 Well, thank you, everyone, for coming this morning to our event on Future Vertical Lift. And I want to begin, first of all, with the security announcement, which we need to do just in case. It's never been an incident, and it's a very secure facility. But if there were to be an incident, there is an exit in the back, and there's an exit out the way that you came in, and I will be the security officer who will provide direction on the event that we need to leave the room. But the chances of that happening are very small, and hopefully not something that we'll have to worry about. Let me begin by mentioning that this event is part of a series on future aviation technologies, and particularly those applicable to ground forces, part of a ground forces dialogue. And as many of you probably know, Dr. Marne Leed really began this series of events and has been leading it. She has seen fit to return to the Department of Defense and actually to the Department of Navy to help advise some of the leaders there on their important tasks. And so I'm going to be picking up the mantle on this discussion, and we have a couple of future events in addition to this event that we'll be having on this topic and on these discussions. So the great work that's been done on this already by Marne is going to be continued and carried forward by the group that's continuing to work on it here at CSIS. Well, let me start today's event by talking a little bit about the future vertical lift and the consortium that's been put together, and we have Nick Lappos from the consortium here today to talk about it, and Jim Kelly from AT&L, and talk about how this fits into the overall picture of what's happening in technology at DOD and in the discussions that are underway. And so as has been noted in the past, particularly by me and future events, some of you may have heard, technology and the future of technology is really critical to the national security strategy and to the defense strategic guidance and to the DOD strategy is laid out on the QDR. And fundamentally, as has been noted many times, frequently by then-USD-AT&L now-Secretary Ash Carter, we know that the capabilities of technological capabilities that the Department of Defense relies upon for its strategy aren't produced within the department, they're produced by industry. And so it's the dialogue between DOD and industry, the partnership and the cooperative efforts of both that makes the strategy work and will make the strategy work in the future. And so I think what we have today is really an interesting and a critical example of how that dialogue actually takes place and what it actually brings to the table, how it informs the future of the department. So with future vertical lift, there is right now a dialogue going on between, within the Department of Defense, between the military services, but critically also between the Department of Defense and industry. And many times, those of us who follow the acquisition world, you get to a certain point and you save yourself, how did we get here? You know, whose idea was it to do things this way? Did anyone talk to industry? Did anyone in ask industry when they came up with this plan, with this path forward, whether this was the right way to go? Whether we were truly accessing the best of technology? Did we overlook something that was available? Did we move too soon when better technology was just right around the corner? Are we accessing what industry has to offer in the best way? You almost always reach that point at some point in acquisition program and you think about the paths you didn't take. And something that most people walk away from when they go through those moments is, boy, that early dialogue between the Department of Defense and industry about what's really possible, what's really in the art of the doable, what are the smart ways to think about these problems? That early dialogue is a key factor in success going forward. And what's nice about the Future Vertical Lift Consortium is it has provided a venue for that dialogue between duty and industry. There's a lot going on in the world of Future Vertical Lift. In addition to the dialogue that's happening vis-a-vis the Consortium, there's an Army demonstration program going on on vertical lift technologies. There's a DARPA demonstration effort going on. There are various S&T efforts undertaken by the services, particularly the Army, in the vertical lift area. So there's quite a bit going on. But what I think the key differentiation or the key thing that's happening with the Future Vertical Lift Consortium that we'll hear about today is really that dialogue on concepts, requirements, the art of the possible in technology and how Future Vertical Lift can play in potentially new and different ways in the future and not just reiterate what it's done in the past and make marginal improvements. Although marginal improvements may be useful and may be the path ultimately selected. And that dialogue is critical at the time when the Department of Defense is thinking about and working on the Defense Innovation Initiative and Meding Firing Power 3.0 and trying to identify the technological advances that are going to be really the key differentiators in future warfare. Now, I think we'll hear more from Nick on what the dialogue of the Future Vertical Lift Consortium is really pointing towards what kinds of things have been identified in this conversation within industry, within the department and between the two, and where the ultimate gains are likely to lie. And I think from what I understand, one of the ideas and concepts that has really jumped to the fore has been the issue of commonality. And I'm not going to go into great detail about what that's going to be, because there are smarter people here to tell you about that. To tell you about what they see as a potential for commonality and what they see as lessons learned on prior efforts to do things in a more common way, some of which have been very successful, some of which have been less successful. So with that brief introduction, I am going to introduce the first of our two speakers, Nick Lapos, who is the chairman of the Future Vertical Lift Consortium and has been leading, actually served as the chairman in a prior term and then took a break and then came back and has been the chairman, I think, since 2012. That's great. Helping to lead that dialogue in those efforts. And his day job, he works for Sikorsky Aircraft as Senior Technical Fellow for Advanced Technology. He previously began his, I guess you would say, began his career in the United States Army and was a attack helicopter pilot in Vietnam and no doubt with other service. Joined Sikorsky in 1973, was program director for the S-92 helicopter, so knows a thing or two about bringing a product from concept to fruition and a successful product that's out there in the world. The program under his leadership earned the Collier Trophy, which is quite an achievement. And he has been a test pilot and I've thought the most interesting thing on his resume holds 18 patents and three helicopter world speed records. So he's really the full package. Thank you for coming today, Nick, and we'll look forward to your comments. Thank you. Thank you and of course helicopter world speed records are roughly the taxi speed of an F-35. Thank you very much and good morning. I'd like to divide what I'm talking about into two general sections. One is an introduction to the vertical lift consortium and then to answer some questions that were asked of us by the Council of Colonials for the Future Vertical Lift and that were reported to the Executive Steering Group and the questions had to do with such things as what about requirements, what about acquisition, what can we change, what about commonality. So let me go through these slides and a little bit of of that order just for the vertical lift consortium. Our mission is basically to serve as a conduit for a pre-competitive information exchange and for work that's done on a research phase with our government customers and we do represent about 65 or so companies in the vertical lift industry. Most of the companies who are the key players in vertical industry are part of the vertical lift consortium. We were formed so that we could have a single voice and we could speak with that voice. We're a 501C organization. We do go for consensus but every report that we pass in also has the minority reports of any outliers so that the the unwashed opinions of the vertical lift industry are presented to our customer. We do have in our vision is to try as much as we can to support our customer and to create better tools for our warfighters in the future that is very important to us. Most of the members of the consortium who represent the their companies in the consortium are former military. This is a description of who is the vertical lift consortium and you can see that if you look at the size of the industry and recognize that 66 companies that represent this represent the bulk of the work that's being done to develop and field today's production machines and future machines. So we are a voice of industry. We represent the ability to do collaborative projects and we have the ability to work through an OTA that means a rather rapid contracting capability so that work can be done relatively quickly and we're finding now that we're beginning to pick up traction in terms of doing research work into the longer future and we have a competitive posture as well so members within the consortium compete with each other for those the revenues that have to do with doing research. Now the future vertical lift council of kernels asked us to answer some questions that had to do with the questions about what can we do with acquisition are there any changes that could be recommended from the industry outward? What about commonality? What are the concepts that the industry thinks could be approached with commonality? And then how about requirements can you tell us about that as well? So this represents the distilled thoughts of the industry back to the council of kernels and the executive steering group. First we would say for acquisition we have to recognize we've enjoyed a tremendous advantage. Our combat systems around the world are unparalleled and we think that today's system therefore works well but there is a question for us that has to do with the development timelines for today's systems and we reported back that the timeline to develop a full system and put it into the field is probably about as long as the shelf life of that system. We have to be concerned then with the idea that if we're talking now about concepts that will not be fielded until 2034 or 2035 will they be viable concepts then? And so what could be done to shrink acquisition