 This is a quick overview, as you can tell. We have some amazing tri-service speakers with us today, starting with Captain Margaret Wilson, who is our program manager at PMA 209. I'm delighted to have her with us. She's going to be giving the official welcome in just a moment. We have Vice Admiral Dean Peters, whom you'll be hearing from, Mr. Gary Kurtz. Again, just wonderful, wonderful to have both those gentlemen give us some time and speak to you today. Also delighted to have Mr. Randall Walden, who is coming on from the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office. He is our keynote speaker and Brigadier General Robert Collins. So we've got one heck of a great lineup that is, as I said, coming in your direction in just a few minutes. Let me also give a quick heads up to our wonderful panelists and session speakers. We have on our panel discussion Joe Carter, Jason Derner, Dr. Elia Lipkin, Tyler Robinson. And that panel is going to be moderated by Jerry Gipper. Most of you probably do know Jerry, as he is our executive director of the Vita Trade Association. Following that panel discussion, and that will be interactive. So feel free. Again, I invite you to put questions in the window. We'd like to get those open architecture and open standards experts available to you to reply and keep that conversation going. There's a lot happening, as you all well know, in open architecture and open standards. A little bit further down, I'm excited to share. We're gonna be having Brendan O'Donnell and Jason York do the face session talking about the new business guide and what's happening. And we will follow that up with our SOSA session speakers, Mike Orlovsky, Valerie Andrew and Roy Keeler who will round up all the exciting news that's happening in the SOSA consortium and what is going to be coming very soon in early summer. So I will let them get into that conversation when their session gets started. Without further ado, Captain Wilson, ma'am, do I have you online? Yes, you sure do, Sally. Good morning. Oh, good morning, good morning. Thanks again for joining us for this today. I turn it over to you and it's all yours. Thank you very much. Good morning and welcome everyone. I'm Captain Maggie Wilson, Program Manager for the Air Combat Electronics Program Office here at NavAir. Thank you very much for joining us and thank you to Sally for such a wonderful introduction. It's an honor for PMA 209 to be serving as the host of the Open Group Face and SOSA Consortium Technical Interchange Meeting. Next slide, please. I wish to also extend my appreciation to the Tim sponsors who are contributing to the growing open architecture ecosystem. Today you will hear from several distinguished tri-service leaders, open architecture and open architecture experts that will speak about the significant inroads with respect to open standards, collaboration and alignment. They will touch on facilitating opportunities for strategic reuse across systems and subsystems with a focus on what comes next. It has not been a quick task for government, industry or academia to rapidly navigate the modular open systems approach at any level from the supply chain up through acquisition and implementation. In light of increasing federal budget constraints, we tackle an even bigger challenge to the MOSA Initiative. As significant resources have needed to shift to the COVID-19 response, MOSA becomes even more important and meaningful to incorporate innovation, increase interoperability, reuse of technology, decrease upgrade time and reduce lifecycle costs using openly competed CODS technology. PMA 209 is proud to be participating in the joint open standards efforts with the Army and the Air Force, as well as the technical standards organization VITA and the open group FACE and SOSA consortia and its members. Now I'd like to take the opportunity to provide a little background on the MOSA efforts here at NAVAIR. Next slide, please. PMA 209, Avionics Architecture Team or AAT has a long history of supporting the development of open architecture standards. We've been involved with FACE and hostency inception and support SOSA and other open architecture efforts. As the OA standards have matured, our team has made the transition to focus more heavily on supporting the adoption of OA standards. Efforts have grown to include direct engagement and support for the adopting program office as well as the development of supporting documentation and example implementations. Our team works diligently to support program adoption of standards, not only within NAVAIR, but across industry and the Department of Defense. We are continuing to engage and collaborate with a broad spectrum of MOSA organizations in an effort to promote standards, alignment, and maintain expertise in this rapidly evolving initiative. Next slide, please. Here are some of the examples of the MOSA efforts currently active within NAVAIR. We are regularly engaging with other program offices to maintain awareness and provide OA solutions. For example, the platform integration and modeling team recently conducted a FACE model review for the Tactical Combat Training System Increment 2 or TIX2 within PMA 205. TIX2 provides an encrypted combat training capability for airborne, ground, and ship-based platforms in the Navy Marine Corps. This is a prime example of the way that our team of experts continues to support programs that have already implemented standards and are looking for further guidance. This effort was noted as being of great help to PMA's 205's TIX2 team. Next slide, please. As noted, the focus of AAT has broadened beyond just the development of standards. Two of our primary goals are to identify open architecture opportunities and support the insertion of OA solutions. Additionally, our team is working on applying model-based systems engineering tools and processes to open architecture efforts. The goals of MBSC and open architecture are complementary in many ways. The robust modeling tools provide our means to document functions and interfaces, which are key aspects of enabling portability and reusability. Lastly, I'd like to invite you to visit the Tri-Service Open Architecture Interoperability Demonstration website at www.tsoad-id.net. The site is an OA resource, as well as a showcase of upcoming open architecture events. Speaking of upcoming