 All right. Good morning, everybody. How's everybody doing? First day of the conference. It was exciting. So some great words this morning, the open and everything. So excited to be here. It looks like the schedule jam-packed. Three days of some really compelling breakouts, meetings, all that stuff. So while you're out here, take advantage of all these different resources. I mean, just today, I didn't realize how many different organizations we're going to be here. So just this morning, we ran into DIU, ran into Bespin, ran into AFRL, so all the different opportunities out there, great opportunity. So what I'm going to talk to you about today is we actually have options here. Because if you saw the outside, there was a real-time edit to the opportunity here. So we can talk Afrox, we can talk software factory, we can talk both. So who wants to hear just Afrox stuff? Just software factory stuff? We've got one. What about a combination of both? Is that compelling to people? All right, so we'll talk a little bit about both. So a lot of really cool opportunities. So what we'll start off with was just a little Afrox 101 to show our hands. Who's heard of Afrox? Who feels like they know what Afrox is? All right, yeah, so less hands. So hopefully this will help put some context into your understanding of Afrox. So before we get started, I'd like to show you something. So what we have here, one of our Afrox hubs that we operate is out of Vegas. Vegas, a lot of showmanship. We've got some magic people there. Penn and Teller, they have a show at the Rio. So what I like to bring this up is a lot of people see this innovation ecosystem as magic. And what I want to demonstrate to you today and hopefully get you to believe is that it's not magic. Actually, anybody can do it. And if you're willing and able to put in a little extra effort, you too can do some of this magic stuff. So to demonstrate this, first off, could I get one volunteer in the room that wants to participate in some magic? I think we have a staff sergeant right there in the second row. All right, so all the way from Hickam, right? All the way from Hickam Air Force Base. So maybe anybody further from Hickam? We'll travel here? All right, we've got two people from Hickam. So further this traveler award, all right? So pick a card, any card, all right? Don't tell anybody? Don't tell anybody? Don't tell, just in your mind. All right, pick it, all right? So I'm going to do something really special. Well, Penn and Teller are going to do something really special. So you remember your card? So for the first time, tell the entire audience. What was your card? King of Hearts. What if I told you Penn and Teller actually removed your card? So the computer's right here? Did anybody else choose a card? Did anybody, is your card gone also? So what's seemingly magic actually has a very simple explanation. So who caught on to this? OK, so someone please share the secret. All the cards are different, yes. So this is a lot like what people call innovation. Whenever you see these organizations coming with solutions quickly, you're like, oh, there must be something special. There must be some magic involved. But what I want you guys to take away from this is it's not magic. It's very much just normal people with a little bit of grit getting stuff across the goal line. All right, so here. Organization, one of many organizations across the Air Force and the broader DOD that is helping these magic tricks to teach other people to do these magic tricks. So it's not just organizations, but we want to teach you how to deal with magic. All right, so who am I? So I'm Tony Perez. I'm a reserve major just recently, so 12 years active duty. KC10 Pilot is my background. So there I am, flying, I mean, desert flights so somewhere over Iraq, Afghanistan, or Syria at the time. So how did I get into this ecosystem? Why do I care? So I spent seven years in the KC10 out of Travis Air Force Base and the opportunity and the privilege to do some acceptance flights for a newly modified KC10. KC10, 70s, 80s technology. Super excited to do this. I was going out to Oklahoma City to do acceptance flights. The first time I walked into one of these newly modified KC10s with new avionics, it looked like this. So this is what we did. We took 70s and 80s technology and moved it into the 1990s. And this was 2015, 16. And so fundamentally asked the question as a lot of people have, I'm not unique in this sense, but can't we do better? The world's best air and space force, can't we do better than updating technology from the 70s and 80s and moving it into the 90s? Is that truly our modernization? So that's how I found myself in this thing they call Afrox now. So what is Afrox? So Afrox, so you have the traditional industrial base. You get one dimension, whatever you wanna call it. So this is a byproduct of World War II, Cold War, you got the traditional industrial base. So what Afrox tries to do, along with a lot of the different organizations across the DoD innovation ecosystem, is how do you expand that? How do you expand the traditional industrial base and to go have startups operate, have academia operate, have venture capital operate and contribute to the solutions that our war fighters have. So with that and how we expanded it back