timelines? We think that there's a great deal at can time that can be taken out of these timelines but they have to do very much with the idea of teamwork. I'm not going to read the slide to you but basically point out that there are ways of running programs and running organizations that have to do with concurrence and have to do with teamwork. Many of us in the consortium are familiar with Kelly Johnson's rules and recognize how programs might be run and many of us are also students of World War II history where we had no other choice and so programs are often run by having the military, procurement organizations, the contractors and the users work as a team together and build products that were fielded in months not years and we think that that kind of speed can be put into the system again. We think there's some actual concepts of it that are available today. We have to recognize that such systems as the 787 or the Sikorsky S92 or the Bell 525 can be designed, built, tested, fielded and change their operators environment in a period of about one half the time of a typical DoD program that goes to IOC. So we have to ask ourselves if we were to use a benchmark of a 787 how could we then take that kind of a program and mirror it into a DoD program to save the time that it takes and therefore to put these devices into the warfighters hands earlier but something else as well time is money and a marching program spends by the day so if we get systems out into the field we believe it will also have a significant cost savings as well. So we look at the acquisition strategies we recommended as well that the cost of systems is very much driven today by initial costs, recurring costs, but there's also a life cycle cost and we believe that if you consider the amount of money that it takes to keep our systems fielded operating we have to recognize that life cycle cost is very much a distinct measurable and a very important piece of the pie. We also think that that when we do that it will change our procurement strategies to some degree, it'll change our design strategies to some degree and that should lead to a better products in the field. Generally speaking cost to operate is directly associated with the maintenance cycle and to the time spent in maintenance and therefore we think that that looking for life cycle cost advantages might very well lead to systems that are more durable and more persistent in the battlefield. And how might the government organize? We think that this acquisition is tied directly to commonality. I won't spend time on this slide but show you the next slide. We believe that a nested program of programs might be the way to go and that is that we would end up having a system that could produce the common elements that are used by all of the capability sets for future vertical lift and those common elements are produced by its own program and delivered as deliverables. We also think that the Skunk Works approach as I mentioned before is a very important concept to consider and we have to recognize the oversight requirements and the procurement laws that there are and we have to protect ourselves. All of us as a taxpayers money is spent well and wisely but we think that that can be done and we think that the contractors can help to make that occur and we're ready to collaborate as an industry to try and create this this future system. In terms of commonality we picture this and this is this is with no dissenters within the industry on this and that is that we would have a system that would be fielded but would have common elements that were produced separately. If you could picture is there a reason why every flying machine has to have a cockpit design team design that cockpit and every flying machine has to have generator control units that put on the generators hydraulic elements that are designed separately. It's amazing how uncommon today systems are to the point where if you open the maintenance manuals on two army helicopters made by different manufacturers in different programs they use different words to describe the ship systems so the maintainers have to learn a different vocabulary to move from aircraft A to aircraft B. So if you think about that maybe we could produce if you will a series of programs that develop the elements of each of these programs that they share such things as a training and currency systems such things as the crew stations and cockpits all relatively identical or at least common and that maybe a ship system that would drop torpedoes would be different than one that would launch anti-tank missiles but those would be hung on the outside of a cockpit that otherwise would be identical and maybe even so that different engines had different limits but the crew had a limit gauge that was labeled in percent and the colors and the concepts of those percent of limits were the same basic concepts so the crews did not have to learn in the language and in a way of thinking to move from machine A to machine B. Now these elements are already had in the world today if you have a Penske truck and you drive into a U-Haul dealership and they change the starter do they have to look in the book we already know that most of the systems we deal with have elements of commonality they're driven by by the fundamentals of economics and by the fundamentals of it's a good enough way to go we have to recognize that these systems that we're talking about that have become common do erode to some degree the payload of the system that they go into because there is a natural price to pay for being slightly less than perfectly optimal. The ideal cockpit in one machine is not the ideal cockpit in another one so there'll be some trade-offs to be made and some biting of the bullets by the project pilots and by the program managers to accept the system that comes from the cockpit program management team and as presented to the team and says this is your cockpit and of course there has to be the elements of the cockpit that then serve the aircraft it's put into which modify it so modifiability has to be built into it as well. I don't want to spend a lot of time here but I must point out that we think the commonality goes all the way back to the point where the maintainers have the same basic troubleshooting charts the same basic troubleshooting procedures and it is not a strange thing to open up a page in the maintenance electronic maintenance manual and read that maintenance manual for aircraft a as opposed to aircraft b and find that they are roughly the same and that it didn't take a total retrain to use that system. And this is another way to say roughly the same thing and and please note that their basic system design even so much as to standardize the hardware and tool sets even so much as to have the same basic hydraulic and electrical connection systems that were all fundamentally the same it seems radical today but go on ebay and look for a world war two turn needle as a cockpit display and find out that that turn needle was used in seven or eight different aircraft the same part number. So we find that in the past we didn't have a luxury of standardizing each aircraft to itself only and when we don't have that luxury perhaps we gain advantages and costs in the commonality. Some of the pitfalls of course or what do we do about the fact that there will be one design that's licensed across the board so there's lots of business interaction that take place because of this and lots of tracking of the intellectual property that exists there but this again bridges we've crossed in the past. We have to recognize too that all the data and data rights question will have to be solved we stand ready to discuss this fully and try and help work that out. We have to recognize that the industrial base is an issue too if there's only one fundamental cockpit design who does that design where does it reside and who else loses their atrophies their ability to make those systems. Lots of ideas of single point failures as well if everything is quite common that way what if we discover a flaw in the way a hydraulic system works does every aircraft get grounded because of that flaw so we have to build resilience in as well and it's very similar to what farmers face when everyone buys the same strain of corn. Lots of lots of things to think about for this. There are also some other commonality questions. If we are talking about building logistics systems that are virtually identical for the various future vertical lift capabilities does that mean then that the services change the logistics system fit or do these adapt into the services logistics system? A big question to ask and a lot of rippling that'll flow back into each of the services so we have lots and lots of work to do there. Requirements recommendations lots of words here they give you read afterward and please enjoy yourself with them. The fundamentals of this we think that nothing is a requirement until it proves itself through operations analysis and good solid science and good solid field practice. So we have to be very careful about declaring requirements until they prove themselves and it's it's very difficult for us to be able to weigh which is worth more 40 miles more range or two more missiles. 