events, the open group, Face Expo and Tim, will be hosted by the Army's PAO Aviation on September 14th at the Von Braun Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Details will be forthcoming at the open group Face Consortia website. We are eagerly planning a live and in-person TSOA ID event in early 2022. Please check out the website for more details. Before I introduce our special guest speaker, on behalf of PMA 209 Aviation, Avionics Architecture team, I wish to extend a special thanks to the open group team who's worked long and hard to bring this Tim together with us and to the Face and Social Consortian members for their dedication and support throughout our communities and ultimately to our warfighters. Next slide, please. Ladies and gentlemen, it's my honor and privilege to welcome and introduce Vice Admiral Dean Peters, Commander Naval Air System Command. Vice Admiral Peters is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and has earned postgraduate degrees in aeronautical engineering and telecommunication while also completing the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School. He has served in numerous acquisition billets, including serving as program manager for the H-60 helicopter program office and then the presidential helicopter program office, leading the program through milestone B and contract award for the engineering and manufacturing development program. Black assignments include commander and naval air warfare center aircraft division, assistant nav air commander for research and engineering, program executive officer of the air anti-submarine warfare assault and special mission programs or PDOA. In May of 2018, Vice Admiral Peters assumed responsibilities as Commander Naval Air Systems Command. Admiral Peters wishes he could join us in person today, but since his highest regards, he has pre-recorded the following message for us. Thank you very much for your time. Hey, good morning, everyone. I'm Vice Admiral Dean Peters. Really wanna say thank you for allowing me the opportunity to participate with you in this forum. I'm glad we were able to work around some of the COVID restrictions and actually get this forum together because I think it's a really important forum to have. I'll talk about that a little bit in my comments. What I'm gonna do, for those that know me, you'll know that I'm all about speed and readiness. That's nav air's mission. That's what I usually talk about and today is really gonna be no different. I've got a few notes here that I'm gonna refer to, but what I really wanna do is tell you three stories and then pose a question. And it goes like this. For the first story, you're gonna have to travel back in time with me a little bit. So we're gonna go back a little more than 20 years ago. And this was my first program office assignment. It was the UAV program office for nav air, PMA 263. And at that time, they had all of the UAVs. And it was just a really busy place because the Navy was experimenting with UAVs, the Marine Corps was experimenting and actually operating UAVs. And in fact, the Navy and the Marines had fielded UAVs at the time that we were supporting. And all of the services were developing new systems and we were trying to come up with strategies on how best to deploy this new capability. So it was an exciting time. It was also when we started the vertical takeoff and landing UAV program. So better known now as the Firescale program. And I realized right when I got in the program office that I just don't know enough about telecommunications. I mean, I knew how to tune my tack and that I had in the aircraft. I knew how to talk on the radios but I really didn't understand all the intricacies behind telecommunications. So I actually went out and enrolled in a degree program. It was an after hours distance learning program. And this was the early days of distance learning. So the way it worked then was every few weeks you received a box of VHS tapes in the mail and you were actually watching the lectures that the onsite students had attended. So everything was just the same as it was for the onsite students, but it was displaced by about a week. And during the course of this master's program in telecommunications, I just learned a ton. Learned about communications of course, command and control, learned about satellite communications. But one of the things that I really took away from there was the importance of standards. So even when you're talking about analog phone systems and the history behind analog phones, it was obvious very early on that there's just not enough infrastructure. There's not enough right-of-way to be able to have separate standards for every product that's out there. Just think of all the telephone poles and all of the now the fiber optic conduit that would have to be laid if that were the case. So collectively, the technical community came to the realization that you've got to have standards. And this was important as we were developing the fire scalp because we were going to use a digital platform. We were going to use digital video. We were going to use digital transmission means. And up to that point, all of those programs that I talked about that we either had fielded or that were in experimentation were generally analog systems. So it was really important to understand what the standard was going to be. And there was a thought there during the design process that, hey, we don't need to adopt any standards that are out there. This is a military system. We can develop our own protocols. And I'm happy to report that what I learned in that program and the importance of standards such as MPEG, the Motion Pictures Expert Group, by adopting that standard, it really turned out well for fire scalp. And it's been flexible through many starts and stops and changes in the program over the last couple of decades and is really what's the foundation for how we use the system now and are able to incorporate other payloads. OK, so that's story number one. Story number two, you have to fast forward a few years, about eight years in fact. And now I'm the program manager for the H60 program. And this was an exciting time for the H60 program. You know, we were producing aircraft. We were still developing the mission systems but we're starting in production. We're going to field this aircraft and