in 2017, the secretary of the Air Force along with the chief of staff signed this memo and this is how Afrox was chartered. So if you look at bullet three, I guess bullet three made it official, it said drive innovation, all right? Is this unique? No, this is something that everybody's wanted for a long time. But this is just what helped Afrox get off the ground and start moving towards this whole Air Force innovation thing. So where does Afrox live? Afrox lives out of the Pentagon so it's out of half A8. A8I is the actual three letter. We're currently Lieutenant General Harris who's retiring soon. It's gonna be Lieutenant General Mahone here shortly. So that's where Afrox lives organizationally. So what is Afrox? Afrox is a fusion of capabilities that connects innovators and accelerates results for Air Force culture and technology. So a couple of key things here. A fusion of capabilities. So what you're gonna see from Afrox and why it's difficult to wrap your arms around is it's a fusion of different products or capabilities. All right, so we have, we're not just one thing, we're many different things. And those things change. We add some, we get rid of some. But Afrox is a fusion of various capabilities that connects innovators and accelerates results. Afrox is not a project management program. Like we are not a program office. We have a very small team. So what we try to do is take the existing infrastructure, the existing organizations, and we try to augment those teams and we try to connect the various dispersed organizations that are trying to get stuff done to the warfighter and the MAGCOMs. And then we try to accelerate results. How do we take what the organization has been doing for all these decades? Knock off the rust and make them useful tools to actually deliver solutions out to the fight. And not only in technology, but also culture. This is where we think it's a large cultural play that we need in order to actually move the needle with innovation for the Air Force. All right, so how do you think that's fusion of capabilities? All right, so the best analog that I have is Google. All right, who knows Google's parent company? How are they actually publicly traded? Alphabet, right, okay. So Alphabet, so everybody thinks Google, no Google's actually Alphabet. And this makes up the whole Google enterprise. Look how many different things are there. So you got YouTube, Waymo, Google X, Android. All these things, independent products, but can work cross-functionally if required. Also, Alphabet can add products or take away products. They're not sold on any one thing, all right. So this is similar to how Aforx is organized. Aforx, you can see we have all these different products. So we have spark cells, we work with the match coms through these things that we call tids, technology integration detachments, we have virtual tools, we have spark tank, innovation hubs, design challenges, we run tech accelerators, Sibir, we got into that, and then we have agile contracting pathways. So if you wanna organize this in your mind in a more pipeline approach is we have uncovering opportunities, connecting with real options and transitioning solutions. All right, so to overlay it one more time, what do we really have and what are we trying to do? At the end of the day, we have demand, supply, and then we have a bridge between the two. And so Aforx is covered down on all three of those things. So we try to bring supply and demand together. So supply, we have access to a lot of companies that can deliver real solutions to the warfighter. On the demand side, we work with the program offices, we work with the match coms, we work with the bases to figure out what the actual needs are. And then we find agile contracting pathways in order to bridge those two things. So what's a real role example of this happening? Those cross functional Aforx teams actually delivering a solution. All right, so I'm gonna use an example of a drone. All right, so with our hub in Vegas, so hub, off base location, we created a, we did a problem curation workshop, all right? They defined that, hey, we needed to augment and help perimeter security for Air Force bases. Through that, they made a very well-defined problem. They ran Aforx challenge, so challenges are like DARPA-X challenges, public challenges that anybody can apply to. From that challenge, they held an event where they invited and down, they down selected from the challenge and invited about 80 companies to Vegas in a showcase. One of the companies that was invited to that showcase was Easy Aerial. Easy Aerial then got further down selected and invited back to showcase their technology to more Air Force and DOD stakeholders. One of those stakeholders was Travis Air Force Base. They had a spark cell. These spark cells are grassroots-based level innovation organizations. The security forces at Travis Air Force Base said, hey, this is super interesting technology. What Easy Aerial had was a drone in a box. That was completely autonomous. It could be triggered through either optical or other sensors and then go see what's going on. Travis Air Force Base said, hey, this is interesting. Let us test this out for you. So through some agile contracting pathways, they got on contract through the cyber process. In this