 Okay, so it's my pleasure to introduce our next speaker, Mr. Tom Vulture, law head, a quick vulture analogy that I think is actually maybe pretty good here. So when I was growing up, my dad used to have this cartoon picture in his office. And it was, you know, it's one of these lone trees in the desert kind of thing, you know, one branch. But on the branch, there were two vultures sitting on the branch and one vulture's talking to the other and it says, I'm tired of waiting, let's go kill something. And so when I think of Air Force Futures and what Secretary Kendall is asking us to do with operational imperatives, it always reminds me of that, right? Because in the end, I think that's a little bit what Secretary Kendall's message to us is, right? We got to stop waiting, right? Let's go figure out how we kill something. And so Vulture, as our leader of Air Force Futures, has really been charged with the analytics behind figuring out, right, what is the right thing to do, really has a huge part in the operational imperatives, I think a great speaker to lead us through, and also how we think, current forward to your point about capability development planning. So Vulture, over to you. Thanks. All right, good afternoon. Thanks, General Morris. Super excited to be here, have this conversation. Interesting to be the cleanup hitter here, if you will, you know, an hour from now we can have a discussion on whether I was actually the cleanup hitter and successful or was I the cleanup sweeper behind the circus parade in the elephants. So we'll see where this goes. What I'd like to do is kind of offer the operational side of the imperatives how we got there, why we got there, and then a few lessons learned along the way. I will note before I forget that I brought swag for you. It's not stress balls, it's not totes, it's not key chains, but up on the front desk here is one page front and back, unclassified placemat for the operational imperatives, kind of lays out the situation, the challenge and the approach for each of the seven operational imperatives. So might be of interest. So why? Why do we care? Why are we going to this effort on the operational imperatives? And as you've heard over the last several days, both in WDI and ELSIID, it's because of the threat that's out there. The peer adversary that we're facing continues to increase range of their weapons, lethality of their weapons, capacity of their weapons, and most importantly in grouped the ability to achieve their wartime objectives regardless of what we do. That's the overall imperative, if you will, for the operational imperatives. So what is changing? The risk is changing. As we look at our peer adversaries, China and Russia, we are increasing risk across the spectrum with them. We're increasing the risk of maintaining our space superiority. We're increasing the risk of being able to gather and mobilize and deploy forces where and when we need to. We're increasing risk to the ability to generate the number of combat sorties that we have to generate to deny their objectives. And we're increasing risk to getting to and fighting in that highly contested environment. These risks are unacceptable because without facing and surmounting those risks we lose. To Dale White's point, the reason we do this is to win. But what does winning look like? We'll talk a little bit about that in detail. But even winning is not a good thing. If you can imagine a cross-Taiwan straight war, when we win and prevent China's objectives of seizing Taiwan, we still lose carriers and other surface combatants and all the people on them. We still lose whole air bases and a good portion of the airmen on them. We lose army and Marine Corps fighting positions and the Marines and soldiers on them and that's a win. So and potentially decades of economic impact to the globe. That's a win. So more importantly, the force that wins in that environment is also the force that deters prior to any conflict. So if we want to win, we also want to deter. The force that wins is the force that deters and we would like to never have that fight. So every morning when President Xi gets up, we'd like him to open his curtains, look out and go, eh, not today. And we want to continue that. And that's the sense of urgency that the SEC app has given us for the operational imperatives. It's the sense of urgency that we have to continue this capability development to get us to the force of the future and the joint force of the future that is able to deter our peer adversaries and survive against that increasing threat. So what are we doing about it? You may have heard of the joint warfighting concept. Start out at 1.0. Now, surprisingly enough, we went to 2.0 and we're actually working on the JWC 3.0. That is directly focused on winning this peer fight specifically and across Taiwan Strait fight. It's aligned with the national defense strategy. It's aligned with defense planning guidance. All the joint services are aligned with that warfighting concept, and that's key. You can think back to Air Land Battle and not everybody was maybe on board with ALB. All the services are on board with the joint warfighting concept. It is where we are going. It is the future force we need. And from an internal look to the Air Force side, it is where our future force design is focused at getting to. It is where our Air Force future operating concept is focused on operating and how we get there. Underneath the joint warfighting concept is these four supporting concepts. We can go into them afterwards. If you want more specifics with specific concept required capabilities. And as we look at those concept required capabilities that are spelled out, we see where the gaps are. Those gaps from an Air Force perspective are exactly what the SECAF looked at and said, these are the critical imperative gaps that we have to fill, hence the operational imperatives. So that's where we got this first tranche of seven operational imperatives. Those are the critical gaps in the concept required capabilities to fulfill the joint warfighting concept. So we've tested the hypothesis. We've