Episode 44: Air Force Engages Industry for New Air Mobility Solutions

The Elara Edge

Host: Scott King (SK) 

SME: Gen (Ret) Jackie Van Ovost, Senior Principal Advisor at Elara Nova (JVO) 

Lt Gen (Ret) Rick Moore, Executive Partner at Elara Nova (RM)  

Lt Gen (Ret) Ty Thomas, Executive Partner at Elara Nova (TT) 

00:02 – 01:27 

For over 75 years, the United States Air Force has been able to deploy and sustain forces at a time and place of its choosing, but a series of converging challenges have undermined that ability. Key mobility platforms like the C-5 and C-17 are aging, parts are harder to come by and the long legs required to cover the Pacific theater consume flight hours faster, shortening the time between maintenance cycles. Meanwhile, integrating new capabilities to outpace an accelerating threat demands additional downtime the fleet can ill afford. 

In response, the Air Force has initiated two efforts set against ambitious timelines. In June, the Air Force published a Request for Information to acquire a Next-Generation Airlift (or NGAL) platform to replace both the C-5 and C-17. At the same time, the Air Force is putting funds toward a new research and development program, Large Aircraft Survivability Systems (or LASS) to equip airlifters and aerial refuelers with their own defensive weapon systems. 

Welcome to The Elara Edge! We have three guests today, here to discuss these efforts to revitalize and modernize the Air Force’s mobility fleet. First, we have retired General Jackie Van Ovost, a Senior Principal Advisor at Elara Nova and the former Commander of Air Force Mobility Command and U.S. Transportation Command. 

Ma’am, welcome to the show!

01:27 – 01:29  

(JVO): Thanks. Great to be here. 

01:29 – 01:41 

(SK): Also joining us is retired Lieutenant General Rick Moore. Now an Executive Partner at Elara Nova, General Moore retired as the Deputy Chief of Staff for Plans and Programs at U.S. Air Force Headquarters.  

Sir, welcome to the show! 

01:42 – 01:43 

(RM): Thanks, Scott. Appreciate the invite.  

01:44 – 01:59 

(SK): And then we have retired Lieutenant General Jon “Ty” Thomas. General Thomas is also an Executive Partner at Elara Nova, and previously served as the Deputy Commander of Air Mobility Command and Pacific Air Forces.  

Sir, thanks for taking the time to join us today! 

02:00 – 02:01 

(TT): Happy to be here, Scott.  

02:02 – 02:22 

(SK): Let’s start today’s discussion with the Air Force’s RFI for a Next Generation Airlift platform, or NGAL. The primary mobility platforms the Air Force uses for its airlift mission is currently the C-5 and C-17.  

But what is the current status of those airlifters? And how has the threat landscape evolved to prompt the Air Force to put forward this RFI?

02:23 – 03:37 

(RM): Yeah. So the C-5M fleet is a little bit challenged these days. The mission capable rate is in the high 30s. Right now, it’s about 37%. Without giving a specific number, the plans call for something dramatically higher than that, which means that the amount of C-5 capability and capacity that TRANSCOM counts on – it’s not there. 

The C-17 fleet is faring a pretty good bit better. The C-17 MC rate is in the mid 70s. Right now it’s about 75%. That’s down about 7% from pre-COVID. And the C-17 MC rate seems to kind of be drifting down by about 1% a year. As the fleet ages, more parts get obsolete, it becomes more difficult to keep the supply chain intact as just technology leaves the C-17 behind. 

So the plan from Air Mobility Command that you see in the Request for Information is for a single airplane to replace both of those. The C-5 replacements will start in about 2050, and the C-17 replacements should finish by about 2075. The plan is to have Next Gen Airlifter ready to fly by 2038, and initial operational capability by 2041. 

That is quite far away if you consider that the C-5 now are languishing in the high 30s for mission capable rate. 

03:38 – 04:57 

(JVO): When we think about our ability to maneuver anywhere in the world and sustain operations for the joint force, the first thing you think about is air mobility. 

Now, we have a lot of great other modal capabilities with sea and land. But I tell you, when I think about our most consequential theater in the Pacific, it is an air and sea fight. And we do not have the capabilities for airfields and road networks and even sea networks, if you will, and river networks that we had even in Europe. 

So we cannot execute our national strategy without this capability. So it is critical that we spend the time to analyze what is the real requirement of the transformed force for maneuver and sustainment, and how are we going to supply that?

There are some great movement trying to get some funding for parts and sustainment to resurrect these airplanes and get them higher. But the bottom line is: this is the consequence of an aging fleet, the consequence of not recapping early and the consequence of old technology. 

We’ll have an opportunity to talk about software and software defined and agile updates. But when we look at the declining MC rates, it is way too far out there. We just do not have a coherent strategy to get us, even if we can meet these accelerated timelines for the Next Generation Airlift.  

04:58 – 05:35 

(RM): Yeah and Scott you asked about how the threat landscape has evolved and how that impacts the air mobility fleet. We’ve been at war in the desert for 35 years now. We have not yet had to contend with contested lines of logistics. We’ve been able to move everything to and through Europe and on to the Middle East without our supply lines being contested. 

That will almost assuredly not be the case in the event we find ourselves in conflict in the Pacific. The air mobility fleet that we have today is designed to protect itself from some threats, but its ability to to handle itself with truly contested supply supply lines – it’s just not there. 

05:36 – 05:53 

(TT): Scott, the one thought that I would add that comes to mind is so we remember our 21st chief of staff who used to talk about mobility as like oxygen. When you’re breathing, it’s there and you never even think about it until you don’t have it and then that’s all you think about. That’s what mobility is for and what it does.  

05:54 – 06:01 

(SK): And so how will the NGAL, as a single platform, be a solution for replacing both the C-5 and C-17? 

06:02 – 07:00 

(RM): I think you’re going to find that a single platform to replace the C-17 and the C-5 is likely to look a lot more like a C-17 than a C-5. And if you consider the distances that we have to operate over in the Pacific, the RFI called for just a marginal increase in range over the C-17. Then I think when you start looking at numbers: 274 airplanes is about what the RFI envisions to replace an equal-sized fleet, 222 C-17s and 52 C-5s. 

I think you’re going to be challenged with an airplane with a similar cargo box to the C-17. Marginally more range to equal what we have in the two fleets today. The one thing that is the equalizer is the mission capable rate of the C-5. If you can have an airplane with a high mission capable rate, you can probably be okay there. 

But the Pacific is a remarkably challenging environment to operate in. There are a few alternates. The legs are really, really long and the requirement for lift is really high.

07:01 – 08:19 

(JVO): Can I add that US TRANSCOM does something called a Mobility Capability Requirement Study (MCRS), and that is being refreshed right now. And some of these requirements from the RFI look a lot like MCRS-16 in 2016. 

You’re at 160,000 pounds, which is roughly when you think about maxing out a pallet at 10,000 pounds. You know, it’s 16 pounds pallets. C-17 has 18 and that 2500 nautical mile unrefueled range. And as we refresh the MCRS, we have to have a better understanding of what the joint force is going to be using. The entire joint force is transforming to do distributed operations. 

So the 160,000 and the double-wide sounds like heavy armor. And we just need to make sure that as we’re moving munitions, moving drones and other things, that we’re actually creating a box and a capability that’s going to move that most effectively and provide options to the Combatant Commander. So I am looking forward to the MCRS as it develops out – and that’s a classified study. 

But there should be some work done with industry to understand what the capabilities are and what the services to see what they’re developing and their concepts of operations out into the future.  

08:20 – 08:37 

(SK): Thank you, Ma’am. Now at the time of the RFI’s release, Air Force leaders indicated an opennes to having NGAL as a crewed or uncrewed platform. Or in other words, fully autonomous.  

What are some of the advantages and disadvantages of using autonomous technologies for the airlift mission? 

08:38 – 09:39 

(JVO): From the COCOM perspective, I would say that autonomous capabilities are part of the mobility enterprise and must be.  

It gives us an option in the fight to make a decision, like if this is optionally crewed to to not use a crew going forward for a particular hazard that’s out there. That said, these are not attritable airplanes, so we still have to have some defensive capability and the C2 architecture to support even autonomous airplanes like NGAL at that level is totally separate when you’re talking about something that’s moving 1,000 pounds. 

But when you’re looking at NGAL, it’s really not meant to be attritable. So it does provide options. And we want to be able to get an airplane into a higher threat region without and do the mission when it makes sense from an autonomous standpoint. 

Certainly, of course additional reps and sets. You could fly the airplane longer. You don’t have the crew. Not only are you not concerned about crew safety, but I’m not concerned about running them dry or running on a crew duty day. So you have more use out of it, but you want to use it in that capability when it makes the most sense. 

09:40 – 10:26 

(TT): Yeah, it doesn’t surprise me that they’re calling for that in the RFI. I mean, to some extent, though, especially the term optional, it almost puts you in the worst of all worlds in the sense that you’ve got to make design provisions for a full up crew, and that costs you weight, that costs you payload, that costs you fuel, costs you all kinds of things in the design of the aircraft while also needing to provision for the aircraft to operate autonomously with the digital backbone and all of the things that we have now with modern aircraft, it you should be able to insert that in.  

But to be able to have both is going to increase the cost of the aircraft. And we should, carefully examine: do we need to have all that optionality? Industry will come back and say this is how you can do it. Ultimately it’s going to become a design requirement or not, and then that’ll drive trade-offs that occur.

10:27 – 11:06 

(RM): We typically think of grey tails as cargo aircraft. But if you get into competition and then into conflict, gray tails, maybe the only way that you have to get troops all the way forward in the battle and an autonomous cargo aircraft there probably is a pretty fair amount of appetite for that. 

When you start putting people on it and you start talking about moving passengers, even combat troops in an autonomous aircraft, I’m not sure we’re quite there yet that we’re willing to put a couple hundred folks on an airplane and send them off into the night without some folks in the cockpit that can recover if something goes wrong.  

If nothing goes wrong, everything’s fine. But as soon as something does, then you have the potential for a very serious problem.  

11:07 – 11:19 

(SK): And General Thomas, given the cost challenges you mentioned, can you walk us through how an innovative concept like NGAL could be realistically funded and sustained – particularly in a congressional environment where continuing resolutions have become the norm? 

11:20 – 13:42 

(TT): Well, maybe I’ll build it up this way and just kind of get to a number. And I’ll start with Rick did a great job of laying out what’s in the recapitalization memo. Kind of the dates, key milestones at 2038, 2041, 2075. So if you look at that and if you just kind of set aside the front end developmental costs, which are consequential and big, but we can come back to that. 

Starting with FY26 dollars, it’s probably an all up cost of an NGAL. I would argue about $350 million. That’s not just the airframe itself. That’s all the spares. That’s ground support equipment, that’s training systems. All the things to actually like this is a machine that’s a fielded capability, that’s got all the things that are necessary to last for the decades that we’re going to expect to do it. 

Okay. So maybe you get a couple aircraft out of the developmental program and then your first squadron, let’s say Jackie’s successor says IOC is going to be one squadron of 12 airplanes. Okay. So you get to that at 2041. And then basically you’re making those airplanes all the way through about 2068 or so. And it’s about ten airplanes a year.  

So it’s $3.5 billion FY26 a year. This is a $100 billion aircraft production program just in and of itself. If you push the developmental cost there in front of it, I venture it’s probably a $20 billion developmental program. If this is a full clean sheet design, not based on any commercial derivative or a modification of existing military assets. 

And then you go back to what is life like in building a program and then defending it with OSD and then getting it over through the gates and the Hill to end up in an appropriation. This is going to scream having a multi-year. That would be the only way that you can have assurance that a program of this length, when it’s recapping at only ten airplanes a year is going to have the continuity that it requires. 

And actually, if I’m in industry, ten airplanes a year is a really low rate. 12 airplanes minimum? Companies that are building tankers right now would like to go from the existing 15 to 18 or 24 because they know the efficiencies on the line that come from the higher production rates. 

So to me, that’s just kind of the basic math. And there’s going to have to be a long  commitment that locks in funds in the Air Force generally doesn’t like to do that if they don’t have to, because you want to maintain that budget flexibility because the programmer always has to create offsets.  

13:43 – 15:12 

(RM): I agree absolutely with Ty’s assessment. An optionally manned aircraft – that’s a marginal cost that you’re talking about. It’s not a question about whether that can fit in the budget. The highest risk for the NGAL program overall is the time when C-5 and C-17s are still flying and NGAL is in development. $20 billion is about what we spent on C-17 development in the late 80s. 

And so development costs could actually be fairly substantially higher than that. Trying to fit all of that in the budget, that’s the highest risk to the program. If you wanted to de-risk the program, you would look outside the Air Force to see what kind of capacity absorbers are out there, so that you could start to bring the C-5 fleet down before NGAL starts to deliver, or certainly not a one-for-one tail replacement. 

If the requirement is that NGAL and C-5 and then C-17 have to shake hands with each other one-for-one replacement, I think there’s great risk that that won’t even fit in the budget. You’ve got to find a way to bring down that spike of non-recurring engineering, NRE and C-17 ops and C-5 ops. 

And if you’re going to start to bring the C-5 fleet down, we spend about a billion and a quarter dollars a year on C-5s. The real money is in the depot. It’s not in the airplanes. So what you have to do is figure out how you can let the fleet degrade gracefully without a depot, and let that be a shock absorber for the NRE for NGAL. 

Then you have to use outside capacity to fill in the gap. Otherwise, I’m not convinced that NGAL actually fits in the Air Force budget.

15:13 – 16:59 

(JVO): Absolutely, spot on for both of them. That bridge strategy is critical. There is no funding to bring the C-5 back up to where it needs to be. That really should be critically looked at. And what commercial capability is out there? What are we actually using the airplanes for?  

As we remember during Afghanistan, we really focused on the C-17 in theater, and we use the C-5 around the globe to clean up issues. It performed well, but it still didn’t perform at the level that we had expected after we did that major modification to the airplanes, we made the revised C-5M. 

Let me also go back to what Ty talked about with the respect to the acquisition strategy. Yeah, I would say more than 20 billion because of what we’re trying to do here and it is a clean sheet so far. There are some other thoughts about C-17s but pretty much just a clean sheet if you’re going to walk away from a tube and wing. But how we do it right? We all think, oh, it’s the magic button. Is it OTAs or using new acquisition strategies? 

You know, maybe there’s a tweener out there where we can accelerate the development through another strategy. But that would take a handshake with industry certainly, and partnerships and consortiums to probably do that. And then, yes, we expect that when you have a hot production line that you can get efficiencies by accelerating it. 

We see at a smaller level here with munitions and whatnot that we just some of the capacity issues, the materials issues, the second and third tier supplier issues, may be what really stops us from putting out something more than ten a year. And that’s what we absolutely have to do that.  

And I agree a multi-year strategy. And you’re seeing it more with this administration really understanding we have to have a commitment to industry so that they will invest in what it takes, automation, the materials to produce faster so that we can get a better copy – one – and two – reduced risk on the bridge strategy.

17:00 – 17:12 

(SK): Say the Air Force is able to overcome these budgetary challenges and deliver NGAL on these ambitious timelines with all the funding required: what would that NGAL capability look like in a theoretical future fight in the Pacific?  

17:13 – 19:24 

(JVO): The Pacific theater is the most operationally restrictive theater that we deal with. Whereas Europe is land and air, the Pacific is air and sea, and we just do not have the nodes, the multi-modal routes that we’ve defined over the years and years of dealing with NATO and then the logistics depth in Europe, and frankly, even in the Middle East right now, than what we what we have right now in the Pacific. 

So I would say that as we’ve been talking about it as a huge theater. The challenge is not just distance. It is the logistics depth across that theater that really can bite us. And when I think about the 2500 unrefueled distance, certainly you can get from northern Australia to most of the first and second island chain, certainly from Japan down to the first and second chain. 

We start talking about Alaska and Hawaii and the Konas. It’s going to require augmentation by tankers or some sort of a cross-load strategy with our commercial partners. And certainly we’re going to be depending on our allies and partners. They have some of the depth for what they need, but not for a major theater fight and that’s what we really have to be looking hard at. 

So it’s not just an NGAL, it is the mobility enterprise system, which is air, land and sea. And we’re going to have to depend more on intra-theater sealift. So we’d have to resurrect some of the capabilities we have or use as a service with our commercial partners or joint ventures out into the Pacific.   

I’m hoping that the MCRS that TRANSCOM is working on is going to help develop some of those concepts and put pressure on the services to deliver all of those capabilities so that the entire enterprise, which also has to be C2 fuzed in sensors and see the entire picture, that’s air land and sea mobilization capability, that they’re all together so that we can have options to move across different modes to meet the requirements.  

And we’re going to use NGAL for what NGAL can exclusively do, which is that high threat area. And then we’re going to use all the rest of the capabilities so that we can keep NGAL focused on what it does best. 

19:25 – 19:47 

(RM): It’s interesting that the range at 2500 nautical miles, it’s only 100 miles more than the C-17. The question is, does the NGAL design under this RFI drive a tanker requirement that we would like to engineer ourselves out of?  

There could be an opportunity here to reduce the requirement for tankers based on the design of NGAL, but I don’t see that that’s what the RFI intends. 

19:48 – 22:31 

(TT): And I would submit that this is no longer unique to the Pacific, although we’ve traditionally focused on the Pacific and this is in a combat environment: it’s getting off the X. But getting off the X in the CENTCOM AOR is important right now. And getting off the X in Europe is going to be really important if we ever get down to it over there. So there’s part of it in the RFI that gets to an element of getting off the X, which is the ability to upload and download cargo and passengers without any support equipment. So that’s going to have to be a fundamental requirement. So good on the RFI for capturing that. 

There’s a couple of things as I went back through it that puzzled me a little bit. The first one is there’s actually no question that asks about receiver AR capability on the NGAL. Maybe that was intentional. I’m not sure. But I would think that particularly for the Pacific, NGAL is going to need to be able to receive fuel from a tanker. 

There are other mission sets, by the way, where we’ve had to move people across the world or things across the world, and there was no stop between where it started and somewhere in the United States of America. And NGAL is going to need to be able to do that. So I think receiver refueling is maybe a critical miss in the RFI. 

The second one is the RFI talks about defensive systems, but that’s actually one of the most troubling things because it immediately goes to, ‘What are the things that are on the airplane that could handle some kind of engagement, whether it’s a terminal airfield or maybe something in the air?’ But the question I would submit that we need to be asking is: what is the signature management approach of the system? Of the aircraft as a platform and how it interfaces with the system as we have it?  

 There’s lots of ways to manage signature. We have historically struggled with focusing first on the platform and its RF signature in response to an active RF sensor that is merely just one part of it. So maybe we’ll get to that. Maybe that’ll become part of the industry discussions. But because if the opponent never finds you or struggles to find you, they’re not going to necessarily be able to target you. And if we can do that and pull it to the left, we’re going to be winning.  

The last one is a little bit more mundane, and it’s not necessarily related to getting off the X, but I think it’s particularly important going back to the long term: how do you have this system in our Air Force? 

And there was no question about aircrew and maintenance training systems, which will be a critical part. And the OEM has to bring that – it can be followed up and maybe provided to the services itself by somebody else. But putting thought right at the front-end to the air crew and maintenance training systems is going to be an important part of NGAL. 

But going back to the Pacific, we got to get off the X, we got to get off the X everywhere in a time of conflict. And there’s a few things that are worth talking about that aren’t in there.  

22:32 – 23:13 

(SK): During this same period of time, the Air Force has requested and put funding toward a new research and development program, Large Aircraft Survivability Systems, which would explore defensive weapon systems for air-refuelers and airlifters.  

Meanwhile, the House Armed Services Committee has also formally adopted language in the FY 2027 National Defense Authorization Act, requiring the Air Force to report on its plan to field LASS by 2031, explicitly stating Operation Midnight Hammer as proof that air-refuelers require some sort of defense mechanism. 

General Moore, if you wouldn’t mind starting us off with this one, why is the Air Force taking a revitalized approach to “survivability” for these larger aircraft? 

3:14 – 24:06 

(RM): I think it’s particularly important as you start looking at logistics over contested supply lines, you have to make sure that your airlift fleet is survivable. As Jackie said in the first part, these are not going to be attritable aircraft. Every single one of them that’s lost, is the loss of a national treasure. 

And certainly LASS is one way to think about large aircraft survivability. I would also add that one of the things that Air Mobility Command is looking really hard at is the survivability feature is connectivity. One of the things that you can do with a large aircraft is at least let them know where the threat is and what they need to do in order to avoid it and that’s kind of the first step.  

LASS then comes in or large aircraft infrared countermeasures. LARICM on the fleets that we have now, those come in in the event that that doesn’t work. But I think the first step is actually connectivity, so that you don’t get yourself in a situation where you have to use LARICM or LASS.

24:07 – 25:53 

(JVO): Scott, as Midnight Hammer and Epic Fury have shown that tankers and the airlift, tactical and strategic, are all vulnerable to air-to-air and air-to-ground. Obviously, we’ve seen some reports of battle damage out there, so we absolutely have to plan for, as the name Large Aircraft Survivability Systems portends, we actually need systems that are interoperable for defensive, and we need it not to be a single point system. 

It’s got to be much like: this is a kill web with sensors from space and airplanes and effectors that can come from different locations. We have to have a defensive web in layers around both types of airplanes. As Rick mentioned earlier, there is some defensive capability on C-17s, but that’s not the type of weapon that is really the reigning weapon right now. 

So we have to think about kinetic and non-kinetic and layered. And that’s what LASS looks at on the layered side. Ideally, you have CCAs that are out in front or drones that are out in front that are providing a layer for not just a tanker or an airlift, but for all aircraft followed by sensors on board that can see everything that to alert the crew to scram if they have to, or to maneuver to reduce the threat or reduce the signature, followed by electronic warfare capability, followed by a last chance kinetic effector. 