picture here is actually the people that are the most underappreciated people in the innovation ecosystem. The contracting, finance, and legal folks. They executed a contract in OT in under a month and actually delivered Easy Aerial to Travis Air Force Base. $3 million contract. The rest of the story, which is a longer story, they ran into some issues with the drone moratorium. But we'll talk about that later. They're going to overcome that one. So that's an example of AFORC's capabilities or products working together in order to deliver a solution. But AFORC does not do it alone. Not any one of those capabilities that AFORC has works in a vacuum. It's in conjunction with other organizations within the broader DOD innovation ecosystem. We have MGM works right here, Steve up front. That's another great innovation organization that you should reach out to. DIU's here, Defense Innovation Unit, which is an OSD level organization. Another great partner. We leveraged CBER, Small Business Innovation Research, a program that's been around ever since the early 80s. Again, that's not an AFORC's thing. That's just something AFORC's has partnered with in order to enable the activity in order to enable us to get solutions out to the fight quicker. So what's our model? How does AFORC's look at it? So it's not linear. If you want to see a flow chart, it's not gonna happen. But what we can do is we have a hypothesis. We work on this hypothesis that if you can identify and get commitments from these five nodes, it's gonna increase the probability of the success of any one project. So what are these five nodes? I probably can't read them all the way on the back, so I'll read them to you. So we've got the entrepreneur. A different color because it's perhaps the most important of the five nodes. So the entrepreneur is the problem owner. The person that actually wants to see a solution. This is what we're gonna, because we have a very small team of AFORCs, we support entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs are just entrepreneurs internal to a large bureaucracy. Guess what, the Air Force is a large bureaucracy. So we want to leverage entrepreneurs. We wanna rally resources around them because that's how we scale in a distributed innovation model. So entrepreneur, problem owner. Contract and legal. Like I talked about in the last slide, those are perhaps the most important folks that are gonna enable things to happen above board. AFORCs has no special button that says, oh, this is AFORC project because it's gonna, so it gets fast tracked or anything. No, we work within the existing processes and we believe we have to. That's the only way that we're gonna prove that there's ways to do things right and at scale is to use the existing infrastructure. So you better believe that we work very closely with our contracting folks and legal folks. Of which I'm neither, but anybody can learn. If a pilot can learn a little bit about legal and contract, anybody can. So contracting legal. Leadership engagement. All right, so leadership engagement. Where's that, how's that fit in? It's not, I mean, the leadership, they need to support and provide a level of protection for that entrepreneur to operate. So any project, leadership needs to see themselves as a, through the venture capital lines, right? They are an investor. If there's a project that they wanna go after, do they need to execute and actually create, do the project? No, they're not gonna be the action officer, but they can invest resources to that entrepreneur in order to enable that activity. So what can they invest? Surely, yes, money, yeah, that's great, okay? If leadership does have money, that's awesome. Maybe more importantly, time. White space, give that entrepreneur white space in order to execute. Maybe lastly, what other resource does leadership have? Just support, support goes a long way. And just publicly saying that this project is important to me, that's something leadership can do. Technology partner. Technology partners can be internal, they can be external. They could be someone right at your base. So I know at Travis Air Force Base, we had just getting ops and maintenance to talk together, not realizing that, oh my gosh, right here, just literally a building away, that's my technology partner that can get to a solution. Or it could be off base, it could be someone in Silicon Valley that you might have never met. They could have a novel solution that is gonna enable you to enhance your mission. And lastly is a resource advocate. So even though leadership could have money, they don't necessarily have the money. Resource advocate, the actual resources, the money, fiscal resources, could come from a different organization. It could come from Ciber, it could come from the program offices, it could come from the MAGCOM. Also thinking with resource advocate is the sustainment piece of that, all right? So all these things, all these five nodes work together in order to increase the probability of any one project success, all right? You notice, I said, I'm not saying that, hey, this is gonna guarantee it. Nothing's gonna be guaranteed in this space. But if you can identify and get commitments from these five nodes, we believe you can increase the probability of success. Last, but not