tested the future force design to see if it actually wins in the JWC. Future Games 22, Future Games 23, that will be next January, actually takes the Air Force future force design. Wargames it in a joint warfighting concept scenario against representative threats and sees how it does and what we need to tweak. Most recently, this spring in May, General Hynote, Air Force Futures director led the globally integrated wargame, which is a joint staff 5I, so with allies and partners, it's a joint wargame in that same warfighting scenario. And we found that that future force and the joint warfighting concept, when we are able to fight in all domain, fight with our allies and partners, wins in that scenario and prevents our adversaries meeting their objectives. Key point there is that with our allies and partners. So we talked in the previous panel about the comparative advantage we have in propulsion. I would offer that one of the great comparative advantages that we have that our peer adversaries do not have is our allies and partners. I include in allies and partners our industry partners. Granted, they have a very tight coupling between their government and their industry. But I would say that the brain trust that we have in industry, the brain trust and the capability that we have within our allies and partners is and will be critical to the future warfighting effort. So given that capability gap analysis of the joint warfighting concept in the SECAF direction, the OIs started out as a sprint, an important to note. This was a sprint to figure out what we could get after and insert into the FY24 POMP. I could not agree more with all that's been said about this coupling between the acquisition professionals, the requirements professionals, and the resourcing professionals, as well as industry to get after this. That's really what we do in capability development. And what we need to continue to do is that trinity between requirers, acquirers, and resources has to continue. Sprinkle over the top of that the analytic rigor that SAF studies and analysis brings and the other analytic branches in all the services. And that helps us get after that force that we need. The sprint nature of the OIs, while focused initially on the FY24 POMP, will continue on. You'll see as POMPs get revealed, we've made a down payment on the operational imperatives, but the operational imperative work itself will continue. It'll be folded in to multiple other capability development planning efforts, and we'll continue to do that. So let's talk a little bit about the operational imperatives themselves from an operational perspective. Next slide, please. So on the chart, the one-liners on what exactly is the title and the one-liner for each of those operational imperatives, but let's talk a little bit about what that means. On the space side, we cannot afford in a future fight to lose control of space. We need to be able to bring effects to space, from space, and in space. We need position nav and timing capability. We need communications capability. We need data transport capability. And we must have that as a joint enabler for the future war fight, period. On the ABMS, Advanced Battle Management System side, this is a critical effort. Really, two, three, four, even five, if you will, all kind of get lumped together. And my mind is one big mosh pit of capability. But ABMS itself is that critical ability to sense, to make sense, and to bring effects to the battle space at a time and place of our choosing. If you think back from post Desert Storm into, and certainly post 9-11, we've had the luxury in the counter-VEO fight to put exquisite ISR up over potential targets, orbit for hours, sometimes days, pick up kind of life trends, specify targets, talk about what would be the best shooter and the best weapon against that target, and ultimately make a command and control decision, yeah, go ahead and schwack that target. We have to have a battle management system that can scale to thousands of targets in hundreds of hours, making near real-time decisions. And think, if you will, a battle management system that can take information from a space sensor, get it down to an army long-range fire shooter who fires a surface to surface missile that's now moving at hypersonic speeds that gets an in-flight target update from a Marine Corps fighter that then hits a target and we get real-time battle damage assessment from some other weapon, some other sensor in the battle space, and that comes back to command and control authorities as well as the rest of the fleet so that they understand from a battle space situational awareness standpoint whether that threat is up, it's down, it's at least been rendered unfunctional, and then we can continue operations. So that is not a simple solution either from an architecture standpoint, as General Genetempo very well knows, or from a doctrinal standpoint. So think about for a minute who's doing the C2 of that specific battle management? Who owns that space sensor, that army shooter, that Marine in-flight target updater, and the battle damage assessment capability on the back end of it? This is not trivial, and I think next to OI-5 and base resiliency, this is probably our toughest nut to crack going forward. Probably take us the longest to kind of morph up to that full capability. Next, you've heard Dale White talk about the NGAD family of systems, and one of the key takes out of that is that we believe that collaborative combat platforms or combat aircraft will be part of that family of systems to increase volume of fires, to increase lethality, and to increase effectiveness on the battlefield. And we are working to develop and field those CCAs, and we will continue to specify what that means and how it will be employed. And again, back to the kind of .milpf side of this, while we have uncrewed platforms today, we are going to be using them in a completely different fashion, which will require us to potentially organize differently, certainly train differently, potentially deploy differently, and certainly employ differently. Alongside