correlation between success in the programs and the ability to balance programmatic and technical workforce and to have enough people in place in order to do the job. This is, of course, always a challenge in DOD and particularly in the acquisition community in the technical side with a pretty small oversight function so that you don't encourage everybody who has a parochial interest, has a representative in the oversight authority, and they all have to have a say before anything gets decided. Let me have the next one. This is really my last substantive chart, if you will. On the incentive structure, we found that successful programs had a very strong mission commitment which required them to have a strong identification of what the mission was and a pretty good ability to get people to be aware of and following that. And particularly for subsystems and components, an ability to eliminate barriers to entry so that you could find and bring into play those contractors and developers who had something valuable to offer in that iterative cycle where you're updating requirements based on technology. Reducing the barriers to entry, not only the process barriers but the cultural barriers to entry seem to be an element of success in those programs that did very well. And then finally, on risk assessment, we had three major findings from successful programs, mitigating risks through better systems integration and subsystem development. It's easy to say, very hard to do. Focusing on bringing in more mature technologies and commercial off the shelf or nearly off the shelf technologies wherever possible as a risk mitigation has a high correlation of success in a number of these. And establishing, identifying, recognizing the less mature technologies and establishing a very clear critical path tracking system so that the minute that starts to threaten the execution of the whole program you can bring those back into play if you will. That's pretty much where we are. The last slide is our next steps. We're always, the beauty of working in a think tank is we don't actually have to worry about follow on work. There's always follow on work. There's always more questions to answer. There's always more research to be done. And so we're still pursuing this as well going forward. So thank you very much. You may have seen some evidence of the fact that I threatened them all to stay on a tight timeline in that very quick rundown. So I appreciate you adhering to my request in that regard, David. So it also was a requirement as I was putting this panel together that all of the male participants had to be named David. So now, David Van Lett, if you could please offer your thoughts on this. Thank you, Martin. The two previous CSIS panels on Future Vertical Lift had the Department of Defense describe the why and to what they aspire and how they will pursue it. For why, they said it's an aging aircraft fleet. There's high operating and sustainment costs, capability gaps that exist, concern for the rotary wing industrial base health. What they need is low cost manufacturing, lower operating and sustainment costs, and improved performance, faster, farther, and better systems capability. How they'll achieve it, model-based acquisition approach, open architectures, and a joint approach. So with those understandable needs and aspirations and a modern sounding approach, what could possibly go wrong? Having a past association with complex acquisition programs, I could be reading Ecclesiastes 1.9 and there was nothing new under the sun. A notable point made several times by Dan Bailey, the Army Program Director, is the intent to gain from the joint multi-role technology demonstration project tools and competencies. Later, he explained tools and competencies for what? He said tools and competencies for the government workforce to be effective preventing requirements creep. Very good. But I wish he had added tools and competencies to enable an effective lead systems integration function. Tools and competencies that value fundamentals, transparency, and realism. Dan expresses himself very well and he knows his job and he's very experienced and if we met and talked a bit, I imagine he would agree that he meant to imply all of those. With that, Dan begins to strike my interest because that is a focus on people and their actions and the decisions in performing their work of acquisition, both in government and industry. The hazard to overcome is the intersection of wanting to have it all, capabilities required in QDR, for example, colliding with this world of constrained resources. That collision creates desperate people under extreme pressure to find something new or believe something new will emerge that enables one to have it all for less. The pressure becomes extreme to the point of driving organizational behavior and leverage to conform and find reasons to support that belief. The battle banners that lead the charge are acquisition reform, innovation, rapid acquisition, and training an enlightened acquisition workforce that is less risk averse. It is the resulting unenlightened efforts in policy and process and associated leadership messaging that created an environment where people are prone and incentivized to depart from sound fundamentals, transparency and realism. We have always lived in a world of constrained resources, both in our personal and professional lives, yet we still must produce results. That happens through the fundamental of optimization of the design and the constrained resources. To deliver a real result that is effective in the midst of all the constraints. Systems engineering emerged in the middle of the last century to perform that exact optimization function. The pressures from the collision create forces wanting to believe all that pesky systems engineering can be streamlined, that new models free us from unnecessary design reviews and expensive time consuming testing. There