And does that have to come from that airplane? It all depends. But it’s a layered effect to get after the web because these are not single shot issues anymore. This is a complex web multi-domain, and we have to defeat that multi-domain threat both for airlift and tankers. 

25:54 – 27:13 

(TT): Scott the the only thing that I would add as well and it goes back to like thinking of this as a holistic system. And Jackie just laid out a really coherent: what’s it going to take particularly oriented on the high value airborne asset? Because it’s exactly right. It’s just as important for the rivet joints and if it ends up being an E-7 or whatever it is, the various other platforms, but it’s also the rest of the assets in the joint fight. 

So it really got my attention as a mobility airman, actually, when we just became public that there’s a few air-to-air weapons with a stick of 250 nautical miles plus now in our inventory. Red has to respect that. So when red is forced to respect that, just like they’re trying to push us back, that’s pushing them back as well. 

That’s winning for us in large aircraft survivability. You got to have the sensing, you got to be able to close your own kill chain on the red assets. But all of that works together. There’s no sole mobility solution. There’s no sole combat Air Force solution that fits into this. It’s all of it together that counters the red threat, enhances our survivability, lets us do the mission. 

And as long as there’s an Air Force and as a joint force, we’re thinking it through that way, we’ll find the right solution. So LASS is a piece of something that’s really much larger and has to be pulled together all the way through it. 

27:14 – 27:32 

(SK): The Air Force has requested to fund the LASS program to the tune of $508 million, and so far four different industry partners have been contracted to take part in the study. 

But what is the role of industry studies like this, particularly as the Air Force looks to develop novel and innovative capabilities necessary for the future fight?

27:33 – 28:16 

(RM): So we saw with Collaborative Combat Aircraft that the Air Force took a different approach than we’ve taken before. Rather than define a requirement and pass it to industry and ask them to build to the requirement. We asked industry what would be possible if we gave them the opportunity to build CCAs and let them come back with what their thoughts were. 

These industry studies are part of the way we’re letting that happen right now, rather than developing a requirement, which, by the way, invariably leads to technology that’s been available for quite some time. I suppose that’s not always the case, but that tends to be what happens. If we ask industry a question and give them a chance to do some studies and come back with an answer that wasn’t already predefined, the chances that we get something truly innovative are actually pretty high.

28:17 – 29:27 

(JVO): Yeah, I would say that how we used to treat studies and now how we treat studies are really different? A decade and a half ago, we were looking at kinetic effects for defense on large aircraft. But study after study that we didn’t get very far. We didn’t drop a requirement down. We didn’t fund it.  

There was some thought on test for a small weapon, but we never got there. And now, clearly the operations are showing that we have to have it and we need it soon. So when Congress said, ‘Hey, show me a plan, they must have been thinking, ‘You know, I haven’t seen a plan.’ 

Or maybe the briefs that they got that were unsatisfying. And that’s going to add a little pressure to ‘What’s the plan?’ But we have to have resources for the plan. And the amount of resources does not seem like it’s going to be enough for the fleet. And that’s just, I mean, LASS starts with tankers, but it is like you mentioned, this is about all heavy airplanes we need that effect for C-17 as part of the bridge strategy to 2075. You know, in 2040, the multi-domain threat, the kill webs that are out there are very complex and we have got to have a capability by then that addresses the complexity of that web.

29:28 – 30:16 

(TT): Yeah. Scott on that my comment would be 500 million is a drop in the bucket. If you’re talking about fielding some type of endgame effector on the mobility platform, if that’s the number that you end up with, I’d much rather see industry be asked for options to. Rick touched on it and they’re moving out on it with [sic]. But increased connectivity to the platform, increase the situational awareness of the crew as well as the C2 system that’s supporting it, and then manage the signature in ways which are mostly passive. 

You can do that less expensive than hanging things on the airplane that have to go out and go boom. If we approach it maybe in that order, which is increase situational awareness, understanding connectivity and then reduce signatures through passive means, we can make a lot of progress within a smaller budget. 

30:17 – 30:32 

(SK): And to continue on the thread of budget constraints – what opportunities  exist for the Air Force and its industry partners to incorporate or leverage private capital to either facilitate additional funding or offset some of these costs in order to deliver these capabilities into our Airmen’s hands? 

30:33 – 31:38 

(RM): I think probably the most powerful way that that’s happening right now at large scale is the Office of Strategic Capital. And they have the authority to put out something like $250 billion of guaranteed loans. That is, in my opinion, the most profound impact on the requirement for research and development to be funded by the government. 

It still takes time. You can’t rush the engineering and you can’t necessarily buy your way out of it. But what you’re seeing is the current administration. They understand private capital. They understand how to leverage it. It’s important to them. The Dep SecWar has said he would like to see something between one third and two thirds of the development costs of new things that are coming to the department funded by industry. 

When you get into some niche capabilities that aren’t used universally and there’s no commercial application for them, like LASS, you have a little bit more difficulty. But if you’re looking at something like simply airlift capacity, then you can see that there’s applicability outside the DOW you have dual-use capability. And then I think that’s a place where the Office of Strategic Capital can come in and make a really big difference.

31:39 – 32:57 

(JVO): Absolutely. What Rick was saying that the dual use potential for components for airlift and tankers that we can use for efficiency and effectiveness. And for C2, as airlines, they see to their forces. Well, they see in transit visibility of the stuff that’s moving around that they’re moving around. And they’ve been very effective with that.  

And frankly, all the way out to doing autonomous operations and dropping packages, we could learn and use a lot of that to leverage as much of that as possible into the system and leave as minimal as possible for the military requirement. But there’s no doubt the military requirement is not an easy one to address. 

Although when you think about what is different between a C-17 and an F-35 on some of the systems that it uses to understand itself, to sense and whatnot. So there are some components there that we could use from across, not just us, by the way, but our allies and partners who are willing to go there. And then on the allies and partners side, obviously, if we have capability that we need to be interoperable with them.

And that’s just not the airplanes themselves in the C2 piece, but the offload and unload, the minimum MHE or minimum handling equipment, minimum people doing servicing on the ground, but also flat out selling those and being able to scale that way and reduce the unit cost for the aircraft that we’re going to be buying. 

32:58 – 33:37 

(TT): Two words that I think is what attracts private capital. Intellectual property rights. Okay. So if you’re going to make an investment you’ve got to own the rights. The government may have its own unlimited rights, but you’ve got to have the rights to be able to use it as you see fit. And it’s an assumption like Rick made on his first comment that there’s a market out there for you to use that intellectual property, right?

And then the other one is run rate. Okay. So what’s the demand? So out there is a government man that’s going to manifest as a commercial demand that’s going to manifest? But if you’re going to bring capital to bear, you’ve got to know that there is good confidence, not 100%, that you’re going to get a return and a decent return. And if you don’t see it, you’re not going to bring it. Those two. 

33:38 – 34:59 

(RM): We mentioned continuing resolution before, but we didn’t spend too much time on it. But continuing resolution is probably the biggest threat to defense modernization that’s out there. On average, we spend four months out of every year in continuing resolution. Essentially, we’re giving the Chinese four months of head start every single year because we’re waiting for an appropriation to come to the Department of War. It’s truly challenging.  

 First of all, in a time when defense budgets are going up, typically continuing resolution is based on last year’s budget, and usually it’s something like 80% of last year’s budget. But if the budget was accelerating, then you don’t feel any of that acceleration until the continuing resolution is replaced by an appropriation. And continuing resolutions almost always include a provision that there can be no new starts. That means you can’t start a new program, and it also means you can’t transition from research and development into procurement for most programs that are out there, which means you just have to wait until it’s over. 

And this is why I say we’re giving away four months of modernization space every single year. Continuing resolutions also include multiple provisions for things that would be automatic in a normal appropriation cycle that have to be individually approved under the continuing resolution. And it’s just become completely commonplace. But it is a dramatic damper on the ability to move quickly with respect to defense modernization. 

35:00 – 35:10 

(SK): And what are some of the challenges that industry leaders might be facing that the U.S. government might not be aware of? And in what ways should the government be engaging those industry partners to get in front of those seen or unseen hurdles? 

35:11 – 36:03 

(RM): I think with NGAL, a particular hurdle for industry is going to be the timeline that we think this is going to happen on. I think having a first flight by 2038, the RFI is on the street in FY26, but there’s not even money for analysis of alternatives in 26. There is $8.9 million in 27 if it makes it through the appropriations process. After a continuing resolution, because it’s new money.  

But I mean, just if you look at what it takes to actually get things like this moving, I don’t see that there’s going to be a first flight by 2038. I don’t see that industry can cross that rubicon. If we were doing a commercial derivative, that would still be challenging to meet. I don’t see with a fresh design, a clean sheet design that there’s any way that’s going to happen.  

With LASS, it’s great that the House asked for a plan to put this in place by 2031. I just don’t see that. I don’t see that being feasible. I don’t see that it can happen that quickly. I don’t think industry can get over that hurdle. 

36:03 – 37:33 

(TT): There’s either some assumption on the part of the writers of the RFI and the recapitalization memo that we don’t know, or there’s a little pixie dust laid in there, and it’s probably the latter. What I would add on this one is particular to NGAL.  

If you go on the website the Sam.gov and there’s industry questions and one of the industry questions was about airworthiness and certification and what I would offer to industry and to the Air Force as well is that: unless you must, like there’s no alternative unless to get civil certification. Don’t. Don’t attempt it. The reason why is not because anybody on either side is necessarily so much better than one or the other. The incentives are different.  

So for the FAA, for our civil regulatory authority, their incentives are for safety. So is ours on the military. But on the military, there are also other incentives, other mission imperatives that that airworthiness authority has to take into account. And so what you end up getting is it just is simply a different approach. 

Neither one is right nor wrong. But if you are building a machine to go to the places and do the things that we’ve talked about in this call – that calls for military airworthiness. Unless you’re starting with a civil already type certified design. And I can just tell you a little bit about this, because right now I’m in a world where we’re flying a military designed aircraft with no type certification and attempting to have a civil airworthiness certificate. 

This is not easy, so I would suggest not attempting to do it from the very beginning unless you have to. 

37:34 – 38:51 

(JVO): Well taken, right? I’ve been in that world as well, that if you do propose something that for the military and you can get data off of that for future FAA certification for civilian cargo or passenger movement or using the airplanes for something else, then there may be a lot of data, but that has to be mapped out early. 

And so I’m hoping that digital twinning will show the difference against the FAA certification requirements versus what we’re trying to do in the mil-standard to support safe military operations.  

I’d also add that requirements change. I have yet to see a large airplane that didn’t have some requirements change. Even in the B-21. There may be some requirements changes there. And it’s been very successful, don’t get me wrong, but we don’t yet have an updated what the joint force needs given the environment, how we’re going to fight, which is really radically different than what we did even 15 years ago. 

So I would look to see and partner with TRANSCOM on the MCRS and the services to try to get a better understanding of how we’re doing it. We’ve published things on distributed operations, but what’s the final thing that we’re trying to do? And work with us on that and focus those industry studies on the areas that are the deltas that they’re out there.

38:52 – 39:04 

(SK): Now, we’ve discussed two separate, but tangential efforts today in NGAL and LASS, both of which have pretty ambitious timelines set against them.  

What do you see as the common thread that ties these two efforts together? 

39:05 – 40:11 

(JVO): So let me just start at the strategic level. These are not platform programs per se. I talked about the enterprise. They are real statement and an urgency associated with this because we want to maintain the ability to deploy and sustain forces around the globe at a time and place of our choosing. 

We have been doing that for 75 years and we’ve not had an issue. We now have an issue. The environment has changed. And this is not a future problem. This is a today problem. That’s why that bridge strategy is so important. Timelines are a little questionable. 

And I think that we have to look at risk over time and risk to the strategies that we’re saying we’re going to use out in the Pacific and around the globe, frankly, when it deals in denied environments. So we need to have these systems, whatever it is, whether it’s an actual platform or its software that all has to be interoperable.

We have to have sensors everywhere. The information has to be integrated for the joint force so that we can see and react to how the joint force is morphing around the globe. And that includes, the use of drones, and how we’re using that data to ensure we can do the mission of deployment and sustainment. 

40:12 – 40:38 

(RM): So I think you have to look at two things here. I think you have to look at what the Air Force is studying and looking at, and what they’ve actually committed to do in the budget. You can see with both of these that there’s a commitment to a study and there’s a commitment to exploration, but with neither of them is there a commitment to procurement and installation. 

So I think it’s obvious that we’ve acknowledged that there’s a battlefield that we’re not prepared to fight on necessarily. But I don’t see that we’ve acknowledged that we’re going to make that become true. 

40:39 – 41:27 

(TT): Yeah. And that presents to industry a gigantic risk, because the Air Force and Air Mobility Command, in particular, has asked repeatedly: invest your time and effort into answering these RFIs or participating in this AOA or fill in the blank, and those don’t come for free. You know, it’s not the same as a capital investment in setting up a production line and so on and so forth. 

But the Air Force has to show that it is serious about this problem that Jackie identified is not optional. This is a problem that has to be solved, should have been solved in the past, needs to be solved now. But the way that you’re going to convince industry to dig in and commit more resources is to first show that the government is serious about it. And with a couple of the other things we talk about, about what incentivizes private capital, I think it could be done. But it has to start at the beginning.  

41:28 – 41:44 

(SK): Now, each of you represent Elara Nova in different capacities as part of its Aeronautics & Mission Systems sector. How does Elara Nova and its AMS team in particular, fit into this ecosystem at a time when the Air Force has set lofty goals, set against ambitious targets for its mobility fleet? 

41:45 – 43:05 

(TT): I’ll hop on that one first. I mean, in this case helping the government on the front end. Like for example, this RFI, I don’t know if they asked somebody to come help that was outside what used to be building 1600, I don’t think they moved back into it at Scott Air Force Base. If they didn’t, that was a swing and a miss.  

If they did, then great. Congratulations and good job. Keep doing it. But there’s a lot of talent and industry experience that could be just brought into, ‘Hey did you consider this?’ That makes the RFI better, makes the RFP better quite frankly, and then closes the times faster on what needs to be done. But if you don’t ask the question and you don’t bring the additional team member on board, you miss the opportunity.

And the other part I would just add throughout the process. I think if I’m out there in industry, I think that the capabilities that Elara Nova brings very much helps them in the response and identifying where the opportunities are.  

There’s just a deep portfolio on this call right here. And I’m not talking about myself. I’m talking about the other two – that just know how the system works, have been out there and flown the aircraft, and if you’re able to craft a better, more coherent and innovative response just because of that then I think it’s absolutely worth ringing the phone and calling us. 

It’s not quite a cheat code, but it certainly can help to move in that direction. 

43:06 – 43:45 

(RM): So I think Elara Nova has certainly all of those traditional things to offer that Ty talked about. I think there are a couple of nontraditional things that we offer as well, which are important. The first one is we have partnerships that allow us to help companies navigate the Office of Strategic Capital. There’s a potentially strong role for OSC to play in this process.

And we also have a team that focuses on NATO and international partners, and I think that could be key here as well. If you look at just the development costs that we’ve talked about, the ability to share those across some allies and partners and to count on procurement from other than just the U.S. Air Force, that could be an important way to get the program across the line, and certainly we can help with that.

43:46 – 44:51 

(JVO): And I think Rick is spot on there. Both you and Ty. I think Ty mentioned being the interpreter. Understanding the deep experience that we have. We can interpret what the signals are, what the language is. And then we have experience possibly doing that exact process, but also contacts that are doing the process right now and are trying to help and they’re trying to translate themselves. 

And how do we sit at the table on both sides and help industry and help the government speak to each other in a clear language? And absolutely on the finance part, not just only the finance division, but the OSC and the opportunities that are there, and frankly, seeing the tech that’s out there, because all of us also do and work with other various companies in various sectors and trying to apply that technology and how that might work for aeronautical mission systems or anywhere else for the Department of War. 

We’re all keen to it because we all want to help. We’re not wearing the blue suits anymore, but we all want to help be part of the Department of War and be the success arm and root on our Airmen out into the future. This is our way of giving back.

44:52 – 35:28 

(SK): This has been an episode of The Elara Edge. Elara Nova is the trusted global security partner delivering decisive advantage.  

As a strategic advisory firm, Elara Nova builds expert teams uniquely tailored for client needs to deliver actionable results. With the trusted insight to deliver your decisive edge, Elara Nova is your source for expertise and guidance in global security. 

If you liked what you heard today, please subscribe to our channel and leave us a rating. Music for this podcast was created by Patrick Watkins of PW Audio. I’m your host, Scott King, and join us next time at the Elara Edge. 

Air Force Engages Industry for New Air Mobility Solutions

Aging Fleets, Evolving Threats Drive Modernization Efforts

For over 75 years, the U.S. Air Force has been able to deploy and sustain forces at a time and place of its choosing, but a series of converging challenges have undermined that ability. Key mobility platforms like the C-5 and C-17 are aging, parts are harder to come by and the long legs required to cover the Pacific consume flight hours faster, shortening the time between maintenance cycles. Meanwhile, integrating new capabilities to outpace an accelerating threat demands additional downtime the fleet can ill afford. In response, the Air Force released a Request for Information (RFI) to acquire a Next-Generation Airlift (NGAL) to replace both platforms, while also engaging industry to study new ways to enhance the survivability of large aircraft like air-refuelers and airlifters. Together, these efforts demonstrate a revitalized focus on modernizing the Air Force’s mobility fleet, but success will require sustained funding, institutional discipline and meaningful industry collaboration to prepare for the future fight. 

“Right now the C-5’s mission capability rate is about 37 percent and the C-17’s mission capability rate is at 75 percent, so the mobility capacity that TRANSCOM counts on is just not there,” said Lt Gen (Ret) Rick Moore, an Executive Partner at Elara Nova and the former Deputy Chief of Staff for Plans and Programs at U.S. Air Force Headquarters. “We’ve been at war in the desert for over 35 years and have been able to move everything to and through Europe and the Middle East without contested supply lines. But that will almost assuredly not be the case in the Pacific.”  

As both the C-5 and C-17 fleets continue to age, it will become increasingly difficult to maintain the required parts and components to keep them operating. At the same time, a future fight in the Pacific will only heighten demand on these legacy platforms.  

These converging concerns prompted the Air Force’s RFI for NGAL in June. 

“The Air Force’s request for information is for a single airplane to replace both the C-5 and the C-17, which will probably look more like a C-17 than a C-5,” Lt Gen (Ret) Moore said. “The plan calls for NGAL to be ready to fly by 2038 and have an initial operational capability by 2041. The C-5 replacements will start in about 2050 and the C-17 replacements should finish by about 2075. But that transition timeline is still far away, particularly considering the C-5’s are now languishing at a high 30s mission capability rate.” 

Next Generation Airlift RFI Weighs Autonomous Technology and Cost 

Air Force leaders are also looking to leverage recent technological advances so that NGAL can not only lift off semi-prepared and austere airstrips, but also potentially fly autonomously. 

“Autonomous and uncrewed capabilities give the Air Force optionality, particularly if there’s a known hazard in the operating environment,” said Gen (Ret) Jackie Van Ovost, Senior Principal Advisor at Elara Nova and the former Commander of U.S. Transportation Command. “An uncrewed NGAL would remove crew safety concerns. But it’s also important to remember that these are not attritable airplanes, so NGAL will require a defensive capability and a command-and-control architecture to survive operations in a high threat region.” 

NGAL Program’s Biggest Risk: Air Force Budget Constraints 

A single platform with both crewed and uncrewed options will be a significant investment for the Air Force, putting additional pressure on the service’s budget that will likely require programmers to make trade-offs.  

“I would argue a single NGAL would cost about $350 million to include the airframe, the spares, the ground support equipment and the training systems required to field and sustain it over decades,” said Lt Gen (Ret) Jon “Ty” Thomas, an Executive Partner at Elara Nova and the former Deputy Commander of Air Mobility Command and Pacific Air Forces. “That means building ten airplanes, or nearly a full squadron, will cost roughly $3.5 billion in Fiscal Year 2026 money. Then factor in the clean sheet design, defending it in front of OSW and getting it appropriated on the Hill likely means this program will require a multi-year procurement contract, which would limit budget flexibility for the Air Force.” 

That’s why Lt Gen (Ret) Moore contends that one of the biggest risks to building NGAL is doing so while still flying the C-5 and C-17s during the transition.  

“If NGAL is expected to replace the C-5s and C-17s at a one-for-one rate, there’s a high risk that the Air Force budget won’t be able to support both flying those platforms and developing NGAL simultaneously,” he said. “The real budgetary costs for the C-5 and C-17 are in the depots required to maintain them. That means the Air Force needs to look outside the service to find what capacity absorbers are out there in industry so it can bring the C-5 fleet down before NGAL starts to deliver.” 

But with budgetary constraints, there is also an opportunity to leverage private capital resources to offset those constraints.  

“The Deputy Secretary of War has said he would like to see between one-third and two-thirds of the new capability development costs to be funded by industry,” Lt Gen (Ret) Moore said. “One of the most powerful ways the government is engaging that opportunity is through the Office of Strategic Capital, which has the authority to put out $250 billion in guaranteed loans. That will have a profound impact on research and development for something that is dual-use by nature, like airlift capacity, and that’s where OSC and private capital can make a big difference together.” 

An Industry Study to Equip Large Aircraft with Defense Mechanisms 

NGAL and other mobility platforms, like air-refuelers, are expected to be increasingly targeted as they operate in hostile air spaces. Consequently, the Air Force has recently requested funding for – and begun contracting with – industry partners on a research and development program for Large Aircraft Survivability Systems (LASS) to enhance defensive mechanisms for both air-refuelers and airlifters alike. 

