 I am fortunate to be joined by the co-chairman of the executive steering group of the Future Virtual Lift Initiative. Mr. Jose Gonzalez is the deputy director of the Land Warfare Munitions Directorate in the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition Technology and Logistics. He's an engineer by training, began as a software engineer and worked a number of different Navy programs, joined the Office of Secretary of Defense about 13 years ago, I think, and has worked on a whole bunch of different high priority initiatives in that capacity. And as I mentioned, is co-leading the executive steering group for FBL. His co-chair is regular general Gary Thomas. He's the deputy director for force management application and support in the joint staff of the J8. He is a career aviator and trainer with both command and instructor positions to include at the Air Weapons and Tactics Squadron. He was the commander of the Second Mon Afghanistan and student of the Weapons and Tactics Instructor course, and then again back there with Mott's. He's a graduate of the Air Command of Staff College and of the National War College. So maybe, so that and has had assignments previously in the joint staff on the J5 and at Headquarters Marine Corps Aviation. So has a really broad joint perspective on both the operational and training and instructor elements of roadcraft issues at large. So one of his able-bodied assistants in this effort is Colonel Kevin Christensen. He's the chief in the Force Support Division and J8. He is responsible for the joint requirements for joint future vertical lift. He also has commanded at multiple levels and to include the attack recon battalion and an attack recon battalion in Iraq and was the brigade commander and a fort rocker responsible for aviation training for the Army. So again, a great team with lots of different experiences and perspectives. And so I'll turn it over to you Mr. Gonzalez to kick it off and go down the line. If I could just make a few admin remarks briefly. If you could turn off the ringers on your cell phones we'd appreciate it. And we will be opening this up for Q and A when we get through these remarks. If people would like to tweet questions they can do so to our security dialogues to at CSIS SEC SEC dialogue. Or you can email them to me at mleed. M-L-E-E-D at CSIS dot o-r-g. So with those announcements. Over. All right, Dr. Leed. Myron, thank you very much for this opportunity and to see this as well. I see a lot of familiar faces, some new faces but also some very good friends of mine and the audience here. So thank you very much for coming out to this. This is a very important and it's an honor to have this opportunity to come and share with you all what the building VOD is thinking about in this future vertical definition. It's very important, as Dr. Leed mentioned there's often some misconceptions about some of the terminology. What we're doing here is very different than how we've done a lot of historical and traditional programs. So it's very important to communicate our strategy and what we've got going on to the entire community of which industry, small business, academia, our friends on the hill, and everyone to really understand what we're doing. I want to start by saying from within the Office of Land Warfare Munitions I oversee a variety of portfolios from the munitions, ordinance side to ground robotics, ground combat vehicles, tactical vehicles, and then there's aviation. And aviation was the newest to me when I took on board this job. And I'm not qualified at a lot of things but one of the things that I feel like I'm qualified because of this broad portfolio, I'm able to do a compare and contrast between what some communities have gone for them that others don't. And I apologize if I repeat myself because I often talk about this when I talk to this community. But if you bear with me here, I want to talk a little bit about what I see the Rotary Wing vertical lift community, its industry partners, its operators have gone for them that some of these other communities don't have. And it's a room for optimism as we step forward. The first one is there's a long history in vertical lift and aviation. It's a very mature community, strong reputation for producing world-class aircraft. So I can go down the list, the V-22s, the 53Ks, to the Blackhawks, to the Patches. And I apologize if I leave any of your aircraft up but we do have the world-class best helicopters in the world. The best and most adaptable operators and warfighters. I have Colonel Allie Thompson out there, a 53 Echo, and she tells me all the time how it is she had to operate that aircraft. Helicopters are not easy. I'm a motorcycle rider, so I'm used to hands-on stuff. That's the way helicopters are. You got to, yeah, you have to work them. So we do have the best and most adaptable operators and warfighters that they take whatever aircraft we give them and they make it work. We will always have an enduring operational mission need for rotor wing and I'll certainly defer to the general on that because he's a real true warfighter but I believe in a lot of the missions that we see ourselves doing, we will always need the capability that the vertical lift brings to us. A record of steady and healthy funding and I can speak, certainly the armies had a large budget in this area, a lot of production dollars through the years, so we've benefited from that. We've got leadership attention on a rotary wing to include our congressional members. We've got a vision, a strategy, and plan. We have a depth-seq-depth approved strategic plan. There's not a lot of communities that I can say that have that and we do have that and it's in black and white written down. I wanna share a little bit more about what that strategy talks about. We have government