least is roadblocks. I mean, that's just a fact of life, right? So think legal, moral, ethical, policy, instructions. These are all things that are real that you have to, you can't just ignore. If you just ignore them and go around them, no one's gonna believe your solution is viable. So make sure you identify the roadblocks and address them head on or figure out a way around them. All right, so you're like, oh, great, Tony, this is awesome. Got all this good stuff, got all these great slides. What is this based on? So I'm here to tell you that this is based on some pretty compelling academic research, all right? So where do we start? So let's start with the innovators dilemma. Who's read this book? All right, so yeah, so we got a couple of hands out here. So really good book, and this is where the challenge, you know, audible. You can listen to it. There's actually even shorter versions that blink less. There's a lot of opportunities to get the succinct version of this book. Really good. So what it says is for disruptive innovation to happen, there's basically two ways you can do it. You can either have a complete spin-off with your existing bureaucracy, or you have to acquire a brand new offering. Within the Air Force, part of the easiest way to do it is a complete spin-off, and that's kind of what Afrox is, is a complete spin-off of the traditional system, all right? But it is difficult. That's what this book teaches us. Drive by Daniel Pink. Drive is really interesting is how do you motivate people in our current society, all right? So we are in a multi-generational workforce. And guess what? Each generation is motivated by different things. The Air Force, interestingly enough, guess the majority of our workforce is probably under the age of 30. Perhaps, I mean, then even more under 35. So how do we leverage them in order to execute the mission that we know we have to do, all right? So what Drive talks about is three things. People want autonomy, mastery, and purpose. So think about that as you're trying to motivate projects. Team of teams. All right, General McChrystal. Organizations are most effective when the workforce is empowered to work across silos and make decisions at the lowest levels. Another really interesting concept. You know, if you read this book, the secret is this is actually how Al-Qaeda has organized themselves. So how do we use those principles in order to create a more agile organization and get solutions quicker out to the warfighter? All right, two books here. Anti-fragile and nudge, all right? Both loosely tied to behavioral economic concepts. All right, anti-fragile talks about complex system and how they react. We are in a complex system. Any ecosystem is a complex environment. The beautiful thing about complexity is there's nonlinear relationships. So any input, you don't necessarily know what the output's gonna be. You know, you could put in a one, you could get a million. You could put in a one, you could get a negative million, right? It's nonlinear effects. And it's impossible to really tell what's gonna happen. However, how do we take advantage of nonlinear upsides? And this is where nudge comes in. So anti-fragile talks about nonlinearity and complex environments. Nudge talks about how do we put in place, how do we design to defaults or other parental libertarian methods in order to nudge people and increase the probability of the upside of complex systems? And last but not least, lean start at methodology. All right, so you got two lean startup books here. You got Eric Rez and Steve Blank, both great minds in the lean startup world. And so this is methodology that startups use in order to scale fast and everything. So this just says we can increase the probability of success by taking an iterative, user-centric approach. All right, so how do we think about this in Air Force terms, all right? So everybody says, oh, our acquisition cycles are so long. Oh, it takes so long and we have to align with the palm and all that stuff. So all of these are true things. But let's think about how we can change things and make work within the existing structure in order to take iterative approaches to deliver solutions. And if we think creatively, we can actually get after some of those ways. All right, fail fast, fail forward, fail cheaply. That's a more provocative way to say it. And then failure is not an option, it's a requirement. So two more provocative ways to think of a lean startup methodology. All right, so I am, all right, so I still got time. So pause there for, that's kind of the Afrox 101. I think the biggest thing to take away from Afrox is small group, different capabilities. We're spread out all around the country. It's active duty, guard reserve, out of half A8. It's kind of the big takeaways. And then we're here to help out. So if you have a, we're not gonna take on projects, but if you need help doing something or you want your team augmented or supported or you want access to some of these, help us help you uncover some of these tools, you know, we can definitely do that, all right? So with that, because I got more time, I guess we'll go into different deep thoughts, all right? Or we can go into DevOps factories, software factories. All right, we'll go into deep thoughts. All right, so as