40 miles more range or one half hour more hover capability. We're not sure which one is more valuable and we have to be very careful before we weigh and recognize that when we weigh one against another one takes from another. The volume if you will that defines the design of an air vehicle is a fixed volume and if we make one thing better something else has to be made worse. I often describe that the volume that is a design is like a soccer ball and if you're right on the face of the soccer ball hover performance high speed range each face has a different word on it if you make that face better by pulling it out other faces have to go in so the volume stays roughly the same and we have to recognize then that balancing requirements is very much balancing so that we get the best combat power in the warfighters hands and we do not seek parity with threat forces we have to seek solid advantage with threat forces at all times. I have a saying that's on the internet you're free to look it up and that is if you're in a fair fight you didn't plan it properly so bottom line is that we're here to help one of the ways we think we can help is to point out that today if you were to go into the desert you discover that the war is being fought to a great degree with dependence upon rotorcraft to support the warfighter there are observation posts and and places that are being fought at that cannot be accessed other than by rotorcraft introducing the tilt rotor to introduce more range and speed has changed that battle even further and what we're talking about this slide is let us not talk necessarily about replacing today's battalions with tomorrow's battalions let's talk about whether or not it's time to think about rotorcraft changing the battlefield enough so that today's missions that are done by ground units could be done tomorrow by aviation units and think about the fact that if you run supplies up a road and a truck moves at eight or 10 miles an hour in contested territory the truck has to have its own fuel and its own people and its own protection and then what goes 100 miles it has to stop and be protected overnight and then go out again and the actual cost to get the bullet to the end of that truck's line 250 miles from the port city to get that bullet out there how many bullets did it take and it's sort of like if you can picture this the moon mission put 30 000 pound flight vehicle on the moon and weighed six and a half million pounds a takeoff so what is the weight of the system that gets that bullet to the last person on the end of the line and we believe that rotorcraft vertical lift machines can be a very essential tool at reducing the total amount of tail to get that tip where it needs to go so we invite us all to look at future missions and change the mission structure as necessary this same slide could have been used in 1937 to talk about the difference between aircraft carriers and battleships it could have been used in 1932 or 1933 as the difference between troops that walked and tanks that rolled the warfare changes with technological advantage we believe that vertical lift has got the sustainability and battle hardness now to be a fighting member of the force and perhaps to be counted on even further so that's all I have thank you very much well thank you nick and our next speaker is uh mr james kelly goes by jim uh jim and his day job leads the f-35 logistics team and the office the assistant secretary of defense for logistics and material readiness uh i think i've heard of that guy what's his name that would be mr burto burto yes we have heard of him congratulations to you for acquiring david from us um he advises the the assistant secretary on all aspects of sustainment for the f-35 but he's here today in a different capacity an older capacity for him because he began life as a u.s. army attack helicopter pilot i was a veteran of the first gulf war and the bosnia campaign and he served a number of positions in the g4 of the army and logistics capacity and within the assistant secretary of the army for acquisition logistics and technology in their aviation systems area he has a masters of science and national resource strategy from icaf and also a masters in public administration because if one masters is good two must be better definitely the case and he is a member of the defense acquisition corps with certification and program management life cycle logistics and business financial management so a triple threat there as well so gem gem i look forward to what you have to tell us about the osd view of where we hopefully can go great okay i am happy to be here and a bit humbled with andrew and nick and it's nice to see past and current colleagues in the audience what i want to talk to you about today is ons costs and commonality i spend an awful lot of time looking at the ons costs for f-35 and other systems and my whole message here is really just to make us think as we pursue any future systems i contend that the data on our current systems can tell us an awful lot about where we might want to focus if we actually want to achieve reductions my bottom line here is there's a ton of data out there both actual and estimated data both in government and industry for our current vertical lift aircraft a lot of cost and performance data we have to go grab it and look at it the data can really help us inform strategies concepts of operation and it can really help us get to affordable readiness when i say that i mean that we achieve systems that meet our readiness requirements these systems have to keep numbers of trained and ready crews available to the combatant commander simple as that and they have to do it in a way that doesn't break the bank so their sustainment costs cannot exceed what the services and the agencies can afford to spend i think commonality as nick really touched on is going to have some huge opportunities to acquire these systems i think commonality is going to come with some political and operational benefits to operate and support these systems i think we'll get a lot of backing especially in the political area and there are some potential cost reduction areas as well too again if we look at the data and we're really smart about it this chart is a typical cost Pareto using actual data for one of our current rotorcraft systems in the department and this is by the capes cost estimating structure those are the categories labeled down in the bottom and i just call your attention to the left side of the chart this is typically where our rotorcraft systems live in terms of the cost areas that make up their total ons cost and how those things come out so generally depot level repair parts all categories of maintenance to include the manpower costs and the material costs associated with organizational intermediate depot level maintenance and the energy costs but where our systems really you know it's where the spend really exists for our current systems by the time you get to energy your upwards of about 90 percent of the Spanish so a first look at some costs and a way to begin to focus in on what might we want to attack through commonality once we put a Pareto together this chart takes that same cost data and we just built a simple excel rough order of magnitude cost model that's all this is and we take the cost categories again down to a second level we plug in some costs that we actually experienced in 2014 on this system and the real message here on this chart is the drivers if you want to reduce costs on anything if you want to focus strategies on things you've got to come in on the cost drivers i highlighted a couple and pointed them out but really the things that drive the cost in our systems are the numbers that we have to procure you know the number of aircraft in this case the hours that we need them to operate per year people costs which are huge and a big inflation area not only in dod but across the government and then in terms of the burn rate and the cost per per gallon of jet fuel down on the bottom that gets to our energy costs if you want to reduce on s cost you got to reduce the drivers you got to find a way to have these systems be fewer flying fewer hours fewer people involved in lower energy costs so what this chart does again it builds on the same data takes out of the model and we rack the cost drivers the separate cost drivers and the the things that are driven by the numbers of aircraft flying ours people and the energy costs and we get to look at the sensitivity what this chart does is it takes each one of those cost drivers and it increases it by 10 percent and it shows you what the impact would be on total o and s cost the same is true for reductions we call this a tornado chart when we draw out the reduction side because it looks like a profile of a tornado on the first line i'll just walk you through an example here so in our model that particular aircraft had 148 in the aircraft if we add 10 percent more aircraft to this model 15 aircraft we're going to have almost a one for one increase in on s cost 9.8 percent same would be true for a reduction if you found a way to do a mission through commonality that resulted in fewer aircraft the numbers of aircraft very very large impact on total on s cost down towards the middle of the chart what i highlighted is some areas where commonality really may have some some payoff again nick touched on this when he was talking about on the acquisition side developing common systems if you can bring those into your sustainment con ops and you can bring them away where those cost for the repair parts the labor and material costs associated with those things are less we have an opportunity to save some money there those are things we definitely should be doing in the acquisition and sustainment strategies all of those areas that i point to the depot level reputable cost per flight hour the depot cost per aircraft the consumable parts cost per flight hour and the mod cost per aircraft are really part intensive areas and again if you could bring those costs down by 10 percent and you could aggregate somewhere around a five or six percent savings in that area which is not insignificant so really i just want to reiterate the message of the last three charts you've got to get to really understanding the drivers of cost and each one of our current systems has got kind of a thumb print some rule of thumbs that you can look at to see what's going on there switch gears just a little bit here and this chart is now showing you what might be in the realm of the possible for future systems based on what we achieve with a couple of current legacy current systems that replace legacies this is average cost per flight hours now and if you look at the two stack bars on the left part of the chart the one on the left is the legacy bird and the one next to it is the current system it achieved a slight cost per flying hour reduction it's really interesting when you look at the data and we haven't gotten into it a whole lot other than to capture it but there was a large reduction in maintenance costs which is the green mar and an increase in the manpower costs and a also a slight increase in the ops cost to be really interesting to get into that data and see what was going on if you look at the two examples on the right hand side again a legacy bird and a replacement aircraft significant cost per flying hour reduction was it actually achieved this is actual data and it looks like maintenance driven costs was a significant reduction and the continuing system improvement or the mod costs which is the blue on the top of that stack bar came down a lot kind of indicative of newer systems where you're modifying older ones to keep them going and those mod costs go away early in the life of newer systems nick also touched on this you know if your planes are not if they're in maintenance they're not up they're not available to train and fight this is some other data that that i pulled looking at the aircraft corrosion database which happens to have all the work order data for the current systems in it so here's five systems and it gives you an idea of where they're spending their time in terms of corrective and preventive maintenance corrective maintenance has a real strong tie to reliability highly reliable systems will have less of that preventive