and industry working together. Some of you all are part of the Vertical Lift Consortium. That's an opportunity where we've been able to share our strategies and get insights from industry, academia, small business through the formal Section 845 OTA agreement that we have with the Vertical Lift Consortium. That's a huge plus. We've got the services working together supported by OSD and joint staff, so Dr. Lee mentioned this executive steering group. It doesn't end there. We've got council of colonels, we've got IPTs. We have a full structure of joint military services working together up front in this future Vertical Lift Initiative. We have a very hungry industry, very competitive industry, active, you're self-investing, and you're pushing innovation and we really do appreciate that. We have an active S&T component that's feeding the future of future Vertical Lift, which you all know is a joint multi, or the Army's joint multi-role S&T project. So we've got a very vibrant, ongoing initiative that's helping develop technology that will help feed future FBL programs. And then we've got, in the area of Rotary Wing, we get commercial and military markets, which really helps our DOD vendors because you can leverage the commercial markets that we have in Rotary Wing. So that's probably more time than I know Dr. Lee wanted to give me on that, but let me just talk a little bit about why and what FBL is if I can. A lot of the why's, why we need to have a future Vertical Lift Initiative. We've got an accelerated and aging force due to the, of helicopters due to the op-tempo. Of regrettably, we've had a significant amount of Vertical Lift losses, both in lives and aircraft. We've got escalating operational sustainment cost. We've got a set of documented capability gaps from a 2008 CVA. We see as the aircraft that we're producing today, we see a sunsetting of those aircraft. We see that we have some concern in the area of industrial basin and what comes next after we finish buying the helicopters that we're planning to buy. We do know that we have a significant development lead time for something as major as a helicopter. And then obviously we've got the challenges that the budget environment provides us. So that's all of the reasons and there's many, many more for why we needed to have a future Vertical Lift Initiative. Now, Colonel Thompson helped me here. There was an ADM acquisition decision memorandum signed out by Ash Carter back in 2009, which really started the Future Vertical Lift Initiative. And that got the services that allowed us to engage and start up the consortia, but it also got us working together as a community driven towards how do we meet some of those challenges that I talked about. So there's six elements as I bubble them up. And Dr. Lee, I'm gonna actually give you a card. So a lot of you all see that I've got this little fancy little card. I don't have cards for everyone. But when I first took on job, there was this huge strategic plan that was about this big and I asked my folks, look, how do I communicate what this big document says? What are the big nuggets here? What is our strategy? And I'll go through them very quickly. And as I address questions, I'm gonna frame it. And in fact, we run the ESG. What we do is we go through each of the six elements and we talk about what are we doing in each of these areas and how are we progressing in the state of the art in each of those areas. The first one is a decision point based plan of execution and that's simply a roadmap. We understand all of our aircraft across all of the services. We understand what aircraft we have today and we clearly understand that they have a finite life. We do like to stretch that life, but they do have a life. And clearly understanding that if the life of the aircraft ends here and we have a development cycle to either modify or start in the air, we do know we have finite time to start something. So it's a very deliberate, very focused effort to understand kind of where all of our helicopters are across all of the services. The second one is early joint requirements development and the general and current Christian and it's a lead that for us. But we upfront deliberately are ensuring that the multi-service requirements are being viewed from a joint perspective and we're spending a lot of time early on to get those requirements right. And those are requirements that will feed future military programs in the area of Rotary Wing. The second one is that, I'm sorry, the third is the S and T plan that aligns technology development with milestone decision options. Again, in order for the decision makers to be able to have clear decisions to make we need to be maturing the critical technologies in the right area. In the case of JMR, JMR is doing that. Joint multi-role is advancing technology and that technology is being matured to help feed future vertical lift. The fourth one, we knew early on we weren't gonna build one helicopter that would do everything for every mission that would satisfy all sizes and all missions. So we're envisioning a multi-role family of aircraft. Those could be by way class. We've talked about light, medium, heavy, ultra heavy. We've talked about mission type. So we're still formulating how we will structure but we do know we will have multiple aircraft. The fifth, which is very important to us is common systems and open architecture. And I hear a lot from us in terms of common alley how important it is, not just from a logistic standpoint but how important it is for us to build commonality between those multi-role family of aircraft. And the last, definitely last but not least is having industry engaged with the government and DOD from the start. And again, that's afforded to us through the Vertical Lift Consortia but having you all as