“Operations Midnight Hammer and Epic Fury have shown that tankers and airlift platforms are vulnerable to ground-to-air, air-to-air or air-to-ground attack,” Gen (Ret) Van Ovost said. “The modern threat is no longer single shot issues, but a complex web of multi-domain attack vectors. So the Air Force needs a layered defensive web around both of these airplanes, to include kinetic and non-kinetic layers, onboard sensors to alert the crew to maneuver or reduce their signature, as well as an electronic warfare capability and a kinetic effector.”  

LASS is the latest example of the Air Force engaging its industry partners early to develop innovative solutions that meet the evolving requirements of modern warfare.  

“We saw the Air Force take a different approach to engaging industry when it came to developing the Collaborative Combat Aircraft,” Lt Gen (Ret) Moore said. “Instead of defining a requirement and having industry build to it, the Air Force asked industry what would be possible for CCAs. These industry studies are a way of incentivizing innovation, which means the chances that the Air Force gets a truly innovative capability is much higher.” 

The Air Force is requesting $508 million over the next five budget cycles to fund the LASS program, but more meaningful and sustained funding from Congress will be necessary to bring the LASS solutions to fruition.  

“$508 million is a drop in the bucket for fielding a kinetic effector on a mobility platform,” Lt Gen (Ret) Thomas said. “The opponent also cannot target you if they cannot detect you in the first place. So the Air Force also needs to ask industry for increased connectivity and a C2 system that will allow situational awareness and enable the crew to manage the platform’s signature in passive ways. Those are less expensive solutions than kinetic effectors, while also enabling greater progress for large aircraft survivability within a smaller budget.” 

A Critical Need for Sustained Funding  

While two similar but tangential efforts, both the NGAL and LASS efforts demonstrate how recent conflicts have exposed the need to revitalize and modernize the Air Force’s mobility fleet.  

“There is a strategic urgency for these capabilities because the Air Force needs to maintain its ability to deploy and sustain forces around the globe at a time and place of their choosing,” Gen (Ret) Van Ovost said. “The Air Force has had that capability for 75 years without issue, but today’s operational environment has changed. The bridge strategy between the C-5 and C-17s and NGAL matters because these systems will be deployed in denied environments in the Pacific and around the world. It reinforces the imperative that these systems be interoperable and integrated with the joint force to ensure the deployment and sustainment mission.” 

But fielding an innovative platform like NGAL, with the defensive mechanisms realized through the LASS research and development program, will require financial commitment from the Air Force in order to succeed.  

“Industry leaders should pay attention to capabilities that the Air Force is interested in, but also what capabilities the service is actually committing to in the budget,” Lt Gen (Ret) Moore said. “Both the NGAL and LASS efforts demonstrate the Air Force’s commitment to explore innovative solutions, but neither of them currently have committed procurement dollars behind them. That means the Air Force has acknowledged these capabilities are necessary for a future fight, but still needs to commit to funding these solutions to make them a reality.” 

As a strategic advisory firm, Elara Nova’s Aeronautics & Mission Systems team is positioned to help the government and industry partners navigate the technological and financial challenges facing the Air Force as it seeks to modernize its mobility fleet.  

“Elara Nova has partnerships that help companies navigate opportunities with the Office of Strategic Capital,” Lt Gen (Ret) Moore said. “We also have a team that focuses on NATO and international partners who can be key players, as well. Just looking at the development costs and the ability to share those across allies and partners to support procurement beyond just the U.S. Air Force could be another important way to get a program across the finish line.” 

Elara Nova is the trusted global security partner delivering decisive advantage. Learn more at elaranova.com    

Episode 43: NASA Reorganizes to “Ignite the Orbital Economy”

The Elara Edge

Host: Scott King 

SME: Renee Wynn, former Chief Information Officer at NASA and Partner at Elara Nova 

00:02 – 01:05 

Earlier this year, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (or NASA) announced a reorganization effort that restores its “mission directorates” in a way that agency leaders hope will position itself for an ambitious future. The moves, whose influence can be traced back to a December 2025 executive order, will streamline workforce priorities toward five new objectives recently unveiled by NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman.  

Taken in tandem, the reorganization steps and the new agency objectives aim to ignite a commercial orbital economy that advances scientific exploration, but NASA can only get there by scaling the safety and cybersecurity discipline that the agency has forged over the years. 

Welcome to “The Elara Edge.” Here to discuss these changes, and why NASA’s commercial space partners should be paying attention to them, is Renee Wynn, partner at Elara Nova and the former Chief Information Officer at NASA. 

Ma’am, welcome to the show.  

01:06 – 01:16 

Thank you. Scott. It is fabulous to be here and represent what I think – the most iconic federal agency in the United States federal government. But I’m biased. 

01:17 – 01:24 

NASA certainly is an iconic agency with a storied history, so before we get into the changes underway today – can you first take us back to NASA’s founding? 

01:25 – 03:19 

I think a great place to start is our origin. And that is those Soviets up there in space, not before us, but parts of what they were doing were before us. And a bit of how dare they? I mean, we’re the United States. And so the National Aeronautics Space Act of 1958 charged NASA with some very important and I think a very sustainable mission that really holds true today. 

I’m going to point out, I think, some key elements from this Act of 1958: expanding human knowledge of phenomena in the atmosphere and space. It included performance, speed, safety, efficiency of aeronautical and space vehicles. And today we benefit with our airplanes on greater safety and greater sustainability. Developing and operating vehicles capable of carrying instruments, equipment, supplies and living organisms, not just astronauts, but living organisms through space. Establishing long-range studies for the benefits, opportunities and the challenges for aeronautical space activities for peaceful and scientific purposes. 

And I stress peaceful because space is highly contested. Intentional and unintentional. The unintentional is we’ve also got a lot of space debris. Some of it is man-made, some of it’s not man-made. And of course, this Space Act says preserve the role of the United States as a leader. And then finally, I want to point out, is cooperating with other nations in the peaceful application of space research and its results.

03:20 – 03:27 

Thank you, Ma’am. Now, can you speak about the influence of NASA’s role in what’s become a projected $1.8 trillion space economy?  

03:28 – 07:35 

The shuttle program was retired in 2011 and there wasn’t a replacement. And imagine what that might have felt like that retirement day, that decision, how that would have weighed on the agency and the nation to say our route to the International Space Station, which was done in cooperation with the Russians, is no more.

And I think from a business perspective, that you do have some stopgap measures in place. And so the United States sort of turned to Russia and said, “Hey, can we buy some seats?” to the tune of roughly $80 million for U.S. astronauts to ride on Soyuz, and our astronauts needed to be trained in Russia. So we’re going to Russia.  

This was a costly lesson, and I share this because it had some benefit from a geopolitical relationship perspective. But it also meant we lost some things from a United States capability. And so it really set us up for a lot of learning and a lot of opportunity.   

And so NASA got to work long before the retirement to begin what was called the Commercial Crew Program. There’s a big culture shift. NASA went from being a buyer and a maker of all of these things, to being a partner and having, in this instance, SpaceX and Boeing developing something. 

Then we were going to be buying these rides to the International Space Station. You also had the culture of: does the commercial sector truly get what it’s like to look in the eyes of the family to say, “I am sorry that we lost an astronaut.” Over 40 astronauts have been lost in the pursuit of space exploration. They were NASA employees, they were NASA people that went to those families to break the horrific news, just like it happens in the military. 

Would those cultures truly understand the depth of the heartache and heartbreaking that that would bring? We understood it because there were engineers from the shuttle program that knew Columbia and Challenger, and knew what it felt like. Did they understand safety? That was a very, very hard thing for NASA to convey.  

And so you begin on the lower risk version, but it’s still high risk and that’s cargo. So first we’ll do the cargo and then we’ll get around to crew. It’s a tiered-risk you know milestone-based. And we just worked and we worked and we worked. NASA helped SpaceX and Boeing achieved success. And that was hard sometimes because we were there to coach and mentor and So you have all of this learning going on and the next launch from American soil wasn’t until May of 2020.  

So what is the difference make? The difference makes from a bottom line. And I like to use this with people is in 2020 when I left NASA, in general, it was $17,500 to launch a kilogram of something into space. And that just gives you kind of an average price. Today, that average price is $1,500 to $2,500 per kilogram. That is the difference six years makes and that is the economic difference. How more and more businesses and countries are now reaching space. And I think that puts a really fine point on how accessible, although still expensive, space is today, more so than it was just a few years ago. 

07:36 – 07:45 

And this past May, NASA announced some reorganizational changes to position itself toward the future. Can you describe what these changes are and why they matter? 

07:46 – 10:10 

I want to begin with the objectives stated by the administrator, Jared Isaacman. And that is one: Artemis is key objective on this one which is a continuation of what was going on when I was there. The Moon Base. The moon base is a sustainable presence on the moon, and that has been back and forth between being a lab off the moon called Gateway versus a lab on the moon. The decision now is a moon-based lab, the Moon Base. 

This next one, I think really matters. It is the creation of a Space Reactor Office. And in short, is a nuclear power in space. Then the fourth thing is “ignite the orbital economy.” Not only astronaut missions, but high potential commercial science. And finally is build more X-planes, launch more missions of science and discovery and finding some efficiencies in commercial Earth observation, space weather, and other missions beyond their original design life. 

So the reorganization puts NASA back somewhat like it was when I was there. What NASA announced was the Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate and Space Operation Mission Directorate was pushed together to make Human Spaceflight Mission Directorate, which is what it was when I was there. And then the other change was the Space Technology Mission Directorate and the Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate was pushed together to create the Research and Technology Mission Directorate.The Science Mission Directorate remains where it is.  

So when I say bottom line, NASA looks more structurally like it did when I was there. The big change is this former STMD, as we call it, and Aero, have been pushed together. It has the opportunity to succeed. I think from a perspective of an organizational size. It puts it as a size that’s probably about right for a directorate at NASA than it would have been given budget size and people size losses that we have seen at NASA over the years.

10:11 – 10:19 

So what do these changes enable NASA to do now that maybe wasn’t possible or more difficult to do before? And why make these changes now?  

10:20 – 12:03 

I think the changes are largely resource-driven. So NASA offered a number of deferred retirement opportunities, and a number of individuals took this opportunity, and it was multiple waves of it. As an example, in my organization, in the end, about 25% of the people took it. And that happened across the board. NASA was certainly one of the agencies at the higher end of people staying for their career. 

Most people, when they hit their 30-year mark, that is not even close to when people are thinking about retiring from NASA. So the opportunities offered for the deferred retirement, a lot of people took that. And this particular administration went over the five objectives: Artemis, Moon Base, Space Reactor Office – nuclear power in space – ignite the orbital economy and build more X-planes, launch more missions of science and discovery. 

And they felt that the reorganization would allow them to focus because they also created a place for a space reactor office. So that was a new creation. And pulling people into that, all the rest of the stuff is tightening up the organization, which is what we’ve seen in this administration. So I don’t see it as trying to fill a gap or anything else other than: how do we tighten up our organization in order to meet these five objectives?  

12:04 – 12:07 

Can you explain some of the challenges that will need to be overcome as these changes unfold? 

12:08 – 14:16 

It’s all about people. Any reorganization needs to have a clear purpose. The current administrator, Jared Isaacman, laid out why he did what he did. So clarity of purpose was written, and he’s been going around to provide that clarity to more people than just the people that get to see him on a regular basis. But the challenge remains: does everybody understand what needs to be done and how their job matches with the objectives of the reorganization? 

And so not only does the administrator and his direct reports, but all the way down the line, everybody just needs to understand their role in that reorganization.  

And the second difficult piece with reorganizations is: how do I get my job done? So if the people I worked with moved organizations, the good news is they didn’t move their email and their phone number – most likely. 

I still can reach them, but some people may have left their job. So now how do I find my procurement specialists that would help me get something done? How do I find my HR person? How do I find my software engineer? Making sure I know how to get my job done in the middle of a reorganization – that’s the other hard part that happens during a reorganization. 

It’s a little bit of the chaos with it, and so doing that piece is also very hard. I say this from experience. Every reorg that I did, I did better and better on it. I feel like now if I ever led a major reorganization, first of all, I would set the bar really high, but I would spend so much time getting to that clarity and making sure that everybody knew how to do their job, so that when we moved the chairs and shifted the figurative organizational boxes, that when we hit the go button, everybody would be able to do their job 60-80% on day one.

14:17 – 14:23 

And what does this reorganization effort reflect about how NASA, as an agency, has evolved from its founding?  

14:24 – 15:05 

I think it just represents the evolution of science and space exploration? And that is when NASA was founded. Yes, space exploration was envisioned. We have humans living in space, and we have for 25 years.  

That’s not what was envisioned. I mean, yes, we plan to put boots on the moon. Well, now we’re envisioning not only have humans lived in space for over 25 years, but now we’re envisioning this Moon Base and so I think the evolution of an organization is with these dreams and these goals that we have of space for our country. 

15:06 – 15:20 

As we mentioned at the top, this reorganization effort can be traced back to an executive order that was signed in December of 2025: Ensuring American Space Superiority. 

Can you summarize that executive order for us and what some of your key takeaways are from it? 

15:21 – 18:05 

I see this building off of the previous administration’s efforts for the United States, and this is especially under Trump’s first administration. And as I read through it again, the emphasis that I see in it was the deadline for commercializing the ISS, the International Space Station replacement and explicit preference for commercial solutions, and a preference for Other Transaction Authority or Space Act agreements at NASA to focus on troubled programs. 

That’s always been a focus of NASA, but it’s calling it out in particular in this executive order. And then the firm fixed price and “as-a-service” models were extended for weather and ground infrastructure. This is really continuing to nudge on the commercialization of several elements of what NASA does – ground infrastructure being one of those. And we’re seeing the private sector really develop some of that as well. 

So those were, I think, sort of some of the highlights. There’s a lot of information in there, but those are the things that really struck me.  

I see there’s a couple of benefits and I see there’s some challenges. I see economic growth in what they’re pushing on this one, and that’s always good. Advancing space traffic management, that’s a definite need from a safety perspective, as well as for economic growth, vehicle safety as well as astronaut safety. 

Debris management – we’ve got to continue the conversation on debris management and the harm, as well as the opportunity that managing this debris better can come of this. and just start to get going on this. It’s just going to take us some time to get there. 

The challenges are the timelines. I love a good challenge, get this done by then, but I also like to be realistic because of safety and just want it done well. And funding. And I reflect on the 27 president’s budget across the United States government and the funding that would be required for some of these items in here. I don’t see it matching up, but perhaps these Other Transaction Authorities and Space Act Agreements can offer some innovation towards the funding that I’m just not privy to. 

The International Space Station replacement. It’s a funding thing. And can we get this going? Because it is a wonderful asset for this country and for humanity and I don’t want to see it lost without us having a replacement. You know, I go back to the example about losing the shuttle and not yet having commercial crew. I really, I don’t want to see that. That’s where I would see those challenges.  

18:06 – 18:10 

Can you elaborate on what Other Transaction Authority (OTAs) and Space Act Agreements are? 

18:11 – 19:42 

So for an OTA, as they are most commonly called, you can write a white paper to the government and get an early stage technical solution to a problem. And the government can say yes and fund it. You can’t scale it and say, wow, this really does solve our problem. You got to pop over to the more typical understood acquisition process. 

But if you want to do your experimentation and all of that, the OTAs are a great way to say, “Yeah, let’s try a few of these items and see what they can do to solve some of these problems.”  

So I’m not that familiar with Space Act Agreements. It wasn’t an instrument that I used in my organization, and I wasn’t exposed to how it was being used in other parts of NASA as well.But quite quickly: Space Act Agreements enable NASA to enter into flexible mission-supporting agreements outside the typical procurement rules, which means they can engage contractually with private and commercial industry, universities and nonprofit organizations, government agencies and international entities. So it allows them to pretty much work with a lot of different entities to support getting the mission done. 

19:43 – 20:00 

Now, earlier you shared NASA’s historical emphasis on safety. In the modern day, particularly in space, cybersecurity is a key component to safety.  

So given your prior role as CIO at NASA, how do you think NASA views the relationship between cybersecurity and mission safety? 

20:01 – 23:24 

Oh, I have direct experience about how NASA thinks about cybersecurity. When I first got there NASA didn’t want to think about it at all. Why do I say that? Because I had only been the CIO for a few weeks when a now dear friend of mine called from the White House, the Chief Information Security Officer, former General from the Air Force, calls and says, “Renee, we are coming over to talk to your administrator about a problem here at NASA.” 

“Well, what’s the problem, Sir?” He says, “Your cybersecurity posture is a problem for national security.” “Well, tell me about that problem.” “You are a problem for everyone.” “Everyone?” “Like, everyone.” “Yes, for almost every federal agency and the military that you work for.” “Okay, well, that would be a big problem,” He says, “Yep. I think you’ve got the picture.” 

So he proceeds to describe to me what the conversation is going to be about – greatly appreciate it. You know, a phone call before bad news to your boss is always appreciated. I call my boss, Charlie Bolden, former NASA administrator, former Marine Corps general, former astronaut, former shuttle pilot. So it’s going to be former general to former general Air Force to Marine Corps. 

And I’m like, all right, I got to get everybody ready. So we get Charlie ready for the whole thing. We have a great meeting. Explain everything from the White House’s perspective. So Charlie’s listening, he’s like, “Great. Thanks so much for telling us that.” And he just looks over to me and he says, “You just go make that happen.” 

What they were talking about was not only our global posture. Remember, we operate in Russia, but also our posture in space. So at this point, this is 2015. We are seeing satellites hacked from a cyber angle, NASA’s included. So you can take it as a crisis or you could take it as an opportunity. I frankly took it as both. 

And what the approach was is mission had to operate – don’t break mission. But I also had to say we let nothing happen to our astronauts and we can’t have an international incident on the International Space Station because of the cyber incident. So we did all of the basics first because that didn’t exist. And I made it a point that we were going to be doing a culture change, that NASA would be a safety and cybersecurity culture by the time I left the agency. 

And we just did it by hook or by crook, we made friends. We got yelled at like you wouldn’t believe. I got called up on the Hill a lot to brief them on one incident after another, we found things that’s embarrassing for the United States government. It was embarrassing for NASA to have this. 

We got F on our report card for how we managed IT, and NASA was embarrassed by that report card. And Charlie and then Jim Bridenstine were huge supporters of these initiatives that we went about to make that change.

23:25 – 23:34 

The relationship between space and cyberspace is a thread we frequently pull on in this show. But to get your perspective on it: how do you personally view the relationship between the two? 

23:34 – 25:06 

They go hand-in-hand. I mean, first of all, you can go on YouTube and see how to hack a satellite and it’s not wrong. Secondly, you’ve got insider threat, which can be a cyber hack, and then you’ve got the ability to hack a satellite through typical cyber means. And it’s a real threat. And from a science perspective, if you’re going to build your entire career on the integrity of the data and what you find in space – cybersecurity is confidentiality, integrity, and access of data – that is the heart of scientific discovery in space. 

They’re just hand-in-glove. Go together for scientific integrity. So to me it’s a must do. It’s table stakes. If you’re going to put your career on the line for discovering planets and dark holes and dark energy and all of that, you’ve got to have cybersecurity in place if that’s what you’re going to do. When you’ve got human space exploration, you have lives on the line. 

Everything that those astronauts rely on in space, on station, we are giving it to them. It’s not like the air they breathe is out there in space. It’s not like the water they drink is coming from a stream. It is coming from services provided to the International Space Station through complicated – and that’s chips and software and hardware. And the Mission Control Center for Human Spaceflight is very, very well run from a cyber perspective and I was so excited to learn that. 

25:07 – 25:28 

This also brings to mind the challenge that comes with having so many stakeholders operating in the space domain, whether that be national security, civil, or commercial entities.  

Can you elaborate on why a military service like the Space Force or the Air Force should care about the cybersecurity measures in place at a civil agency like NASA or similarly at a commercial partner? 

25:29 – 27:32 

So NASA is not military, it is civilian, and it will remain that way. However, NASA does a lot of research projects. They do a lot of research projects for FAA. They do research projects for NOAA, they do research projects for the military, and they do research projects for space just in operational space awareness and things like that. That means we’re grabbing data, we’re looking at things, we’re interconnected. When we’re taking on these research projects, that interconnectedness means that I’m exposing myself to you and you to me. 

I like to use the example, and this does hold true for space. If I do a project with glitter, I get glitter on my hands. And let’s think of glitter as cybersecurity. Then I go to hug you or shake your hands. Now, I’ve tried to get rid of that glitter, but guess what? You now have glitter on you, Scott. 

And you go home and now you’ve got glitter on your carpet. That is cyber security. For a moment in time, we became interconnected and tried as I might for personal hygiene for glitter. It didn’t go so well. And if I hadn’t had personal hygiene or cybersecurity hygiene, you just got covered in glitter. I give that as a visual. 

And that’s what cybersecurity is, is when I shake your hand, you’re getting my glitter. When I connect up with you to exchange data, you get my glitter. And that’s what was happening with NASA is: we were giving you way too much glitter, whether it was in space when we would have to connect or when we were coming down here, or sending you data with our research projects or however we were working with you. 

You weren’t just getting a packet of data, you were getting a very sparkly packet of data. And that’s what was putting other agencies at risk because of the way NASA was and wasn’t taking on cybersecurity.

27:33 – 27:49 

Earlier we also spoke of the lessons NASA learned as it transitioned from the shuttle program to commercial launch providers. 

So how have conversations evolved between NASA and its commercial partners to ensure that their hands are, as you suggest, remaining glitter-free? 