maintenance seems to get a lot more into the maintenance system that we field with the aircraft how we design it for you know for maintenance in the field some of these systems you know have 60 40 splits some of them are about half and this and the data that i pulled their systems that just kind of span the last couple of decades from some old systems to some new systems definitely an area to look in for commonality in terms of how much reliability is appropriate for these systems and what do we want to do for maintenance systems when we put them out there here's another view can't tell you what it's like to be in Bosnia on a cold winter day and pull a road ahead off an Apache and see standing water inside the road ahead with corrosion kind of makes your day interesting our aircraft spend an awful lot of time in corrosion correction type maintenance and there's a lot of cost driven there as well there's a 20 to 30 opportunity and we really really have to get away from from this stuff in the system designs if at all possible but there's also other ways of thinking about corrosion the Coast Guard manages their aircraft to be in and out of corrosion intensive areas there's smart ways of going about doing this but there's a tremendous amount of potential here to reduce operating costs on future systems and the last thing i'll look again from the work order database five five systems this comes down into the subsystem cost areas and it just is showing you as a percentage of cost where things typically reside and for most of these kinds of systems if you just walk down from the top it's airframe it's engines it's it's a rotor and drive type things they've been our primary subsystem cost drivers for a long long time so i'm going to stop here and again my intent was just to put some data in front of you about our current systems and begin to make us think a little bit about how we would go about focusing on areas where we might have some high payoff for cost reduction in the future thanks thanks Jim and at least to this audience of one you certainly know how to appeal to the audience because we love data here and i love to see it and what was really interesting to me was that your data gets directly at the question of what makes a difference what actually is going to make a difference in at least in terms of cost and obviously there may be other difference makers in terms of operational effectiveness or ability to perform new missions but using data to really identify what makes a difference on the dod side marry that up with with what the potentially industry can bring to the table in terms of what's the order the doable what's the order the achievable and you know then it seems to me you start to really flesh out okay what do we want this program to be and that's so that's my my first question to the two of you is the question of you know in this conversation back and forth between the department and industry looking towards a future vertical lift program a program in the future that hopefully will be an acquisition program and actually developing new hardware what really makes a difference what is brought forth in that back and forth that that that you have seen that can help shape a future acquisition program nick one of you yeah i'll start off i must say that speaking for the industry representatives for the vertical lift consortium this is the first time that we've been at the bakery while the bread is being considered before it's even baked we find a great deal of commonality with our meetings with the consular kernels and the executive steering group that that teaches us what the customer's thinking about in the past that would often concept the formulation would often be done by small groups of engineers meeting with small groups of engineers and not necessarily at the highest level we're finding out we were attached from the research end all the way up to the executive end and it's giving us a much better insights into where the future systems are going i must say too that we have tools industry as tools like ops analysis tools that can help and we are beginning to shadow the work that's being done by our customer and help to duplicate the data in some cases in some cases find differences that are worth bringing into the conversation so i must say that this is this is a formal method of getting us in fairly early and we feel very good about that one of which strikes me you've mentioned the council of kernels several times and what strikes me about that is it seems like it's a and maybe you can let me know if i'm on the right track here that it's a venue that brings in that multi-service dialogue but also i'm i'm hoping brings in you know the requirements community in addition to the acquisition community not just the industry side of acquisition community but the dod side of the acquisition community in that early dialogue which is something that's long been a goal and if you will acquisition reform efforts but it's you know hard to point to instances necessarily where it's been done or done well i certainly don't want to be speaking for the council of kernels directly and i would suggest that that might be a very good future topic to have understand the construction but the the system includes acquisition and user community very directly so there's an attempt to produce practical results that are the results that will change what happens on the battlefield jim i don't know if you've had a chance to go to any of those events and see you know from you've been obviously an operator and also a longtime member of the acquisition community have you what have you seen in terms of that interaction between the between the sides yeah i would agree with nick that you know i often imagine if i could have been around you know a decade or so ago around f35 and so we really have an opportunity and what the governance structure for fvl and and our interaction with industry i think brings to the table is the opportunity to really be there and not just when we're putting the bread in the oven but i mean we're really thinking about the ingredients and a whole bunch of other things for me i keep going back to this term of affordable readiness secretary kendall talks about executable and affordable programs a lot but it's gotta it's this interaction has a high probability in my opinion of resulting in a really great set of requirements and i think the primary way to have an executable program and an affordable program and acquisition in ons is to really get the requirement right scrub it to the bone make sure it's the needs get the wants out of it and make sure we can clearly articulate that among the stakeholders and industry so they're not guessing about what we're trying to do backing that up with some great strategies and some great contracts and we're going to get the performance we need and we're going to go about it in a way that we're not going to pay more than we should and that's the thing that i think we really really got to focus on and change as we go forward if you consider the pressures that are on the fiscal environment right now you know it's uncertain it's probably the best you can say about it but it's likely that we're going to have to do this at best with the resources we have today and it could be something a whole lot less in the future that takes me to my next question which is you know Jim you've raised an excellent point about the budgetary pressures and so i'm sure everyone in the room and part of their brain at least comes into a discussion about future vertical lift and says you know is this going to happen on my lifetime you know i do the are the resources there to actually begin and execute an acquisition program in this area towards a new capability and obviously this dialogue on getting the requirements right is critical to determining the answer to that question if the requirements are wrong you can head and down a path that we've seen in some other programs that i won't individually name but we can all think of our favorite candidate where we went several years down a road and discovered either midway or very late in the game that we were on an unaffordable path and so a generation was essentially skipped we skipped a generation of technology not in the good sense that we meant to but in the sense that we we didn't get there we didn't get to a successful program and so i'm wondering in in terms of the dialogue that that has taken place to date and what you see coming up and i'll start with you nick as to is there something that has jumped out to you that that that this dialogue that you've learned and let's say the government side about what really mattered to them about what they really saw as the potential benefit of a next generation system what it was going to bring to the table that the current systems don't do or don't provide or don't do well enough that maybe before this dialogue began wasn't at the top of your mind something that jumped out that you maybe weren't expecting you know underscore gym is talking about the idea that gave the requirements right is so very important to to starting this game i must say that the industry came and responded to the requests for what the realm of the possible was with regard to vertical lift machines the future and there's a realization that there's an increase in range that's probably between 50 and 100 percent and an increase in speed that's you know in that order of magnitude as well and in fact that there's also a question of the future battlefields requiring that range and speed to allow the systems to function at all that leads us to a at least an intuitive conclusion that has to be proven as we start to to run the ops analysis is that if we don't create these future systems we're probably not going to be viable in that future battlefield i'm talking about that we're the islands in the pacific are that much farther apart and today's helicopters with the given range and speed they have cannot effectively fight in those environments i must say then that the real question is not necessarily just affordability which is always a question in our minds but also whether you are preparing the warfighter to win in that future environment and we have to be very careful that we don't end up with something where we are so carefully able to save money that we don't allow ourselves to win and that that really is the crux of the discussion here the jmr tech demonstrators that are being built right now by two different teams that represent a wide swath of the of the vertical lift industry are quite revolutionary in their behaviors in terms of speed in terms of range in terms of maintainability in terms of the flying agility that the machines possess they are far and away better than any other vertical lift machines in the