partners with us upfront is extremely key to our future vertical lift strategy. So I'm gonna stop there. And then Dr. Lita probably gonna turn it over to the general. Thank you, Dr. Lee. Just a few thoughts from the Joint Warfighter perspective. The first thing that I would say that makes me enthusiastic about future vertical lift in terms of an approach is the whole notion of interoperability. As you look across the Joint Force and you got many former and current operators in the audience, I think we're better than we've ever been. However, there are still some gaps there. When we tend to think of solutions, we tend to think of a platform. But I would argue that in the area of interoperability, particularly, for example, digital interoperability, I think that we've still got a lot of room for growth. I can think of several recent experiences where we've got tremendous capabilities from different services who are working together on the battlefield. But because they can't share that information because one particular system doesn't talk to the other one because they weren't made by the same OEM, there's a tremendous amount of knowledge that we are not able to push out to the force because of those stovepipes. Future vertical lift as an approach gives us an opportunity to move the ball further down the field across this family of aircraft or family of systems, rather. The other point that I would make, and it's related, but it's also got the programmatic piece and Mr. Gonzalez has already touched on it, and that is the ability to define requirements earlier in the process. And this has been kind of a longstanding goal, not just in FEO, but in other programs, and I think it's been, we've had various levels of success doing that, but when you're looking at a family of systems or a portfolio, and you do get the requirements right, you are going to create a capability that's much greater than the sum of its parts. And again, I go back to the area of interoperability from an operational standpoint. From a programmatic standpoint, as many of you will know, and my experience has shown me, is that the earlier that you get the requirements scoped, it's gonna give you a better chance of success in terms of executing that program. One of my own experiences where initially we didn't get it right, but subsequently did, was presidential helicopter. And requirements just kept moving everything to the right. The cost went up, schedule moved to the right, and eventually the program, as you all know, became unaffordable. Again, as an advocate for this particular approach across a family of systems, I think it has the potential to provide a lot of value, not just to the individual services, the individual customers, but to DOD as well. Go Christian. Well, thanks for having me here. I feel very passionately about a future vertical lift and the effort. Today, as the Joint Warrior Fighting Force, we really do have the world's best fleet of aircraft. But we shouldn't be content with that. We really can do better. If you look at what we have today, we have a fleet that has proven its success from Desert Storm to present. But that same fleet consists of around 25 separate mission design series aircraft, over 6,000, about 6,600 aircraft across OSD. And when we go to support that Joint Warfighter, we haul 23 separate or so systems to a theater each with its own separate line of supply. And we're not nearly as interoperable as we could be. So as we look towards the future, there are capability gaps. We should be able to go faster. We should be able to go further. But some of the biggest areas where we can do the most good for the Joint Warfighter may not necessarily be in the air vehicle itself. The gains that we can have in commonality and not just in a physical context, but commonality in terms of system, common architecture, training, maintenance, sustainment. Where we go in the future, it's not that our current fleet of airplanes are gonna fall out of the sky. We will continue to incrementally upgrade the community to make a very capable, more capable platform reduce our O&M costs. Reduce our losses that we've experienced due to mishaps. We lose too many aircraft in mishaps. The next fleet of aircraft should be able to operate in a degraded visual environment and bring that capability to the Joint Warfighter. As an Army aviator, I'm very thankful for the leaders that came before me who in similar budget environment and tough trying times coming out of the Vietnam conflict, they saw and had the vision that there was additional capability that could be achieved and they had the vision and the leadership fortitude to make the current fleet of aircraft that formed the backbone of our fleet. I think that same leadership is required in our time. We have to look out towards the 2030 and beyond timeframe and see what that Joint Warfighter has to have. And we are wrestling with the requirements. We'd like to have lots of ands. Ands are go fast and go far and go high and hot. But there are many cases where there's gonna be oars. And as we look towards making this aircraft, it's gonna be affordable and it's going to have a reduced operating cost or we certainly won't be able to afford it. There's great opportunity for us to be able to do that. And as Mr. Gonzalez and General Thomas have identified, so much of our effort is pre-MDD analysis to figure out and really lock down what do we have to have. The more stable we can do that, the family of systems and programs that follow from it, we're gonna achieve that interoperability and those cost savings that I think will make FDL truly a great family of systems portfolio approach to vertical lift that we just have not done in the past. Thank you. Great, thanks. Thanks very much all of you for that overview. Let me kick it off with a couple