within your organizations, as you're thinking about innovation, how do you innovate within your organization, right? So define innovation, all right? So that's one of these things, and I always hesitate to think about innovation, actually just saying it because it's such an overused buzzword right now. So just, I mean, this doesn't have to be your definition but this is one that I think about is it's rapidly turning a novel idea into something the warfighter uses, all right? So rapid, there's a speed aspect to it. Novel idea, it's a new offering. And then perhaps the biggest piece is something the warfighter uses. So until you operationalize that or you actually have an impact on mission, you know, what are we doing? So always think about how do we take it? Even though it might not get filled because you might learn something that says, hey, this shouldn't be used operationally but you should always be moving that direction. All right, and then innovation, it's very intimidating when you ask someone to innovate, right? So think about it, this is something the horizon's innovation, just a way to think about it. You know, you're not always gonna be thinking about time travel or some other novel concept. Think of it in three horizons. So you have horizon one, two and three. So horizon one, think incremental, all right? So what this chart actually says, it says existing technology that we currently use and deploy within the existing market. That's kind of like, this is a known known that we're just kind of implementing, all right? The next one is it's something that we know but we're not currently deployed in that space, all right? That's horizon two. So if you say horizon one is going from, you know, like pencils depends. Horizon two would be going from like a gas-powered car to a Tesla, all right? Horizon three, that's absolute disruptive innovation. This is really difficult because it's unknown unknowns. By definition, you actually don't know whether something's gonna be disruptive or not because you don't know the market actually exists if you think of it through company terms. So as you are going after various innovations within your organization, something to think about is portfolio management. You know, what percentage of your portfolio should go after horizon one, two, and three? So you know, Peter Newell, a gentleman that led the army's rapid equipment force back in early 2000, someone that's been, he says 70, 20, 10. 70% incremental, 10% horizon two and 10% disruptive, all right? You all have different missions and different everything. So, you know, just something to consider. Think about portfolio management within your innovation portfolio. All right, thought two, build the team. All right, I've already hinted on this. Not one Avenger is gonna take down, I can't think of his name, but Thanos, yes. It took a whole team of them, right? So who's your Tony Stark? Who's your Captain America? It's gonna be everybody, you need everybody. Not any one person can cover down on all those things. So, Adventurers say legal contract and finance, those are three that you have to have. Com, user, you need OSI is another one as you start working with non-traditional folks. So think about that, think about the local team you need to build in order to get after true innovation. PA is another one, public affairs, very key. All right, find early adopters. Because you're not gonna be able to do it all on your own, you need a team of folks. So who are the right people to bring in, all right? Because it's a very simple math equation to determine who the right early adopter is, all right? The good news is this gentleman right here in the front row boiled it down for us. And so if you had a look at it from just your typical bell curve, all right. So we're working with two standard deviations on the left, all right? It's a very small percentage, especially early on when you don't have the resources in order to participate like you would like, all right? You need people that are force multipliers in this. So I'd venture to say two deviations fell off. So I mean, you're looking at maybe two to 5% of people that are gonna be effective in this space. All right, who knows what this is? Shackleton, all right? Who knows who Shackleton is? Raise your hands, all right? So this gentleman right here, this is the Endurance. It's an Arctic mission, absolutely incredible. They had, they basically shipwrecked, ice came in, and there's 100 and some men, and they all survived. Months in Antarctica, they made it to civilization with no help except themselves. Absolutely incredible. These were the early adopters you need. How did Shackleton get these individuals? Legend has it, he put out an ad. This ad, because it's probably hard to read it, I'll just read it to you. Men wanted for hazardous journey, small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success. Absolutely incredible. So think about that as you are building your teams. Think of what Shackleton did. Execute them good enough. All right, what's this? This is building a plane in flight. This is how it feels like a lot of time whenever you're doing this stuff, right? Whether you're in a DevOps software factory, whether you're doing whatever it is in the innovation space. It feels like you're building