will be little to no discovery or rework required. We can do it for less than the old fashioned way. And the train departs the track of schedule and cost realism. And when a few old fashioned voices point out concerns, the train departs the track of transparency to protect and defend an unreal schedule and budget. This is the complex acquisition development lesson learned for future vertical lift. Now I clearly believe there is benefit from needed reform, innovation and rapid acquisition. These can deliver better outcomes by keeping a sound grasp on fundamentals, transparency and realism. The key is leadership creation of the environment that values them and motivates imitation and practice of them. The legislation, the organization, the regulation and process that are presently in place are a result of degraded trust from an extensive record of disappointing performance. But they are not causes, they are symptoms. Color of money, program manager, tenure and incentives are not meaningful or effective cures. Leaders from acquisition executives, PEOs, systems command commanders, competency and warfare center leaders, program managers and all their counterparts in industry must raise a generation that more broadly holds to these traits. There are leaders that value and practice fundamentals, transparency and realism and those who do not, you can tell. Those that do should be praised and promoted and those that do not should be set aside or not confirmed or appointed. Again in both government and industry, that is real and trains the generation coming up what to imitate and what to avoid. So I would promote a schedule and budget with margin for discovery and rework in the vein of realism. I would encourage the department to embrace independent designer view chairs, independent schedule risk assessments and cost estimates and only start the right programs. It's not a quick fix and it is a long road so I look forward to your questions in our dialogue. Betsy is going to now talk a little bit about the congressional landscape. And so I, Martin asked me to come on the panel to sort of put my old congressional SACD hat on and talk about how I would look at this program through those lenses. So thanks for inviting me here today. It's not often that I've been asked to comment on an initiative while it's still in the very early stage of concept development. So I appreciate the opportunity to engage and possibly raise some red flags that may need to be addressed early in this stage of the process to help FBL get from paper to reality. And I'll confess up front that I've not had an opportunity to thoroughly review this program or as I've been told it's not a program. It's an initiative or a system of systems which raises red flag number one for me. Initiatives tend to have a hard time going from a great series of concepts to programs of record. The strategy underlying them tends to be sound and thoughtful and hard to disagree with. The trouble is turning those grand ideas into production lines and platforms delivered to the warfighter which leads me to red flag number two. From the outset there appears to be too many cooks in the kitchen here. And if I understand it correctly OSD and the joint staff are currently developing the requirements for this initiative. And let me state from the outset the right goals and objectives in mind to bring significant increase in capability to the services. The trouble is OSD and the joint staff don't have the capacity to manage programs and they don't have the funds to manage programs. Not to mention one as complex as FBL. So they need a service lead which leads me to red flag number three. It appears that the Army will be the executive agent which absolutely makes sense since they're the largest user of vertical lift. But love them as I do for their service and sacrifice it's no secret that the Army has had a difficult time getting from acquisition concepts to programs delivered to the battlefield. So need to make sure that they're committed to this early that they have the capacity, the buy in and the budget to get this system of systems off the ground and really need to keep that in mind going forward. Red flag number four be wary of taking on more than you can chew. The FBL concept includes four variants from light to ultra that intends to satisfy the requirements of every service. And there's no one better suited to discuss the difficulty of combining multiple capabilities for multiple services into a single platform than Dave Van Let. So I won't try to mimic his experience and his real on the ground experience with the Joint Strike Fighter program. Red flag number five if I have the correct information FBL is already in its fifth year of activity in DOD and the target timeline for IOC for the first variant FBL medium is 20 years away. That is a long time. And one of the goals of FBL is to ensure the defense industrial base remains viable for vertical lift. A 20 year process to only hit IOC for one variant doesn't bode well for the success of launching this effort. Not only will the technology under consideration be obsolete the concept will likely change many times leadership will change many times and industry may not have the incentive to stay in the game that duration without a substantial production program underway by that time period. And lastly red flag number six and that's just the budget reality unless there's a substantial relief from the Budget Control Act or Congress accepts changes to military benefits or base closures to make room for another major investment initiative it's challenging to see how this fits in the palm against other competing pressures. I could go on with other concerns but I'll end there I don't want to paint a dismal picture a failure that's just not the case here it's too early and important to put it on death row this soon. The capability has the potential to bring to the future battlefield true game