of questions and then we'll open it up to everyone here and out in the web world. So you mentioned the strategic plan and the senior level commitment. I think one of the ways that commitment is manifest always is in budgets. Some have pointed out that funding for FDL is both a little bit in the future and relatively small. In your collective judgment, is it adequate? What are the implications of the budget environment for FDL in particular? And is the sort of scale and scope of the effort an advantage or a disadvantage in that context? Would you like me to start? I'm glad to jump in first. So we obviously, you all have watched how the start of at least the first program has moved a little bit to the right over the years. We had hoped to have started more of a programmatic effort a little earlier, but as you mentioned, Dr. Leed, the budget environment is very difficult. We find ourselves having to make trades. Services find themselves having to make very difficult decisions in the creation of their budgets. One thing we need to keep in mind, a lot of the future vertical lift work, the analysis work that we're doing, the technology work that we're doing is could feed alternatives other than a new start program. They could inform a major upgrade or there could be a con ops change. So I think what we're delivering with very few resources and the leadership commitment is a lot of leadership commitment from the services. The IPTs that the kernel leads, there's a fair amount of people that are engaged in the development of the be it con ops requirements, acquisition strategies. There's a fair amount of, even though it's not programmatic dollars, there's a fair amount of commitment in terms of people resources working this. But a lot of the work that's coming out of that is helping to provide decision makers, which is not me, by the way, providing them with technological options, analytical foundations, good strategies. But it is going to, at the end of the day, to start a new start program. It's gonna require the services having to come up with dollars that are gonna come at an expense of something else. The large scope, I think the large scope is an advantage because we're leveraging each other. So no services going at this alone. The Navy can leverage the Army's S and T. The Army can leverage the Navy's understanding of open systems architecture. So I think the broad scope, us taking on a broad scope initiative, I think is an advantage to us, vice of disadvantage. And then again, the resources, we'd like there to be more resources to this, certainly. But we're not unique. And again, that is a service decision that they have to make those trades. Yeah, I would just piggyback onto those comments. I mean, and you alluded to it, Dr. Lee, I mean, this is not about this particular approach per se. I mean, the fiscal constraints that we face across the department are gonna make things challenging over the next foreseeable future. From my perspective though, just looking back over decades is, it's not a matter of if it's a matter of when. That is a lot of the work that will be done will inform a broad range of activities that Mr. Gonzalez has already highlighted. And then if you look at our current force, there are options that we've got to you can sustain life longer. But the point that I would make is, and I think everyone in the audience understands this, eventually you get to a point of diminishing returns. So sustaining the life of your current force becomes more expensive. And so it's, from my perspective, are we getting the approach right? The demand signal is going to be out there. We may argue about where exactly it's going to fall, but we know it's coming. And vertical lift is a large portion of the department's capability. And it's something that's gonna have to be addressed. I think when we look at a family systems approach, we realize that we're not gonna take the entire family of systems to a material development decision all at the same time. There'll be pieces of it, and it's prioritized based off of who's first to need and what things we think we're ready to bring. But also I think part of the cost is we look at, there's the procurement cost of a new helicopter, but the real value may be in looking at how we affect downstream the O&M cost. So the total cost of ownership of this family of systems may be much more manageable because we're taking a family systems approach. Even if you had a modest 5% decrease in your total O&M cost, when you look at that across the life cycle of all those systems, that's measured at hundreds of billions of dollars worth of savings. So I think it never going to be inexpensive to design and procure a new system, but I think the way we're doing it is the way that will give us the best return on investment. Well, let me open it up for questions. I think we've got a couple in the front up here. Start with you, and then Jen, you can go first this time. She never gets to go first. Hi, Jen Judson, with Inside the Army. Bouncing off your question, I think we're looking at potentially seeing full sequestration again in FY16 and then beyond. So I'm wondering what you're doing to protect things like the JMR developments in the future, what that may look like if you're looking at a tighter budget. If you'll have to scale back or maybe look at more cost sharing options. And then another quick question regarding training, maintenance, and sustainment in the future. Will there be a phase where you hone in and really look at that? Like we're looking at an air vehicle, we're looking at mission systems. Will there be a phase where you do that? I'll take the second part first, because yes, I mean, you can't just look at the aircraft and the mission systems as a separate entity. And we look at JMR, there's a phase one and a phase two