the MH60 Romeo in particular was going to be integrated into the carrier air wing for the first time. So the system that it was replacing, the SH60B, was not integrated into the carrier air wing. It was just on the surface combatants. For this platform, MH60 Romeo, not only was it going to be on the surface combatants but it was going to be on the carriers as part of that air wing. So it needed to be integrated. So there was a data link on the MH60 Romeo, very similar to fire scout. It was the tactical common data link. And, you know, this was important because there was a whole set of protocols associated with TCDL and CDL in general. So we're putting this data link system on the helicopter. We were also developing the system that was going to go on the surface combatants and the carrier already had CDL on the ship. It was CDL in. So here you have a helicopter that's, all of the systems that are on there, the mission systems, you want to be able to get that information off the helicopter down to the ship so that tactical decisions can be made. And we thought, well, you know, all of these systems use the same standard, the CDL standard. So this should be easy, right? Well, actually it wasn't. And what we found out was the TCDL system that we were putting on the helicopter, the TCDL system that we were putting on the ship and the CDL system that was already on the carrier were not necessarily compatible. They all use the same protocol but they were all implemented in a different way. And that just reinforced in my mind the importance of these standards groups that not only talk about the protocols that have to be used but how to implement them and the importance of how that comes together from an interoperability standpoint. Okay, so that's two stories down. So now we're on to story number three. And this was just a couple of years ago. And it goes to an event that occurred at CR Space. And I wanna thank Captain Minnie McDowell who was the program manager at that time for PMA 209. They have always been advocates of FACE and SOSA and other similar standards. And he invited me and some other folks out to CR Space to witness this demonstration. And he told me right up front, hey, there's no guarantee that this demonstration is gonna work but if you can come out, I think it will show great advocacy for FACE because what we're trying to do is bring a lot of disparate systems that are already fielded together with FACE incorporated to show how they can be interoperable. And as I recall, we were working on a, it was a attack assault scenario that was followed up by a rescue mission. And it used different platforms like V-22, it used different sensors like EOIR and it brought together multiple manufacturers. In fact, we had Boeing, Sikorsky, Lockheed Martin, Rockwell Collins, Harris, Northrop Grumman. There were probably a few other ones in there. And so I'm thinking as I go to watch this demo that I'm not exactly sure how this is gonna work because I know these systems. Some of them have been out there for a long time. Most of them have unique OFPs and they don't really lend themselves well to being able to interoperate. Something that we've known for a while. So I wanna tell you that the demo just worked fantastically. It went off without a hitch. And most of our time was spent talking with the folks that made it happen. And what they did was they really incorporated this face-conformant software that was a wrapper that was placed around the software of the particular platform or the sensor. And then it was integrated. And because it had this face wrapper on it, it was easily integrated. And that was the main message that we took away from all of the participants that day. I mean, most of these folks were young engineers. They were excited. They had been working hard because this all came together just in time. But the way they described it, it took anywhere between three or four weeks to just over the previous weekend to come together. So the indication there was that this can be done. It's really not even that difficult. So we've gotta incorporate that thinking into our acquisition strategies. And just the enthusiasm of those engineers made me think that this is something that we've really got to pursue. Okay, so the major takeaway there was that this really can be done. It can be done quickly. It can be incorporated relatively inexpensively. And that it can include open architecture. The advantages here are obvious, right? System portability across platforms, rapid capability insertion, improved interoperability, and as I mentioned, reduced cost. So we really do need to adapt our acquisition strategies to make this a requirement. We've not figured out how to do that yet. You know, this type of collaboration is really essential to where we started. Readiness and speed. And if open architectures are successful, then we've got to be able to do this together as a government and industry team. So you've heard the quick stories. And some of you may have even been at that demo that I described at CR Space. And so here's the promised question. What will you do? What will you do today? What will you do this week? What will you do this year to take standards like face and SOSA to the next level? If you're here, it's because you believe in this open architecture way of doing business. That's it. There's no elaboration required on the question. You're all together, so go figure it out. In closing, I want to thank Mr. Kurtz, as well as my distinguished colleagues from the Air Force and the Army. Mr. Walden, Brigadier General Collins. I want to thank PMA 209 for coordinating the event. And I want to thank each of you for your participation. I truly, truly appreciate the work of the open group and the open architecture industry community at large in support of naval aviation, as well as the Army and the Air Force. This is about speed and readiness. And you are doing the nation a great service. Thank you and have a great event. So again, everyone, this is Sally Bixby, Nav Air PMA 209. Just want to give a wonderful thank you to Vice Admiral Peters for sharing his time. He recorded that just last week, so that is all brand new information. Delighted to have him with us today. Even as a recorded presentation, it's just wonderful to have him. There may have been some of you that were having difficulties