changing technology just like the V-22 is today and that was a program fraught with challenges and was nearly canceled on many occasions for those of you who lived that lengthy development program but it was vision, leadership and quite frankly sheer willpower that kept it alive during some of its most precarious moments so I look forward to answering questions. So perhaps we should have started with pessimism and gone to optimism period of gone the other way let me now turn to you Colonel and put you in the position of having to talk about I assume perhaps incorrectly that many of the red flags that Betsy raised are what drive your daily business so if you could give us your perspective on a to the extent to which you recognize those flags and b how from your perspective you're attempting to manage them sure well thank you for this opportunity to I think this whole dialogue is very very important and I'll kind of quickly please keep me on time address these in first with the doctors and then Betsy and addressing the vice admiral's points you know I hadn't seen we hadn't been able to share some of our comments so you saw me fiercely taking notes up here which is the point of this whole thing and it goes to the knowledge sharing and access to information we can only get better by learning from mistakes that we've made in the past and things that we've done right so as I looked at those eight attributes you know I could quickly jot down how how point by point we're going through and in construct setting up things to mitigate those those attributes you know level of focus we have the executive steering group that Mr. Gonzalez and General Thomas who opened up our first panel talked about and with that and that pulls in industry and all the services and folks within DoD that have key stakeholders in that and so that's our executive steering group and then we have a council of colonels again made up of subset of the services we're going to start bringing in the VLC more because that is very important vertical of consortium thank you vertical of consortium so that we can partner with our industry teammates on this because it is absolutely critical and then we have all the IPTs that Mr. Dan Bailey integrated planning teams that are looking at acquisition requirements commonality and then the S&T piece that you've heard so much about with the joint multi-role tech demonstrator so we certainly have a level of focus but I can caveat that as well it is a long time away the integration of the user in need certainly we did the capabilities based assessment identified 55 capability gaps and that is the premise of which this whole that is the foundation that all of us is being built on how do we address the warfighter needs how do we make risk mitigated mature technology but still make it a leap ahead so that we can maintain that air dominance and that battlefield edge the enforcement that I don't have anything for other than I think just budget and venues like this and as we go along just with standing the test of time and all the hurdles that we ever will will kind of help enforce keep us on track the workforce that is something that we certainly need to work through possibly going to some kind of joint program office at your point in the future that certainly has been with the difficulties in the past we need to make sure that we have a good construct of that and make sure that we have belly buttons to push when there are issues but then that we're bringing in perspectives and viewpoints and knowledge from across DOD incentive that will go to the contracts how we write those how we shape those and making sure that the industry in the fold and keep them engaged so that we can keep that base stabilized and also get good value for the taxpayer the knowledge access absolutely I mean we've got within the IPTs they're going out across all the different types of programs not just rotorcraft not just vertical lift not just fixed wing aviation but ground vehicles communications and trying to glean the lessons learned so that we can incorporate those and have a good program with the best ideas that are out there and then certainly for the risk we have the joint multi-roll tech there's no other program that has that level of S&T effort prior to MDD prior to AOA prior to all these things when we really have to start putting hard money on the table making tough decisions about what are our requirements and so to your point I understand there's a lot of difficulty of having requirements you talked about requirement flexibility and how important that is and certainly we need to be adaptive and that's where we get into the common architecture common interface commonality so that you can as things that merge incorporate those on the main chassis of you if you will but at some point so that we avoid some of the mistakes of the past I mean that presidential Hilo had I mean you go through some of the Comanche I mean you go through some of these programs that are viewed as failed programs and you do get into requirements creep so we are cognizant of at some point snapping the chalk line on what are key requirements that we need what can we afford and that is the whole basis of what we're doing making it affordable and then allowing the growth to incorporate things so I think in fundamentally we have addressed those to your point absolutely the proof will be in the pudding and cooks in the kitchen and requirements one thing I would say is you mentioned the OSD and joint staff are defining requirements and that's true as an oversight and speaking for DOD that's what we do but that is based on rigorous rigorous working teams for the requirements from the services and I mentioned those 55 requirements gaps I highlighted those what is common across all the services what is common across different mission sets and in what is specific to individual services and those get lower priorities so that we can make