to JMR. Phase one being focused on the air vehicle part. But phase two is equally important and that's looking at the common mission architecture. Each service is gonna have to make tough decisions about how much money they're able to put against this effort. But by the time we are at the point where serious money has to be put against FBL, I think most of the services will be in a position where they'll be less focused on the close-in and be able to look out a little bit further. I should also note that we are also planning to have a specific JMR event on the 1st of July, so put that on your calendars. And again, we will have additional fall-on sessions about all of these things as well, but that one's already on the calendars. I would like to add, if I could, Jen, to the first part of that. And that's certainly a question you should ask the Army during that part, relative to the joint multi-role program. But the sense that I've got is that they're doing everything they can to protect those S&T dollars. Certainly when we get the service poms, we'll see it or we won't see it, but I have a sense that they're gonna try to protect to the extent that they can. The technology piece of that, which is JMR. Sydney. Thank you, Sydney Friedberg, breakingdefense.com. Looking at, well, recent and less recent history, we have in the Army a succession of helicopter programs that went, well, they flew, but they didn't actually go into production. And then we hear, conversely, the model we have for a big joint multi-service program is F-35, which has also been somewhat painful. Now, I don't think, when you say family, you don't mean something that's, like an F-35ABC, where they're visually similar, even if they're massively different in the engines, but how do you avoid the pitfalls of both the Army-specific and the sort of overambitious tri-service programs of the past? And when you say a family, how much flexibility do you have in there before you lose the commonality that was the point in the first place? Kevin, you want to hand it over? I think it's a great question. I mean, those are the kinds of conversations that you have throughout. One thing I would say about the, we talk about JSF, for example, and the challenges associated with that. I would argue, of course I'll just say up front, my background is tack air, but I think that there are gonna be bumps along the road and it is painful. It's just kind of the nature of what we do. And I think that there are a lot of lessons learned in terms of that program and mistakes that were made that we could capture in terms of an approach. My opinion is that the taxpayer is gonna feel in the end like we've made a good investment on that particular program. On the second part of your question, what's the balance between having this family of systems and where's the tipping point where you don't have the type of commonality. We don't know where that is. But one thing I would emphasize is we, and this isn't just FDL, I would just say this for any capability, we tend to think in terms of platforms. And that's an important part of it. But we need to think, what I would argue is, as we have this discussion, we need to think about both the platform and the mission systems. And again, I would also argue that it's a different perhaps view than what we've taken on vertical lift writ large in the past. And that is, it's a helicopter, and this is what it does. There's so much more across this family of systems. I'm going from a mission system interoperability standpoint that I would argue is where your greatest return on investment might be. In addition to the additional capabilities, speed, lift, et cetera. To follow on to that, all of the services to varying degrees are pursuing man-to-man teaming approaches that are changing how they're utilizing rotorcraft. And many of those developments have come since the publication of the strategic plan. Have you re-looked the strategic plan in that context? Does it need to be updated to reflect that evolution? How do you keep those two things moving forward consistently given that you only own a part of that? So the strategic plan is a living document we updated annually. But when you think about how it stays relevant and how we answer the questions of man-to-man teaming, all those things, and we're gonna continue to have a lot of discussion on requirements to include things like should it be optionally manned, the degree with which all the variants need to have manned and unmanned teaming requirements. Certainly we've seen the value in the warfight of unmanned systems. And I think their integration with what we do in future vertical lift, I see that as being more certainly increasingly important. If I could just tag on to that very briefly, an opportunity that this approach allows you to do, it allows you to capture, I would argue, the great work that the services are doing individually and to a degree act as an integrating function to get it across the whole joint force and not just within one service. What I'd like to just mention, though, back specifically to your question, unlike JSF, we're talking a program to do multiple variants of an airplane. FDL may be several programs of record. We're not already having envisioned a particular one airplane that's gonna do everything. I don't think that's the reason. So you may look at a family of things, and from the outside, there may not be any resemblance, but in terms of engines, in terms of digital architecture, there may be a lot more insight into that. Absolutely, there should be laws of physics still apply. So the bigger one's gonna have a bigger engine and the smaller one's gonna have a smaller engine. But the power would be is that that service member who does the work on that knows how to pull the engine. And it comes out in and