us, we talked about battle management and the NGAD family of systems inherent in those and in the long-range kill chain piece of the OIs is the weapons themselves. So by and large, the weapons we are developing currently have the right capability we need. There are some changes we'll make around the margins and some potential additions in terms of weapons, but capacity will be critical to the future fight. And frankly, we are not producing at capacity not near enough capacity for the future fight, and we must do that. We've flip-flopped the OI order from this chart to where they sit number-wise now, but moving target engagement at scale is a critical piece. And we've pasted out in the OI work the mission engagement thread for the long-range kill chain or kill web, if you will, and where the critical gaps are in that long-range chain. And we are getting after that. Com, data transport, sense and sense-making are critical to those efforts as well. We'll also look at how we get moving target indications and how we actually maintain target custody over time in that battle space so that we can, in fact, track targets from the air or the surface, potentially from space, both moving surface targets as well as airborne targets, and maintain combat ID, maintain custody of those targets to seeker width of whichever weapon we need to pair against those targets. That, again, is another tough nut to crack, but we're going after it. And I'd say I think Mr. Hunter mentioned a little bit about any sensor, any shooter, and I would just refine that a smidge in the long-range kill chain. It should be the right sensor to the right shooter with the right weapon for that particular target. And that's what we're trying for. I think foremost in Secretary Kendall's mind and probably his biggest concern is the resilient basing sustainment and communications in a contested environment. That is one OI that is keeping him up at night. I think anybody who's ever deployed to a main operating base, lived out of it, went to their aircraft at the same spot every day with the same weapons load barn, with the same weapons and ammo dump, with the same fuel supply areas, knows that that is a ripe target. You can get that target from Google Maps. So this is not a difficult targeting situation for our adversaries and one that we really have to think hard about. Part of this will be agile combat employment. So let's make the targeting of our adversary more difficult. Part of this will be prepositioning as we move out from hubs to spokes. Part of this will be prepositioning of assets. But what are the right things we need at those places? How do we get it there either before conflict or during conflict? And what might not be highly contested, but certainly will be contested airspace. How do we resupply? How do we infill an ex-fill? And how do we continue ops and generate sorties that logistics under attack piece, it must occur? At those particular bases or anywhere we're located, in addition to preposition, in addition to dispersion outside the base, we need to think about dispersion on base. We need to think about camouflage. Some of these old concepts that were second nature in the Cold War are now coming back. Camo, deception, and concealment. Those are going to be part and parcel of the way we fight the war of the future. I'll talk now about the B-21, the family of systems. So initially, we were kind of thinking that this would parallel N-GAD and the family of systems. I think we've thought a little bit differently about this. And we're taking, I'll say, an operational pause on the family of systems piece of the B-21. We're concentrated mostly on what is the right weapons load for the B-21, what are the right effects we need, and when actually will we need, and how best to use the B-21. So that would be critical to us. But we will need that ability to penetrate in the highly contested environment. We will need it to be survivable, and we will need to bring volumafires to those engagements. So we will continue it. Finally, OI-7, the readiness of the Department of the Air Force to transition to wartime footing. Really, with General Hock as the lead, worked a lot on the cyber side of that transition, and how do we protect our networks that mobilize, and deploy, and generate forces? How do we get them in theater? What we are now thinking about is whether we add on to OI-7 for the mobility piece and the air-to-air refueling side of this. So do we have the mobility forces we need? Do we have the air refueling forces we need to be able to get into theater, to be able to move around within theater, to be able to sustain and supply the forces, and that's the joint forces, not just the air forces within theater. So that's what we're looking at on OI-7. You can see, as we've had this discussion, that the common thread, and you've seen it over the last several days, the common threads through these operational imperatives are communications, networking, and logistics. So either during competition and certainly during conflict, we will need to be able to command and control from CONUS. As we start to generate forces, we will need to be able to C2 the forces as they move into theater. We will need to be able to command and control the forces as they disperse within theater. We will certainly need to be able to C2 as we move into the area of operations and deny enemy objectives, say in a cross-strait invasion. And we will need the networks that allow us to do that, the data links that allow us to move information, not just to crude and uncrewed platforms, to command and control platforms back to the main operating bases, to forward operating bases, to army fires positions, to marine expeditionary operations positions, to inflight targeting weapons in flight, and then drawing what information we can as battle damage assessment from whatever sensor in theater we can and bring it back to the C2. All of those communications and networks need to be built. It is not going to come at, hey, we're not going to wake up one morning and go, hey, everything we have is in place. We're good to go. We will be