sure we have that and I already spoke to OSD joint staff bandwidth that is something that we'll have to watch and make sure that we have funding we're working on mechanisms so that services can help fund joint things without losing control of the money because ultimately they are title ten it is their money Army absolutely you know I would echo your point as a peripheralism with the Marine Corps there has been you know Army has a very strong fleet it's a very large fleet but there are definitely advantages to be gained by bringing in expertise in the other services and so the commonality IPT is a Navy led they're working to make sure that we bring in you know we're government we talk about whole government we're trying to bring in whole DOD if you will to make sure it's successful too big of a bite yes that is something that we also have put a lot of focus in and that is something that we're very strenuously going through and trying to capture what should be program of record one I call it what is that first thing what is the size what are the attributes because we don't want to have one giant behemoth that we try to glom on all the requirements and gets way too expensive and can't lift its own weight we don't need you know a fleet of 6000 supersonic stealth helicopters you know it's just we're never going to get there from here so but because it's a family of systems we can spread load some of those requirements across to what makes the most sense and then finally the too long yes it is a long time out we're looking at possibly pulling it forward in a budget constrained environment there's always that trade off and Mr. Kendall spoke about that the other day as far as where do we stop investing I mean we'll always need to invest in legacy fleet but where do we stop kind of incrementally improving the legacy fleet and make a clean step towards mature technology but that gives us that advantage and so we bring it back to this type of form will keep the discussion going so that we can keep interest keep the dialogue going and so to your point on realism and transparency that we can bring this all together so that we keep everyone going MDD is 17 that in acquisition world is very very close so even though we're looking at IOC a little ways out when you look at the length of time it takes for a clean sheet design rotorcraft we're actually speeding that up and we're doing that by not circumventing or accepting more risk to your point and Mr. Kendall spoke about there's a study that recently came out where if you go back at failed programs you look at the budget environment in which they were began it's constrained environment you accept more risk and therefore you have more failed programs so all the things that we're doing MDD JMR getting a technology right defining our requirements defining where we have the acquisition trade space for affordability those things will allow us to even quicker get through to a program of record and field the fleet so I'll just end with I appreciate this forum and we're taking notes because it's early on and all the good ideas that are out there we can incorporate and hopefully avoid disrupting the future thanks very much for that I apologize one downside of having a large panel is that it takes a lot of time but all of these I think are really great diverse perspectives so I want to open up to the audience for the remainder of our time if people could raise their hands and they'll again come around with the mics if you could identify yourselves quickly so if you can come up here Sidney Friedberg BreakingDefense.com Hello a question particularly for the admiral I think everyone will have a perspective on this it seems like you know to boil down to a Hollywood high concept the idea here is we want FVL to be the anti-JSF to do avoid all the pitfalls of JSF and there are some signs of that like the fact that's not going to be a single it's not going to be a single design with variance for all the services it does seem to be like they're going to be a family of designs but looking at the JSF as at this point a too big to fail program but a program that's had many failures in it what are take some of these abstract principles what are some of the specific things that went wrong on F-35 that we need to make sure to avoid on FVL and are there signs that we're avoiding them or falling right back into them thank you Sydney since you addressed me I'll just briefly say that the differences between FVL and the range of capabilities from super heavy heavy to medium to scout level are enough unlike F-35 that I'll not make a direct comparison I think a way to get at what you're talking about would be not to have one umbrella program office and basket them all together but to start separate programs when the funding is ready those separate lines would be easier to defend and manage and I think have a better chance of success I'd like to add one other thing to that unlike the Joint Strike Fighter Future Vertical Lift can draw from and will draw from over the next couple of decades a very robust global commercial technology and industrial base at both the technical level and the capacity level and I think in a way offers opportunities but also challenges because being able to both identify those things that we'd like to go be able to get and bring into DoD and then incorporate those into the requirements once you snap that chalk line it has things in it that you didn't know you could put in it and they will become available and you'll say well I don't have a requirement for that well that's because you didn't know you could do it you didn't know the global commercial world was moving in that direction you also have access issues not just by America and access to global technology and who we buy from but particularly the commercial market tends to say why exactly do I want to do business with the government do you have so many rules and regulations that