27:50 – 28:59 

Number one, NASA FAR has been modified that if you’re getting a NASA contract, you’re supposed to be doing your part for cybersecurity, amongst many other things. So the first thing is, it better start being in the contract. And then the second piece is it’s got to be enforced. The point of rules is that at some point when things go wrong that you can enforce against the rules and you hold everybody up. The third piece is risk, which to me is really important. When we work together digitally, which we all do, we’re passing along our risk to each other, which we’ve got to have a line-of-sight on that risk and keep an eye on it to manage and mitigate it. 

We don’t get to zero. First of all, space exploration is highly risky and it will remain that risky. Just because we can see it all the time doesn’t change the risk of space exploration. It just means we can see it all the time. And that third party risk is now changing. And you’re just going to have to take a look at it. And NASA has looked at third party risk for quite a while. And some of it will watch but most of it. We’ve got to mitigate. 

29:00 – 29:23 

This next question goes back to the December 2025 executive order, which pushes commercial first acquisition and leaning on tools like OTAs and Space Act Agreements that we talked about earlier.  

That same executive order also calls for identifying supply chain and industrial capacity gaps. What are these gaps NASA sees as needing to be filled? And how prepared are their commercial space partners in being able to fill them? 

29:24 – 31:38 

It depends on the gap. So from a launch capability, I think we’ve got that filled. One of the things is that there’s been a bottleneck just in terms of number of launch pads and so that’s getting fixed here. That’s not a capability thing. That’s just a – we need more launch pads. It also depends on what orbit you want to get to. Private sector is pretty good at building satellites to look at the earth and things like that. So we’ve got good capabilities there. You know, data back from space. That has been a choke point. 

It’s been a choke point for NASA for a very long time. We got a lot of data that we can collect in space, but we can’t always bring it down. That is being worked on quite a bit, and we’ve seen some great strides by the major providers really coming up with amazing ways to do compute in space and bring down a completed product that doesn’t take as much of the pipe, which is just so amazing for the science that we can get. 

So those are sort of some three big things that we’ve solved for, and that’s awesome. And working there, there are some advantages to computing in space for space use. That’s going to continue to get better. We have use cases, both civilian and military, national security. That’s going to continue to get better. And I think the commercial business will get improved.  

On the human space side. There’s a few companies that understand what it’s like to keep humans alive in space. So that’s an area of growth and opportunity. And so you can start to fill that gap with former NASA people and we can do that. I think all in all there are some gaps because there’s some seams. But we’re well-positioned for that growth to happen and in that growth we’re going to learn about more seams and more gaps. And then we will begin to fill them. 

The big however, and I worked in supply chain risk from a cybersecurity perspective: chips, compute power. Space is facing that. Because all that stuff that’s floating up there needs chips. And we need to make sure that those chips are of a good pedigree. 

31:39 – 31:49 

And to tie it back to the reorganization of NASA and its mission directorates, how will those changes tie back that to those gaps? Will this reorganization effort help facilitate the closure of those gaps and in any way? 

31:50 – 32:44 

Thanks for asking that. I think to the nuclear power. That is a gap that needs to be filled. My opinion. There are a lot of people that are not going to be into this nuclear power piece. I am because deeper space needs nuclear power. So that is in fact an industrial capacity gap that is being filled. NASA’s reorganization has set an organization out to help with that particular gap. 

And so that is a gap that is being filled. We talked about other acquisition vehicles besides the typical procurement. NASA knows how to do that really well. So I think they’re just well situated with the number of people that they have. They are on a hiring spree. The new folks will have to blend in and understand NASA’s history of safety culture, and then bring their way of thinking and innovation and curiosity to help NASA advance as well.  

32:45 – 32:51 

And so why should industry be paying attention to these reorganization steps, particularly given NASA’s recent commercial-first approach? 

32:52 – 33:55 

First, I would ask them a question: do you want to be part of the Artemis generation? If you want to be part of the Artemis generation, then let’s get going. And this is one of the things I like to mention because I’m part of the Apollo generation. 

But what we are seeing in front of us is the blossoming of the Artemis generation. So if a business wants to be part of that, then let’s take a look at NASA and where they are going, their five major objectives and what can you do to advance Artemis or nuclear power in space, or X-wings or science in space? 

What can you do to advance it and be respectful of the fact that you are getting taxpayer money, and honor that money and honor a culture of safety, and then become part of history in the making? It’s really that simple. 

33:56 – 34:12 

Now, as a partner with Elara Nova and a member of its Cyber, Data and Communications sector, what role can and does Elara Nova have in this moment in time? Both for NASA as it reorganizes and its commercial space partners looking to be a part of its future? 

34:13 – 35:25 

Elara Nova has deep experience in space and a cadre of individuals vested in the mission of the United States government. 

And I give that as an umbrella because they are bringing on more and more individuals, shifting away just the national security piece and more of my colleagues from the civil space side, but also civil space on the aeronautics side as well, where they can now offer a wealth of knowledge and a greater breadth of knowledge across aeronautics and space, which would allow our clients, commercial and government clients to have the opportunity to use our deep experience in space and in aeronautics to really advance their objectives. 

And if I tie it back to Artemis, if their objective is to be part of the Artemis generation, then that means by hiring Elara Nova that they get the opportunity to be part of putting boots back on the moon. 

35:26 – 36:06 

This has been an episode of The Elara Edge. Elara Nova is the trusted global security partner delivering decisive advantage.  

As a strategic advisory firm, Elara Nova builds expert teams uniquely tailored for client needs to deliver actionable results. With the trusted insight to deliver your decisive edge, Elara Nova is your source for expertise and guidance in global security. 

If you liked what you heard today, please subscribe to our channel and leave us a rating. Music for this podcast was created by Patrick Watkins of PW Audio. I’m your host, Scott King, and join us next time at the Elara Edge. 

NASA Reorganizes to “Ignite the Orbital Economy”

Scaling Safety and Cybersecurity Discipline Will Determine NASA’s Future Success

Earlier this year, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced a reorganization effort that restores its “mission directorates” in a way that agency leaders hope will position itself for an ambitious future. The moves, whose influence can be traced back to a December 2025 executive order “Ensuring American Space Superiority,” will streamline efforts toward five new objectives recently unveiled by NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. Taken in tandem, these steps aim to ignite a commercial orbital economy that advances scientific exploration, but NASA can only get there by scaling the safety and cybersecurity discipline that the agency has forged over the years. 

“The National Aeronautics Space Act of 1958 charged NASA with an important and sustainable mission that really holds true today: expanding human knowledge of phenomena in the atmosphere and in space,” said Renee Wynn, former Chief Information Officer at NASA and Partner at Elara Nova. “This Space Act aimed to preserve the role of the United States as a leader, while cooperating with other nations in the peaceful application of space research. It also included performance, speed, safety, efficiency of aeronautical and space vehicles, and today we benefit from NASA’s accomplishments with greater safety and sustainability on our airplanes.” 

The reorganization returns the Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate and the Space Operation Mission Directorate to a single Human Spaceflight Mission Directorate, a single structure previously held before the directorates were split apart in 2021. The other consolidation is the Space Technology Mission Directorate and the Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate, which is becoming a single Research and Technology Mission Directorate.  

The Science Mission Directorate, however, remains the same.  

“The bottom line is NASA will return to a mission directorate structure that aligns with its current budget and workforce levels,” Wynn said. “The current administration laid out five ambitious objectives: the Artemis and Moon Base programs, a Space Reactor Office for nuclear power in space, an aim to ignite the orbital economy and launch more missions of science and discovery, among others. This reorganization enables NASA to focus its current workforce on meeting these five objectives.” 

Lessons Learned from a Commercial Transition 

The five objectives seek to revitalize an agency that has accomplished remarkable feats since its founding: ranging from enabling the first American to orbit the Earth in 1962 and putting boots on the moon in 1969, to building and operating the International Space Station and launching the Mars Rover Program. 

But those achievements have not come without setbacks. The Challenger and Columbia disasters, in 1986 and 2003 respectively, resulted in the loss of 14 total astronauts and contributed to the decision to end the shuttle program. 

“There wasn’t a replacement for the shuttle program when it was retired in 2011,” Wynn said. “The United States had to turn to Russia to buy seats on their Soyuz rocket to get to the ISS to the tune of roughly $80 million a seat. This meant U.S. astronauts needed to be trained in Russia, and so from a business perspective NASA needed a new alternative to get space. They got to work on the Commercial Crew Program, which led to the next launch from American soil in May of 2020.” 

NASA had long facilitated commercial opportunities through its scientific experiments and exploration activities in space. But turning to commercial launch providers to even get to space was a significant culture shift for the agency. 

“NASA went from being a maker to being a partner in helping and mentoring commercial partners develop something they can buy, in this case rockets to get to the ISS,” Wynn said. “But NASA had a real concern over whether the culture of the commercial sector truly understood what it’s like to lose an astronaut in the pursuit of space exploration. So, they took a tiered risk and milestone-based approach, where commercial launch providers first brought cargo to the ISS and then crew. In this way, NASA helped SpaceX and Boeing achieve success.”  

Now that a projected $1.8 trillion commercial space economy is taking hold, NASA is seeking to replicate the success of transitioning to commercial solutions through other programs like Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) to deliver scientific payloads to the lunar surface and the Commercial Low Earth Orbit Development program that seeks to design and deploy private commercial space stations to replace the International Space Station once it retires in 2030.  

Cybersecurity and Space Exploration Safety 

As NASA hands off more of its operational footprint to industry, the agency is also expanding the number of partners with access to its data, networks and mission-critical systems. But this increased reliance on commercial partners also carries potential ramifications for NASA and other government agencies that depend on its science and research, including the Air Force and Space Force.  

It’s a risk that became front of mind for NASA and its government partners during Wynn’s tenure as CIO. 

“Cybersecurity in space is a lot like glitter,” Wynn said. “If I have glitter on my hands and I go to shake someone else’s hands, they now have glitter on their hands. When NASA was exchanging data with a commercial partner or another federal agency, they were getting a very glittery packet of data because of the way NASA was treating cybersecurity at the time. This was a problem because cybersecurity is inherently tied to the confidentiality, integrity and access to data that is the heart of scientific discovery in space.” 

While necessary, the culture shift toward a stronger cybersecurity posture was not easy.  

“NASA recognized we cannot afford to put astronauts on the ISS at risk due to a cybersecurity incident, because lives are very much on the line in human space exploration as everything astronauts depend on for survival in space is provided to them through technology,” Wynn said. “So, I made it a point that we were going to be doing a culture change, and NASA would be a cybersecurity culture by the time I left the agency. There were times NASA got an ‘F’ on its report card for cybersecurity but now, NASA has strong cybersecurity measures in place that align with the agency’s historical focus on safety.”  

Cybersecurity requirements are now written into NASA’s Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR), which means its commercial partners are contractually obligated to maintain a high-level cybersecurity posture, as well.  

“NASA approached the cybersecurity problem as both a crisis and an opportunity to bring another culture shift that prioritized safety,” Wynn said. “Space exploration will always be highly risky, and this is part of NASA recognizing the third-party risk of working with commercial partners and working to mitigate that risk. Now, if you’re getting a NASA contract, you have to do your part for cybersecurity and those measures need to be enforced.” 

Reorganizing to Close Industrial Gaps 

NASA has identified supply chain and industrial capacity gaps that the agency says needs to be filled as it redirects its focus on the five objectives laid out by Administrator Isaacman, all of which will require support from commercial partners. Some progress has already been made, but other challenges remain as the agency looks to scale data-intensive science missions deeper into space. 

“We’ve had a bottleneck in launchpad availability, but that is something the private sector has been working on,” Wynn said. “The private sector is also good at building satellites for earth observation, data computing, and transfer capabilities, which has been another historical choke point. One remaining supply chain risk that will need to be addressed, however, is ensuring we have enough chips that are of a good pedigree.” 

Now, these reorganizational steps will help facilitate public-private partnerships to fill capability gaps and achieve mission objectives laid out by Administrator Isaacman.  

“The Space Reactor Office for nuclear power in space is a good example of how this reorganization supports the agency’s future ambitions,” Wynn said. “Deep space exploration will require nuclear power, and that is an industrial capacity gap that will need to be filled. Now NASA will need to continue working with its partners to leverage commercial innovation while embracing NASA’s history of safety and cybersecurity culture.” 

Now, Elara Nova exists as a strategic advisory firm to help facilitate both reorganizational efforts and cross-collaboration between public-private partnerships. 

“Elara Nova has deep experience in space and a cadre of individuals vested in the mission of the United States government,” Wynn said. “Elara Nova offers a wealth of knowledge that enables both our commercial and government clients to really advance their objectives and be part of the Artemis generation. That opportunity comes with a responsibility to honor the taxpayer dollars behind NASA’s mission and the culture of safety the agency has built over decades, which requires the same discipline from its commercial partners.” 

Elara Nova is the trusted global security partner delivering decisive advantage. Learn more at elaranova.com   

Episode 42: Chinese AI Closing Gap in Cybersecurity Vulnerability Detection

The Elara Edge

Host: Scott King (SK) 

SME: (KC):Maj Gen (Ret) Kim Crider, Founding Partner at Elara Nova; former Chief Technology and Innovation Officer at the United States Space Force 

(BS): Lt Gen (Ret) Bob Skinner, Executive Partner at Elara Nova; former director of the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), and the commander of the Joint Force Headquarters, Department of Defense Information Network, (DODIN) 

(MR): Col (Ret) Mike Robbins, Partner at Elara Nova; former Director of the USSPACECOM Joint Cyber Center and Joint Ops Center 

00:02 – 01:06 

(SK): The race to artificial intelligence supremacy appears to be getting tighter. Earlier this summer, a Chinese AI model known as Z.ai was found to match Anthropic’s Mythos at discovering cybersecurity vulnerabilities despite trailing U.S. models on other tasks. The narrowing gap in AI-enabled cyber capabilities carries real national security implications as the cyber domain increasingly operates at machine speeds. It also heightens the imperative for the U.S. government and commercial industry to partner together and streamline development and adoption of secure and reliable AI tools. 

Welcome to The Elara Edge! We have three guests today, here to discuss the ever-evolving and attention-consuming topic of artificial intelligence, as well as the challenges and opportunities to streamline adoption of these cutting-edge technologies in national security.   

First, returning to the show is retired Major General Kim Crider, Founding Partner at Elara Nova and the first Chief Technology and Innovation Officer at the United States Space Force.  

Ma’am, welcome back to the show! 

01:07 – 01:08 

(KC): Thanks, Scott. Great to be here.  

01:09 – 01:27 

(SK): Also joining us is retired Lieutenant General Bob Skinner. Bob is an Executive Partner with Elara Nova and the former Director of the Defense Information Systems Agency, DISA, and the Commander of the Joint Force Headquarters, Department of Defense Information Network, or DODIN.  

Sir, welcome to the show! 

01:28 – 01:30 

(BS): Thanks, Scott. 

Happy to be part of this esteemed group and panel. 

01:30 – 01:43 

 (SK): We also have Mike Robbins joining us today. Mike is a retired colonel with the United States Air Force and a Partner at Elara Nova who previously served asthe Director of the US Space Command Joint Cyber Center and Joint Ops Center. 

Mike, welcome to the show! 

01:44 – 01:46 

(MR): Thank you very much, Scott. Appreciate it. Really honored to be here.  

01:47 – 02:04 

(SK): Now, there was a Wall Street Journal article published earlier this summer that found a Chinese AI model now matches one of the most advanced U.S. commercial models in discovering cybersecurity vulnerabilities.  

Mike, can you bring us up to speed on what the implications are for this finding? And what makes this recent development so concerning? 

02:05 – 03:38

(MR): Appreciate it. Scott. So it’s not a real surprise the Chinese are actively seeking to advance their technology, not only do they have human resources, but they want to be able to leverage all the technology that they can. So nothing shocking about that for those that have been paying attention to what our adversaries have been doing in the cyberspace and cybersecurity realm for the last 20 plus years.  

It is a common theme for the Chinese to steal both intellectual property from our defense industrial base, as well as from the government itself, on how they can maximize the capabilities that they have at the lowest cost to themselves. They’ve actively sought ways to exfiltrate data, exploit data, and embed themselves into our systems.  

And if you take a simple search of various academic and industry periodicals, the U.S. assessment has been clear that the Chinese have the intent to leverage AI wherever they can, and they want to advance their technology, whether it’s through the chipsets that they are trying to develop or procure through whatever means necessary, or whether it’s their models and how they are trying to exfiltrate and learn from our most advanced models. 

It is concerning because as they advance their models, they make those models available to whoever will work with them and in whatever manner they want to work with them. 

03:39 – 04:49

(BS): Hey Scott, I’d love to add a little insights into what Mike’s talking about from a China standpoint. They have stated publicly that they want to dominate the emerging technology sector by 2030. That’s a huge goal.  

And really, I think we’re talking more on artificial intelligence and quantum computing. If you think, okay, how can they best do that? Well, it’s to continue their coercive manner of stealing where they can and disrupting the time continuum that it would normally take through research and engineering to get to a good spot. And so that’s really what they are focused on is: how do they continue to coerce and steal their way to the top?  

I am less concerned about their technology because I think in an autocratic environment, it’s harder to innovate than it is in the United States. And so I would offer our LLMs, I think we will stay ahead of them from a technology standpoint.  

But I don’t think we can overstate what China is trying to do, but I think their normal manner just will not enable them to be at the top because of the innovative ways that the United States and our allies and partners, which is a key component of our ability to innovate where we’re headed. 

04:50 – 05:04

(SK): And Mike, what does this emerging AI-enabled cybersecurity environment change for the cyber operators on the ground at a place like the Joint Operations Center or Joint Cyber Center, who are now confronted with an operating environment that is moving at machine speeds, both offensively and defensively? 

05:05 – 06:36

(MR): I’ll go back to my Air Force roots and John Boyd. It’s about the OODA-loop. 

As an ops center, your job is to get information in, identify those things that you can exploit and move on and make a decision so that you are ahead of your adversary. So in an ops center, it’s not really going to change what you’re trying to do. The tools that you’re using might change. And that’s where you talk about moving at machine speed, moving in that machine learning environment. 

I would propose today, if we’re not already using AI in our ops centers to help synthesize data to help commanders in their OODA-loop, then we’re already falling behind, right? So from a cybersecurity standpoint, a big risk we have is if I have somebody who’s finding a zero day exploit on zero day or before zero day, I’m already at a disadvantage. 

My challenge becomes how do I respond to that? What are the tools I am using to identify that zero day, and then have my defensive tools write a rule for me that says, ‘Hey, I found a zero day. Here’s a rule that you can implement that will help prevent an attack or mitigate an attack on that,’ and then move forward. 

So two separate things how the ops center works. And then what is it tactically my operators have to be able to do? I can’t emphasize enough if we’re not using AI already. We’re behind the power curve.

06:37 – 07:17 

(BS): I agree wholeheartedly with Mike. The cautionary tale with AI, though, is if you’re just jumping into AI for AI’s sake, then that’s going to cause more problems for your mission and your operations than what it’s worth.  

You have to understand what problems you’re trying to solve and have the mindset of how can I leverage technology to achieve the gains and achieve the objectives that the mission requires? And that takes some thinking beforehand, because there’s a whole litany of cautions from a fiscal standpoint, from a legal standpoint. But yet that’s my only cautionary tale, is, that yes, you want to jump in, but you got to be careful that you don’t jump in without understanding where you’re trying to go. 

07:18 – 07:25 

(SK): So considering how quickly these models are being developed, how do you balance the adoption of these innovative technologies weighed against the inherent risks that might come with them? 

07:26 – 08:07 

(BS): The thinking model doesn’t change because at the end of the day, as a commander, you are responsible for understanding the risk and managing the risk. 

If we go into this with being risk averse, we are going to lose ground significantly. So you have to manage that risk. Part of managing that risk is understanding, so there’s an education piece and a training piece. Understanding the technology well enough that you at least have kind of an understanding of what that risk is and what the potentiality is. 

And then you can make the decision of, ‘Hey, do I need to slow down a little bit until I understand a little bit more, or do I need to go fast because I understand the second, third order implications of this technology and understanding the operational impacts and then just move out. 

08:08 – 09:24 

(MR): It’s a risk management approach. And there’s two things to that. There’s what the commanders do in understanding the tools that they have available to them. And then there’s what we want industry to do and we talk about our allies and how that works. We want to have the defense industrial base advancing as quickly as they can, and putting opportunities and options in front of commanders to use this.  

We look at where we were in World War II, great example, the P-51. We needed the P-51 in 1942, but we didn’t have it. We didn’t get that until late 1942, 1943. And what really advanced the P-51 was the defense industrial base, combined with an ally to put the Merlin engine into a P-51 that made it what it is. 

And then American industry took that and implemented it fully because the British could not meet the need. So it is truly about advancing as quickly as we can. And once we have a solution, let’s go. And that’s what we need to be in AI. We need to have all the industry partners working in concert with the government, and with what commanders are willing to accept risk on. 

09:25 – 10:36 

(KC): Yeah, I think I’ll just add to that, Scott, is that there’s an opportunity cost that’s also a risk. The risk of not leveraging the technologies effectively to do what you need to do. To Bob’s early point, first, you have to decide what your objectives are, and then you have to understand how can this technology help me achieve these objectives and then you need to be able to leverage that technology and move out.

But it’s not just an individual unit leveraging the technology necessarily, because how we win is at scale. So we have to be able to leverage the technology at scale with the whole operational entity being able to employ it effectively, which includes not just pointy end of the spear operators, but all of that infrastructure that comes behind them: the acquirers, the policy makers, the defense industrial base all being part of how do we drive this technology into our operations to maximum effect? 

It’s not just as simple as saying we’re just going to leverage technology, but we have to be able to do it at scale, and we need the entire enterprise to be able to work together to that outcome to get us the maximum benefits that we want to achieve. 