out the same way on the big one as it does the small one. And that when we do avionics work, the avionics architecture ought to be plug and play so that if an army airplane's at a Marine Corps facility and the radio or nav system needs to be swapped out, we can do that and we can get that interoperability. Today, we certainly don't have that capability. That's the existing fleet, all right, some of that existing fleet? There's lots of things that you can do, but at some point the cost of the incremental upgrades, you can applique a lot of things onto your legacy system platforms, but at some point the age old problem of airplane gets too big, it gets too heavy when everything that you continue to want to add in terms of capability is an afterthought. We want to have this capability, we added on. Before long, now you got to go back and redesign and buy back the power margin that you gave up. So when you think about what capability you want to have, if you know from the very beginning that interoperability and common architecture, I'd be able to get into the attack variant and a submarine warfare variant or any other variant, and I ought to be able to see a common system architecture. It doesn't have to have the exact same layout necessarily, but certainly there's a lot more that can be done in that area. And if you do that from the very beginning, I think there's a huge payoff down the road. Going in the back and then over here. This is Tony Capasio with Bloomberg News. I had a specific systems question. Where does the combat rescue helicopter fit in the overall flight plan that you're talking about? The Air Force in March said that they were moving forward with a June award to Sikorsky of the plane. From where your shop sits in Cape and AT&L, is the plan, is the award on track this month or is there reconsideration because of sequestration concerns? Yeah, Tony, I cannot address that. That's all pre-decisional at this point. So I cannot address that at this point. Yeah, so as you mentioned, as I mentioned in the element one of the strategic plan, it does look at all of our helicopter assets, Army, Air Force, Navy. So clearly we recognize that there's a mission there that the Air Force has and we recognize the state of their current helicopters and we know we have to make some decisions. It's either a new one, retrofit the existing one, so it fits within our overall portfolio look at vertical level. But no, I cannot answer the question relative to specific decisions on combat rescue helicopter. One back here and then over here. That's a, wait, can you use the mic for the recording? I won't talk too loud. Tom, it's good to see you again. Doug Morrison from Dupont and had somebody ask me what does Dupont provide to helicopters, a lot of material. But that's where the discussion has been. I'd like to take it away from that. So any of the panel members, maybe non-material solutions, roles and missions. I saw one, on my time on active duty, looking at common airframes like the 60, which both Special Ops, Air Force, Navy, Army had. But is this a roles and missions potentially? It would seem that the days of separate fleets and multiple, 23 I think was the number that was mentioned, 23 different platforms, it almost seemed like that can't be afforded anymore. So are there non-material solutions that we're looking at in terms of operational concepts in terms of roles and missions, i.e. what services are responsible for. And again, General Thomas, I pick you out. Does the Marine Corps need three rotary wing aircraft plus the V-22 kind of thing? And I'm not picking a fight on that, I'm just saying that's kind of the tone of the discussion. I guess I would answer this way. From an affordability standpoint, for all the reasons that Mr. Gonzales and Carl Christensen have already articulated, I mean, there's value and that common approach. But to get to your question, I think that if you're successful in terms of achieving much greater commonality in the material solution, then that informs the broader question about how we use our force. Because what you are doing, by increasing that commonality, you're increasing the flexibility of the joint force. So that a mission that was previously only done by one particular service could be done, perhaps, by another service. And then that raises other questions. In the end, however, I think it's value because you've increased the overall capability and capacity. You may not have increased the total numbers, but de facto, you've increased your capacity because each of those individual platforms are more, can do more missions. Otto Kreuzch was C-Power Magazine. This is kind of a mirrored question. When we're talking about commonality, there's different services during different missions. The Army wants to try to move into some of the Navy things operate from ships. We've had problems in the past, you need to operate in the sea environment, saltwater, it'll damage your ships. Are you going to maintain the separate material condition between Naval helicopters and Army helicopters? Another one, speed is obviously one of the speed range, one of your big capabilities. There's programs out there to do high speed helicopters with rotors and push propellers. And you've got tilt rotor concept, or all of those in the factory. And then basically we lose helicopters all the time landing in brownout conditions. Is that part of the program to try to avoid that? Well, I think when we look at how the commonality is going to work, all the discussions, and being able to sit down at a table where we're working requirements, and I have folks working hard, Army and the Navy together, the Army is looking to have their variant is being marinized, desire to have DDG compatible airframes. Well, at the same time, we recognize that we need to have