with the audio on his talk. Perhaps that just didn't come through at all. My apologies, but I have good news. And that is, is that we will be posting this presentation and actually all presentations and slides will be posted in three different places for you to access at your convenience. We are going to be having it on the opengroup.org forward slash face website, same with the opengroup.org forward slash SOSA website and the event website, which was expotim2021.com. These URLs you'll be seeing in slides as we progress through the day. I'm also sticking them into the chat window. I'm hoping they're viewable for you. So that's the good news. Again, if you had any kind of a glitch, we're delighted to have you here as a guest. Don't go away because we do have many, many more presentations. As a matter of fact, the next one up, we're very fortunate to also include from Vice Admiral Peters, but now we're going to be hearing from Mr. Gary Kurtz. For your awareness, all of our speakers following Mr. Kurtz will be live and available for questions. So don't hesitate to put those in the Q&A window as time permits. We are recording this Tim and capturing all those questions that come through. So on the off chance, our speakers don't have the time available to respond to your questions. We're going to get back to you. We will be doing a follow-up, and I'll be presenting those questions to the speakers for them to circle back with you as well. So just wanted to let you know. And again, in the Q&A window with your questions, if you would also insert your email so we could have a little bit of a heads up and easily identify you for follow-up. Now, ladies and gentlemen, if you would help me welcome, we're delighted to have Mr. Gary Kurtz with us. As you can see from the screen, he is a member of the Senior Executive Service and Program Executive Officer of Aviation Common Systems and Commercial Services, Department of the Navy, ASN, RDNA. We're delighted to have him and we will get his presentation started right now. Thank you for extending the invitation to me to attend today's event. I'm sorry I can't be there in person with you today, but I do believe this to be both an important and exciting topic. So I would like to share just a few thoughts on how the modular open systems approach MOSA is gaining speed within Department of Defense acquisition. As you heard Vice Admiral Peters speak about the highly contentious, congested, and competitive environment we find ourselves in, our adversaries are rapidly growing their capabilities with minimal transparency and are committing widespread cyber attacks of our systems. We know now more than ever we need enhanced readiness and increased speed of capability. For the first time in recent history, we see the potential for us to lose our position as the world's greatest maritime power. The impacts of that outcome can not be more overstated. Maintaining our lines of commerce at sea is of utmost importance to all of us, which has organically brought government and industry together in this partnership to advance new capabilities and increase readiness faster, easier, and in more competitive ways than ever before. When it comes to our command's strategic imperatives of readiness and speed in the current climate, industry truly is our partner in advancing open architecture as an innovative solution in maintaining our dominance at sea in the air and on the land. I include these visuals of the various platforms we have here at Navair employing Mosa because these are the real life systems employing open architecture to keep our competitive edge on the world stage. We've gone from what was a desire for a modular approach to employing it and ensuring the Naval Aviation Enterprise as a consistent approach to understanding, specifying, and delivering fleet requirements to the warfighter as a part of a holistic effort. Understanding how operational requirements in the context of theater can be addressed using Mosa techniques and processes enables capability engineering to architecture management. Enhanced capability helps to reduce our operational risk, increase overmatch, and ensure our foreign policy objectives are met. Back in 2019, the tri-services of the Navy, Army, and Air Force signed a memorandum agreeing to advance open architecture to the greatest extent possible going forward with our industry partners. With that tri-service backing, we together with industry have transformed the way we deliver capabilities to the warfighter. At NavAir, we are working on advancing Mosa in many of our major programs across the command. For example, we are working on avionics software applications with open systems components that offer plug-and-play interchangeability. This interchangeability of hardware and software opens up competition for industry to those companies not already doing business with the government. Increased competition really ramps up speed of capability to fleet when we're talking about making upgrades in a dynamic operational theater. In PEO Common Systems, the Air Combat Electronics Program Office, PMA-209, has been making great strides in advancing the mission computer alternative, MCA. The MCA is a hardware open system technologies, host, conforming, mission computer. We are testing in the land-based training aircraft, the T-45. And the tactical airborne early warning aircraft E-2D. The MCA drastically reduces schedule for the regular hardware and software updates associated with mission computing in some instances, reducing this time from years to only months. We intend to advance this solution to other platforms as well. These open capabilities offer greater force projection through consolidation of common resources, decreased risk ratio through maintenance of capability overmatch and enhanced tactical options through deployment of flexible systems of systems. We are currently exploring open systems application options in the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and the CMV-22. Future airborne capability environment face is gaining tactical traction in current and future NAVIR development programs, including the next generation jammer, manned platforms such as the C-130, Avionics Opsolescence Upgrade and the CH-53K Basic Cockpit Upgrade and the FNA-18 Distributed Targeted Processor Networked. We're even taking these plans another