I have to comply with it makes it hard for me to compete in my global commercial market there's a host of challenges on that side but I think a number of both technical and programmatic management opportunities that you didn't have the ability to go do yeah and if I can just add from more fighter perspective it in no way wants to be the complete antonym of joint strike fighter because that technology capability will add a lot to our arsenal so even though there were many challenges and high cost I think will be something that will be very happy that we have Steve Sydney's question and Admiral then let's answer practically anticipated my question but I guess I will persist nonetheless by observing that I was in the Pentagon in 94, 95, 96 when this initiative with respect to the JSF was called JAST and I'm telling you this conversation is a perfect transportation by 20 years of the conversation going on about then called JAST joint advanced strike technology which became the JSF program and I just want to commend Admiral then let's pretty forthright suggestion as to at least one of the antidotes to have learned from the joint strike fighter program so here's the question have we overlearned jointness I think the original premise of jointness was that at least one of them from an economic point of view is that there were scale efficiencies to be had from jointness either in terms of money and maybe in terms of operating effectiveness and I over time particularly over the last 10 years when scale efficiencies in the economy relative to technology are actually not that great I wonder if we need to stop this catechism of jointness and maybe this is the program or the whatever we're calling this the activity on which to stop and recognize that there were some limits to the values we could get out of jointness and let's appreciate them can I jump in that one or the other because I get fairly passionate about this because I think there's so much to be gained not just in pulling together resources and getting increased capability but when you look at you know they always talk tooth and tail right so yes we want to increase our tooth longer range faster speed all those types of things that are going to give us that edge on the battlefield but the entire tail is very constrained and very very costly right now when you look at between 70 and 80% of life cycle costs are after procurement you're talking all the logistics trains you're talking all the training all the parts this is where joint commonality can give us so much and flexibility on a battlefield too because if I'm flying a 53 and I have to divert in the middle of Afghanistan or Iraq or wherever we are fighting to an army base I am at best able to share a can of oil that I can put into my aircraft not to mention parts and now you think of all the huge iron mountains that we build so to speak of parts in theater jointness will give us flexibility and greatly reduce this cost when you look across the entire fleets and you have absolutely repeated and correctly you've absolutely repeated and correctly the concept of value that we get from jointness I would strongly I would be interested in Admiral Venlet and Betsy's remarks on this I'd strongly recommend somebody go back and redo the sums we all understand the concept but I really wonder if the sums in practical application add up the way you I understand feel convinced that they do yeah I would be curious and very interested in how that wasn't work because we would absolutely like to look at that and I would just add the concepts are always they're always brilliant it's just how you carry them out and I liked Dave and let's comment on you know possibly looking at this as several different program lines setting this up so ok if the army is going to develop the medium variant then there's no reason the other services can't just buy off the army contract like they do with the Blackhawks now why not just perpetuate that as this program goes forward and having four separate programs with a little bit less of the complexity but work real hard to make sure that you've got that parts and maintenance and all that built in which is a challenge but it's good to do I think that's a more winning strategy because it's just the joint working in the joint world is difficult but if you've got ok army you're going to do the medium lift, air force you're going to do the scout whatever the mix ends up being then you force the other services just to buy off that multi-year contract hopefully it will get to that stage and phase I'll put a different aspect of jointness in my response and talk about the level of the execution of the acquisition process I would strongly advocate and encourage that the leaders one of the competencies that Dan aspires for should be a value of horizontal integration across the areas of the technical commands within all the services that there should be a conviction and a commitment to those fundamentals but there should be the proper blend of humility to know that they don't all exist the army would reach out to the navy and to the air force and to all of those places of expertise because in something as broad as the full range of weight capability of vertical lift there are specialties and issues that have developed from experience in all of those so jointness in that aspect that crosstalk that mutual support at the acquisition level across the technical community should be enhanced and not reduced as a think tank person I'm seized with the opportunity here for additional research but more importantly Steve I think that if you look at the question of joint from incorporating user needs and more and more variety of communities as part of that process it's easy to conceive of a tipping point where adding an additional user actually creates a negative impact rather than a positive impact and I don't think we have a good sense of that as we're assembling a program the