 From Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering LiveWorks 18, brought to you by PTC. Welcome back to the seaport in Boston, everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, and my name is Dave Vellante. We're here, this is day one of the PTC LiveWork Show, the confluence of internet of things, edge computing, AI, blockchain, security, a lot of innovation going on here in this new industry that's being formed a lot of older and existing incumbent industries. Lieutenant Bruce Litchfield this year is the VP of Sustainment Operations at Lockheed Martin. Bruce, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it coming up. Thanks, David. How are you today? I'm doing great, thanks. It's a good show here, a lot of excitement, a lot of really interesting demos. We see a lot of movement here, but I wonder if you could talk about your military experience and how it relates to your current role at Lockheed Martin. Sure, so I spent 30 plus years in the military, and I retired as Lieutenant General. Well, thank you for your service, really. You know, it's an honor to serve. And time went by fast and really got to work with some great people. And when you have that in your blood, it's hard to walk away and not continue service. So I got a chance to work with Lockheed Martin, who delivers the products and builds the products that I grew up with in the Air Force. Most of my career was in the sustainment and keeping them flying kind of aspect of the Air Force. So now I get to work on them from a corporate perspective and continue to deliver products and capabilities and upgrade them so that tomorrow can be better than today and that the folks out in the field make sure that when the systems are needed and they have to use them, they're ready, capable and to go to do whatever they do. So, sustainment is in your title and it's your current role. So by sustainment, you mean it works when you need it to work. Is that, describe that a little bit. That's right. I mean, I use a simple term, keep them flying. And when you think about that, all over the world, 365 days a year, 24-7, you never know when a mission needs to take off or a soldier, sailor, airman, or Marine might need a capability to save a life, change the course of a battle or otherwise make a difference. And if a Lockheed Martin system's involved, I want to make sure it's there and ready to go and they don't have to worry about whether it's going to be able to succeed in the mission. So what's the role of technology in keeping systems up? I mean, in the IT world, it used to be, just get two of everything or three of everything or four of everything and just make things redundant. You know, that thinking obviously has evolved, but what tech is Lockheed Martin bringing to this problem? So, if you look over the systems and I'll just take, I came from the Air Force. And so the Air Force is flying weapons systems that are 50 plus years old along with we are delivering now the F-35 which is the absolute latest in technology and capability. And so when I look at the evolution of technology over that time, it really is very impressive. And I really do term sustainment as a systems engineering problem. It's making sure the part is there. It's making sure the system's reliable. It's making sure the tech data. It's making sure the support equipment, anything that the maintenance person may need to get that jet airborne, got to make sure it's there at the right time at the right place. And so if you look at the technology of how it's evolved over the year, it's much the same as our capability to go to war is from what I would consider the command and control of World War II where you just launched the jet. In fact, we talked about it today. For one raid in World War II, it took almost 200 bombers to hit one target dropping over almost half a million tons of munitions. To today, one aircraft can hit multiple targets with precision accuracy and keeping our airmen safe. So technology has evolved along with how we sustain aircraft has really evolved over that time period. So much more software obviously involved in the aircraft today. How has the industry dealt with the increasing complexity as a result of things like software and code? But at the same time, it's clearly delivering more reliable systems and more efficient systems as you just described. That's right. So think about it in this way. Underpinning an inherent capability such as the F-35 is the reliability of the system. So if I just take that one weapon system, so we have right now delivered over 300 aircraft and they're bedded down at over 14 locations around the world. 74% of the items in that aircraft have never failed over the time that they've been out there and including over about 100,000 hours worth of flight hours. Then when you start looking at that, almost 94% of them meter exceed their reliability requirements. So now we're just down to a few parts that we've got to make sure that we improve through regular upgrades that you would do under any normal conditions to make the most reliable system. Then on top of that, you put the software embedded into the aircraft that helps the folks on the flight line know what's failed, where it's failed, and then how to troubleshoot. And so you brought technology to a point of what I would call the human interaction on the flight line. And we talk a lot about predictive maintenance, anticipating failures. Presumably that's part of this capability. Is that, how real is that? Is it in action today? Is it sort of a future thing? Or can you talk about that? So it's very much in action today and we have a predictive health. And what we're really trying to drive to is a condition-based maintenance airplane. In other words, if you think about going to a commercial airline, you don't want it to fly to fail. You want to make sure that whenever you show up