building on that throughout. The sense of urgency that General White talked about, to me, means this isn't, hey, we just need to have something out there by 2030. This is, we need to be ready tomorrow. So if I'm a fighter wing commander today, my forces need to be ready to deploy tomorrow. We, as requirements professionals, you as industry and acquisition professionals, logisticians, you need to be ready to go tomorrow. We need to be able to build to the best capability that we can in this next few years, and then continue to work through those capability development plans, those roadmaps, via acquisition strategies and the appropriate requirements, documentation, and certainly the correct resourcing to get us to the future force that we need that actually fights and wins in that battle space. So lastly, I'll comment on what are the OIs and maybe what, maybe more importantly, what the OIs are not. Again, I'll reiterate, the OIs were a short sprint initially to get to a FY24 POM solution, particularly in the near years. What they morphed into and what they will continue to be is a long-term capability development planning iteration on where are we today and where do we need to get to in the future? And what can we do right now so that, again, every morning when President Xi wakes up and opens his curtains? Not today. Today's not the day. There is, obviously, along those lines, a lot of work to do. What you'll see in 24 is a down payment on some of these. We'll continue to work that. Obviously, we don't even have a FY23 budget yet, so that will affect the near term. That will then affect what actually is going to happen in 24 to 27. So we will continue to iterate on these capability development plans to get to the force that we need. And so we will all have to breathe through our noses for a couple more months, maybe several more months, maybe until early spring, before we even know what FY23 budget actually looks like. So that will ripple through all of this. The enemy gets a vote. The threat will change. We will continue to iterate on these capability development plans, but one thing I do know is, as quickly as we can, we need to get capability into the hands of the joint war fighter and then be able to iterate and modernize and improve that capability to get out to the full capability that they need to fight that fight. So what the OIs are not? They're not the whole picture. You can't say, hey, we funded all seven operational OIs. They're fully funded. Life is good. We don't need to do anything else. There are a ton of other concept required capabilities and foundational capabilities that both the Air Force, Space Force, and the Joint Force need that are not nested inside the operational imperatives. So there is a whole other part of the Air Force that still needs to be funded. Think weapon systems, sustainment, think the flying hour program, think test and evaluation. All of that still has to get both funded and planned so that it marches in pace with the specific efforts of the operational imperative. It's also, I think, as we've talked about, not a one and done. So the operational imperatives are not a one and done. Again, once I get them funded, life is good. These are living documents. We'll continue to develop those capability development plans. Lastly, I'd like to finish up and then get into questions with a couple of thoughts on lessons learned from the operational imperative sprint so far and the ongoing work. I talked earlier about the criticality of our allies and partners. And actually, that discussion during the OIs has spawned a lot of conversation on, wow, wouldn't it be good if we could bring the allies and partners into this classified discussion, see what they can offer in that space, see what they're bringing to the war fight, and increase the overall joint force and coalition force capability. The good news is, from a security standpoint, we have broken down some doors, not all the doors. There are still some doors in the castle that need to be broken down. But we've broken down some of those security doors and started getting the ability to have higher level conversations, both within the services, in Department of Defense, external to the Department of Defense, as well as with our industry partners to have more fulsome conversations about what we need, when we need it, and how do we get there. One of the big lessons learned that we've got out of the operational imperatives, and we've talked about it in multiple panels already, is that collaboration is critical. Collaboration within the department, collaboration with industry, collaboration with the requirers, the acquirers, and the resources is critical. And even collaboration between the operational imperatives. So what we saw as the 7-OI teams scattered out and did their collaboration, when we first brought the 7-OI teams back in for briefing, some of them were working on exactly the same things. So there's goodness there. So everybody's at least thinking alike. But there's some redundancy of effort that we need to prevent. And so there was goodness to see that, OK, we still have a gap and a seam over here between these OIs, but you guys are already working on closing that gap. That's good. But they're also working on closing that gap. Stop doing this. Let them work on that. So that collaboration is key. It is a beautiful thing if you think about that Venn diagram of the acquirers, the requirers, and the resources, the more and more that we can bring that Venn diagram into a single cylinder of excellence, the better off we'll be. Again, sprinkle over the top of that the analytic capability that we need. Sprinkle into that the solutions that industry will provide. And we are onto something that will bring us success. So that, to me, is very exciting. And then lastly, I'll just touch based on what's next. I don't know. I imagine we'll use the term operational imperative for quite a while to come. I think, as I mentioned, we'll bring mobility in to the OIs either as a separate OI or in addition to an add-on to OI7. We've already had, as mentioned before, the missionary