sense is let's have everybody who can attach to it and we'll sort all those things out later so better mechanisms for actually evaluating that tradeoff wouldn't be a bad idea I think from the point of view the other aspect is clear from our research here that you can be as joint as you want but you can't give the joint players unilateral veto power there's got to be a program structure where there's a single decider of the trade space at every stage of the game here and that's where jointness ends and good governance and good acquisition management process begins and I think what you're looking at is where is that point in the program and do we sometimes go too far in that direction I think the answer is probably yes but I do think this is a notion that really does need a lot more look Dave if I could pull the thread a little bit on your comments about transparency and realism and some of the tensions that exist between those two and Betsy draw you into this as well that being transparent about the realities of your effort can sometimes put it at high risk right I mean and in particular I think there's this challenge sort of between the services and OSD and then to some extent or to a larger extent potentially between the Defense Department and the Congress right so can you expand upon that tension a little bit and how you think it is best managed because I think in practice that's something people wrestle with over and over again and Betsy can you give your perspective on that as well I mean it's a lovely theory that is really hard to put into practice I think Betsy in the years of growing up in acquisition I had the opportunity to see both those who led with valuing transparency and those who kept their information closer to the chest and my observation of the impacts of both of those methods I chose the transparency method fully acknowledging the risks that come along with that but the point that's priceless is the trust that it builds and if you believe that you have nothing to hide you should have nothing to fear with transparency David back to your comment I a title I like to use when I search around for that decision point is who is the chief of good enough when the trained resources come to bear and there are many of those chiefs they don't need to be recreated they don't need to be created anew they exist they exist in the service chiefs and the secretaries at that level and when you get into the difficult discussions between operational tests and acquisition those are healthy they should be embraced and welcomed but then there needs to be the chief of good enough to come in and move things along and I would agree with Dave when he took over the joint strike fighter program it was like a breath of fresh air especially from my perspective I think the first time that I met him I felt like well here's someone who's going to tell me what's going on in the program and when he doesn't know an answer to a question he would go back and look it up because he might have wanted to know the answer to the question himself and it really built a tighter relationship and from the congressional side you always feel like the department is hiding the ball they don't want to tell you everything and I'll tell you that's probably the worst way to run a program you want the professional staff you want the members to have buy-in you want them to be in at the front you want them to be your partners in an effort versus trying to set up something that's more adversarial because they'll take your money they'll slow down your program they'll do things that may unnecessarily penalize a program going forward and not to be spiteful but because they genuinely don't understand or they don't have the trusting confidence that you can pull it off so they'll want to see Gates, they'll want to see maybe we'll draw some money back to make sure you're progressing in a manner that's good and when I looked at the House and Senate marks on the FVL program it kind of alerted me to the fact that I'm not sure the FVL program has had an open dialogue with the Congress yet House marked the program the MHXX lines in the Navy and said a headed need which to me sort of raised an issue that they might not understand the concept or they don't think you can execute the money in time but a dialogue needs to take place sooner than later and then the Senate added money for the consortium but also moved money from a larger Navy Hilo line into the MHXX program line which indicates they want visibility into the program the justification materials that accompanied the request didn't talk about this effort so already there's probably a little bit of tension going what are you guys doing over there can you include us, talk to us we want to see this program and see how whether it's viable and what path forward is yeah and Betsy was kind enough to take some time with me a couple days ago to talk through that and get a list of who to go visit on the Hill and I think absolutely that's something that has been missing as we internally try to sort out the best way to go forward and get all the different mechanisms in place so General Thomas and Mr. Gonzalez and probably others will be engaging with the Hill for that very point audience questions Mike Miller with Bell Helicopter Admiral Van Letch you've been doing this a long time what is your message to industry on such a complex undertaking DFL Mike you're kind and TPS classmate thanks for being here today good to see you friend it's the same as my points are equal to industry as they are to government the realism, the fundamentals need to be applied there the search for leaders who value those need to be applied equally in industry as they do in the government Major General Giovanni Fontuzia I'm the Italian defense attache if you allow me I would like to bring the discussion a little bit on the international perspective if we compare J.S.F. to FVL we are missing a big