step further in exploring other open architecture software system solutions for unmanned systems such as the MQ-25 Stingray and the MQ-8 Fire Scout. Also in PTO Commons systems, the Naval Aviation Training Systems and Ranges Program Office PMA-205, Tactical Combat Training Systems Increment II Program Team has been working hard and is tracking to achieve milestone C on schedule despite of all the difficulties of this past year. Six-two is an open architecture system that will revolutionize the way we train by securely connecting the aircraft to the ground, other aircraft and simulated threats. The next level of training enhances readiness, allowing our pilots to train as they fight. This open architecture training solution provides enhanced tactical options through the deployment of flexible training systems of systems. Spread one flexible training system of systems for example and we're on a whole new playing field. We can do more than we imagine in places where we go, where we are ready for combat and where we prepare to make changes in support of it. I thank you again to the open group in Captain Wilson for inviting me to speak. I'm proud of the great strides made in PMA-209 advancing MOSA. I look forward to hearing what my Air Force and Army colleagues have to say on this topic. What discussions happen on the panels and what partnerships lie ahead with industry? Hello again, this is Sally Bixby. Thank you again for coming and joining us at the open group face and social technical interchange meeting. As you could certainly see, Mr. Kurtz was a prerecorded video although all of our upcoming speakers and presenters will be live, but I do want to send a very gracious thank you out to Mr. Kurtz and his office for taking the time and making this video for us. Again, like Admiral Peters, his video was recorded just last week. So it's all brand new information. The good news as well, I mentioned this just a few minutes ago is that these videos as well as all of our presentation slide decks and so forth will be posted on the open group face and the open group SOSA and the Expo Tim 2021 websites. So if you dialed in late or have any challenges getting on and listening to these presentations, we are going to be making those available and accessible to the public. So just wanted to share that information with you. I have received a quick little side note that our upcoming keynote speaker, Mr. Randall Walden is going to be joining us shortly. Let me check it if I may for just a moment. Mr. Walden sir, are you online at this time? Sally Waldo, can you hear me? I can sir, how are you? Good afternoon. Very good yourself. Good, you know, just fine and just absolutely delighted to have you with us. I'm grateful for the just constant effort to make sure that we can have you as a part of this Tim today. So thank you for making this happen. Well, no, I gotta tell you, I think we just proved that using 20th century way of open architecture does not work as good as the 21st century. So I reckon that we work on 21st century open architecture. I'm with you, absolutely. Well, I've already given our attendees a quick overview introducing you. So at this point, I'm gonna go ahead and ask my colleagues, Joanne and Maggie to advance to your slides. And ladies, if we're ready, we can go ahead and launch Mr. Walden's presentation and hang on just a minute, Mr. Walden. We will get you up and running. All right, sir, we are on your first slide, your intro slide with the name. I'm gonna turn it over to you, Mr. Walden. It's all yours and I think you were gracious enough to also mention you are open to fielding a few questions if and when they come in through the Q&A chat window. So if you don't mind, I think we'll take you up on that offer as well. That's fine, yeah, count me in on that. Perfect, all right. I'm gonna go on mute for the moment, sir. The podium, so to speak, is yours. Thank you, Sally. And I appreciate the intro that I missed, but that's okay. I remember when I was down in Atlanta and had a great time down there. And so what I plan on doing today is talking a little bit of the RCO's history when it comes to the work we've been doing with regards to open architecture and our interoperability. And so the goal, oh, am I not, okay. So the plan is to kind of walk through a little bit of history of the office and then get right into maybe some updates that I provided a handful of years ago with regard to some of the programs and then end with what we're doing in advanced battle management system and what we're doing on our capability release one, if that makes sense. So next chart, we're gonna see it this 20th century way. There it is, it did work. Okay, a little bit of history of the organization. I'm not gonna spend much time on this, but in the center you'll see three individuals. They're kind of the followers of the RCO. Pete Alders is 18L. Dr. Jim Roche was secretary of the Air Force and General John Jumper was the chief staff of the Air Force. Everybody thinks they're frustrated with acquisition. That's not true, they're frustrated with both acquisition and requirements process. It appears as though a lot of things they would ask it done never really got done the way they expected. And so they set out to create a very streamlined organization that Secretary Roche dubbed the Rapid Capabilities Office. And the good news is this nation has done RCO like things for quite some time. On the far left I show an individual and another organization. So Kelly Johnson, at the time the lead guy for Lockheed Skunk Works. And for those that know, he created quite a few programs that really set the stage for certainly the Air Force and other organizations out there to increase our national security objectives. And then on the very lower left, National Accountants Office, a lot of people don't know, but there was a Air Force 06 colonel that actually led the instantiation of that organization. It was highly streamlined back in that timeframe. And so we kind of went back to the future. We used their principles and how they tailored to inform how we would do that. And on the far right, kind of get a sense of our mission objectives. We'll go into a lot of detail here, but it really is about fielding capabilities, not just doing development. And then we knew that we would have to enhance our material responses to