world and those will fly in 2017 so the real question for us is that once we see that revolutionary behavior and understand how to harness it in the battlefield how quickly can we get it into the warfighter's hands we think that the cost per pound for these machines will be no more than today's machines so then the question is do we invest and continue to invest in overhauling uh today's systems or do we invest in the future system at about the same cost that gives us this much more warfighting capability and you're hearing i represent one of the manufacturers of today's systems they're very very capable systems but to imagine that they would also maintain that capability up through the 2030s is a is a tough tough thing to imagine jim you sort of preempted my question a little bit in your slides you talked because i was going to ask you about the capabilities that that may have become a parallel in this dialogue and industry that that can influence these decision makers you you really highlighted corrosion and the opportunities uh to change potentially change materials and uh maybe make a significant difference in the amount of maintenance that ends up having to occur and the amount of downtime that you end up experiencing as a result of corrosion uh i don't know if you have anything more to on that on that case that you could highlight a little bit about the opportunities to change the dynamic there yeah absolutely and and so i'll try to stay with my theme um so if you look at corrosion and corrosion related maintenance cost it's got a real tight link with the number of maintainers per aircraft so that's going to be the driver and uh you know i i date myself now but i i look at the current systems um to try to undate every now and then but with what we're doing with the technologies the constructions of the aircraft the types of materials but really that's the area to look at how much we know we don't want the aircraft to corrode we know that we're going to be going into corrosive environments so as an outcome we'd like to have the number of maintainers that we have to dedicate to corrosion related prevention and correction inspections and all those kind of things to be minimal from a design standpoint as well too um again blackhawk apache kyle warrior shinook kind of my uh my forte when i was flying um the um you know to have to do cleaning and prevention and sealing and all those kind of things and await cure times cure times uh for uh corrosion and if any of these aircraft get uh LO technologies low observable type things put on them is an incredible detractor not only in the cost area but it's a readiness impact while you're just simply waiting for things to dry and adhere and all those other kind of things so we've got to think about the outcome you know again we want to have affordable readiness that readiness definition has to be crystal clear to all of us and you know i i'll tag on to a point that that nick made that i really agree with too um this idea about requirements and affordability another way of looking at it and it's really the way the warfighter in the department looks at it as priority the same for f-35 think what you will about where we are with that program the warfighters want to go places with that system that they can't go with their current systems today either because they're timed out or they're just not capable enough and the rotorcraft vertical lift community is envisioning the same kind of things they're being pulled to do things that they can't do with the current systems today so we got to think about you know what kind of readiness what kind of capabilities um it's going to go along with that because my guess is the priority is going to stay high for that and if the priority stays high the department's going to find a way to do it if i could add to the concept of corrosion protection and corrosion cost folds right into that area that that i mentioned that our team felt was very important and that is cataloging controlling the total lifecycle cost that that if you don't do that then you end up with the trades with the with magnesium gearboxes would save weight and which can be made for a given nickel and then when they get in the field they cost a lot more to maintain because of the corrosion probabilities of those materials if we spend the money up front and and readjust the design for lifecycle cost we find ourselves making decisions that have great benefits into the longer future they trade other ways that perhaps they a little bit more weight spent on that system and therefore some other system has to be larger larger engines or different rotor systems or wings to support the machine but those trades can be made so that the long lifecycle cost is dropped i'll offer the tools exist i was the program manager of one machine that required all the designers to catalog not just the weight of every part which is part of the katea database it was actually a screen that totals the weight for every print that's being released and there's another one for the initial cost that is on everyone's tool set today we added a third screen which was the maintenance burden now we totally chose to catalog it in terms of maintenance cost per hour literally but it ends up becoming lifecycle cost and that screen was part of the design decision making for that machine interestingly that machine now is is changing the way operators operate and the typical machine in the field is pushing 2000 revenue hours a year in a helicopter and the high time last year for that particular machine was 2300 hours in norway and if you could picture the operating environment there's no way you could assign to that some degree of you know it's a simple easy atmosphere and so on so you get what you ask for in the requirement stage and if the requirement is to drive life's lifecycle cost we in industry think we have the tools to help truly control that and deliver it i'm gonna open up one more area of discussion before turning to our audience this is a very distinguished group here with a lot more knowledge than i have so i want to get to your questions soon but but before i do that i wanted to get at one other issue which nick you really raised on your slides was this issue of commonality and what commonality could potentially bring to vertical lift and that there's a lot of opportunity there and i i always like to think of things in terms of examples and in commonality there's some as i mentioned as an all of acquisition there's some good examples maybe some less successful examples the one that always stands out for me that has shown a lot of successes and it's a little bit ironic and mostly we come to these events and we we bash mill specs we talk about how bad mill specs were and how we got to get away from them and in some cases that may well be true but there is the mill spec the mill standard 1760 for the interface between aircraft and stores and carriage that's really been you know it's interesting to me that as we've gone through my 20 years following acquisition system that standard has held up through the entire time it has been something that has has definitely stood the test time of the design and so i just was hoping that you could talk a little bit about where you think some of the high payoffs or what difference makers commonality really could bring to the table you know it's interesting you mentioned that because i i do know that the 14-inch standard nato rack is just a great thing to have and everything fits on it because everyone designs to it i think the commonality has a number of aspects that that save the one that i would lean on most because it's the most apparent immediately is the time it takes to develop the total system from an acquisition standpoint if we have for example specified that everyone will use the same generator control logic and i just offer that as a part nobody ever talks about but if you if you think about the idea that they're already developed or the boards are developed they may be larger contactors that have much greater current flow but the fundamental control of the system is not in doubt and maybe the same system would be used everywhere and that way you didn't have to spend the time it takes to develop that for your product and another product and another product the same thing with the cockpits as i mentioned the same thing with the maintenance logistics environment the same thing with training simulators if if you could picture that five capability sets were supported with one of those programs for each of those major areas then you would collapse that share of the program it might only be 10 or 15 percent of the total procurement dollar for the for the development of that of that system but that's 10 or 15 percent you didn't spend five times over so you ended up i think with a large savings there and then on the other side of it i think jimmy had some data to show that once you had relatively common and i must tell you it's the difference between identity and commonality. Identicality means exactly the same part and that is an obvious savings but there's commonality in that the crews know how to behave because even though it's a different part by dash number it behaves about the same way so you don't spend three more hours trying to figure out if that's the one that broke and there's an amazing payoff for commonality that is not identical but close enough that the system behaves because it understands that area so i believe that it has both acquisition and it has a development cost i should say um acquisition cost and life cycle cost advantages to having that commonality. Jim lessons learned on commonality you you've had some experience in this field there's a lot of opportunity there there's also and then nick acknowledges on his presentation some possible downsides what do you think is the kind of the key factors to making sure that commonality ends up being a net benefit towards an effort like that. Yeah so in addition to the designs and you know i would defer to nick on those kinds of things one of the things that i really think has to get going soon in fvl is a definition of the concepts of operation and i think we really need to again draw that future picture of how we think some of the potential high payoff things are actually going to work what do we envision for training everyone goes to the same school they can be initially trained certified and sustained throughout their life cycle what do we think about sustainment you know is a native you know vertical lift system going to touch down at an army base and get everything it needs is the information technology system going to recognize a different mechanic from a different unit touching that jet i mean there's a lot of things that we really need to work through i think