10:36 – 11:20 

(BS): And, Scott, I’ll give you a perfect example on risk. As a commander, as you leverage AI, you have to understand that you’re going to get a non-deterministic answer. You can have the same input and you can put it in twice and you get two different answers. And so you’ve got to understand that just leveraging AI isn’t necessarily going to give you the right answer that you need for the problem that you’re trying to solve. 

And so as long as you understand that and you understand that risk, I think you can be successful. I have a concern with those who are leveraging AI and thinking AI is going to give them 100% right answer every single time. And that can be devastating when you’re thinking about security and you’re thinking about potential lives on the line, on the front lines and or even in the rear echelon. 

11:21 – 11:32 

(SK): To take the idea of risk one step further, how do you go about trusting the answer that you’re receiving from an AI-model on whether or not a vulnerability exists, or that after it’s been identified, it’s been effectively patched? 

11:33 – 12:53 

(BS): The first thing is industry and the government has to do a better job of validating and auditing LLMs. Being able to ensure that the success rate, because every model has a different success rate when you’re talking about the prompting and the answering that it’s doing and I’m just talking about the prompting part, right? There’s a whole bunch of other AI that’s going on. That’s the first thing.  

The second thing is what kind of testing mechanism do you have as an organization? That is, once you get those answers, than how are you validating and testing? Are you finding? Do you have a way to quickly find like, say, there’s X, Y, and Z vulnerabilities in X, Y, and Z systems? 

How are you able to assess and validate in a quick manner, sometimes autonomously, X, Y, and Z vulnerabilities are in X, Y, and Z systems, and then you start building the confidence levels that the model is providing the right information, realizing that it may go off periodically, but I think that there’s this validation step that and I know we talk about the risk management framework, which I’ll tell you that that three letter word is like a four letter word in a lot of vocabularies because of the way that is implemented. 

And so how do you have continuous monitoring, continuous validation, continuous auditing to highlight and showcase that things are operating nominally. That to me is where we as a Department and we need commercial industry and our allies and partners to help us get there.

12:54 – 13:39 

(MR): I can follow up on that, Sir. You want to have that model that works for your environment. You can’t afford to have your model exposed where the adversary could potentially inject things into it through a concerted effort to change what the model is looking at. That’s where as we look at space systems, we’re going to be in a position of how do I have a model that is developed at the scale that the commercial world can do it at, at the speed they can do it at and still be focused enough on a what’s my niche that I need to have my model work because I can’t on a classified system have my model call home. It can’t go out to the dirty internet and call home. I’ve got to have a model that works in my environment. 

13:40 – 13:59 

(SK): Now Mike, on the note of space systems: it’s well known that both space and cyber capabilities underpin all of the operations across the Joint Force.  

So when it comes to cybersecurity risks and threats, not only to IT networks and systems terrestrially, but to space systems themselves, what are the implications for those risks? 

14:00 – 14:52 

(MR): Everything. General Burt a number of years ago had a quote. That was when she was at SPOC. It was, you can’t have space heroes without ones and zeros. And that is true. I would propose that you absolutely cannot separate space and cyber, because you cannot get to your space vehicles without those ones and zeros without cyber to do that. 

Yeah, there’s RF signals involved. There’s electronic warfare that’s involved. But fundamentally you’re talking about commands at the basic level that we’re sending to space vehicles to do things and those commands are cyber.  

That’s a computer programming thing and has been since the dawn of the space age and without effective cyber operations, space operations will cease to be effective both in the space vehicles and on the ground systems and the networks that connect those ground systems.  

14:53 – 16:51

(KC): I think it’s important to recognize that a space system is not just the network. Mike kind of touched on this. It’s really an interconnected system that includes the spacecraft, the ground segment, the links between them, the user terminals, and then any extended cloud infrastructure and supply chain that may be connected to that. So the attack surface is pretty extensive.  

But what’s also interesting is that an adversary doesn’t have to necessarily hack a satellite. You can get into this environment in a variety of different ways and the most accessible entry point still is the ground segment. But that’s not to say that these other parts of the system are not vulnerable. So it’s an integrated system. It has multiple components that are threatened. And you can’t really think about space cybersecurity. Therefore, just as our general understanding of enterprise IT cybersecurity extended into orbit. It’s an entirely different system, and the consequences are a little bit different as well. 

When a traditional IT enterprise is hacked, there’s a recovery process. It could involve rebuilding a server, isolating the attack, maybe restoring data from a backup. But when you’re talking about a space system that’s been compromised in some way, even if the compromise starts in the ground but then impacts the entire system, that attack may not be noticed right away. 

It might be a limited, gradual degradation of the system, and it might not be something that you can immediately address through an immediate recovery or restoral process. Space architectures are different than a more traditional ground-based IT enterprise architecture, which raises the stakes of what we’re talking about here. And to Mike’s point, the dependency on that environment is at the heart of everything that we’re able to do in space. Those are important subtleties to keep in mind. 

16:52 – 17:52 

(BS): Well, you know, I think Kim’s hit it on the head. If you think about a mom and pop shop in the Midwest that an adversary has exploited that has a connection either from a supply chain and or a connection to a power supply, to a data center, to something else that is critical to space operations or critical to those space systems operating. That’s pretty powerful.  

And you may not know because leveraging AI, they can find it, they can sit low. And we’ve got to be able to do a better job of countering that because as of right now, I would offer AI has given the adversary a leg up or the attacker a leg up until the defensive systems and processes and technology catches up, but it is significant as you think about the operational technology and the nontraditional IT that Kim was talking about. I think that is a huge challenge, but also an opportunity to get things better in the future. 

17:53 – 19:06 

(SK): Thank you, Sir. Now it’s important to note that to date, the leading AI models have been coming from U.S. commercial industry. In the context of our conversation today, we’re referring to Anthropic’s Mythos model and the Chinese model Z.ai that appears to have matched its cybersecurity capabilities.  

This development follows a series of years where federal export control orders were increasingly used to restrict the AI chips that could potentially empower them in the national security environment.  

But in June, the U.S. government went a step further to place an export control order on the Mythos model itself. And because Anthropic could not assure the foreign national status of every user, the company revoked access to Mythos entirely. But this also had a collateral effect for other government users relying on that model, including the National Security Agency.  

So all that being said, General Skinner, you spoke of the vetting process that goes into ensuring the AI tool is suited for the job, weighed against its risks.  

So Sir, can you take us behind the scenes of the vetting process to ensure a commercial AI model is both reliable and secure? And then walk us through what happens when that model disappears on short notice, whether it’s due to a flaw within the model itself or an adversary’s action to compromise it? 

19:07 – 20:56 

(BS): Yeah Scott, to me, it all starts with the approval for a system to operate on a DoD network. DISA being a big part of that, although not the only part because you have authorizing officials throughout the entire department who helps enable that. I think it starts there. Again, it’s a very slow process and one that continues to need to be refined to catch up. 

I will tell you from an operational standpoint, it really drives home the fact of what is your PACE plan, right? Mike talked about John Boyd’s OODA-loop. A PACE plan is probably been around as long as the OODA-loop, where you’re really focused on what’s your primary, alternate, contingency and emergency. People look at it from a communication standpoint more so than anything else, but I look at it from an operational and a mission standpoint. 

It’s: what happens if you do not have something that you are relying on? I mean, we used it in a Space Command. We used to do “A day without space,” and you would have the combatant commanders or the component commanders come in and you kind of walk through that. We have to do the same thing from a cybersecurity standpoint.  

What happens if you are no longer able to use this capability, whether it’s because of an export control, whether it’s because there’s an eccentric CEO who decides that their patriotism has a limit if the dollars don’t come with it, or is there a cybersecurity issue that you need to stop? And so I think that really comes into play is: how resilient are you in your operations and what kind of PACE plan do you have to really understand what your next move if something like this happens? 

And it goes back to risk, as a commander, you have to understand the risk, not just the risk from an adversary, but risk of your own operations and how you need to leverage that to move forward. And I think that’s going to bring them to bear how important a PACE plan really is, at least from a planning standpoint, and then have the flexibility and the adaptability to change as necessary as you’re moving forward. 

20:57 – 22:00 

(MR): It’s no different than any other tool, AI and whatever the tool it is. If you look at another space system, GPS and what are operators  having to do understanding the risk to GPS? They have to go out and figure out, well, how do I operate? If you’re in the Navy, maybe you’re using a sextant again, very old school type things, but that’s what you have to do. If I have to do analysis on my own because I lost access to a model, how do I do that?  

The second part of this, the export control right, is then you start to get into: how involved is the government in deciding what industry and not defense industrial base, what the commercial capital market will be able to do and not do? And how much constraint do we put on our innovation if we say, ‘Hey, the government’s going to get involved in that and what you can and can’t do,’ because the Chinese government’s not going to put that constraint on their industry. They want them to go as fast as possible.  

22:01 – 22:15  

(SK): And General Crider, speaking from your perspective as the former Chief Technology and Innovation Officer with the Space Force, how do you go about leveraging these systemic processes that are put in place across the government to adopt a tool that is oftentimes iterating faster than the approvals can keep up? 

22:16 – 24:46 

(KC): This challenge, this conundrum that we face is not necessarily new and is certainly not specific to space. It really is kind of a broader cultural challenge that we’ve seen over and over again, where technology is very often moving faster than the organizations can adopt it. 

We’ve seen it in the case of nuclear technology, where we had advances in nuclear capabilities that moved a lot faster coming out of the labs and policy was prepared to address. We saw it in the internet. When the internet boom first happened, the internet spread pretty quickly, faster than policies and organizations could adopt it effectively. 

So this happens a lot, right? I would say what’s different this time around with AI is that AI is literally just exploding on the scene, and the velocity of change that we’re seeing in AI since it first really came out in a grand way, has just been moving very, very quickly. 

The advances in technology that I talked about earlier. These things unfolded over several years and decades. But with AI, the capabilities are quickly evolving in a matter of months. So it’s really hard to get in front of that, especially when large organizational processes, policy acquisition, workforce development, governance, these move on multi-year timelines. So you’ve got a technology that’s evolving very rapidly in a matter of months, and you’ve got organizational adoption through those sort of mechanisms taking years. 

So it’s really about how do we build our institutions to be much more flexible and adaptable? How do we get ahead of some of these changes? How do we become much more flexible in our ability to leverage these technologies? Hopefully we’re going to get smarter as organizations because we’ve talked about AI for quite some time.  

I remember running around the country talking about AI was such an important capability and we need to take advantage of it.  It wasn’t until the advancements of ChatGPT, when it went out into the marketplace that people actually started to realize, ‘Wait a minute, this really is a thing.’ And then all the other frontier models came out and things started to rapidly take off. But still, the organizations then and now, struggling to catch up, struggling to find ways to integrate it, struggling to find ways to have the right policy to adopt it, to manage it, to control how it’s applied in the most effective way. 

24:47 – 25:03  

(SK): And to bring it back to General Skinner, how would you respond to the questions that General Crider just posed? 

Does the example we saw this summer that played out with the Mythos model, where there was approval, implementation, a temporary revocation before it was ultimately restored, change anything about the current vetting and approval process? 

25:04 – 28:07 

(BS): I would offer it validates that the current process is not flexible enough, but that’s something that we’ve known for decades now. And it’s just it’s so hard to get over the hump when you’re talking about authorizing officials who have a fiduciary responsibility on: I am a signing off that this system or this application is secure enough that it will not cause mission impacts by putting it onto the network. And so it’s the dichotomy of how do I go faster? But also, excuse my French, my butt’s on the line because I’m authorizing this. And so I think that’s the dichotomy that Kim was talking about.  

I would offer there’s a couple of ways. There’s an education piece. Being able to educate, authorizing officials not only their duties, but also on the missions and the understanding of the technology underneath those missions. I think helps, because the more comfortable they are with the systems and the missions and the software, the more comfortable they are to accept a certain level of risk based on that understanding.  

I think there’s partnerships. Too many authorizing officials I would offer and too much within the Department. We think, well, just because the Army approved it doesn’t mean that I should approve it or the Space Force approves it, so the Navy is not going to prove it. Well, there’s a foundational reciprocity that we have the authority already out there to leverage, but we don’t leverage that enough.  

And I think because there’s a trust part of this, that I’m not going to trust them because I’m the one that is going to get in trouble if something goes wrong versus how do we have a foundational education, foundational training, foundational certification to ensure that people are staying up with the technology and the processes? So I think the reciprocity from a partnership standpoint is also important.  

And then I think we don’t leverage technology enough from a validation standpoint. There is technology out there that we can leverage to improve our understanding and improve our probability of risk percentages to the technology and to the mission. And we just don’t leverage that enough. And part of that is, is some of the workforce within the Department is mature. And we’ve got to make sure that they are educated and trained with the new technology versus just understanding the processes that they’ve learned over the past decade and or two.  

So I think it’s a multi-pronged approach, and I see Mike laughing because of my mature comment. But I think that plays into it because I would offer if I’m in charge of auditing and authorizing, I have a much different mindset than a person who is 20 now or 25 or 30 who has basically lived with the technology that we have today. 

And there’s a culture piece of that we don’t usually talk about enough that I think plays into how do you understand the risk management part of all this versus being risk averse? Because the easiest thing to do is be risk averse, and I’ll get in less trouble if I’m more averse.  

28:08 – 30:41 

(MR): So the mature comment, I think, Sir, I think we’re part of that mature group. We just happen to have a better understanding of the technology. So I’ll bring up a couple of things. We talk about how AI is going to do all these things and the advancements and the speed.  This is no different than many other technologies that have come into the services over the last 40 to 50 years. How quickly can we adapt the technology into what we operationally need to do? 

It just so happens AI is moving so much faster than those technologies have before. How do we address that? I think we address that with good design. The systems we have authorizing officials signing off on today, in the last 20 years have all been, ‘Hey, we’re just going to go throw this system out there and we’re going to go do some software development, and you end up with poor design habits, poor systems engineering because computer processing and computer power got cheap, we were able to do things a lot faster. 

But we didn’t maintain good design practices, good engineering practices to ensure we had a foundationally secure software application or network. We just kind of had things happen. So we have authorizing officials that are trying to make decisions based on that history. Now, we’re not going to fix that overnight.  

But I would also propose that there are authorizing officials that are both accepting risk on behalf of an operational commander, that that operational commander then does not know that somebody has accepted for them and therefore they can’t make decisions. 

But I would also propose there are times when authorizing officials are too restrictive, because the operational commander might be willing to accept the risk on something because they’re going to be able to move inside the OODA-loop of the adversary and make the fact that there is a risk on their system not a factor, but that authorizing official doesn’t always think about that way. 

And that goes to what General Skinner talked about, is helping authorizing officials have better understanding of missions and systems, not just from a pure technology standpoint. There’s a lot of times where we try and evaluate things and it’s, ‘well, there’s a risk to the system, which means there’s a risk to a router, a server, a software application,’ but there’s not a good understanding of what the risk to the mission might or might not actually be. 

30:42 – 30:50  

(SK): And Sir, who in your mind is responsible for that educational piece? Does that come from the industry partners developing these tools or some other leadership within the Department? 

30:51 – 31:42 

(BS): I’m always most cautious because when I say shared responsibility, then a lot of people think that is nobody’s responsibility. But I do think it’s a shared responsibility.  

I think at the end of the day, since authorizing officials fall under the DOWCIO from a policy and procedure standpoint, they’re the ones who are ultimately responsible. But it has to be a shared responsibility with industry and with mission owners so that we can make sure that authorizing official, they got to be educated on the process itself and their responsibilities, but also whatever missions that they’re assigned as an authorizing official for and then industry, which I would offer industry loves to make things complex way too often.  

And the more complex you make something, the less comfortable that people are leveraging that technology and or authorizing it. And so the simpler that you can make it, the better at the end of the day. 

31:42 – 32:03 

(SK): We should note that the Department of Commerce is the one that issued the export control order that temporarily restricted the Mythos model.  

What does that demonstrate about the delegation of responsibilities and authorizations across the various departments of the U.S. government? How does that delegation complicate the vetting and approval process, and what can the U.S. government do to overcome that challenge? 

32:03 – 33:08 

(BS): Whenever you have multiple organizations involved in something that makes it more complex, and I talk to the industry about this all the time: you cannot have a transaction relationship and be successful. It’s got to be a partner relationship.  

And so as the Department of Commerce is making determinations on export control decisions, they have to be discussing with the Department of War, and I would say the State Department and others, to make sure that they understand all the implications of what that decision is going to entail, whether it’s going to be a productive one or if it’s going to hinder operations and or capabilities. 

And then at the end of the day, right there, the ones that ultimately held accountable and responsible. But it also gives an opportunity for the Department of War to go to the President as an example and say, “Mr. President, here’s the implications of this. We don’t agree with what the Commerce Department is going to do.” And then the President is the one ultimately who will make the decision based on national security. 

So I think there’s a partnership that has to be there in order for us to be successful, when we’re thinking about the export control and what it means to us. 

33:09 – 33:57 

(KC): I think that I would agree with the point that it really comes down to communication and partnership. Before we start to develop specific policy, we should be thinking about what is the outcome that we’re trying to achieve collectively? Put on that commander’s risk hat. What level of risk does one policy decision or another create to the mission? What are the effective controls that are appropriate to mitigate risk?  

So in all cases, I think the policy measures, really should come down to being risk-based, continuously informed with some data and evidence of their effectiveness and executable in a way that supports mission outcomes. 

33:58 – 34:19 

(SK): So in some ways the vetting and approval process can be described as “export control, plus trusted access.” But given the size and scale of the Department of Defense Information Network (DODIN), which includes the joint force, the defense industrial base, and international allies alike, is this process positioned to accommodate that size and scale required for the mission? 

34:20 – 35:56 

(BS): Well, I say it has to. I mean, at the end of the day, and I think that’s where the partnerships come into play is to enable that scaling. You mentioned the scale of the Department of Defense, Department of War networks. Think about: it is the third largest number of addresses in the world, the United States number one, China’s number two and the Department of War is number three. So that is significant from a scale standpoint.  

We all heard the saying of, “bureaucracy or headquarters staff simulate the enemy in peacetime.” And I think that there’s friction in peacetime of those processes and the amount of time that it takes to get through your approvals or the amount of time that takes to get those partnerships and those interagency, I’ll say, task force together to address. 

And so I would offer they are not where they need to be. And I think senior leaders know that and understand it. And they take that into their risk calculus, whether it’s something that’s internal that they’re working through or it’s something that’s external from an export control standpoint, they just continually work through that as part of their risk management process. 

But it’s still too slow. And the leveraging of technology has to be at the forefront because you have to understand them. And then you can make changes as necessary. And I just don’t think we’re there yet with all the different policies and procedures and understanding across the partnership realm. 

35:57 – 37:48 

(MR): And Scott, following up as General Skinner said, right? We’re talking about the DOW here and the impact of export control, which is very much national security based. But the challenge is the US does not have a lock on smart people and it’s a numbers game. There are 1.5 billion Chinese five times or whatever it is more than we have of U.S. citizens in this country. 

And we’ll go back to the nuclear weapons and coming out of World War II, that was a nation state it took to develop those capabilities. And we were utterly shocked how fast, despite our best efforts to control that technology and that information, how fast the USSR developed weapons with that. 

Move that to computers, we still try and control that and that’s part of what we’re using to control AI is the compute power to have the models run fast enough and generate that. As we move into models, once you have the compute power. And oh, by the way, every other country can develop that compute power, this is almost less about what the DOW does internally. We ought to be finding ways to use that technology.  

But the genie’s out of the bottle on AI. It’s not a matter of whether we can control it through export control. We tried that with nuclear weapons. We’ve tried that with compute power, and the same thing is going to happen with AI. We are going to have to be able to move fast, be agile, and honestly get out of industry’s way to allow them to develop fast enough. 

Because, as General Skinner said, our innovation is going to be better just because of the environment we’re in than an autocratic society is. If we try to control things in an autocratic manner, we’re not going to be successful. That’s fact. Industry and our commercial world develops fast enough, and that’s where we need to control what we can, but understand it’s not going to stay in the bottle forever. 

37:49 – 38:00 

(SK): And what about our international partners? They may have different policy, procedures, and approval processes in place when it comes to adopting innovative AI technologies.  

So in what ways does that factor into our discussion here? 

38:01 – 39:15 

(KC): I think I’ll jump in on that one. Scott. This becomes more of an alliance and international partner problem than a technology problem. 

I mean, the fact is that every international partner has a different set of legal authorities, privacy rules, security processes, and we shouldn’t expect identical approaches or identical laws. But we can establish a common set of mission assurance standards. So I think it really comes down to working towards that outcome and fundamentally getting to the point where with our allies and partners, we have some degree of federated trust. 

They have their policies and procedures, we have ours, but we have some common standards between us so that we have a federated trust. And we can verify that through those managed standards and credentials that we agree to as allies and we agreed to as coalition partners.  

This enables our partners to maintain sovereignty in their approaches. But we can still have interoperability, and we can still have a degree of trust to employ these technologies effectively in our coalition operations. 

39:16 – 40:40 

(BS): And I think, Scott, in my travels within the government and since I’ve been out of the government, our allies and partners, the first question they ask is what is DOW doing? So we have a leadership opportunity and they are looking at the U.S. relationship. That doesn’t mean, again, as Mike said, right? We don’t have monopoly on the talent. We don’t have a monopoly on the technology, but they’re looking at how we’re doing it, because what they understand is the things that we use. 

We develop playbooks, we develop TTPs, tactics, techniques and procedures. We develop all this around the technology from an operational success standpoint and operational maneuverability and or implementation and they like that. They want to see that because they don’t have the staying power and the buying power that we have. It’s just they just don’t. And that’s okay.  

So I think as we kind of continue these partnerships with our allies and partners and we continue this federated trust, I think it’s a golden opportunity because I think, again, at the end of the day, I think our allies and partners is what’s going to save the day against whatever China is trying to do in changing the rules-based international order.  