both combat air and space forces and really in support of combat commander needs. So again, the idea is modernize, but at the same time field. And then while we're doing that, push the bounds of the performance and think more along the lines of both acquisition related performance, but at the same time also working closely with using MAGCOMs to deliver that capability. Next chart, please. The model that we use, most people typically use and I'll get to the secret sauce at the end, access. So what this really is, not just access with the senior leadership of the department of the Air Force, but also access to the leadership of the Pentagon and to Congress and to the White House. And that access comes from being co-located in the national capital region. But at the same time, those individuals are interested in what we're doing and how we're doing it. That draws me into those types of meetings. On the top, talk about resources. Couple of things here. The first one is our charter, the RCO charter really is the governance and oversight by what's term board of directors. I mentioned the original three and what we have today, it's grown based on a number of things. The first one is 18L split to USDA and S, USDA RNA, so they're now two board members. And then the US Air Force split and the US Air Force, US Space Force. So both chiefs, chief of the Air Force and chief of space operations are now members of my board. And then the service acquisition executive for the Air Force. And if they create a space force service acquisition executive, most likely that will become another member. And then we use an internal POM process to where those individuals, our board members, are the ones that dictate how we're POM'd or not. And then the rest of corporate Air Force follows their direction, including myself. And we use a selective hiring process, most notably on the military side, we also try to do that when we hire civilians. And then finally, the secret sauce of most organizations like we have is the culture. And typically the culture is proactive critical thinking as well as proactive management of efforts. And really everybody comes in with, hey, I wanna deliver a product and not worry too much about the process. Doesn't mean we don't do processes. Now the challenge is use the right process for the right reasons as opposed to use every process and find that you're going through essentially duty 5,000 in a very bureaucratic or lethargic way. Most of the decisions we try to do at the lowest level, in fact, most folks that are senior leaders in the Department of the Air Force consider most of what they want done, either decided by me or the group leads or program managers within the organization. And it works quite well. And then why is that we really want to empower and trust the individuals that we're putting to work. And I'll just, I'll share this one a little bit of a story with you. Typically when it comes to X strategies and contracting, it seems like every time a program manager comes in with X strategy or contracting officer comes in with the best contract laid in, the bureaucracy or processes want to add their words or sentences in there. And what you find is at the end of it, you don't even recognize what the X strategy was to include contracting. And what I've typically found is most individuals including the ones that work for me really are all about trying to do the best they can as opposed to coming up with something that appears to be broken. And I've rarely heard a program manager or a contracting officer come in to my office going, hey boss, I got a great idea. Let's see if we can slip the program a number of months or years and let's see if we can add more money to the taxpayers bill. I've rarely seen that happen. In most cases, most of the time, program managers and contracting officers do a great job in setting the first instantiation of an X strategy. So if we just follow that lead for a while, typically we'll find we'll go faster. Next chart, and while I'm going to the next chart, let me just share the basic premise that I even talk about at DAU. And I break acquisition up into three broad areas. And you won't find us at Defense Acquisition University, more 5,000, 5,000. But in essence, the three broad categories are make a decision, number two is get on contract and number three is actually build the weapon system and deliver that weapon system. And typically the first thing, make a decision, sometimes people are risk averse to making a decision, they want more information. In some cases, they'll put together a study called an analysis of alternatives or front end assessment. You may have heard them as AOAs or FEAs. And in some cases, those can take many, many years. Number two, get on contract. Again, each service has its own way of doing contracting and approval of the getting on contract. In some cases, that can take years. And then finally, hire someone to go build your weapon system. That's the true systems engineering. And I would not recommend cutting any corners there. You want to get that right. But if you were to take, make a decision and get on contract and make a decision and get on contract in a manner that starts cutting the time down. So make it fast, get on contract fast. If you just cut it in half, you can start to save anywhere from two to four years. That two to four years accelerates the entire acquisition process. So you don't have to cut corners on the systems engineering. And that's truly what makes it rapid when it comes to accelerating the build of a system. All too often folks think that it's all about accelerating the development and getting on with production and putting something out there. That's usually, that's usually a mistake. So you don't want to cut corners on systems engineering. So on a chart four, which we're on right now, if you look at the recipe, what you're really looking at is kind of a flow diagram of what's actually written in words in our charter of how we actually do the true codification of streamlining and tailoring coming right out of 5,000. Everybody seems to think we have waivers to 5,000 or waivers to laws, we do not. We follow it, but we actually have codified the tailoring and streamlining section of 5,000. And so we do meet the internal statute. We try to meet the FAR, D-FAR, and Air Force FARS and those requirements, but