without concepts of operations that are different today we're likely to produce some systems that may have common designs we can leverage them perhaps you know to an extent in operations and support but it's not going to go far enough f35 for example you know in the memorandums that chartered that program between the the dod and the modes of the world those that are involved in the cooperative development had an idea of use in a common spares pool so rather than sparing each service in each nation the the entire global fleet would benefit from the right stuff in the right places being repaired to common standards and being available for for anybody's use based on the priority and the urgency of need but let me tell you that a lesson learned from that is it is you know the idea is easy to grasp pulling it off so that a left main landing gear can come off a turkish jet be repaired in norway and go on an air force jet you know at luke is is something that really takes a lot of work in terms of qa and qc and supply and maintenance and transportation standards but i think without a conop i think without you know really employing ourselves and the requirements sponsors to really think about well how do you how do you want to operate these things that's different than today and i would just mention to you know i have an opinion but i think the political benefits are something that we have to grab i think the sense of the congress is they probably want us to cooperate and collaborate on these future systems and i think they believe that a cooperative development of things that we can share in the technologies and the capabilities is going to cost less and be better for the country so we can't we can't miss that piece of it as well too it's a little bit squishier but that's just my opinion well i want to open up now to audience questions uh and uh i always like to start with someone on the front row so sydney why don't we start with you uh microphone coming your way much louder now sydney freed bird breaking defense uh first a question about commonality you know obviously we have the f-35's model which was to build three variants of the same aircraft and how common they are today relative to goals perhaps disappointing but you know you on fbl are proposing to have you know multiple programs and then you would say sounds like one sort of commonality program almost that serves the others that provides things like here is your cockpit or you know here is your your gearbox or at least the components for those how would you envision that working because i don't think it's a model i've seen on a defense program it's fascinating but i don't know how to work i agree and i'm not sure that i could tell you exactly how it worked either it is we're really saying what we think would be i'll use the word conoffs to describe the concept uh and please recognize that where you have f-35 or three aircraft of quite similar uh general layouts and capabilities here we're talking about future vertical lift which can have as many as five different capability sets within each capability set there might even be one or two models of machine so it spreads it and raises even more questions because it's among so many different airframes nonetheless the idea that there would be a program that would produce the fundamentals for the cockpit or a program that would produce the fundamentals for the maintenance of logistics systems including diagnostics and and uh and so on uh and the training of the crews those programs would deliver their products down we picture to the to the program that actually developed the air vehicle the air vehicle would see this as being a piece of furnished equipment that came from another source to fine tune it though the program that produces the cockpit has to have representation from each of the constituent members so that there are enough hooks in that cockpit to support the equipment that each of the aircraft would use you can't simply build a blind alley and ask them to then redevelop the system where i think you lose all the benefits that we're describing and i would have to point out that uh if you look at today's computer systems you see the kinds of things i'm describing in in great length the the mac that you've got there you put on the apple store and by um aftermarket changes vast changes that change the the capabilities of the system and turn into a scientific computer or a publishing computer where the core itself is is a common system so i think that we have around us examples like this um and i think that the the trick for us to do is to recognize that the systems that we build those flight systems might take a small reduction in their um in their efficiency in their payload efficiency but accept a large increase in the economic advantage of developing that system because these these um um features that are provided to it are already provided and the program does not pay to develop them i hope that gives you a little bit more clarity well in the end i think the taxpayer but as a point of fact it would it would we would picture the structure might be that there would be a future vertical lift program that might be at the service level or it could be at the dov level and that program would then marshal the programs under it there'd be larger programs for the features i mentioned and then underneath that would be those that develop the air vehicles and just as an air vehicle now doesn't develop an engine the engine is delivered usually through a customer system and it's called government furnished equipment very possibly that we would find that kind of furnished equipment provided to the lowest level programs the ones that actually are produced near vehicles and they would be administered through perhaps a dov but perhaps it would be by a master service that was expert in that particular field i offer today the face consortium is developing software this way and i believe the navy has got the lead in the face consortium but the army's carefully following it as well and that might serve as a small example of what i'm describing it almost sounds to me a little bit like taking the open system architecture concept which is generally applied at the platform level and applying it at the multi-platform level or cross-platform to some degree and i think that has that has relevance yes come over here morning autocrats receive our magazine focus on commonality the army has said you know there's been some proposals that we're going to have maybe one system that can be different size you know an attack on utility or something you know similar aircraft different sizes different capabilities the army has says they indicated they want two different systems and they don't want to you know one you know one that you can stretch to do do two different things how would that affect the your commonality drive i'll jump in a little bit i haven't heard precisely those words i believe that the requirements the capability sets are still being understood and i believe there's pretty good concurrence among the services for what the the fundamental properties those capability sets are i would love to have one of the representatives when the time is right discussing the details for each of those systems i don't believe that the the blanket's been shaken quite enough to to know the details for the systems yeah i think my we as i mentioned this is going to continue to be a series of events and so i think we are hoping that at a future date when folks are ready to come talk a little more detail about what these efforts advancing towards formulating a requirement and coming out of the dialogue between the industry as they get to a point of maturity where they're ready to talk about some conclusions as opposed to some of the inputs we're hoping to have an event on that in the future maybe just to add a comment i believe that there are some examples out there today i would offer as one of the positive examples for commonality is the is the h1 series for the u.s. Marine Corps having it forced to a great degree the differences between attack and the utility machine but the similarities i'm told that there's about an 80 percent parts commonality between the two aircraft even though they're dramatically different fundamental airframe appearances and and that has great benefit for the shipboard parts storage and training of crews and maintainers and that might serve as a small model of what we're describing to a much larger degree i'd also point out that the bowing fleet has common cockpit elements so that pilots who are qualified in one bowing model can climb into another one and the faa says they're legal to fly it and and those are examples of this kind of commonality that we think we might be able to achieve at least for the fundamental air vehicle if not its mission systems so that we didn't have to repeat the process of developing every single multi-function display for every single capability set aircraft and i hope that gives you some picture of at least where things stand today hi george knuckles from a special operations consultant several years ago when jean taylor congressman jean taylor was chairman of c power subcommittee at his keynote speech at the surface navy association he said as much as we're paying for an aircraft right now as much as we're paying for a ship right now it's going to have to last 20 to 30 years we have to have a built-in growth capability so it comes before my committee and even though he's still not there i'm gonna ask that question two days later in a discussion with the peo ships and his three-star boss i asked that question and said you don't understand we don't worry about objectives and a requirement all we're worrying about is building the thresholds how do you look at this growth capability being built into this into this initiative i guess that's my question thank you for the softball question it is always a challenge and i am at heart an engineer who thinks of the design and we always have the design tools to be able to design exactly to the edge and of course when we do that and build no growth into the system we have optimal payload optimal range optimal capability for today's system but no growth the growth that occurs on today's systems occurs mostly because our tools aren't accurate enough and so that we learn the greater capability of the system as we exercise it and squeeze the next 10 or 15 percent out of it that wasn't true in the earlier days there was so much margin because there were so many overages built in that we had that advantage i would only argue back this if you want growth in the system that is capability you are not using for the first 10 years of its life the area under the curve of the stuff you didn't carry for those 10 years is how you're paying for