in flight, and you probably are, but it's okay. So how do you figure out where to allocate your resources? For those CPI practitioners, you might recognize this, but there's an impact and effort, all right? So if you had a look at it, high impact, low effort, those are Superman type projects. High impact, high effort, Batman, because Batman, he's just human, but he had big impact. So it was hard for him to do it, but he had big impact, so Batman projects. Hulk projects, a lot of effort to make that guy mean and green, and then he causes much damage as he did good stuff, so that's why it's kind of like lower impact. Then you got Buzz Lightyear projects, all right? So think about this, as you have a portfolio projects that you wanna get after, because you can't get them after all of them, where do you dedicate your resources as you're building your plane in flight? So take all your projects, have your teams map them out on this impact, effort, chart, and then just work top left to bottom right. The things that are top left, those are where you get your most bang for your buck, all right? Bottom right, a lot of effort, little impact, not waste your time, don't waste your time, all right? More interestingly, you could have your leadership, your champion there, plot the exact same projects across this exact same chart, and this actually uncovered some pretty interesting conversations, all right? So why is A, in the eyes of the people wanting to do the project, very impactful and low effort, where as far as leadership goes, F, so those are conversations that are really interesting and valuable to have as you pursue your innovation activities. Failure will happen, all right? So how do we, failures will happen, all right? This is the lean startup approach, build, measure, learn, build, measure, learn, because we're in a software factory briefing too, this is the DevOps little infinity symbol. There's all these great charts you could use in order to show this great learning and creating and everything. Pick one, go with it, use that in order to help understand and frame what you're doing. Thinking of it through the VC lens, all right? So venture capital, this is who invests in startups to make billions of dollars, all right? So in the blue dots, you have the dollars invested, this is 2011, and billions of dollars. The purple number of companies invested in, yellow is total number of startups, all right? So what you see is out of all the startups in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, you have over 3,400. VC is only invested in 430 of them, all right? And then of those 430, I guarantee you how most VCs look at their portfolios, five to 10% success rate. They are actually throwing millions of dollars down the drain knowing that 90 to 95% of the things that they invest in will fail. But because of complex environments and non-linear upsides, it is worth the investment. All right, rethink the foes in middle. Foes in middle, everybody points to them. This is why we can't do anything, right? This is why I would be so successful if it wasn't for in point your finger to whatever organization or whatever person. I would ask you to rethink that. Because I know for a fact that I have been the frozen middle before. As Ford leaning and as innovative mine as I think I am, I have definitely told someone no, or said you can't do that. So how do you work with that individual? How do you compliment their efforts? How do you understand that whoever you're calling is the frozen middle? That they're great Americans too. And actually they probably have the AFIs on their side, especially early on in this innovation movement. How do you work with them in order to accomplish the goals that you seek out? So it takes a team. So instead of vilifying them, work with them. So rethink the frozen middle. This is a nod to the DevOps thing. So choose a name wisely. All right, so how do you get a successful organization, right? And this is to the DevOps focused in the group. All right, so you've heard of Kessler Run, you've probably heard of Bespin, you've probably heard of Durdana, there's Tron out there. So you got the Star Wars references, Lord of the Rings. So choose a name wisely. And there's a chart to actually codify this, all right? So this was a Stanford study, I believe. All right, so success of the organization versus the Geek Index, all right? So pop culture, if you just go pop culture, okay, there's some success there, but that's going like, this is like Ray and the current Star Wars series, right? Yeah, you're gonna get some people that's on, you're gonna get some movement, not much. Retro Sci-Fi, now you're starting to get growth, all right? If you can go to the 70s, 80s Star Wars movies, okay, now people, now you're talking across generationally. Now you're gonna get more buy-in. Sci-Fi requiring a Google search. If someone, now it's a Google search it, now you have, you're tapping into the geeks you want and people are interested enough to where they might fund you. But don't go too far. If you go to like cosplay and larping, that's probably a little too far, so I would venture to stay away from that much. You can go too far on the geek scale based on the research. All right, so parting thoughts. All right, anybody know this guy? Cainian