those common discussions. It's not like as if an Army aircraft hasn't been on a carrier or something like that before. And instead of having those joint interoperability problems sorted out on the deck, we can sort that out by working together way upstream with requirements. You talked about the different kind of variants where we've got tilt rotor, the new technologies that provide additional speed. Again, all that will inform the process going forward and the technical demonstration will, I think, be very helpful. But again, what I would encourage us all to do as we begin to collect data from the technical demonstration and so forth is think about the capabilities. Don't go, I want this kind of platform that does this. Think about the capability first, and then we'll find the best combination of mission systems, rotors, drive trains, et cetera, that we need. So the first question we always need to ask is not what type of rotor craft or tilt rotor, it's what are the capabilities? And I would say it, I don't want to be Polly Anish, and then you talk about commonality. There are areas where we won't be entirely common. But if you can, to the maximum extent possible, come up with a common baseline that you can add on, that's scalable. Again, these are all attributes that, and in some cases will be achieved, not in every case. Let me ask a question about, I believe the report, the strategic plan uses the word stagnant when referring to the rotor craft industrial base, and there's been a lot of analysis showing the pace of innovation relative to fixed wing and that it is, and some people argue there are larger national implications for that and worry about the loss of capacity domestically relative to the Europeans, for example, or how much of, does the Defense Department have a broad view of how important this industry is to us nationally? And so, and the practical, implication of my question is, is DOD industrial policy, do they care about this program? Are they involved in it? Do they, should they be? I mean, what's, how does that interface work? Yes, let me jump in. So, AT&L has chartered MIBP manufacturing and industrial based policy to look at, specifically look at the rotor craft industry. So that's ongoing right now as we speak. So that's clearly driven by the concern that you highlight. We certainly recognize the aircraft that we have and again, that concern for that sunset. We have a strong concern for the industrial base and rotor craft and depending on the results of that, what the way options of what we can do to help mitigate, because it's an important part of our defense military capability. So we have to, we have to do everything we can to preserve it. Two questions here. We'll go away. I think I saw that hand first in the back on the end and then we'll come up here. Slow. Sorry. You can't tell, though. Frank Black, Modus wrote a fan. How soon do you think that the next 20, 30, 40 years, I've been at this for 35 years, since Mr. Mark over here run Jart at the Pentagon and it's still at the same place. Are you asking if we've cured all the ills of the Pentagon? And we will do that. The answer is no. But we're this close. I don't know how to say this, I don't. We're gonna take some action and really resolve some of the things that we've talked about for all these years. So I would say there are challenges and certainly failures along the way. I would argue that if you look across the last 30, 40 years as dysfunctional as some may say that we are really large, the government industry team, but you look at what the government industry team has produced, maybe not at the exact time that we had originally hoped, but if you look at the joint force today, even after 12 years of war, I'll tell you it's the best in the world, it's better than it's ever been. So in terms of justifying my optimism, I would say that I am optimistic. I'm not always optimistic that we'll get it on the timelines that everyone may have desired. But we tend to be going, I think, ultimately in the right direction. And that would add. I mean, while it's not producing, while we're not starting new programs, the work that we are doing right now in the technology area, in the analysis work, in the upfront requirements that are way far left of the material development decision, as the general mentioned earlier. Hopefully that will put us in a much better position that when any of the services or the services collectively have resources to put to it, we could hopefully have a more successful program. I think it's very valuable work that we're doing right now. We can't take counsel of our fears and everything that we do. We have to understand that there's gonna be risk in new developments and sometimes those efforts won't pan out. But in the end, if you look at what we have produced, we do produce the world's best systems and they've proven themselves in combat. And that's the ultimate test when it's in the hands of the warfighter. And so I think that whereas our system is always being tweaked in terms of how we manage requirements and how we manage acquisition and even more challenging how we manage money, the system has worked in the past and we do produce the world's best systems. Randy Roddy from The Boeing Company and good afternoon. You know, thanks for investing your time to come out here and listen to us ask you questions. And mine has to do with the potential are possibly conflicting messages and that impact on industry investment. So we're very aware of Department of Defense and the difficult choices that we're facing in terms of especially budgetary, which programs are the highest priority and get the funding, which of those areas we can accept risk. As you might expect, the same thing happens on industry side when they're looking at which especially IR&D, which areas