WASHINGTON — As commander of US Air Force Materiel Command, Gen. Ellen Pawlikowski has a lot on her plate. Headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, AFMC  provides logistics support and acquisition management services for weapon systems across the Air Force. As AFMC chief, Pawlikowski oversees development and transition of technology to the war fighter.

In the face of increasing threats from Russia and China, not to mention persistent budget uncertainty, Pawlikowski's main focus is ensuring the Air Force has the tools it needs to fight all over the world.

Q. What is your take on the state of Air Force Materiel Command?

A. The command is in really excellent shape, so that gives me a good foundation. But there are lots of opportunities as we look to the future to do things better and to be more supportive. A real focus for us in the Air Force is strategic agility. If you look at the world environment with all of the different activities, whether it is now we are fighting ISIL, the next minute we are dealing with Putin, we are finding ourselves needing to be able to move and bring different capabilities around the world very rapidly and as effectively as we can. Whether it is sending F-22s to Europe or flying MQ-9s 24/7, all of those things cannot happen if Air Force Material Command does not do their job. So my major focus is to leverage on the great foundation that is there, and now let us work as a team to figure out how we become more agile.

Q. What is AFMC's role in the Air Force's plan to increase strategic agility?

A. If we are going to have strategic agility in 2030, the weapon systems that we are delivering and starting to develop have to have adaptability, versatility and cost effectiveness to enable us to be agile. Because what does agile mean? You need to be able to change and adapt to different environments. So some of our focus is on that when it comes to the new systems we are developing and the modifications we are doing to current systems.

One example is swarming UAVs, where we are applying new technologies like autonomy that allows us to have small, affordable UAVs. MQ-9s are great; it is not that expensive. Global Hawk is very expensive.

Another example of putting adaptability and agility into systems is taking a look at our existing systems. So my life-cycle management center is looking at the B-2, the F-15 and the F-16. We are focusing on putting open mission systems on the B-2 so that when I get a new avionics capability I do not have to spend a billion dollars to put it on the B-2; I can just take that same box and put it there.

We are also trying to build 3D models of the airplanes. And by doing that we can build a model for the things we need in weeks instead of months for an airplane, days instead of weeks for the weapon, and then dramatically reduce the amount of time I need to actually do flight tests. I can much more quickly bring a new weapon to bear for the Air Force because I do not have to spend time and money doing extra flight tests.

On the other end of the spectrum I was thrilled to see that the command in the Air Force Sustainment Center is applying additive manufacturing. It used to take us months, arguably even a year, before we could replicate an obsolete part. Now, we can apply additive manufacturing and we can make the part in three days.

Q. In the future, would you like to see the Air Force make more parts in-house?

A. I would love to see that. Instead of flying parts or having them stockpiled in certain places, maybe all I have is the digital design and an additive manufacturing tool and I make the part instead. That reduces the storage, it helps to eliminate dealing with obsolescence and people not building the parts anymore. We are a long way from doing that, but if I can cut off bits and pieces as we go forward with techniques like that, I think I am all the better.

Q. We have learned that Air Force is going about acquisition of the long-range strike bomber [LRSB] in a different way than usual. Would you like to see this process applied to other programs?

A. Absolutely. I love to steal good ideas and make them work. The Air Force is going to be putting a much stronger focus on development planning. Development planning is pulling together what do you think the requirements are, what is in the realm of the possible in terms of technologies? It's kind of a cycle. It starts out with, "tell me what you need, tell me what you've got." And when you first start that process, the "tell me what you've got" may be technical concepts, technical ideas. The "tell me what you need" may be concepts of operation that are uninformed about what you've got. And to bring the two together, you start with modeling and simulation. You get to the point where some of the technology now becomes not just models and simulations but experimentation. And then after experimentation becomes prototyping. And that cycle continues.

Q. Can you give me an example?

A. Suppose we focused on what we need for air superiority in 2030. Maybe once a year we cycle back and we look at our planning and you say, "this really works and the technology is pretty mature, and we could probably put this on the F-35 in 2025." We do not need to wait until 2030. And that process is very similar to what we did on the LRSB up front. What we want to do is we want take that a step further. Instead of getting into a particular platform and family of systems, let us go to a concept. For air superiority, maybe the answer is not a brand new airplane, because I can leverage cyber tools more effectively, or I can use space to complement. And so we will be focusing on the tools to do that and looking at a couple of pathfinders along the way.

Q. How else has the Air Force's experience with LRSB impacted development planning?

A. There is a certain streamlining that we do with the Rapid Capabilities Office [RCO], which is handling LRSB, that we do not do across all of our programs. We want to try to apply that. We also want to take good techniques like open mission systems. OMS is another example of what came out of LRSB.

Some of this is like back to the future. It is in our blood. It is something that the Air Force has done but we kind of strayed away from it. And you might say that the RCO was part of getting us back into it because we were able to do it there for LRSB.

Q. How does a continuing resolution impact AFMC?

A. It would be very hard on AFMC. A yearlong CR would freeze the budget at the fiscal year 2015 level. And even at sequestration levels, FY '16 was higher. If we had a yearlong CR, first of all, new starts would not start. The programs that we are going to ramp up, we can't. The third thing that bothers me the most is our logistics complexes. We plan for what is going to be the throughput for aircraft that are going to come in for depot maintenance. And if that funding is done through the weapons system sustainment line and the flying hour program, and if those numbers do not have the appropriate ramp-up, that means that I will not be able to put the throughput through the air logistics complexes. Which means that coming out of it, I am going to have some real issues in FY '17 because I am going to have planes that should have gone through depot that did not get through depot. And we have that scheduled based on what they need to ensure that we can continue to safely fly them.

You can see that it is going to create a backlog. So from my perspective it is going to make it very hard across the board for us. We are going to get caught behind the power curve in our development programs, in our production programs, and in our sustainment activities.

Q. What are your thoughts on Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James' new initiative to speed up weapons delivery?

A. The problem is that if we keep on doing the same thing we always did, we are always going to get the same result. And some of the things that we are trying to do is to be able to do things faster, more effectively, at lower cost. And we have shown over the last five years that we can beat these independent cost estimates for the cost. That is really what the "should cost" is, can I beat that independent cost estimate? We have shown amazing success.

What the "should schedule" says is can we take that to schedule? And I think some of that stemmed from having the industry come forward with some innovative ways. If the industry says I can do it to here and they are willing to sign up for it, then why can't I do it?

Q. What are your thoughts on the recent acquisition reform proposals out of Congress?

A. I have been doing this a long time and I have seen a lot of acquisition reform initiatives. First of all, I am always in favor of a reset every once in a while when it comes to the acquisition rules, because it is kind of like the tax code. You get all these things that are on there, and then what some things originally intended to do kind of evolves into other things. I will say that I think both the Senate and House leadership have actually engaged us and given us an opportunity to give our insights. Some of the things they are doing I think are really good ideas. Others I think the devil is in the details of how they are implemented. I kind of like to wait and see.

Email: lseligman@defensenews.com

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