in a manner that makes sense and actually does get after tailoring and streamlining. And then as you go down to the bottom, we break it up into a number of different plans, which in some cases you might see as milestone, so milestone A, B, and C. And so we break it up into plans that actually are clear and concise. And in most cases, about 10% the size of a true acquisition strategy that calls every one of those out and you end up with a much larger book than what we put together. And we've had a number of AT&L folks in the past come back on, this is an easy read. We love how you guys do this work. But again, the idea here is put a plan together for the area or the phase you're in that makes sense and then come back when you're ready for the next phase. And then finally, if you look at how we actually start programs, that's the flow diagram in the far right of the chart. Again, we go through a board of directors. Those title 10 authorities that I mentioned earlier are the ones that essentially say we like what we see and whether it's a US Air Force, US Space Force or just interacting with other services, they pretty much provide what really constitutes the material development decision. And then from there, we write the ADM to get on with the process that I called out for modernizing the services. Next chart. Now I'd like to transition from the history and process side to just a quick update on two programs that's out in the press. And I did this last time. So if you look on the very top, I'm gonna talk a little bit about the X-37B. If you look at the timing, we landed mission five. We had about 780 days on orbit, a little over two years. We learned quite a bit. And then we launched mission six on 17 May. And it's currently on orbit today. I suspect we'll be pushing that two years, maybe a little bit longer. But the goal here is to take things up and not only test subsystems, but also test the actual vehicle itself. It's got a thermal protection system and attributes associated with the space plane that we need to learn every time we go up. And we learned quite a bit. And then on top of that, there's a number of things. I can't go into a lot of detail on, but in general terms, what you find is we're buying down risk for other programs and we've shared those with the press in the past years. And then at the very bottom, transition to B-21 Raider. If you guys saw the article I gave the, I'd say about a month and a half ago, if you look at the B-21, it really is gonna become the backbone of the future US Air Force bomber force. And the goal here is to maintain that we've been doing over the handful of decades and that is hold any target at risk from our adversaries and get after it from three broad areas, have the right range, have the right payload and the right access to be able to conduct that target, holding any target at risk. And then it's both conventional and nuclear. And then I mentioned that we had two of the bombers, both test platforms in the current production line. And right now we are using the production line that would actually build out a minimum of 100 that the Air Force and this nation are asking us to do. And so we're learning a lot, not only in the build of the test aircraft, but we're learning a lot in the production line start and getting all of those challenges behind us. So we're ready to start full reproduction. Next chart, Alice transition to a little bit on advanced battle management system and where we're going. In the upper left, you can kind of see a, not only the earth, but then kind of a cloud infrastructure and tie in a number of systems together. If you were to remove all the military jargon or acronyms on there and overlaid what you see typically today, like an Amazon cloud or a Microsoft cloud, if you were to overlay some things that you get to experience when you go home, you'd start to get a sense, it really looks more like a 21st century internet. And the goal here is to be able to take the data we have and ABMS is the Department of the Air Forces data and multitude of weapon systems, command and control centers, et cetera, and be able to bring that into a system that we're very used to at home. I'm gonna make this large assumption that anybody listening on this line right now has actually used the internet and for the most part have felt pretty comfortable using the internet and love the way we transport data back and forth seamlessly. In fact, when I log on to the internet, I don't think about all the standards required to make that transparent sharing take place. I just take for granted that it's there. And my put is, why can't we do that in the military? And that really gets after what I think all the services are attempting to do is get after this military internet of things. On the far right, you'll see that we've put the ABMS attributes and that should look familiar if you've used the internet, most of which is really getting the secure processing, connectivity, data management applications you typically would see in services that I described earlier in the 21st century commercial industries internet of things. And then on the bottom, I've got the center integration effects integration. That's really getting after the sensors. I'll just pick ABMS, for example, some of the department of the Air Force's sensors that we have and some multitude, whether it's air space or even command control and then the effects we want associated with each of the missions that the department of the Air Force has to do. And I'm sure the Army and Navy have similar construct and wanna share similar data, even though the format may be different. And then finally, on the lower right, I'm gonna touch briefly on capability release number one. And what I show here is a KC-46 with pods, but really view this as more of a node. And if you're familiar with Wi-Fi, if you've got Wi-Fi at home, think of that as a node for not only your cell phone, but a node for your laptop or any other type of communication you'd have in your home today. In this particular case, it would be a node in theater. Not only would it be a node to transfer and fuel airborne assets across all services, but also it could be used as a node of fueling the information that others may want and they don't even know that. And so if I'm conducting air operations in a part of the globe, where I