And technology is a good way of helping maintain that trust, because we can all see what the pros and the cons and the challenges and the opportunities are with that technology. So I think it’s while they do have different rules and different laws, and I think it is a force multiplier with allies and partners more so than it’s not. 

40:41 – 41:04 

(SK): Now, if you’re a commercial industry executive, and you’re providing a capability to one of the military services within the Department, what should your takeaways be from these recent developments on AI adoption, integration, and risk? 

And how should they, like the Department of War, similarly navigate this rapidly evolving environment where these innovative technologies are becoming available faster than the institutional procedures are capable of vetting them? 

41:05 – 43:22 

(KC): I think we’ve said a lot of this already, so I’ll footstomp a few of the points that have been made. First of all, it begins with moving beyond a transactional relationship, as Bob said, really has to be a partnership. As AI becomes part of our operational infrastructure in how we intend to employ our operations and enable our decision-making resilience relative to that, AI also needs to be built in together in a partnership. 

There needs to be active dialogue on policy and understanding how to present this information in a way that authorizing officials can understand the importance to mission, the risk to mission of certain controls. Industry can be a part of those conversations. Industry can be a part of the joint exercises and thinking through how the capability gets applied. 

I also think that it’s important for industry to recognize that, as we’ve said earlier, their AI capability may not always be there as something that we would employ or would be employable. For any number of reasons. It may become unavailable to the user. The biggest risk we can have with AI is overdependence on it, so we need to be thinking through that. 

And if there is a reason for that particular tool not to be available from a cyber standpoint, export controls, whatever the case may be, industry needs to be part of helping to ensure that there is enough resilience built into the capability that the mission can still be accomplished, the operator can still make the decisions, can still operate the capability effectively, and there’s graceful degradation. 

There’s continuity plans to ensure mission assurance. So industry and government need to be thinking about all of those aspects of working together with AI, not just all of the promise of leveraging the technology, but how to employ it through the enterprise. With all the enterprise factors at play, including policy and governance, and recognizing that resilience when it’s not available is just as important as being able to maximally leverage it when it is. 

43:23 – 44:23 

(BS): Industry, you got to know your own exposure, and that exposure can be internal to your organization. It can be the technology that you’re leveraging and or producing. It can be your supply chain. And Kim will love this one, right? It’s: understand your data flow. And that data flow will show you your dependencies and your potential issues and challenges across the board. 

And I think if you understand that as a company, then you can do the contingency planning that Kim talked about. You can enable a disaster recovery if necessary. You understand where you’re vulnerable to export control decisions before they even happen. And then you can actually advocate for yourself and or your position better. But if you don’t know your exposure, then you’re blind. 

And if you’re blind, then you’re more apt to be caught off guard by some of the decisions that the government may make in regards to your company and or the controls and or technology that you’re leveraging.  

43:24 – 45:36 

(MR): Sir I’d add to that, also is when I joined the military, 35 plus years ago, the DoD had the best computers in the world on my desktop. Within three years, I could buy a better computer for 10% of the cost, and the DoD stopped being able to drive requirements on the industry. So I think the government also has to be cognizant that despite what transactional approach you want to have to declare a model or a company to be not in vogue right now, if it’s the best model in capitalism, that best model is going to win. 

So the DOW and the U.S. government also has to be aware that they can’t cut their nose off to spite their face, just because they disagree with something industry has done or a company has done. We have to be able to work as we’ve talked about. It’s a partnership. It can’t be transactional. If we want to advance and be competitive as we move forward with AI and not allow the Chinese to take the lead that they want to take, we have to be partners and not transactional. 

45:37 – 45:46 

(SK): And so on that note: what steps can the government take to proactively facilitate those touch points with industry, so that industry leaders can recognize those opportunities when they’re presented? 

45:47 – 47:08 

(BS): You can have better partnerships today without going awry, legal and or contractual limitations. I think that’s first and foremost, because the more that you can sit down with industry and walk through your problems, the more industry can bring their commercial capabilities to bear to not only help DOW, but it also helps society as a whole. And you don’t have these, I’ll say one-off or two-off or unique government capabilities. That again, usually costs more and are less sustainable than if you can leverage the technology.  

 So I think part of this is, is okay, I have a process in place. I have a mission that I want to accomplish. If I understand the technology and the commercial company understands my process, there is a back-and-forth to get at a good solution to where I don’t need a one-off technology solution. Maybe I just need to tweak my process a little bit, and then that allows me to take full advantage of this commercial capability.  

There’s very minimal technology that the government and or society takes advantage of fully. And I think that partnership can help bridge that gap to understanding how we can better take full advantage of the technology that we have first and foremost, and then we decide if we need more technology based on that. So I think we are so far ahead of where we were from a partnership standpoint, and we just have to continue with that trust but verify going forward. 

47:09 – 48:22 

(MR): Yes, sir. I totally agree. The transparency that has to be in the requirements part of the process, what is it the government needs from AI? What is it the government is willing to do? And I think where you get in trouble, you get the risk averse is nobody wants a protest on a contract that’s let.

I think it becomes very important to be transparent up front so that every company has an equal opportunity to understand the problem set and help write what a requirement might be versus one company comes in and all of a sudden you drop a proposal that nobody else knew was behind it except 1 or 2 companies? I think that’s where you get into risk-averse.  

And then don’t stop the conversation when the proposal is out there. You have to continue to have a conversation because the business develops things, they learn things and they want to actually have a conversation with the requirement owner. So it’s that transparency through the process, keeping the conversations going. That’s an important factor so that businesses can understand, ‘Okay, this is where I can actually bring value as opposed to, well, I really don’t know what they’re looking for.’

48:23 – 48:40 

(SK): Thank you, Sir. Now each one of you represents a different role as part of Elara Nova’s Cyber, Data & Communications sector. So what can the strategic advisory firm, and the CDC team in particular, do to help provide that clarity and support needed to strengthen that partnership between the U.S. government and its industry partners? 

48:41 – 49:35 

(MR): I’ll go first as the junior partner here, I think the role that we have is to facilitate conversations with the right people. Each of us brings a different background and a different skill set. We bring a perspective that helps companies better understand what the government might be asking and how to shape their message to get their point across.

That’s an important thing, especially for businesses that in the tech industry and the new environment, AI, right? Many companies have never been involved with the DOW before. You have to talk about the operational problem. You can’t just say, ‘Hey, I have a cool solution.’ You have to say the problem you’re solving.’And I think that’s what Elara Nova brings, is helping companies do that and then get in front of the right person to go, ‘Oh, I can use that technology.’ 

49:36 – 50:24 

(BS): Mike was spot on. I think we bridged the gap with perspective and context for partnerships. That includes understanding the technology. It includes understanding the problem set includes understanding the challenges and where a technology and a problem can meet, and bringing them together in a faster manner than what they would to give optionality to the government, but also optionality to the technologist to understand other places that they can go and bring their technology to bear. 

But just as important is how do we bring technology companies together to solve a problem, right? So it’s this multidimensional, multi-domain understanding and context and perspective that brings all these organizations together for the common cause of our national security.  

50:25 – 52:25 

(KC): Bob and Mike really hit it on the head with a lot of why we created Elara Nova and what Elara Nova brings to bear. 

It really is about being able to bring a variety of perspectives. You know, our partner portfolio consists of people who have spent their time in mission operations, in technology development, in systems acquisition, in policy writing, in cybersecurity operations. So we have all these perspectives, all these disciplines where we’ve got folks that have spent their careers working in different agencies, both in the government and in industry. 

And so we can help bring together these entities, connect the dots, if you will, on all of these partners and help all sides understand how do you take this great idea, this great innovation, and make it available? So how can we, Elara Nova, help the government more fully leverage and take advantage of technologies?  

We do that by making sure that industry is very adept at conveying their message. What is the mission that they’re trying to solve with this innovation? But that they also understand the policy constraints and the challenges and how they need to work through those steps. 

We help government understand what industry is bringing to bear. We help government understand where policy may or may not be hindering the ability to leverage this technology effectively with the appropriate controls that need to be in place. So we’re really trying to bring all sides together and act as the connector in getting to resilient architectures that can leverage technologies in a way that can meet mission needs. 

And that goes for AI, that goes for any number of technology innovations that might be coming forward. There’s no company in the world that can do that. And so we’re very excited to be part of that solution and to have a fabulous team of folks as part of Elara Nova, like Bob Skinner, like Mike Robbins, and like the 150 or so other partners that really can deliver on that outcome. 

52:26 – 53:03 

This has been an episode of The Elara Edge. Elara Nova is the trusted global security partner delivering decisive advantage.  

As a strategic advisory firm, Elara Nova builds expert teams uniquely tailored for client needs to deliver actionable results. With the trusted insight to deliver your decisive edge, Elara Nova is your source for expertise and guidance in global security. 

If you liked what you heard today, please subscribe to our channel and leave us a rating. Music for this podcast was created by Patrick Watkins of PW Audio. I’m your host, Scott King, and join us next time at the Elara Edge.

Chinese AI Closing Gap in Cybersecurity Vulnerability Detection

Export Control Disruption Sharpens the Case for Faster Government-Industry AI Partnership

The race to artificial intelligence supremacy appears to be getting tighter. Earlier this summer, a Chinese AI model known as Z.ai was found to match Anthropic’s Mythos at discovering cybersecurity vulnerabilities despite trailing U.S. models on other tasks. The development carries real national security implications as the cyber domain increasingly operates at machine speed, while heightening the imperative for the U.S. government and commercial industry to partner together to streamline development and adoption of secure and reliable AI tools.  

“It’s no surprise that the Chinese are advancing their AI technology through whatever means necessary, whether it’s through the chips that they are developing or procuring or their models exfiltrating and learning from our most advanced models,” said Mike Robbins, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel and the former Director of the USSPACECOM Joint Cyber Center and Joint Ops Center, who is now a Partner at Elara Nova. “What’s more concerning is the cost of entry into the cyber domain is lowering, because as the Chinese advance their AI models they make those models available to whoever will work with them in whatever way they want. That creates a greater national security problem because more people will be trying to hack into our systems.” 

Cyber operators are prepared to address cybersecurity attacks in real time, but an AI-enabled cybersecurity environment accelerates the need to leverage new tools as they become available to achieve the mission.  

“Your job at an ops center is to get information in, identify the things you can exploit and make a decision that keeps you one step ahead of your adversary,” Robbins said. “In cybersecurity, the biggest risk is finding a zero-day exploit on zero day or before zero day, which means you’re already at a disadvantage. While the tools operators use might change and increasingly move at machine speeds, it’s still about the OODA loop. If we’re not using AI to help synthesize data and help commanders in their OODA loop decision-making, then we’re already behind the power curve.” 

Non-Deterministic AI Demands Continuous Validation  

However, adopting innovative tools carries its own set of risks, particularly when the technology’s development outpaces an institution’s capacity to thoroughly vet and authorize its use. 

“At the end of the day, the commander is responsible for understanding and managing the risk,” said Lt. Gen. (Ret) Bob Skinner, an Executive Partner at Elara Nova and the former Director of the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) and Commander of the Department of Defense Information Network (DODIN). “AI is going to give you a non-deterministic answer, which means you can have the same input and put it in twice but get two different answers. So leveraging AI isn’t necessarily going to give you the right answer that you need for the problem that you’re trying to solve. That can be devastating for national security when lives are on the line.” 

At the same time, as China’s AI-enabled cybersecurity advancements demonstrate, there’s an opportunity cost that comes with failing to adopt cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence fast enough.  

“Commanders have to decide what their objectives are and understand how AI technology can help them achieve those objectives,” said Maj. Gen. (Ret) Kim Crider, Founding Partner at Elara Nova and the former Chief Technology and Innovation Officer at the United States Space Force. “But we also have to leverage AI at scale, with the whole operational enterprise and the infrastructure that supports the operator: the acquirers, the policy makers and the defense industrial base are all required to drive this technology into our operations to maximum effect.” 

The first step toward this end starts with the U.S. government and industry jointly validating and auditing these models.  

“Every model has a different success rate when it comes to answering prompts, so you need a testing mechanism to validate the answers you’re receiving in a way that builds confidence that the system is providing the right information,” Skinner said. “There is always a risk for periodic inaccuracies, but managing that risk is the responsibility of the commander. So we must establish continuous monitoring, continuous validation and continuous auditing to ensure that the models are operating nominally, and our allies and industry partners can help the Department with that.” 

Continuous validation becomes even more critical if an adversary manages to compromise or influence a model’s outputs. 

“You can’t afford to have your model exposed to where an adversary can inject [false information or inaccurate data] to change what the model is looking at,” Robbins said. “The U.S. commercial industry is the only one that can develop a model at the speed and the scale necessary to work in a fully secure environment. An operator working on a classified system cannot have their model access the ‘dirty’ internet [where misinformation and disinformation is prevalent], it has to be able to work within its controlled data environment.” 

The same imperative applies to space systems, as well, which are equally dependent on cyber capabilities to function.  

“Space systems have an extensive attack surface, because they’re an interconnected system that includes the spacecraft, the ground segment, the links between them, the user terminals and any extended cloud infrastructure and supply chain that may be connected to that,” Crider said. “When a traditional IT enterprise is hacked, there’s a recovery process that involves isolating the attack, rebuilding a server and restoring data from a backup. But a compromised space system might also gradually deteriorate and degrade over time in a manner that may not be noticed right away, which heightens the stakes due to the Joint Force’s dependency on space capabilities.” 

Export Control Order Reveals Need for AI Resilience Planning 

But while commercially available AI tools developed by U.S. industry partners significantly enhance the opportunity to discover and proactively patch cybersecurity bugs, the ability to adopt those tools and integrate them into the network in an effective and timely manner comes with its own set of challenges.  

In June, the Department of Commerce placed an export control order on Anthropic’s Mythos 5 model after citing a national security concern, a ruling which the company publicly disputed. Nevertheless, Anthropic revoked access to its Mythos 5 model to comply with the order, which meant key government agencies like the National Security Agency also lost access to a leading AI-enabled cybersecurity tool.  

“Senior leaders understand the risk calculus for adopting innovative technologies, whether it’s an internal authorization from DISA or an external export control order from the Department of Commerce, so they’re continually working through that as part of their risk management,” Skinner said. “From an operational standpoint, this example drives home the need to always have a Primary, Alternate, Contingency and Emergency (PACE) plan. You have to have resilience in your cyber operations and be able to adapt as necessary to accomplish the mission.” 

However, the need for resilience is a discipline already familiar to operators across the Joint Force. 

“If you’re in the Navy and lose reliable access to GPS, this might mean you go back to using a sextant,” Robbins said. “It’s no different with AI models. You have to be prepared to do your own analysis if you lose access to an AI model. But an authorizing official can unknowingly take that choice away from an operational commander entirely, so the government has to ensure authorizing officials recognize that the best commercial model is the model the Department needs to win.” 

Government-Industry Partnership Critical to Faster AI Adoption 

To overcome this challenge and manage that risk, increased communication and collaboration between the U.S. government and its industry partners will help streamline the authorization and adoption of cutting-edge AI tools as they’re developed.  

“AI needs to be built and adopted in a partnership, where there’s an active dialogue on policy so that authorizing officials can understand the model’s importance to the mission and the risk of certain controls to the mission, so they can work through those challenges together,” Crider said. “Industry can be a part of those conversations and the joint exercises to think through how the AI capability can be applied. But it’s also important for industry to recognize that their AI capability may not always be something the Department would employ for any number of reasons.” 

That partnership also needs to extend to international allies and partners as well, who will also be part of the broader warfighting coalition.  

“Every international partner has a different set of legal authorities, privacy rules and security processes, but we can establish a common set of mission assurance standards that they will abide by,” Crider said. “So it comes down to working toward that outcome through a degree of federated trust. This enables our international partners to maintain sovereignty in their approaches, while ensuring interoperability as we employ these emerging technologies effectively in our coalition operations.” 

That’s the gap Elara Nova is built to close. 

“Elara Nova is really about bringing a variety of perspectives, our partner portfolio consists of experts in mission operations, technology development, systems acquisition and policy writing,” Crider said. “With experts from all of these disciplines and careers, we can help bring these entities together so that government can more fully leverage these technologies and that industry is adept at conveying their message on how their innovative technologies can be used to meet mission needs.” 

Elara Nova is the trusted global security partner delivering decisive advantage. Learn more at elaranova.com   

Episode 41: NATO Ankara Summit Creates a Call-to-Action for Defense Industrial Base

The Elara Edge

Host: Scott King 

SME: General (Ret) James “Scorch Hecker, Senior Principal Advisor at Elara Nova (JH) 

Brigadier General (Ret) Chad Radeuge, President of the Cyber, Data & Communications sector at Elara Nova (CR) 

Tom Goffus, Executive Partner for Global Security (TG) 

Brad Head, Executive Partner for Global Growth (BH) 

00:02 – 01:46 

Heads of State and Government from 32 nations will gather at this month’s NATO Summit in Ankara, Turkey, looking to accelerate progress toward the goals agreed to at The Hague Summit last year.The Hauge Summit Declaration pledged to strengthen collective defense by committing member nations to spend 5% of annual GDP on defense by 2035, while deepening transatlantic defense industrial cooperation and reaffirming the alliance’s support for Ukraine.  

But now, several factors are also heightening the stakes of the Ankara Summit: Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, recent conflicts in the Middle East and “NATO 3.0,” or the increased pressure on allies to take on greater defense investment and burden-sharing responsibilities. In response to these factors, there is growing momentum as NATO nations increasingly invest in their defense capabilities, which also presents a call-to-action for the defense industrial base to respond in kind. 

Welcome to The Elara Edge! Today we’ll be looking ahead to the NATO Summit in Ankara and the context and conversations that member nations and the defense industrial base should be paying attention to – both at the summit and in the weeks and months to follow. 

We have four guests today, each with a unique and qualified experience that reflects both the complexity of the challenge NATO faces, as well as the opportunities the alliance has to meet its growing demands. 

Our first guest is retired General James “Scorch” Hecker, a Senior Principal Advisor at Elara Nova. Scorch recently retired after a 36-year military career with the United States Air Force, culminating in roles as Commander of U.S. Air Forces Europe, U.S. Air Forces Africa and Allied Air Command at NATO.  

Sir, welcome to the show! 

01:47 – 01:58 

(JH): Well, it’s great to be here. I really appreciate the opportunity, Scott, to address this very important topic. I think it’s going to be a pretty memorable summit that we have, so I’m looking forward to the outcomes. 

01:59 – 02:19 

(SK): We’re glad to have you. 

Returning to the show is retired Brigadier General Chad Raduege, President of Elara Nova’s Cyber, Data and Communications sector. General Raduege previously served as the Director of the Command, Control, Communications and Computers Cyber Directorate, as well as the Chief Information officer at Headquarters, U.S. European Command. 

Sir, welcome back to the show.  

02:20 – 02:22 

(CR): Scott, great to be here. Thank you.  

02:23 – 02:38 

(SK): Our third guest today is Tom Goffus, Executive Partner for Global Security at Elara Nova. He is the former Assistant Secretary General for Operations at NATO, and previously served as the Policy Director for the United States Senate Committee on Armed Services.  

Tom, thanks for joining us. 

02:39 – 02:52 

(TG): Thanks, Scott.  

02:52 – 03:12 

(SK): And also returning to the show as a familiar voice for our audience, and that’s Brad Head, Executive Partner for Global Growth at Elara Nova. A retired Colonel with the U.S. Air Force, Brad has previously served as the Chief of Defense Planning at the U.S. Mission to NATO and later served as the director of International Affairs at Space Operations Command. 

Brad, welcome back to the show.

03:13 – 03:15 

(BH): Thanks. It’s great to be here. Looking forward to this conversation.  

03:16 – 03:39 

(SK): So let’s jump right in. We’re here to discuss some of the expectations, challenges and the broader environment surrounding this year’s NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, which will be held on July 7th and 8th, or shortly after we release this podcast. 

Now, Tom you just recently left NATO, from your post as Assistant Secretary General for Operations, so as the guest with the most recent experience at the alliance, I’d like to turn it over to you for some opening remarks.  

03:40 – 09:21 

(TG): Okay. Thanks, Scott. Let me just start with the framing from a NATO perspective. What I think most allies would tell you is that they see a more aggressive Russia, a more unpredictable America, and a more challenging China. And those are the dynamics driving allies to make decisions and take action. 

I should say first that the overall objective of the NATO summit is not to have a major blow up, not to have a fiasco. But overall, this year’s summit, if I summed it up in one word, would be ‘Implementation.’ The three big rocks at the NATO summit in Ankara, will be one: defense spending pledge implementation, two defense industrial production and innovation expansion. And number three, NATO 3.0 execution, also known as burden-shifting by another name. 

So, first: defense spending implementation. The 5% pledge is broken down into two parts, 3.5% on core defense requirements think planes, tanks, ships, and 1.5% on defense-related requirements such as critical infrastructure, defense industrial base and resilience. 

The 3.5% is very precisely defined, while the 1.5% is broad by design. That 3.5% aligns with the capability targets assigned to each ally as part of the NATO Defense Planning Process. And that process works as such: you ID the threats, that drives the building of operational plans, which in turn drives capability targets that are needed to execute those plans. 

The last targets were assigned and agreed in 2025. The next ones won’t be out until 2029. So I expect for 2029, several big new areas. For example, I expect space, autonomous systems, drones that is, and Arctic-specific capabilities. Those are just three areas that we expect to see new capability targets defined in.  

So back to spending for the summit. You can expect positive announcements. Poland and the Baltic nations could be at 5% as early as this year. Germany is shooting for 3.5% by 2029. Sweden is looking at 3.5% by 2030, and the other hard chargers that I expect will hit the line before 2035 are the Nordics and the Netherlands. 