increasing the capability after 10 years so the real question is where do you want to pay for it later when you modify the system to create the capability or by telling the war fighter no you can't carry eight missiles you can only carry four even though we have four more built into the airplane we're not looking at using yet because it isn't 10 years yet and that is how a designer sees that question so forgive me just briefly before we go to the next question the thought occurred to me is that kind of getting at the question that was asked about if you've got the commonality you've got a lot of people working together the diversity of areas maybe different companies who's in charge or who's managing this and the thought that occurred to me is that's obviously an important question in the design phase who controls the design and those criteria but it's also an important consideration in the ons phase which ultimately is the far greater amount of time for any platform and i know this question is right now being wrestled with on the f35 the issue of how do you structure who's in charge of bringing together the various elements of that maintenance supply chain and the product support manager and the product support integrator and jim i just thought maybe if you could give us a little bit of insights or lessons from how f35 is wrestling with this question of a huge diversity of suppliers international inclusive and who kind of is in control and who is you know managing that decision making process yeah so right now there's a i like to call it a sustainment baseline so there's 123 jets flying in the country today plus a test fleet all three us services plus the uk australia jets are coming on all the time and so there's a there's you know an existence strategy that's taking care of those aircraft today but again it gets back to you know a question of policy and requirements and looking at uh making affordable decisions over the life cycle for f35 there's still a bit of work to be done quite a significant amount of work really to be done and and it's in the middle it'll you know the government responsibility is on the top of the sustainment strategy if you will the product support managers roles and responsibilities and that entity's team that person's team are pretty much laid out in statute develop the strategy make it cost effective study it you know morph it throughout the life cycle to meet the requirements and keep it affordable on the provider end laws law drives some of the workload for example core depot maintenance workload into the organic base in the us where the where the workload exists today for the systems that are going to be replaced harrier f16 a10 those kinds of systems and there's sovereign requirements from all of the international partners they also have industrial capabilities and they believe that that's benefits that they they get and they've earned as part of being the development for the system it's really about in the middle and it's deciding it's obviously a massive integration requirement to do that correctly and to take the resources and to best utilize the training providers and the maintenance and supply chain providers in a way that is again is going to maximize that affordable readiness for the system over the life cycle and that is something that really the department is is going to kind of wrestle out with the program office and the participants over the next really couple of years what's the right mix of industry in that role and there will be a large one i mean the way we acquire these systems we're going to have a relationship with industry for them for lifetime a lot of how we sustain them and a lot of what we face for commonality is sustaining that commonality throughout the life cycle they develop the systems and we're going to need them you know in partnership throughout the life cycle so it's undecided right now for for F-35 but the you know the initial strategy has has the government Lockheed Pratt and Whitney VAE systems it's got Rolls Royce involvement and it's really got you know a lot of warfighter playing it as well too directly into that integration role to help keep everybody focused in on the requirements thank you um microphones come on your way Semar Bell Stark aerospace could you address how you plan to integrate unmanned capabilities in the future since in 15 20 years quite a lot of the benign more benign missions could be performed on men would have a great impact on cost i think you're looking at and i appreciate the question for a detailed answer we recognize that the IOC that we're talking about is quite a good day way off but the program has a timeline associated with the development of the details for the the FL platforms that probably involve having reasonable design understandings in about five years i must say that a great deal of what we see in terms of reliability and maintainability as applied to the field is going to occur with regard to the design that makes it more predictable for the life of components and easier to change components but also result in the data from the aircraft and its systems usage monitoring systems for example that allow us to predict usage and allow to predict sparse allocations on the fly as we learn by a system that is not only able to tell us what it's doing but also then predict what will happen in the future i think that there's a revolution occurring in the maintainability field today that has to do with the understanding of the data that we gather i know that at least one of the model helicopters that i'm deeply familiar with is producing about one gig of data per hour per aircraft flying and that is an enormous wealth of information and i think i'm trying to answer your question to indicate that most of what we're going to do is the traditional attack on the life of components but some of it's going to be an attack on how we then spares provide and how we predict so that the aircraft tells us the part needs changing before it fail the most important way to get the life cycle costs down is to produce a predictable system whose maintenance occurs when it's not needed and not when it is needed and the horror of having as a unit commander to stand there and have a aircraft on the flight line supposed to fly and one of them is not serviceable means you have to say to your boss which missions you're not going to fly and i think that that's one of the ways that we're going to answer that question is by having enough data and a system sensitive to it to be able to predict and to allocate the manpower appropriate to changing parts before they break i'm dick van adder from institute for defense analyses and there's several questions one could ask we don't have that much time i guess but the first thing i curious about in terms of this acquisition strategy and trying to reach these goals of 50 percent or 100 percent better distance and speed is what's the role of the jmr i know they're not supposed to be prototypes but we're trying to get acquisition speed built into this how do we make these things useful in terms of reducing the acquisition and the value of these systems in terms of actually achieving those kinds of goals i can feel that i am intimately aware of at least one of the team's responses to the government's request for building that tech demonstrator for jmr and while we recognize the jmr tech demonstrators are technology demonstrators that are only loosely associated fbl and i recognize our customers wish to be sure to recognize that the concepts are still being formulated for fbl but the jmr represents those high technologies that are buildable today that might be applicable and i must tell you one of the great lessons is to watch the teams building the machines i sit on the board for one of them and i must tell you that the government engineers are next to me as we are judging the preliminary design or critical design review for the machine and unlike in the past where these reports are all buttoned up and mailed off to a command somewhere else to be reviewed at their leisure we have government people sitting on the demonstrator teams making real-time decisions in days not in weeks or months and that's in fact i think one of the lessons learned for how this future acquisition might streamline itself is by having concurrent teams that work together to make decisions fairly quickly and have empowered teams from both the contractors and the government side that can make decisions that stick without relying on long bureaucratic time delays so i think that's one of the lessons we're learning and i i think that's might have been where you were going with some of your question if that does prove to be successful and these machines fly well it is very possible that the government might want to take some of that lesson learned from the way a program is conducted and weave that into the full-scale development of the fvl birds jim i uh your charts you had some data about legacy platforms and then the next generation platform that replaced it and showed that in some cases a big difference of maintenance cost other cases less so i'm just wondering if in your experience because i'm gonna just try to jump you a little bit here because i know your current mission may not lend you towards thinking hard about what's the role of a technology demonstrator in the acquisition process but but you have been in this game for a while so i'm just wondering if you have thoughts about not necessarily what this you know not speaking to what the army is specifically trying to achieve with the jmr technology demonstrations but generally where where technology demonstrations have helped feed the acquisition process and and either reduced risk or brought lessons learned process lessons or other lessons that help the program in the future yeah so the the acquisition ipt and the common systems ipt are really wrestling with this now with the services and and with osd quite frankly to come up with what's the program structure what's the appropriate level on this idea of commonality and what's going to be that executable and affordable acquisition strategy so i won't speak to that but my thoughts to your question really are is about content and then having the guts to let that content stay with the tech demonstrators if we're interested in just demonstrating move shoot and communicate capabilities that's fine if you want to demonstrate the ability to sustain these things and you know maybe give some insight into what the concepts of operation could be for training and maintenance and supply ops and things like that less sexy but things that might have some real high payoff later in the life cycle i would say let's do that and let's have the guts not to trade that off as we need to you know squeeze the soccer ball