that it's ready to, you board it and you take off. Well, we're evolving the technology that evolves us to go to a condition-based maintenance so we can do maintenance on the off time when the aircraft's not needed. Or in what I would call a scheduled kind of timeframe. And that helps ensure that it's mission ready whenever the pilots need it or whenever the sortie requirements call for it. Okay, so let's talk about some of the challenges that you guys face in terms of bringing technology and sustaining this technology into whatever generation of aircraft. I think we're in fifth generation today. That's right. First of all, what's fifth generation and what are some of the challenges that you face? All right, so let's start with fifth gen. So from an operational perspective, when someone says fifth gen technology, it's really taken into account what I would consider low observability or other words, making the aircraft hard to detect. It's putting avionics sensors on there so that the pilot knows what's going on around them and is able to fuse that information to give them very exquisite information of what's happening on the battlefield and then be able to keep those that are supporting him informed of what's happening. It's high maneuverability of the weapon system as well as speed that it goes. So there's the technology aspects of fifth gen. And then what I like to refer to is fifth gen sustainment and that's really what the focus we are doing at Lockheed Martin. And what we want to be able to do is being fifth gen sustainment capability of the field and drive the cost down so it's at a fourth gen or below the price of what current systems are. So get new technology, modern technology, sustain it at a very high readiness rate at a cost lower than what they currently see today. So fifth for fourth is one of the mantras that we're trying to deliver or at least drive the cost down as low as possible. And one of the challenges that I would say is that that balance between how do you have insert capability and then keep the cost down. And so you have to do things differently. You have to evolve to a new way of looking. So we talked about condition-based maintenance or evolving to it in a capability where you don't fly to fail. You do it when the system's down or when you do it on a scheduled basis to do that. At the same time, you have to integrate all the capabilities together for software to bring in analytics into the capabilities that you have and prognostics kind of maintenance to the field. And so it's a systems engineering, a complex systems engineering problem. And really that's what makes kind of, I would call the strength of Lockheed Martin, which prides itself on being a technology company making tomorrow better than today. Yeah, and a systems thinker. And a systems thinker. When you talk about these capabilities, observability, avionics capabilities, maneuverability, increased speeds, it just jumps in my head, data. That's right. Let's talk about the role of data and analytics. I mean, the data explosion here, how are you dealing with all that data? So we get close to a terabyte worth of information, you know, a day. And then how you exploit that really goes across the entirety of what I would call the sustainment ecosystem. And if you look at it, sustainment probably, we can break it down into about 11 different areas. So whether it's supply chain, whether it's managing the inventory that we have within the supply chain, whether it's in reliability, prognostics, whether it's in the maintenance repair and overhaul capability. So we're bringing analytics across the entire spectrum of that and what we're out doing right now is getting best to breed capabilities so that we can piece together a holistic picture to better sustain this weapon system. So data is the key to doing that. At the end of the day, it's how do you bring that data and then bring it to what I would call the analog piece or the human being at the flight line that still has to maintain the parts. But we want to make sure the right part is at the right place at the right time. So the human's still the last mile. That terabyte a day, is the majority of that stored? Is it persisted or is a lot of it kind of throwaway data? No, I mean, the great news is we capture that data and so we have a chance to go utilize it to improve. You know, not only what tomorrow is, but if I look at analytics for sustainment piece, I look at it in three pieces. One is a dashboard, all right? Where are you? What's the status? Okay, that's good, that's your speedometer. Then it is, how do you do decision aids and tools? Which means, how do you make better decisions to affect, you know, maybe tomorrow's operation? Then there's the third part about it, which is predictive analytics. How do I make decisions today that affect me three to five years apart and then I can make a decision today and have confidence that down the road, that's absolutely going to be the right decision. And the first two, the status and the decision aids. I mean, those are real time or near real time. Very much so. Very much instantaneous type of thing. So that's a challenge obviously to deal with. It is, and then, you know, we are dealing with a defense. So you've got to be always cognizant of security, cyber security, and making sure that what you do keeps that data safe and makes sure that no one be able to tamper with it so that you're making real time decisions based on the known capabilities of the data and where it comes from. Well Bruce, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. I hope you're enjoying the LiveWorks show and it was really a pleasure having you. David, thank you. It's a great show and it's great to be here. Our pleasure. Okay, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. You're watching theCUBE live from LiveWorks in Boston. We'll be right back.