Second, on defense production capacity and innovation: in order to actually translate money into capability, we have to have defense production capacity. And what has been clear is that increased defense spending without increased defense production capacity won’t result in more capabilities. It’ll result in more expensive capabilities. 

As the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine sharply underscore, our defense industrial base is currently not structured to produce what we need at the volume and pace required. And this key dynamic is why NATO has announced that the Defense Industry Forum that is connected with the summit in Ankara will be expanded into the largest industrial event in NATO’s history. At Ankara commensurately, I think NATO is expected to officially launch its front door for industry and that’s a single portal where contractors can upload their potential innovative solutions. Those solutions are then routed to the appropriate NATO point of contact, aimed at connecting industry directly with the alliance procurement needs at speed.  

And a third one – on the 18th of June, Secretary Hegseth brought this up with the allies – and it was called “NATO 3.0.” And what it means is that Europe and Canada will have capability gaps that they need and want to close alongside the money to do so. 

Now, here’s where I would offer a word of caution about rhetoric versus reality. The framing coming out of Washington is that America is forcing a reluctant Europe to finally carry its own weight. That is the political rhetoric. The data tells us a bit more of an interesting story. The Secretary General at that same defense ministerial said that European allies in Canada put in over $90 billion more into defense in 2025 than in 2024. That’s roughly a 20% single year increase. So the step up is not a future ask that the allies are resisting. It’s a present fact that they are already delivering on at a pace that has no precedent in the alliance’s history. 

Now, I want to be very clear that I’m not making a political argument here. I am making a market argument. Strip away the rhetoric and look at where the money, the capability gaps and the durable demand actually sit.  

So if America is generally stepping back from its conventional role in Europe, then Europe and Canada own the gaps and they also own the budget to close them. So your takeaway is Europe defense spending is rising faster than at any point since the founding of the alliance. And that demand is going to be met substantially through industrial production. So I’m going to stop there and conclude. Just a quick summary.  

First, avoid a fiasco. Make the event short and sweet. Second, allies are dealing with a more aggressive Russia, a more unpredictable America, and a more challenging China. And third, three big implementation rocks: defense spending, defense production and innovation and NATO 3.0. That is my framing for the Ankara Summit, and we’re hoping for a successful outcome there. Thanks, Scott. 

09:22 – 10:46 

(JH): Great opening there. Really appreciate you outlining the three big rocks and I think it’s important you mentioned some of the burdens-shifting. Getting an extra $90 billion over just a one year period is very important. But we need to make sure that we spend that money wisely in what I used to call an “integration by design,” and I’ll just use integrated air and missile defense as an example.  

 In the past, each country would buy their individual system. So we ended up having some systems, but unfortunately they didn’t talk to one another and that doesn’t work. So we got to make sure that there’s a force inside of NATO that can take this money, group it together, and buy a system for all of NATO that is interoperable amongst one another.  

Another thing that you talked about was shifting the money, the 5% and those kind of things. In some areas, that’s going very well. Let’s talk F-35. By 2032, we should have around 700 of them in NATO. What people don’t realize is of those 700, only 54 are going to be U.S. So that’s a good positive shift that we’re seeing.  

Now areas where we’re not seeing such a good shift is areas like tankers, AWACS, E-7 Wedgetaill, ISR platforms. So those are areas where we need to improve if we’re going to make this shift happen. So I’ll just pause there.

10:47 – 11:37 

(BH): One nuance that I would add. So I happened to be at the U.S. Mission and NATO in the run up to the Whales Summit, when the first investment pledge was agreed. And that pledge said that allies that were above 2% should stay above 2%, and allies that were below 2% should aim to move towards 2% within a decade, which was not particularly aggressive and hard to hold people to politically. 

And what we see in the updated investment pledge at The Hague Summit and what they expect to see at Ankara are investment plans. The nations are supposed to come with specific plans that show how they’re going to get to 5% by 2035.  

The other nuance in that investment pledge, the kind of why of the investment pledge was in order to fill their capability targets. But the whole point of it was to buy the types of stuff that we collectively need to meet our collective level of ambition, so we’ll unpack that in a little bit.  

11:38 – 12:18 

(TG): And I think really good point on the F-35, Scorch as well.  

The other thing that I emphasized before I left NATO, and this is more in Chad’s lane, and he’ll probably cover some of this later, but that’s a lot of data. A four ship of F-35s in an hour generally will produce four terabytes of data. If you can’t take that data and move it, process it and share it, then that’s a good chunk of your investment that’s on the cutting room floor. 

And so that’s going to be a big challenge is how to move big amounts of data, what gets processed at the edge and what gets pushed around the alliance. But I thought that was a perfect example of the shift in burden-sharing that is ongoing in Europe right now.  

12:19 – 12:41 

(CR): Tom, great point on the data-sharing. And what I would offer is the challenge for the alliance really is having an architecture in place that as you set up these things like a front door for industry to come in, that you don’t just buy a whole bunch of tools, but that you have an architecture that supports interoperability. If you don’t have that, then you’re not going to be able to communicate anyway. It’s a waste of money.

12:42 – 12:55 

(SK): Now, given the three priorities Tom laid out for us: there’s going to be a lot of different capabilities that NATO will be looking for moving forward.  

General Hecker, Sir, what do you see as the main capability gaps that NATO will have to address? 

12:56 – 15:28 

(JH): Yeah. Thanks, Scott. I think one of the ones that really stands out to me, that I struggled with a lot when I was the AIRCOM commander, was air defense  because ever since the Cold War ended, NATO has really kind of taken a knee when it came to investment in air defense. 

We would buy some things, but not near enough. And as an example of that, what we do when we kind of are putting together our air defense plan is we will take a look at what we call the Critical Asset List, and we would determine things that needed to be protected. These would be like airfields, oil production facilities, headquarter buildings, munition storage areas. 

And then there’s also another thing called the DAL, which is what you’re going to actually defend – the Defended Asset List. Well, there was a huge mismatch there. There was a lot more assets that we needed to protect than we actually could protect. 

And then you add the fact that the systems that we had weren’t always interoperable and then the third thing that really made the problem worse was when the Ukraine Russian war started, you had the introduction of these one-way attack vehicles. When I first showed up there, the war was just started about three months, and there would be a couple a day.

When I left, it was up to around a thousand a day from each country going against each other. And then the most recent attack that we just saw from Ukraine, they had basically a thousand of these things in one day, and the production capability has really increased in the country. So that compounds the problem that we have when it comes to defending these assets. 

 And the other thing that we need to think about is how are we going to sense these things? Because a lot of these are at low altitude. So a traditional radar on the ground doesn’t work as well. You know, once you get 10 or 15 miles away, they’re hiding at 500ft just because of the curvature of the Earth.  

So we need to make sure we can detect these things. And there’s capabilities that came out of Ukraine where they can do this with acoustics, which is basically putting up a microphone. And they got somewhere around 20,000 of these in their country now, and then they just take the acoustics that are coming from the noise that is emitted from the UAVs, and then they triangulate and they get a pretty good fixed position, and then they have mobile firing teams that can move out and shoot these things down. And they’re doing it in a cheap way, you know, with Triple-A and EW and things like this, that we just don’t have that capability near to what we need it to be in NATO.

15:29 – 16:24 

(TG): So on that Scorch, just curious, you’ve been watching both what’s been going on in Middle East and what’s been going on in Ukraine. Like you said, the threat is much more complex than we ever thought about before. I mean, in Epic Fury, you had two Iranian F-5s and they were just on Iran state TV. The pilots that got in and bombed a base in Kuwait. And to your point about curvature of the Earth, they were flying under power lines when they were doing that.

One of the things that I took away from both Israel and Ukraine is they don’t really do point defense, they do layered defense, thinning the herd, if you will. 

 And Ukraine, like you said, they don’t have all of their sensors around one particular city or one. It’s 20,000 of these things all the way across the country. So for me, one of the things is if you’re going to sit in your one point defense and hope that that’s going to save everything, that’s not how air defense works in the modern battlefield. But having said all that, what do you think, Scorch? What else strikes you that we should be taking away from the Middle East and or Ukraine?

16:25 – 17:30 

(JH): You know, number one is you can’t kill a threat unless you know it’s there. So we need the sensors, whether that’s acoustics, space-based, or radar on the ground or an E-7 Wedgetail up in the air, we need to be able to sense it in order to shoot it. 

And then we need the shooters. The ones that we have are pretty much exquisite ones that cost a lot of money. And we can’t be trading $3 million PAC-3 missiles for a $30,000 drone.  

Ukraine has figured out ways to shoot these things down at relatively cheap and now industry is definitely getting it. But we need to accelerate that to make sure that we’re prepared if something should happen, and then we need to make sure we have the command and control that connects all these things, so that the sensor detects the target, it gets to the shooter, and then the shooter shoots and we don’t want to waste missiles on it.  

So we got to make sure that the right shooter with the right probability of kill shoots that. And then we need operators that are trained to do it. And we need logistics to make sure that they get resupplied. So it’s not an easy problem, but it’s something that’s right in front of us and we just can’t look away from it.

17:31 – 17:45 

(SK): And taking that integrated air and missile defense example, you just spoke to a number of variables within that mission area alone. 

So as NATO looks to better field its integrated air and missile defense system, how does the alliance go about prioritizing which element goes first? 

17:46 – 19:10 

(JH): Yeah. Overall, when I look at the lessons learned from Ukraine and Russia war, the number one thing that stands out is neither side was able to get air superiority. 

So what we saw over the last three years is trench warfare, several casualties, bombings of civilian infrastructure and nothing that we want to be a part of. And if you contrast that with what Israel and the U.S. did against Iran, they were able to establish air superiority fairly quickly by doing counter anti-access aerial denial. So they were able to take those double digit surface-to-air missiles out and take other radar sensors that they had in Iran. And we could basically fly with immunity over Iran and take out high value targets, etc..  

What we weren’t able to do is take out all of their one-way attack vehicles. That’s just going to be a fact that we’re not going to be able to do that in the future, because they produce these things underground, they can set these things up anywhere, and it’s going to be difficult to get all of them. So that’s why we need to make sure that we invest in defensive capabilities for the few that actually get through. And we can’t do this for a long duration using expensive, exquisite shooters. We need to get way cheaper shooters to make that happen.

19:11 – 19:45 

(BH): And if I could add one nuance, Scott, to the way that you framed that question, I think a way a lot of people think about NATO. NATO is a collection of 32 nations that pool their resources to respond to a collective defense. NATO as NATO doesn’t actually own and operate most things.  

So one of the things that NATO can and should do is to provide that overarching framework that would allow countries to invest their resources in a coherent way so that those capabilities [that] come together, are interoperable and additive, and not that there’s gaps and seams. And that’s something I think we’ll talk about here in a minute, particularly as it relates to the space domain and the investments that are being made there.

19:46 – 19:50 

And as it relates to the space domain, what does interoperability look like for NATO? 

19:51 – 23:07 

(BH): Yeah, I think a couple things. One, NATO declared space an operational domain in 2019, but they’re continuing to struggle with defining what does that mean in practice?  

And so we see a lot of activity, but not necessarily the most coherent. For example, there are programs like the Allied Persistent Surveillance from Space, which is looking down like overhead imagery. 3SAS is focused on looking up. There’s a launch capability, there’s a SATCOM capability, there’s a group of nations that are getting together around these various mission areas and working on something.  

But there isn’t an overarching framework that is coherently driving those investments. Like I talked about. It’s not NATO as NATO investing in things. It’s individual nations investing in things. 

And when you get into something like space, which is very expensive and very complicated, that is ripe for these kind of multinational programs or even at the NATO level. Not that it would be a common funded, but the individual nations would be contributing to something. So there’s not a lack of programs, but there is a lack of coherent investment thesis. 

And so I think a couple of things that need to happen over the next period of time are in the NATO Defense Planning Process. In the last cycle, there was nothing for space, specifically. We need to get to a point very quickly that we are articulating those capability targets, which are the things that tell nations. Here’s what you need to go invest in.  

And I look at the Space Force. General Saltzman at the Space Symposium, rolled out the Objective Force baseline, clearly articulating by mission area, by geography. And there’s a classified annex that goes into more detail where we think we need to have those coherent investments.  

So that’s something even the US Space Force is still working on. So it makes sense that NATO would be struggling with that. But again, I think we need to get the right pieces in place, the right capabilities in place. 

And here a dynamic that we see a place is the commercial strategy. So there’s a team over there in the defense investment world that has created a NATO Commercial Space Strategy, which is largely in line with the U.S. strategy. But there’s an acknowledgment that in the same way the U.S. talks about e’ploit what you have, buy what you can and build only what you absolutely must,’ because it will cost billions of dollars and take decades to build capabilities and we have real operational challenges today.   

I think we’ve got commercial providers that are chomping at the bit to provide that. And so as this increase investment comes from the Hague Investment Pledge, and we have individual nations saying, “Hey, I’ve got X many millions of euros that I need to go spend and I’ve got to spend some of that on space, but I don’t have the first idea what is worth investing in.” NATO could help provide that framework so that we are investing those dollars in a coherent way to field real no kidding capabilities.  

And I think the last bit of that is the command relationships. And so once you get those pieces and parts together, NATO and Scorch can talk to this better than literally anybody because he owned that as the AIRCOM commander. He also owned the space function.  

There isn’t really a coherent way to command and control space capabilities that flows back through the U.S. under Operation Olympic Defender. We’ve got Space Force Space out at Vandenberg, which is the operational headquarters that actually deliver space effects on behalf of the U.S. And we coordinate with other nations under the Olympic Defender umbrella. But NATO as NATO does not really have much of an ability to command and control a space fight right now. 

23:08 – 23:45 

(JH): Yeah, Brad, information sharing when it comes to space is so important. The problem is a lot of nations, including ours, don’t share the information with the other countries, or in my case, the commander who is out there. So if I didn’t know what the capabilities were, it’s kind of hard to command and control it.  

So we were starting to tackle that and we released some things from the U.S. that previously we hadn’t released to NATO countries before, and I think that started the ball going, but I think we still got a long ways to go when it comes to information sharing, particularly when we talk about space. 

23:46 – 24:40 

(BH): Absolutely. I remember I went to the space ops commanders conference two years ago when you were still in that position and you said, “Hey, if I don’t know it exists, I can’t ask for it. So if you just want to whisper to I think it was Johnny Stringer. If you just want to tell one guy, tell Johnny, and he’ll be the keeper of all the information. You don’t even have to disclose how you would do stuff.”  

And then I understand. In the last year they actually put out a survey to try and get nations to in a more formal way to provide that input. And I think that that’s still a gap in the knowledge that’s missing. 

I know certainly from a U.S. perspective, that’s something that they’re interested in. And I think from a NATO perspective, the same thing: this idea of like, ‘Hey, what do nations have? What are they in the process of buying? And what would they be willing to do? From a trade-off perspective, would they be willing to invest in this capability as opposed to that capability, if they understood that in the aggregate everything was going to get taken care of? 

And I think that’s still something that we’re struggling with both from a NATO perspective and a U.S. bilateral with all the different nations’ perspectives. 

24:41 – 25:14 

(TG): Yeah, and I’ll just throw in on that. There’s an old policy from 2019 that misses the whole space revolution that basically says, “A couple of us big allies will take care of space for you – don’t worry about it.” But allies are moving out right now with or without capability targets.  

The Bulgarians have two nanosats doing Black Sea overwatch. They have their own satellite manufacturing company there in Bulgaria. So nations are going to move out one way or another in the next three years before those capability targets are there. And we do really need NATO to structure this so that we do it in a logical and effective way. 

25:15 – 25:45 

(SK): And on Brad’s point of NATO facing real operational challenges faced today in the space domain. We have a telling example from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, when one hour prior to the invasion, Russia deployed a cyber attack on a commercial satellite that Ukraine was depending on for their command and control. 

So here is an example of a country that was leveraging a commercial space service, which was then disabled in the context of a pending invasion. So to tie it back to the coming Ankara Summit, what conversation needs to happen today to make sure that NATO, or a NATO nation, doesn’t find themselves in a similar position? 

25:46 – 26:59 

(BH): If I was going to kind of reinterpret that question, I would kind of frame it in the terms of: Can we rely on commercial? If I have my own sovereign national system, I can protect that, and I know it’ll be there in the time of need. A commercial provider, whether it’s they say, “Hey, we’re not comfortable with you using that in a certain way, or they’re vulnerable to things that I’m not responsible for or able to defend them from those sorts of attacks.” 

It does present vulnerabilities. That is a challenge that has been acknowledged, and we’re actively working through that. But I do know that commercial providers in space are doing things that 5 to 10 years ago were the exclusive remit of a handful of nation states. 

And nowadays, if you’ve got a commercial provider who’s going to do on-orbit servicing and refueling, that is the equivalent of what is considered orbital warfare. If I can get up close enough to your satellite to touch it, fix it, refuel it, I can break it and take it where it doesn’t want to go. 

And so now we’ve got commercial providers doing everything up to and including that. It is unrealistic to think that we’re not going to rely on commercial, but there are challenges and risks, and we’ve got to ensure that we’ve got those systems available to us in a time of need. 

So that part of that is the agreements that we put in place. And part of that is, frankly, the agreements between those commercial providers and the government to go, “Hey, to the extent that you rely on these things, then there’s an obligation to protect those assets.”

26:60 – 27:14 

(SK): Thank you, Brad. And so NATO also has their political guidance window coming up in 2027. 

What opportunity does that present the alliance as far as taking a meaningful step towards ensuring NATO has space capabilities available to them at that future time of need? 

27:15 – 28:23 

(BH): This is a critical moment in time, right? So we mentioned the fact that in the last cycle, there wasn’t a demand signal from the political level of NATO to force the system to produce these capability targets that brought coherence to the space domain. 

The 2027 political guidance. If you look at the way the NATO Defense Planning Process operates, the guidance gets signed out that says, here’s what I want you to go do. Here is the level of ambition. Do these two big kind of conflicts, these 5 or 6 smaller conflicts, different geographies, different domains that results in what’s called the minimum capability requirement. 

So the guidance articulates that. And then there’s operational plans. And out of that we come up with here’s how much stuff we need. If there isn’t guidance in this cycle that says you will go develop some space capability targets, and we’ll figure out how we apportion those and how we hold people accountable to those and their kind of effects-based, not specifically platform-based. 

Then you’re going to miss the window of time. And if you miss this window of time, your next window is 2031, which won’t produce capability targets till like 2032-33 timeframe. So NATO has got to figure out in this next round of political guidance, a coherent approach to creating that demand signal for space, which includes the commercial stuff that we’re just talking about. 

28:24 – 28:49 

(SK): Now, moving this conversation forward once more, having 32 nations provide different systems and platforms to the alliance comes with an inherent integration problem that General Hecker referenced earlier. 

And going back to the F-35 example, there’s expected to be over 700 coming available to NATO through its member nations that will have to collect, process, and share massive amounts of data interoperably.  

So this question is for General Raduege. Sir, where does NATO begin to address this challenge? 

28:50 – 30:19 

(CR): Yeah, NATO begins with this by creating a framework of some sort of digital architecture to figure out how to connect those platforms. This modernization challenge where we have these digital assets and capabilities coming in and not having the reliant infrastructure associated with moving those capabilities, that information sharing that General Hecker talked about, it’s really a systemic problem and not the exception of today. 

What we’re seeing is really advanced platforms that are trying to operate on legacy networks, and they’re dependent on communications infrastructure that’s not designed for the contested environment that we’re asking it to fight in. And the big question is why? Well, I would say the digital backbone is harder to fund than the platforms themselves, and that’s simply because it’s a kinetic, non-kinetic discussion. 

What sells – that’s aircraft. What doesn’t sell is investing in your infrastructure. What we’re seeing is that innovation and modernization is indeed happening, and industry is, frankly, leading the way with many cross-cutting and great capabilities. But there’s no funding to put those capabilities in place. 

We can’t afford to just buy those capabilities and hope that interoperability works. So our biggest operational consequence, and really the threat to the alliance, is that every investment is dependent on the digital foundation that has not been proven under attack. If you summarize it in a meaningful way, the comms infrastructure is the limiting factor in this case. 

30:20 – 30:50 

(SK): And so, how does that also factor into the expectation that any system or platform leveraged by NATO is not going to be operating in a benign environment? In any modern day operation, there’s going to be a contested environment where every system is going to be facing jamming, spoofing, and electronic warfare attacks. 

So this question comes back to the command and control aspect, which we saw Russia directly target when it first invaded Ukraine. How does NATO ensure its command and control and the foundational networks you were referring to is resilient to this myriad range of attacks?

30:51 – 32:43 

(CR): Yeah. Resiliency, the word that we often utter, but quite honestly, sometimes misunderstand. When we talk about resilient command and control, we’re talking about having multiple pathways, whether that’s satellite, terrestrial, airborne, HF, what we would call our PACE Plan or Primary Alternate Contingency Emergency communications. It requires some sort of zero-trust architecture that always assumes that the network is compromised. 

It requires that cross-domain solutions allow for appropriate classification sharing at speed, and that there are pre-delegated authorities to allow commanders to act when that connectivity is degraded. And what I would say is that there are indeed pockets of excellence, but there’s an alliance-wide architecture that really remains a very fragile environment. 

The hardest part is not the technology itself, and it’s not the integration of that technology. It’s really the culture. It’s a cultural decision that must be made where we accept that the network is degraded and we design and train to that reality rather than optimizing for some sort of peacetime efficiency.  

The cyber command gap is real and Brad talked about some of that command gap on the space side. But frankly, NATO’s Cyber Operations Center provides coordination and situational awareness right now. They do not have the same authority to employ integrated cyber effects across the allied networks in times of crisis.  

