Are we approaching a future where the performance of a platform matters less than the performance of its weapons?

Yes. Now, let me caveat that. There are days of a war that aircraft performance absolutely, unequivocally matters. The first day of the war you really want to have the right kind of performance and the right kind of observability going into the conflict. That said, every war has a second, third, fourth, fifth day. And as we roll back from the first day of the war capabilities – which is a very high end and expensive capability – there is definitely a place for a lower-end workhorse truck. So the way I would answer your question is, yeah, you need that first day of the capability on the first day of war. But, we’ve proven in the last 15 years that we really did need second, third, fourth, fifth day of the war-type weapon systems, because once you get a permissive environment, you don’t want to be spending high-end dollars to conduct low-end missions.

 

What have been the biggest institutional changes in the command over the years?

Yeah, that’s a great question. One of the things that happened in the mid-’90s, when I was a young NAVAIR O-3, O-4 – I hated it then, but now, I look back and see how brilliant they were – was when Adm. Bowes [Vice Adm. William C. Bowes] and Adm. Lockard [Vice Adm. John A. Lockard] changed NAVAIR from a peer matrix organization to a competency-aligned organization. They took unilateral power out of the hands of small groups and created the constructive conflict power scheme, where folks that are responsible for money and schedule are separated from those that are responsible for performance, and everybody’s got to get along. That constructive conflict is one of the things that I believe breaks NAVAIR out from many other SYSCOMs [system commands], and many other organizations.

NAVAIR takes that constructive conflict very seriously, and when an engineer is standing in a meeting and a program manager says, ‘Look I don’t have the money or the time’ and he says, ‘Yeah but, you can’t go forward if you don’t change this,’ that engineer has the power to hold things up, and that’s different than the way the Air Force runs their programs where that engineer reports to and works for the program manager. It’s called a competency alignment of an organization. That’s probably the major shift that happened in the mid-’90s that I can’t say enough good things about now.

 

So, it seems like you have the power of having everybody pushing in the same direction at some point instead of different people having their different rice bowls?

Right. It’s truly a unique system that requires everybody to play their role and then lock arms on a team and find a win-to-win solution as they represent their equity. That’s about as good an explanation as I can give. You know, organizational structures can only do so much, but the leadership and culture that endorses that constructive conflict win-win scenario is the secret sauce of NAVAIR. It is truly a part of the culture there where the constructive conflict exists on every product team and the culture is: We’re gonna work it out and we’re not going to make a decision that is short sighted and shorting anybody in particular. And if there’s not enough money, then they’re going to go to [the] secretary’s staff and tell them, ‘Look, sorry, we’re out of money,’ or if they’ve got to compromise performance, they’re going to go to the CNO and tell the CNO ‘we can’t get there from here unless you spend a bunch of money, so we’re going to make this choice,’ and it just makes all those trades very transparent.

What would you say have been the major developments in aircraft technology during your service?

I would say composite is a major change that has really helped us evolve the way we build airplanes. I would say the implementation of GPS is another tremendous change. That was a revolution in how we conduct our business. When I was a lieutenant, we would have four airplanes with four bombs all attacking the same target. Nowadays you could have one Super Hornet with 10 bombs prosecuting 10 targets on one pass with the higher probability of kill. That’s a huge game-changer in terms of how we do our business. And then the latest one I would tell you is … there’s a lot of words that are used to describe it. In the Navy, we call it network-centric warfare, and that is where information, the pedigree and the custody of the information is transferred – theoretically – seamlessly over the net and is creating clear insight at the battlefield of who’s a bad guy and who’s a good guy. That’s the latest move ahead. I would be lying to you if I said we have that one completely figured out. We’re at the very front end of network-centric warfare. But, I’m telling you our systems are getting pretty darn good at sorting out the good from the bad. And if we can sort out the good from the bad, then we win. Making our systems work as a system of systems is a game-changer in terms of affordable warfighting capability.

 

Well, that’s always been the dream hasn’t it? Dispelling the fog of war?

Yeah, it has been and there have been many attempts. SIAP [Single Integrated Air Picture] was an attempt and we just weren’t ready. Mostly I would tell you it’s an organizational problem, not a technical problem. I think now it’s safe to say that we can solve this technical problem if we can get over the organizational disconnect.

 

Is it a cross-service kind of issue or is it inter-service?

It’s inter-service, it’s cross-service, it’s service and politics, service and Congress … it’s the whole nine yards. Everywhere you turn in the DOD [Department of Defense] acquisition system there’s a 100-page document that gives you the opportunity to say yes, but drives people to say no.  It’s just the way the system works now and what you’re finding is there’s a bunch of people trying to fight the system and get out of this inability to find a yes path and focus on the no path. And the no path is largely driven by the fact that there’s not enough money to pursue everybody’s good ideas and the process of necking down good ideas to the important ones isn’t working very well. So, consequently the system seeks the opportunity to say no to very good ideas that could solve this problem. And, it’s not an individual’s fault. I’ve dealt with the leadership and all aspects of this and I find them to be the most ethical, hardworking, incredible people that fight the system on a day-to-day basis … they fight it, fight it, fight it but somehow the organism will not allow the win-win. It takes extraordinary effort to pick the ‘right’ good ideas and force them through the system.

 

I think you’ve touched on this to some extent already, but I was going to ask what you see as the major developments in weapons technologies. I know you’ve mentioned GPS already, but what else?

I would tell you GPS clearly is very important. The next generation of GPS-denied weapons – the ability to precisely navigate without GPS – that’s up and coming, and it won’t be long before you start clearly seeing that happening. I think the big evolution in weapons – and I’m a weapons guy, I’ve been doing weapons all my life – isn’t in weapons; it’s in how you feed the weapon the georegistered mensurated coordinates. Weapons are like this little bird sitting in the nest waiting for somebody to drop a worm in its mouth. They just need the coordinates for fixed targets or error elipsoid for moving targets.  Connecting the system of systems to pull the right information at the right time is the key to our future.  So the revolution is how we get to very rapid fixed targets on the ground, or how do we get to a robust track of a moving target and keep the custody and the pedigree of that information through the time of flight of a weapon. That right there is the revolution. And, that goes back to the network-centric warfare discussion.

 

It seems that one of the things that you’ve seen over the decades is that you have weapons that can reach out and touch someone at longer and longer distances. But that targeting information has to be there to make that range worthwhile doesn’t it?

No doubt. Surface-to-surface weapons are a good example. We wanted to modify the Harpoon missile for surface-to-surface because we couldn’t target much farther than Harpoon’s range. That program has been started and stopped a couple of times in my lifetime because people have this fantasy of wanting a weapon that could go over the horizon and kill a ship even though they didn’t have a means of targeting it. We’re finally coming to grips with that and we’re making a much better run on getting to over-the-horizon targeting. When you do that, it’s not only the targeting, but it’s the pedigree of the targeting and it’s the ability to keep a chain of custody on that targeting for the full time of flight of the weapons. That’s the key.