reviews with the secretary. Maybe EW becomes its own OI or it stays as a missionary review. To simple me, it doesn't really matter. What matters is that we continue the collaboration and the discussion and the conversation and the hard work to build those capability development plans, to build those roadmaps that take us from today with getting capability in the hands of the joint warfighter as quickly as possible and then spiraling out of that into the full capability that we need late in this decade and into the 2030s. And that will be success. That is what winning is about. With that, I would love to answer any questions that you have. None OK. Sir, thank you for your comments. Ed Jesperson, Lockheed Martin. Recently, Secretary Hicks conveyed in a memo the executive responsibility for air-based defense. Slight modification, I was wondering if you could comment on that as it relates to OI5 and air-based defense. So are you talking about the secretary's acquisition authority bestowed on the Air Force for cruise missile defense of the homeland? Yes. OK. Thank you. No, I'm sorry, I can't comment. No, no, nothing about it. So that is, I'll say philosophically, that is probably step one, is the acquisition authority for cruise missile defense of the homeland. We are now obviously just starting to go, OK, how does AQ get their arms around all the service efforts? And when you're talking about cruise missile defense of the homeland, it's not just DOD, it's really a whole of government. How do they get their arms around all of that acquisition effort? So that work is ongoing. I would say the next logical step would be acquisition authority is one thing. Do we want an executive agent for the operationalizing of cruise missile defense of the homeland? And I think that will be a conversation that will be brought up at the Joint Requirements Oversight Council with the vice chiefs and the vice chairman and probably soon to accompany that acquisition authority. Clearly NORAD Northcom has kind of the C2 of the actual execution, but there's going to need to be a dot mil PF organizing. How do we get from just the acquisition of capability to the dot mil PF side of how we're going to organize, train, and equip to use that capability, to hand it over to the combatant commander to execute that capability? So those are the conversations I think we're going to have. Now, I am very optimistic that as we define solutions for cruise missile defense of the homeland, that we will transport those solutions to base defense and OI-5 and how that morphs into the future force. But it will be critical. Thank you for that question. Good afternoon, sir. So just to talk about your agile combat employment, my name is Rick Sloup with Floor Corporation. We're one of your contractors on several of the contract augmentation programs, half-cap, log-cap. So also having been a civil engineer in the Air Force, growing up during the Cold War. And I remember the Salty demo results. For those of you who are really old and can look that one up. But where do you see industry playing into this and how we're going to move forward on getting these resilient bases, these outlying island hopping campaign as it works? Thanks for the question. That's a great one, which of course is speaker parlance for give me a second to think about my answer, right? So I'll hit that in several areas. Since you mentioned the CE side of this, certainly there's a milcon element to base resiliency. Can I build extra runways? Can I build runways that we can drop into that aren't necessarily fobs or mobs, but we can drop in there, gas up, how do I pre-pow, fuel, weapons there, et cetera. So there's kind of that piece. There is a base defense piece to this and certain systems that would either, for a long time we've talked about base defense as either inside the wire or outside the wire and that distinction has blurred even as we were in Afghanistan now is not just blurred but kind of pushed off the map. So we will have to have that doctrinal discussion within the Department of Defense on who's responsible for what and how are we getting after it. Certainly as we get into air-to-air cruise missile defense of the homeland, that might enlighten some of those conversations. But what does base defense of the future look like? What are our dispersal capabilities that are gonna be out there in the future? Is there a place in the future force for platforms that don't require 8,000 feet of concrete? So things like high-speed vertical takeoff in land, EV tall, both from a combat capability standpoint and or the ability to resupply infill, ex-fill and sustain the forces in the field, again inside of the second island chain in a contested environment. So you may see things like that and certainly we've been talking a lot about that capability. I think the answer is all of that in addition to material and non-material solutions for camo, concealment, dispersion, hardening of bases that we currently have, hardening of bases that we need to have and concepts of employment. Good news is the major commands, both USAPI and PACAF in particular, as well as air combat command who is kind of honchoing the effort and kind of collating all of the thoughts from the theater commanders on the agile combat employment con ops we're starting to hover on solutions that have a common centerpiece, if you will, of this is the agile combat employment kind of centerpiece with regional specificity for both PACAF because different problem for PACAF certainly than it is for US Air Forces in Europe. So they'll have their own spice, if you will, on ACE. And that's kind of where we're at and where we're going. Hopefully that answers your question, which is speaker parlance for that wraps me up. I think I had a hand up in the back. Nope, she's waving off. Anything else? I will be around. So if you've got any other questions, comments, happy to field them down here after I don't have to leave for a flight for some time. So happy to chat later. Thank you for your attention, really appreciate it. Again, General Morris, thank you so much for the invitation.