piece we think you know the international participation on strategic documents of DOD we are hearing and reading the last one is the QDR a strong advocacy to cooperation to open to a burden sharing to more to get especially you know network countries more involved may ask to the panel why FVL is missing the partner participation in the program office and in the sharing of the development of the program but also is missing the European industry as a whole that I think is not in my personal opinion probably the best way to manage such an endeavor thanks yeah I can jump in to your points here the thing is right now we're not a program as you keep saying so we're still in that very early development and so we've looked into this just recently and we certainly welcome international partners to get with the joint staff on the requirements piece as we develop through that but since we don't have a program yet there's really no acquisition piece to start engaging necessarily with the European industry and what not but that is in its infancy as far as really frankly us just thinking outside of just trying to sort through all the requirements and get through the technology maturity in the S&T realm so it's something that I think we will grow in the future and something that we need to put more consideration into and figure out the best way to possibly include joint participation internationally could I add something to that some of the work we've done at CSIS looking at international cooperation and programs I kind of hate the word burden sharing because it sounds like somebody is carrying more than their share of the load which is never what it really is aimed to be but I don't have a better word for it and while we haven't looked at it specifically from the rotorcraft industry point of view a couple of our findings were that if you wait for government to government agreements to get in place they take a long time there's a lot you can do and back to the question that Mike asked you sir about industry what can industry do there's a lot you can do at the industry to industry level across international lines particularly in an industry like this where there is a very powerful global dynamic and if I were industry I wouldn't wait for the demand signals to materialize from DOD I would recognize that sooner or later the alignment demand DOD is going to have to come up with we don't have an alternative to rotary lift for the foreseeable future in our lifetimes and so there's a lot of opportunity for industry to industry with appropriate government watching if you will but not necessarily wait for government commitments and I would urge industry to be thinking about those sort of things and looking for that now very good Giovanni first thank you for bringing up that point I agree with you that has been missing and would be a great add to this whole dialogue but I would point out that the value gained from the relationships that are can be cemented across industry and MOD boundaries are tremendously valuable and powerful and would bring great benefit in all the aspects of coalition work going forward so thank you for bringing that up I agree with you okay I think we have time for one more question we'll go right there Hi, Roman Schweitzer from Guggenheim Securities and since I'm the last guy I'll take the question that the obvious one that everyone wants to avoid but I'm curious as to why as the Army is the lead and looking to fill the medium lift role is going to wait 25 years to buy an aircraft that the Marine Corps is flying the Air Force is flying the Navy is considering for its COD mission for its international partners I would say the FVL may have disincentivized the current team from looking at upgrades but as Admiral Vinlet knows we took the Hornet and created the Super Hornet and so I just wonder that over the next two decades if we're going to arrive back to where we started from after a very painful development program with V-22 thank you actually I guess I would just say will the V-22 be considered in the AOA and how is it shortfall on the 55 capability gaps right now we're still scoping that all out as I mentioned the family of systems what is appropriate chassis basically for and propulsion system for program of record one when you look at first need across DoD you're looking something a little smaller than a V-22 you know and we're stressing it's not a one for one replacement but Blackhawk Apache Navy as the Romeo and Sierra's Marine Corps has the H-1s that they are currently upgrading but will probably be first to need I think the Marine Corps is committed to doing upgrades down the line for V-22 it's been as you point out a very very successful program so you need escorts for that right and looking at General Davis the new Deputy Command Aviation spoke last night looking at putting fuel tanks in the back of the V-22 military or refuel jets and then hopefully FVL next maybe and I look at FVL is kind of democratizing V-22 right because V-22 is a phenomenal platform has phenomenal capability and is the most in demand platform in the Marine Corps right now by the combatant commanders because of that ability to get wherever you need quickly, fastly and land without a runway so when you bring that though it we're talking Bell helicopter that's their their designs moving that forward and making it even a better mousetrap getting it more affordable scaling it to the right size to make different requirements and then having it complement in this case because that was the question V-22 for the Marine Corps and that's the ability sets to the other services as well as their needs and requirements dictate those because not everyone needs exactly what the V-22 brings okay let me say thanks to all of you very much for a very rich and diverse conversation I'm sure it will continue thank you all for taking the time for coming and we hope you come to our next FVL focused event thanks