Driving Change with Speed
This transcript is made possible through the sponsorship of Schneider Electric
Kirk Rieckhoff:
Thanks. Well, good morning, everybody. It's been exciting event so far. Yesterday the Secretary, the
Under and the Chiefs laid out a pretty ambitious change agenda, and then just to make it a little more
fun, they said, "We've got to do it right now." So this session is all about how do we drive that change
with speed? What I'd like to do tonight, or rather this morning, is to ask first if we can go back to the
very beginning of why, why is it that we need to do this right now, and fast?
Kristyn E. Jones:
So hopefully it was clear from some of our comments yesterday how aligned the top leadership of the
department of the Air Force is, and how we need to move out with a sense of urgency to address the
threats in our strategic environment. As I mentioned yesterday, our battle space is increasing from sub
warfare to cis-lunar, cyber, EW. So the threats are expanding, technology is moving fast.
In some cases, our adversaries are moving faster and getting their new capabilities out than we are, and
we need to make sure that we're ready. First to be able to deter any conflict that might come up, to
have G or anyone else say, "Today is not that day," but if we need to be able to fight and win, and those
are the things that over the last couple of months, we've all come to a conclusion that we need to make
changes so that we are ready today and for the future to win now, and to win the competition in the
long run. And the changes that we're putting in from the secretariat and each of the services will give us
the mechanism to be able to do that.
Andrew P. Hunter:
Well, I'd like to say we got a preview for re-optimizing great power competition as we did the
operational imperatives work last year and the year before. And that was an opportunity for us in the
acquisition community to work side by side with the operational community, to really focus on mission
threads and what capabilities are required to close those threads reliably, consistently over time in a
resilient fashion.
And what you find is we are required then to work across our stove-pipes, in a way that is extremely
non-traditional and that is also not facilitated by our organizational structure. So the why really is we
have to be able to do the things that we identified as operational imperatives. We have to be able to be
postured to do it as a natural act, not as an unnatural act. So for the acquisition community, the things
that are identified and that were announced yesterday by the Secretary, the Under, and the Chiefs, are
the things that we need to be able to consistently and reliably deliver on challenges like our operational
imperatives now and over time, over a span of time that includes the competition potentially over
multiple decades.
Frank Calvelli:
On the space side of the house, as you all know, it's the threat, right? We all built a magnificent
architecture today in space that is absolutely phenomenal that we all should be very proud of, but it was
built in a time where launch was very expensive, and space was a benign environment. So we tended to
go with larger satellites on very long development cycles. And we have a need, space is so important to
the joint force that we have a need now to fundamentally transform our space architecture to be more