economics. All right, so this is John Maynard Cain's, right? So he was an economist during a very interesting time during the Depression, and so what he, of the many things that he did, it's how do we incorporate policy and how do we actually nudge capitalistic markets in a way to cause the growth that we need, especially think about during the time of the Depression, all right, when things were stuck in a rut. One of the interesting observations he made was worldly wisdom teaches that it's better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally. So the thing about that, it is easier for us as human beings to fail in a conventional way than to go out on a limb and take risk and succeed unconventionally. So as we go forward, and why is this important? Who knows what this is? Yeah, so this is a picture of SENTCOM. So this year, so we've been in this conflict for, hold on, 2001, right? We've been taking a very conventional approach at this conflict. This year there's individuals signing up for the Air Force, that when you ask them where they were at September 11th, they will not have an answer for you because they were not alive. So as you move forward and as you explore this great conference, meet new people and you're going after these great new technologies and trying to move the needle for innovation for the Air Force, so we can stay relevant against peer actors. Consider that, consider that you might have to do unpopular things, act unconventionally in order to help us succeed. All right, so thank you very much. That is everything and I will stick around for, yeah, we'll do questions. Yes, sir? Yes, sir? Yeah, resource advocate? Yeah, so the question is for the sustainment piece. The fact of the matter is I think the whole DOD innovation ecosystem has proven pretty successfully that we can rapidly prototype stuff. But how do you actually on ramp it into the traditional system? So the answer is I think that's what we're trying to do now, so I think a lot of the efforts, whether it's DIU, whether it's UF, whether it's any organization, is trying to figure out how we bridge that and on ramp it into the PEOs and actually PEO-BES has been a great partner in trying to explore that. But it doesn't really mesh that well with the incentive structure that they're built around, right? So the short answer is I don't know. Well, actually, how about this? Get the sustainers, the cures and the sustainers in the room early. It's gonna be outside their conventional wheelhouse to improve you with what they're gonna be looking at, but at least let them know. Like know who, you know, you're a side worker, sir. So, you know, the PEO-Digital is a great partner. PEO-BES is another great partner. Rapid Sustainment Office. So I think bringing the AFMC side of the house together and partner with them and make their life easier. And that's eventually, I mean, that's what we have to do is make it easy for them to say yes. That's how you get to the sustainment piece, but it's bringing them on the team early. Sir. You said, coming with Neal Sock, it looked like you did a little bit of a punt on the policy and regulations. You were suggesting, oh, we always have to work in the frameworks. Is Afroxplain any role in highlighting to the proponent office of these policies and regulations where they could improve the policies and regulations and modernize those into the evolving information system? And thanks. So the question is, is Afroxplain a role in shaping policy and all expand that out to law? So the answer is yes and not alone. I think as a lot of these different innovation organizations are going out, trying different things. I mean, we are finding out that within our existing infrastructure that due to supplemental instructions and other things were our own worst enemy at a lot of times or interpretation of certain things. So really all we have to do, so I think Sibir is a perfect example. Sibir is something around for a long time. It lost its usefulness because of just over, people thought they had to use it in a certain way. So how I see that Afroxplain with Sibir was, they took it as like a rusty bike in the garage, took it out through some oil on it, made it useful again. But ultimately, Afrox is not, doesn't want to be involved in Sibir. They don't want to take over Sibir. We just want to try to make it a useful tool for everybody again. But yeah, I mean, we work with the LL folks, but it is in concert with many different innovation organizations to help try to inform what that policy and law should be so we can do the things that you're talking about. Other questions or comments? Yes, you can. And what I gave you is a very top level, it's the balance of Afrox and just kind of innovation philosophy as a whole. But yes, I mean, were you located at? Okay, yes. So go to Austin, they can help out. Vegas is another good place. DC, they're not gonna, I mean, there's not big teams there, but they can connect you to the resources and if you wanna drill down a little bit more and really to get you to the pathways you need in order to succeed. All right, other questions? All right. Well, I appreciate everybody's time. You know, I'll hang out here until no one comes up, but thank you very much. Enjoy the next two days of the conference. All right, thank you.