With lingering questions regarding the depleted U.S. stockpiles due to the war with Iran, the Air Force is looking to build the “right mix” of weapons, not just “replenishing what has been expended,” Brig. Gen. Robert Lyons III said.
During the panel, “Rethinking the Stockpile: Building the Right Mix for Future Conflict” at the Air and Space Cyber Conference on Monday, Lyons noted that the service is working to balance “capability, capacity cost and the adaptability to produce at the speed and scale for future conflicts.”
Citing the conflict in Ukraine, where battlefield adaptations can come within hours and minutes, not months and years, panelist Bryon Kroger, founder and CEO of Rise8, noted that “when it comes to software, we’ve just historically been really bad. Like, in some cases, we’re building software slower than hardware. It’s wild.”
“You wouldn’t think about not establishing a refueling apparatus for aircraft that need to get across long distances,” said Kroger. “But we haven’t really thought about, from an enterprise IT perspective, how to create a similar refueling apparatus or the ability to continuously deliver software to the field in the way that you should. It’s not getting nearly enough attention and we need to start.
“We really have to decouple the software cycles from the hardware cycles. … We [need to be] deploying multiple times a day, where we can get an update to the field on demand. As soon as we need it.”
Ryan Hartman, chief executive officer of Ondas Sentinel, agreed.
“Inventory on the first day of the conflict is one important equation. But it is the ability for that inventory to evolve with the conflict. In my 27 years in the industry, I haven’t seen an adversary comply with our acquisition system yet. And therefore, we have to make sure that our acquisition system enables us to keep up with the pace of the conflict and the adaptability necessary to stay relevant in the conflict.”
When addressing how the government and industry can work together to address stockpile bottlenecks, both Hartman and Kroger offered simple, if possibly difficult to enact, solutions.
For Kroger, the biggest bottleneck Rise8 faces is something simple: a calendar.
According to him, “80-85%” of his company’s time is spent waiting on government authorization to operate — time spent “waiting in the queue” to get on the ”authorizing official’s calendar… if it takes six months to get on the ATO’s calendar, right there you’re at a minimum of six months to fill the system, but they’re going to find something because we always find things during test and evaluation. And now we go back, redevelop, and wait another six months to get on that calendar. This is how you get 12–18-month ATO cycles,” he noted.
For Hartman, the bottleneck within U.S. industry is clear: “The first is the supply chain, the second is the supply chain, the third is the supply chain and the fourth is testing.”
With technological advancements unfolding at breakneck speed amid conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, time is not a luxury the U.S. Air Force and its industry partners have much of.
That has been a boon to people like Kroger, who notes that a government that unleashes performance-based outcomes means that the defense industry is not an insider game anymore. Rather, contracts go to companies that offer solutions-based, scalable products.
As for the most important action the government and industries must take to be better positioned in the next few years, Hartman was blunt:
“Make sure we have capacity prior to a conflict.”
Claire Barrett is an editor and military history correspondent for Military Times. She is also a World War II researcher with an unparalleled affinity for Sir Winston Churchill and Michigan football.
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