do they invest in, which other areas do they decide not to pursue. So when it comes to a program like Future Vertical Lift, on the one hand you hear messages of how important it is and high priority, your investment of time here, panels, press, like you talk about ESG, OIPTs. So you get the message that it's a very high priority. And then on the other hand, we hear or see things about MDD slipping to the right, AOA slipping to the right. You know, nothing in the budget documents that reflects FBL. So if you were in that boardroom, what would you say to those executives in terms of how do you rectify those potentially conflicting messages? Well, you're not allowed to ask those kind of questions. You've been part of this in the past. You should tell us what they're saying in the boardroom. I've never been on that side, but clearly we are doing everything we can to be as transparent as we can with you guys. My door's always open to my industry partners. I really can't tell you what, you know, on your side, I'd give them the facts and the truth as we're giving them to you. This is a very difficult budget environment and there's a lot of competing requirements and it's not just on the material side. There's competition for troops versus material. You just gotta give them the facts as we're passing them on to you. We're trying to be as transparent as we can with an AT&L and other within joint staff. We're trying our best not to hold back any secrets from you all because we understand that this is a community, this is a team and it's a DOD and industry and all the other players working together and we can't do it without you. But I'll defer to these guys. They're smarter than I am. I'm not sure I would presume to know what that conversation would be like inside the boardroom but from my perspective I would say it might be a discussion of time. And what's the horizon and where can we play and how much wiggle room do we have? How much margin can we invest in? But I will point out, you do have real money in the technical demonstration. You do have senior leaders within OSD and the joint staff participating in this process. Again, I'll just go back to my original points. It's not a matter of if it's when and I realize that when you're dealing with the bottom line, that's not a particularly helpful answer but it is where it is. So we would presumably return to the industry team and go, what can you do? Given the constrained environment that we're in? Well, actually I got a question by email but it is now 1.30 so I feel obligated to let you off the hook unless you're willing to indulge. One last question, which is about how the commonality, as it's, I think, not as hard as the last one. How the commonality aspects of the program relate to the combined environment? So how does combined interoperability play into the FEL effort? Can I ask you to just share the example that you shared with me earlier about your experience in Iraq working with the Marines? Well, you know, as a battalion commander in Iraq supported the Marines in the MNF West sector with the patches, you know, and as I would operate in their area, our desire to be as joint as possible was limited by some of the capabilities of our systems both in the maintenance side and also in our C4ISR side. Likewise, when a Marine aircraft was landed break in my area, you know, the best I could do was give them meals in a cot, and that was the extent of the joint support that they were getting out of me, and we can do a lot better. One of our four IPTs, in fact, probably one of our most important IPTs is on commonality and looking at how does the commonality impact our, how we're gonna fight? And one of the things that we have done, I think that's a very important effort, is that we have staffed through what we call developmental connobs and really asking the question, how does vertical lift fight in 2030 and beyond as a joint war fighting force? And all the services have actively participated and we've come to consensus. Now we have documents that help us understand better where, how, what areas of commonality are most important to the joint warfighter? And as we develop those requirements, you know, it also helps us identify more realistic threshold values. And that is going to, I think, be a very important part of our requirements analysis that we'll do over the next year or so. Did you say, how many mission areas did you look across? Like, how many? How many? 15, yeah, different mission areas. So, across those different mission areas, and we are identifying how each service, you know, it's everything from doing a non-combat in the vacuum of operations to anti-submarine warfare to assault operations, everything, and figure out what each element of the joint war fighting force would want to use and looking at what the environment is that we operate in in the 2030 and beyond. And that was highly informative work because there was not a lot of effort looking at how it does the joint war fighting force with vertical lift fight in that 2030 and beyond. And as you'll see later when those become manifested as KPPs and KSAs, that they're informed by that process. But is there a combined element to that as well and allied fighting with partner nations component of your analysis effort as well? Most of what we've looked at now is interoperability in the joint war fighting force context. Thank you all very much for coming. Really appreciate the time. As I mentioned, this is, because of the complexity of the overall effort, we've had some discussions with them about continuing to have conversations about more detailed aspects of FVL. So there will be more in this regard. 8.30 on one July, we will have our JMR specific event and hope to see you then. And again, thanks for coming. Thanks to all of you very much. Thank you.