want to actually update, seamlessly update an airplane that's coming up to get gas, I can do it through a system very similar to what I'm showing in this picture. And then if I do this properly, not only that, I can service other customers. Next chart. So what I show here is an expanded view of capability release number one. And those other customers, if I look at the one I was describing earlier, the tactical customer, whether it be a fighter, bomber, ground, or in this case, maritime types of systems, I may be able through RF mechanism, be able to update using this node, those folks that are in line of sight. And then if I start to look at, well, if I was to move the data beyond line of sight, then potentially I could start servicing other customers like what you'd typically see in an air operations center or a maritime operations center or ground operations center. Think of that more as an operational customer and for the Air Force, it'd be the Joint Forces Air Component Commander. And then if you look at the strategic customer at the very top right, there's been a number of operations that have been done where Secretary of Defense or in this case, the White House has been interested in watching those operations. But again, we don't distinguish between customers, the data is all the same, it's how you display that information to those individual customers. And this just gives you one instantiation of a small contribution to a much larger ABMS construct. Okay, so I'm gonna take a breath and I'm gonna open it up for questions and answers. Sally, thanks again for the invite. It is always good to be a part of this open architecture construct. And I must admit, I love going down to the land and being more in person, but based on the pandemic, I understand doing this virtually and appreciate coming back and share some thoughts. Over to you. Thank you, sir, just wonderful. Always appreciate having your time and your amazing insights and information. You always deliver such critical stuff. I do see a couple of things coming through the window, one just a moment ago from Kimberly Underwood asking, what is the timing of capability release number one? Yeah, so right now our plan is to try to get capability delivered. So you saw how we did the concept development and production. Right now we're looking predominantly of doing market survey with industry out there that does these types of, call it nodes, but think of it as more of radios and whether it's a software programmable, I think 21st century types of radios we're used to today, but also be online a site. So if you think about it, we're looking at the development stage and then get into production if it's required, how many do we need? And we're working closely with the combatant commanders as to when they would expect to see this online. So within about two years, we think we're going to have some prototype pods ready to go and do some testing. Very good, wonderful. And I'm flipping up on our Q&A window. I have this out of line. So I believe it was Patrick Collier who asked the question, is WOSA similar to Flex Weapons? Flex, is he referring to what happened in Allied Force? Patrick, I'm gonna, again, forgive me, my Q&A window is a little smaller than I'd like it to be. Patrick, if you'd like to reply to that and if perhaps I'm missing that coming through, one thing we can do, Mr. Walden, of course, is to come back to you, following up via email and presenting his question, these questions, anything further that comes in through the window. As I'm looking very, very quickly, that may or may not have been Mr. Collier's question. Anyway, let me go ahead and looking at the time right now and again, knowing how busy you are and the fact that you stuck with us and made it through to participate in our team. As our keynote speaker, as a very distinguished individual with the services and to all of our community, I am excited to have you. Let me do one final question. If I may, I just see it pop up now. It says, kindly introduce the agile production of a new aircraft. How was the new process aligned to DO-178C, airworthiness processes? Would you like to field that now or would you like to take that offline? Your choice, sir. Well, I'm not, I'm making sure I'm following the question. I think I heard something along the lines of a new aircraft and then how does that follow, I'll say a 20th century way of airworthy certification. Think that. Yes, please. Okay, so I'm with you 100%. So right now a lot of aircraft are built composite on composite. And so if you look at the way the services have grown up in the 20th, up to the 20th century, it's been on composite skins, but more of an internal metallic structure. And so right now what you're finding is that I believe the airworthy certification officials out there need to kind of get to a more modern way of aircraft building, of which industry has been doing for quite some time. So in most of the aircraft we fly in commercially today, a lot of them are composite on composite build. So the question is, what process did they go through in the FAA and what can the services learn from that? And if that's the question, I think it's we're already doing some of that today with the systems that we have. And so I will tell you, the Air Force is not quite there yet on how we go through that process, but they are learning as we are learning to figure out what things matter when it comes to airworthiness certification of a composite on composite structure, if that makes sense. Hopefully that answered the question. Very good. What I think we'll do is we will just compile all the questions we receive to you and then allow you to just go ahead and elaborate more fully and reply in a future email. So sir, thank you again for your time for this presentation to all of our guests and attendees. Mr. Walden's presentations, his slides will be available and will be posted on three websites. Again, I'll put those in the chat window as to what those are. They will probably be posted in just about a week. So just an FYI for everyone. Mr. Walden, I'll let you sign off, sir. Just a joy and a pleasure to have you with us and to see you again, although on a virtual environment, I hope to see you in person very soon. Well, thank you, Sally. It's always a pleasure to be a part of this group. Thank you, sir. Alrighty. Take care.