other places i have a question over here hi mega next time with us and i news uh since f35 has come up in conversation a few times i was wondering if that program has provided any lessons learned for you guys in the early stages just on how to organize the program or how to um you know what level of commonality you'd like to push for anything yeah again uh i'm not going to speak for the acquisition ip t and the common systems ip t they're really really wrestling with that stuff now to come up with that you know f35 is a highly common system i mean they they share a lot of components for a single engine jet to share the core engine that's going to be a pretty good thing engines tend to be cost and readiness drivers over the life cycle nick mentioned the possibility of bringing gfe engines that are plug and play into these aircraft with common look and feel on the operations and maintenance side it's those kinds of things but again the lesson learned and this is really formed my opinion about fbl is on the con ops i hate to keep going back there but it's okay to say commonality if we took a little test right now we passed out three by five cards and everyone wrote down a definition we'd write something different now i know we would but to really think and and have it be a requirements based operational based kind of a thing what do we want to do with these systems that's different and uh i think it was the seven five in the seven six not only do you get the same type rating but the simulators were so high fidelity you could actually you know be rated to go out and fly in revenue service never having flown in the aircraft i mean it's just take take these ideas further uh and maybe industry and commercial offers some ideas about how we could be thinking really look at what we've done the last 12 years and where we think we're going in the future but f35 for me really i i think it just it it sparks the idea that we really have some work to do with the con ops i end up with something that's common how do i really want to use it to extract the operational benefits out of it and you got to think about that early or you're not going to hit those goals in the back red peniston with defense one uh i get your point about con ops but as they say predicting is difficult especially with the future and is it even possible to know how you're going to want to use these things i mean everything from you know the blackhawk to aircraft carriers gets used differently than how people thought it was how do you even set up a process that allows you to come to to requirements that will actually be borne out yeah go ahead i'm gonna i'm going to use a different word than con ops only to try and explain what i think that jim and i would would probably agree to the concept of operations of the future is actually the vision of how the system will be used so rather than predicting what the system will do in the future it's commanding the system to have to do it because you stated the vision and i think it inverts the paradigm then once the system is created the con ops adjust to what is actually deliverable but one hopes that you've achieved a significant percentage of those deliverable changes to today's systems of that future vision that you now change the game in the end it is the game changing that we're all interested in and and i think that if you look at the tech demonstrators as an illustration of the physical side of this the air vehicle itself and i don't want to dwell on just air vehicle because there's so much more if you think about the the tremendous advantages that future controls that future protection gear that future weapon systems will have one hung on to this aircraft it gives you a tremendous picture of what that future battle will be like i think the con ops we're talking about is how do you want the battle to run let's face it our our war fighters came and set a series of properties for the future system fbl strategic plan contains a table of the number of things that the war fighters asked for and by the way number one of the table was maintainability and reliability interestingly but then also came speed and range and payload and high altitude and and many many of properties all of them prioritized those set then the future vision so instead of cops if we were to say the vision of how the system would fight and then we design a system underneath that vision to get as close as we can i think that's probably what we're talking about and i hope that answers your question well i think the issue you've highlighted it seems to me is is actually a problem that fbl is wrestling with but it's a problem the whole department is wrestling with because it's fundamentally the same issue that the defense innovation initiative raises which is that's an effort to envision where technology both number one will go and number two can take us and they're almost sure to get it to some extent wrong but by the same token the demonstration the last if you will technology offset strategy the 1970s envisioned that gps and and the increased broadband communications were going to fundamentally change how war fighting could be done and they were right they probably had it wrong is what they exactly thought that was going to do but the fact that those fundamental the vision for how that could fundamentally change things was accurate and they didn't necessarily need to know all the wise and wherefores of what it would mean operationally day to day on the battlefield but they understood that it was a difference maker and i think that's what to my mind the defense and innovation initiative is hoping to deliver and hopefully will deliver and that's writ large across the department and you can think of it i think also writ small in terms of future vertical lift and the difference makers that may be there in that technology yeah the only thing that i'm just by way of example there's a there's an operational aspect of this to the you know the field figures things out you know just a watershed for me was during the cold war going from the cobra to the apache and it didn't take more than the first checkout flight in the apache to figure out the thing for me was survival all of a sudden realized that all the stuff that i had been practicing to do in europe in the cobra i'm actually going to be able to do it now and survive i'll come back and i'll be able to do it you know with impunity i think v-22 um is going through some of that right now i mean it was a capability set built a fantastic machine um but uh 40 nautical miles for a fully loaded uh1 november combat radius right in the aor and look at what the v-22 is doing today that community hasn't figured it out yet um so maybe it's back to the whole thing of balance you know we will will try to envision what the world looks like in the future we're probably going to be wrong at any point in time um but uh the field will will use the capability that we give them and they'll and they'll improve their mission sets it naturally happens it's always happened in the do d i'm going to exercise my think tank didactic role for one more second just to say that you know i think that vision's always there whether you're explicit about what your vision is uh is one question but you have to have some sort of vision when you're mapping out a new system there's going to be a vision implied if not one that's expressed so i think expressing it is a good thing to do because again it gets back to that early fundamental dialogue about what are the what are the desires what are the priorities what are the expectations make that as explicit as possible as early as possible in the acquisition system that's one of the things i like about the approach that's being taken here and jib's point that conops is actually a multifaceted question if you think of conops as a book the book has many chapters one of them is the concept of the maintenance and others the concept of the war fighting of the vehicle itself and the other one is the concept of how the program runs and operates in other words the concept of how a unit is is is amassed to put this vehicle to use all of those things change as you change through the vehicle and each one of them is a separate chapter we have time for one more question and there's one hand up so we'll give a two for here so i've got a couple of uh helo pilots up here i'm sitting next to one over here and i haven't heard anything about unmanned versus relative to the concepts and the kinds of issues that are involved in terms of savings the pilots and costs uh and conops and kinds of missions you mentioned one in particular where you were saying talking about this as a resupply capability uh why would that be a man system etc so is that being considered within the concept of the future vertical lift the answer is a resounding yes and unfortunately our charter today was to talk about one part of the elephant and we happened to have the tail in our hand and you're talking about another part of the elephant a very big one and certainly that is being discussed among all of the the user community and the acquisition community as to exactly how that fits into the con tops we see a revolution taking place right now and the answer is yes the only thing i would add on the cost is again go back to the kind of academic side of my presentation today you really got to kind of look at the systems and see what they're telling you i mean a global hawk and a u2 do a lot of the same things they're wildly different in their operational uh context and they can have wildly different cost scenarios you definitely get to pull the cost of the you know the soldier or the airman the rain the coast guard you get to pull them out but then you need to really just look at the cost model for the system you know some of our intel systems have got scores of people grabbing those gigs of data that come down every hour from you know uh reapers and gray eagles and um there are questions that you can answer um but it's it's nice to start with some data about your current systems and what you think you're going to do with it now it's just one point i know i heard a air force official who said you know the manpower cost of unmanned systems is killing us so uh you know there's definitely a balance there and i think some obviously some are better than others and that's where that early dialogue is important well thank you very much it's been a very ten of audience and a very well informed one and hopefully you've got your money's worth today we will as i mentioned have uh additional events on this topic getting trying to advance the conversation towards uh as the aipt and the work of uh at the department grows more mature so keep your eyes peeled for that and uh please thank our panelists for their great work today