NATO, what they really need is an exercise series that specifically designs to break the command and control under attack, not to test the architecture when it works, but to find where it fails when the crisis begins. Frankly, the days of assumed and exercised exquisite comms is over. We must practice resiliency in this place.

32:44- 33:27 

(JH): Yeah, Scott, I can just throw in when I would do my exercises. There is nothing more frustrating than if I had a team at a certain base and they didn’t even have a classified network, and there’s several bases that don’t. 

So then we built some teams that could go up and set up a classified network and then there’s different levels of classifications. Like when we were talking with space, some it’s just at the secret collateral level and then you need some that go beyond that and that needs to be a lot greater in the NATO countries.  

And I think there’s some good progress being made there. But we need to improve that even more, and then we need backup plans on top of that.  

33:28 – 34:22 

(CR): Yeah. General Hecker, that’s a great point. I had the privilege of serving with you in the European theater under the command of General Cavolli. General Cavolli at the outset of some of the Ukrainian operations, had an observation when he would go into some of the coalition C2 centers and at times there would be 80% of the environment was set up for U.S. secret and above operations, and the remaining 20% was all behind some plywood walls. 

And we’d say, go and do all the Coalition and Alliance comms over there. But never could the two speak. And so he would come to me and he’d say, “Chad, really what we’re looking at is the future fight is not 80% U.S. secret and above. It’s really 80% alliance coordinated activity where we can talk amongst ourselves and maybe you have that exquisite 20% that’s off in the corner, but we need to switch the model of what we currently have in place. 

34:23 – 34:56 

(SK): And another follow-up question for you, Sir. Earlier Brad spoke to the opportunities to leverage the commercial space industry for NATO’s space needs. But what about commercial opportunities in the cyber realm? Things like commercial cloud, commercial communications, data service exchanges, things of that nature. 

So, my twofold question here is this: One – what opportunity exists for NATO and NATO member nations to leverage commercial opportunities in cyber and cyber-related technologies? And two – how does NATO, to Brad’s point earlier about commercial space, ensure that resiliency, in its cyber systems? 

34:57 – 35:54 

(CR): It’s a great question. And what I would offer is that you start with the bottom line up front, which is asking yourself two important questions. 

 First, which commercial services are so operationally critical to your entire operation that their loss would degrade the mission execution? Question two is what is your plan to fight without those capabilities? You ask yourself those two questions and you start building in opportunities and resiliency.  

 There is continued opportunities for commercial providers to integrate into our live operations, and whether that’s some sort of stress testing exercise, simulating attacks, working through physical disruptions, having our commercial partners that are there, providing those capabilities from a cloud environment to cyber tools and techniques, having all of those things in place, I think creates a more realistic environment for us, and it also allows for that resiliency to be learned together.

35:55 – 36:14 

(SK): Thank you, Sir. Now as we look to close our conversation today, I have three remaining questions and I’d like each of you to respond to.  

The first is, given our discussion around the likelihood of the threat coming at the seams, what is the biggest seam NATO should be cognizant of and be prepared to protect against? And how does the alliance go about doing that? 

36:15 – 37:21 

(TG): Scott, I’ll go first on seams. Where Iran in Epic Fury, where we had the leakers come through our air defenses were generally along the seams. One of the biggest ones were the air pictures between the Army and the Air Force and I talked to the Ukrainians who went down with their system to go take a look at it. And they were like,”This is crazy.”  

There are 23 or 25 different air pictures, and they’re not all shared. And to Scorch’s point earlier, when you’re not sharing the air picture, either one you’re going to miss and you’re going to get leakers like what happened, or two, you’re going to fire more weapons at what you’re shooting at, then needed in an already adverse cost-ratio exchange.   

So the seams go right back to what Chad was talking about which is the exchange of information in the most seamless way is necessary. And in missile defense, one of those seams as Scorch brought up is the air and space seam that’s going to get bigger as space plays more in missile defense. 

 We’re going to have to sort that out before we spend the more than 100 billion on Golden Dome, because otherwise we’re just building on a rickety foundation and that’s not going to go well. 

37:22 – 39:31 

(JH): Yeah, Tom, let me talk about another one. This is more on the offensive side, but we do not have the capability to produce in the quantities available of offensive one way attack vehicles that are launched from NATO toward our enemy country that we’re fighting, and they’re cheap. So it’s easily the capability to get some of the nations that can’t afford F-35s, for instance, to buy a bunch and build the capacity to build a bunch of these one way attack vehicles. 

And those one way attack vehicles are not necessarily just going to be used like they are in Russia and Ukraine right now, but they will be part of a larger, coordinated attack for counter anti-access aerial denial. So you’re going to have space providing intel and EW and those kind of things. You’re going to have F-35s with stealth going in. 

You have to have the tankers to refuel all of this. You need your AWACS and those things going in as well. And we saw that they were able to make it happen in Iran with Israel and the U.S. But we need to practice that a lot more and then integrate these one-way attack vehicles at the same time, because that just creates a lot of confusion and the success rate will go way up if you can do that. 

And not only does it do that, it empties the enemy’s magazines. So now they are on the wrong side of the cost curve. They’re spending SA-10’s going after $30,000 drones as opposed to vice versa. So I think that’s a seam on the offensive side that we really need to get after and NATO has the capability to do that, particularly with some of our smaller countries. They would be perfect for doing that. 

And when I would talk to them, they’re more than willing. The biggest thing is when they go ask their defense minister to do it. There’s not a requirement, or at least there wasn’t when I left, I was trying to make it a requirement on the list of what NATO needs for equipment. 

There was nothing in the way of one-way attack vehicles. I don’t know, Tom, if that ever got through in that they’re on the list now. But defense ministers aren’t going to buy something that is not on the list that NATO needs.

39:32 – 40:35 

(TG): It’s a great point. And Brad, chopped down this road with the new political guidance that’s coming out in 2027. They didn’t make the list as far as I can tell. And it’s going to be a hard list because what kind of drones do you want or do you need? Do you specify a number of drones?  

It’s really about the effects. So where they’re going is effects-based kinds of things. And actually what they’re sitting on for 2029 is a disposition that is like if normally your country got told you need four fighter squadrons and you can come back to them and go, really, all I need are two fighter squadrons and four different squadrons of drones, and I can achieve the same effects. I’m just giving you a hypothetical.  

Nobody knows how to do that yet. And basically what NATO has done is go, “We’re open. Give us the argument, prove it to us, and we’ll accept it. More than likely.” 

So there’s going to be a real need for operational analysis to kind of come up with that and figure out what those capabilities are to do that. So it’s a really good point on the drones. And you’re right, it’s a big gaping hole in what NATO capabilities we have right at this minute.  

0:36 – 41:25 

(CR): Scott, I’d come in and talk about the digital seam. When we think about NATO communications architectures, faced with simultaneous jamming, cyber intrusions, physical attacks, and that those information sharing gaps between the Allied networks, that’s where we need to invest our time and our resources. 

We should be celebrating the fact that we found gaps, and that we’re closing those gaps through technology or processes. We should not be white carding these exercise environments. We should be recognizing that finding those gaps is exactly what the future fight is all about and we have to figure out a way of fighting through that.  

So it’s no longer a lost training environment because you can’t send the email. It’s no longer that the network is down and so everybody goes home. Now you have to figure out how to work through that and fight through that at the digital seam.

41:26 – 42:20 

(BH): And I think so I’ll end this off with sounding like a broken record. But on the space side, I think clearly articulating what the collective set of requirements that we need so that we have coherence in the investments that 32 individual nations are making, and then having the ability to command and control those effects. 

I mean, space is critical to any future battlefield in the same way cyber is. And so they’re going to have to figure out how to command and control those effects, particularly in the space domain. You think about like electromagnetic warfare capabilities, who’s doing PNT and SATCOM jamming, and what can I do about it? If I had some systems in the same way that we have like Patriots that do defense, we’re going to have those sorts of systems.  

And so even if it just starts with that regional EW kind of capability, getting those capabilities chopped to NATO and then having somebody with the authority to command and control those on behalf of General Grynkewich, as SACEUR, and then having the actual tools and systems that are able to do that kind of work, I think is something that needs to be sorted out over the next period of time.

42:21 – 42:30 

And as far as the Ankara Summit itself, what will you be looking for both at the summit and in the weeks and months to follow? What will be your metrics for success coming out of it? 

42:31 – 45:41 

(TG): I’ll lead off again on that. I’m focused primarily on the defense production and innovation follow through. And then on NATO 3.0, the only way that’s going to get fixed is by producing a lot more capabilities for European and Canadian allies. 

And I’m looking for two aspects out of that. You know, the cost exchange ratio of a $3 million PAC-3 against a $30,000 drone. This came up with the Ukrainians interestingly enough.  

In 2023, at the Munich Security Conference, he was the minister of Strategic Industries Commission. The Ukrainian asked to see me. And so I walk up and I say, “Hey, what’s going on?” And he goes, “Well, because here’s my issue. I have three different anti-tank weapons. I know how much each one of them cost by going on the internet. And I know from the battlefield how many it takes on average to kill a tank. So I’m doing cost-ratio analysis.” 

And he said, “Tom, I’d like to talk to the people at NATO that are doing this.” And I said, “Yeah, I’d like to too.” It’s not how we thought before, but it’s what we need to get at. So I’d like to see some progress on cost-ratio analysis. We’re talking about it more, but something needs to be done there. 

And then the other piece is on the acoustic sensors that Scorch mentioned, 20,000 of them. I talked to the guy that put that architecture together, and I said, “So was this some kind of requirement that the Ukrainian government gave you to fill to put acoustic sensors out here?” He goes, “No, there was no requirement when we saw that our friends and our relatives were dying and getting hurt and so we wanted to do something about it. So we made this up as we went to figure out how to do that.”  

They did not wait for an RFP and a full blown set of requirements to move forward. And it’s a different ecosystem than what we’re used to and we got a lot to learn from commercial. 

And one of the things that we were trying to and Chad will appreciate this. I was trying to get cloud solutions for NATO before I left and they said, “Oh boy.” Well, if you started tomorrow to get approval to pursue one of those kind of things, by the time you go through all the committees, it’s 54 months before you can spend the first euro.” 

54 months. That’s the process to get all the approvals done. And I said, “You got to be kidding me? Everything will be in a rearview mirror by then.” And they said, “Nope, that’s how the process works.” So we need to fix the process. And the folks at NATO headquarters know that. And this is the process of acquisition and what I think it needs to go down is there are a couple things that the Ukrainians do. 

They don’t let the perfect be the enemy of good. They have the operators talking directly to the innovators. When I went to Ukraine in March, I talked to one drone manufacturing company and she said, you know, “We set up 1-800 hundred number for the operators.” I go, “What do you mean?” She goes, “Well, you know, the guys on the front lines every night flying the drones. We gave them 1-800 fix it number so they can call in 24/7 directly to the engineers to get a patch made on the drone. When they see something not work, they just pick up the phone and call. And that next day they have a patch that tries to fix whatever they highlighted.”  

That’s not how our system works, in general. So if we’re going to get somewhere operators talking to innovators, don’t let the perfect be the enemy of good. Build it, try it, fix it, and rinse, lather, repeat. It’s more of the commercial operation than waiting on an RFP and doing a 30-day campaign to try and get a program a record going.

45:42 – 46:38 

(JH): What I’ll be looking for is, you know, last year they had the five-fold increase in IAMD commitment. What are they going to do this year to follow through with that? Because there needs to be a named force package review with measurable readiness standards to push this thing forward or otherwise we’re going to be here on this podcast next year talking about the same thing, right? So that needs to happen.  

How much we talk about the 5% GDP? That is 100% necessary. And the system that we need, needs to be integrated by design from the get-go. So everything’s talking to everything else, and we need to take advantage of all NATO countries capabilities, whether it’s exquisite capabilities like a Patriot or a simple triple-A on the back of a pickup truck that can shoot down a one way attacks, we need all of them. So we just need to get after it. So that’s what I’m going to be looking at, at the outcome of this.

46:37 – 47:06 

(CR): Well, I’m going to be looking to see whether a coalition digital backbone initiative is in fact directed with the specific architecture requirements that we’ve talked about, or whether the cyber and comms resiliency efforts will remain at the 1.5% category level. 

We do have a precedent for this in the alliance. We have NATO interoperability standards. On the communications protocol side. We need the same on the digital and data side as well and that’s what I’m going to be looking for.

47:07 – 47:53 

(BH): Yeah. And I think I would say the specific concrete plans for getting to 5% and investing those things in a coherent way, particularly as it regards the space domain, getting those capability targets in the NATO Defense Planning Process and the political guidance agreed, and then providing that coherence, updating the NATO space policy. When you talk to people over there, they go. “It’s still fit for purpose because it doesn’t keep us from doing anything that we want to do.” That’s certainly one way to look at it, but it also doesn’t tell you where you’re going and what you need to be able to do.  

So I would prefer if it was much more aggressive and forward leaning and driving things, as opposed to just looking and go, “oh, it doesn’t keep us.” That would be my pitch, is that we have a much more coherent way forward on the space domain to take advantage of the increased resources that are coming in as a result of the political moment that we find ourselves in.

47:54 – 48:11 

(SK): Now, our audience is made up of leadership across government and industry, who will also be paying attention to the conversations and actions coming out of the Ankara Summit. 

Can you share a little bit about Elara Nova and how the strategic advisory firm is positioned to support them as they respond to NATO’s needs?

48:12 – 49:02 

(TG): I think that what we’re seeing in Europe right now, the desire to grow the defense industry production pie means partnerships are going to win, despite the political shin-kicking that’s going on, companies still want to work with American companies. American companies have a lot that they can do with European companies. 

There’s a real opportunity here. And one of the things that Elara Nova can do is help companies navigate the partnership landscape. Who should you be partnering with? What countries are most forward leaning in the areas that you want to work in? 

That’s something that Elara Nova can be really good at helping companies in a bit of a matchmaking regime in order to get to the point where we can produce enough to, as Scorch said, to spend that money smartly rather than just spend that money. Scorch? 

49:03 – 49:32 

(JH): Tom talked about the 90 billion increase. Hopefully we get another 90 billion next year, and it looks like we might be on the U.S. side to 1.5 trillion. So there’s lots of money out there.  

And what Elara Nova can do is help you get partners and make sure that we spend that money wisely, like Tom said. So that’s with the operational backgrounds that we have with a lot of the folks that are on board, they can make that happen and we can do it smartly and your company can make money out of it as well.

49:33 – 50:05 

(CR): What I would offer from an Elara Nova perspective is that our value proposition is working at those seams. And we talked about seams in this conversation quite a bit, but what takes place in space and aerospace and cyberspace and how those things are interoperable together, that’s where Elara Nova is built, is to have these remarkable people that we have an opportunity to work with, with the relationships that we have around the world to integrate all those in a very meaningful way and so it’s that integration between multiple domains.  

50:06 – 51:16 

(BH): And I think I would say a couple of things. One, as we see nations going through these transformations, helping nations navigate those institutional capacity building, we have an unrivaled team of experts who have been there and done that at the very highest levels that can come alongside our allies, partners and friends and help them to navigate those transitions to say, “Hey, we learned lessons and you don’t want to go down this road. Here’s something you need to start thinking about early.” So we have the ability to kind of help in that regard from a national perspective.  

And I think with our commercial clients, whether it is European providers in this case who are trying to penetrate the U.S. market, or U.S. companies who are trying to penetrate the NATO market, the days of waiting for an RFP to then compete for a program of record and then be the company that wins that, and you’re going to have that business for the next 10 or 20 years. That moment is passing.  

And so understanding where the requirements are emerging and skating to where the puck is going. We’ve got the ability to provide some very unique insights in that regard, because we have deep understanding at the highest levels of where those enterprises are moving. And so I think we can help clients on both sides of that house understand where they should be going and where they should be investing that would be something that Elara Nova is fairly uniquely positioned to help with.

51:17 – 51:54 

This has been an episode of The Elara Edge. Elara Nova is the trusted global security partner delivering decisive advantage.  

As a strategic advisory firm, Elara Nova builds expert teams uniquely tailored for client needs to deliver actionable results. With the trusted insight to deliver your decisive edge, Elara Nova is your source for expertise and guidance in global security. 

If you liked what you heard today, please subscribe to our channel and leave us a rating. Music for this podcast was created by Patrick Watkins of PW Audio. I’m your host, Scott King, and join us next time at the Elara Edge.

NATO Ankara Summit Creates a Call-to-Action for Defense Industrial Base

Alliance Seeks Meaningful Progress on Last Year’s Defense Spending Pledge

Heads of State and Government from 32 nations will gather at this month’s NATO Summit in Ankara, Türkiye, looking to accelerate progress toward the goals agreed at The Hague Summit last year. The declaration pledged to strengthen collective defense by committing member nations to spend 5% of annual GDP on defense by 2035, deepen transatlantic defense industrial cooperation and reaffirmed support for Ukraine. Now, several factors are also heightening the stakes of the Ankara Summit: Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, recent conflicts in the Middle East and “NATO 3.0,” or the increased pressure on and intention of allies to take on greater defense investment and burden-sharing responsibilities. In response, there is growing momentum as NATO nations increasingly invest in defense capabilities, which presents an unprecedented call-to-action for the defense industrial base to respond in kind. 

“At this critical intersection, NATO nations see a more aggressive Russia, a more unpredictable America and a more challenging China, and those dynamics are driving allies to make decisions and take action,” said Tom Goffus, Executive Partner for Global Security at Elara Nova and the former Assistant Secretary General for Operations at NATO. “There will be three big focus areas at the NATO Summit in Ankara: implementing last year’s defense spending pledge, expanding defense industrial production and executing the NATO 3.0 concept.” 

In Washington DC at the Atlantic Council on 25 June, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte summarized the key themes of the Ankara Summit as: “Transformation in defence investment; revolution in defence industry; and affirmation of our enduring support to Ukraine.”  

Within this construct, he asserted that the major overhaul of defense spending and defense industry will deliver a stronger Europe in a stronger NATO – his NATO 3.0 definition.   

The Defense Spending Challenge

The Hague Summit’s 5% defense spending pledge can be broken down into two parts: 3.5% of spending for core defense requirements like plans, tanks and ships, and 1.5% on defense-related requirements like critical infrastructure, the defense industrial base and resilience.  

NATO’s framework for defense spending is known as the NATO Defense Planning Process (NDPP), a five-step process that occurs every four years in which threats are identified, operational plans are developed and capability targets are determined. The NDPP was most recently updated in 2025, which means the next set of capability targets won’t come until 2029. 

But as the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East have shown, capability needs are rapidly evolving as technologies advance. 

“There will be several new capability targets for 2029, that I believe will include space, autonomous systems and Arctic-specific capabilities,” Goffus said. “And at the Ankara Summit, we can expect positive announcements on spending plans for several NATO nations. Poland and the Baltic nations could be at 5% as early as this year, Germany and Sweden are looking to reach 3.5% years ahead of the 2035 timeline.”  

Defense spending by NATO nations is accelerating. According to the Secretary General of NATO, Mark Rutte, European allies and Canada have invested $90 billion more in defense spending in 2025 compared to 2024, a roughly 20% single year increase.  

Defense Industrial Production and Integration by Design 

Along side growing calls for greater investments under the NATO 3.0 concept and these substantive increases in defense spending, the defense industrial base must also expand to be able to accommodate this increased demand with greater production. One acute example is air and missile defense, a mission area where Secretary General Rutte called for a 400% increase in investment by NATO nations. 

“Our defense industrial base is not currently structured to produce what NATO needs at the volume and pace required for the threat,” Goffus said. “So NATO has announced that the Defense Industry Forum connected to the Ankara Summit will be the largest industrial event in NATO’s history. But increasing transatlantic defense production capacity takes time, that’s why NATO is also expected to officially launch its ‘Front Door’ for industry at the summit which will be a single portal where contractors can upload their innovative solutions.”  

This is one of many initiatives designed to answer the Secretary General’s call “To scale up production, spark innovation, and outsmart our competitors.” 

There’s also an inherent challenge of coordinating investments made by NATO nations in a cohesive way, so members are not duplicating capabilities or investing in ones that don’t directly benefit the alliance. 

“NATO needs to spend that money wisely in a way that’s integrated by design,” said Gen (Ret) James “Scorch” Hecker, a Senior Principal Advisor at Elara Nova and the former Commander of U.S. Air Forces Europe, U.S. Air Forces Africa and Allied Air Command at NATO. “To use the air and missile defense example, when each NATO nation would traditionally buy an individual air defense system, they often weren’t integrated with one another. This created a huge disparity between NATO’s ‘Critical Asset List’ of things that need to be defended, compared to its ‘Defended Asset List’ of what was actually defended.” 

Complicating matters further is the growing complexity and urgency of the air and missile threat. But even still, NATO can address this complexity if the alliance coordinates their investments appropriately.   

“We need to make sure that all 32 nations providing air and missile defense systems can address three different threats: ballistic missiles from space, air threats like fighters and cruise missiles and one-way attack vehicles like drones,” Hecker said. “While not every nation can afford a PAC-3 battery, several nations can buy the less exquisite anti-aircraft artillery necessary to respond to one-way attack vehicles. Yet all of these capabilities must still be integrated with a resilient space-based ISR and command and control architecture.” 

Calls for a Space Investment Framework 

Coherent space capability invesmtent and development is another emerging imperative for NATO, which first declared space an operational domain in 2019. This coincides with growth to a projected $1.8 trillion space economy by 2035. This presents an opportunity for NATO nations to meet their defense spending pledge by investing in space capabilities necessary for the alliance.  

“NATO nations are coming to the Ankara Summit with specific plans that show how they’re going to get to 5% by 2035,” said Brad Head, Executive Partner for Global Growth at Elara Nova and the former Chief of Defense Planning at the U.S. Mission to NATO. “But NATO as a collective defense alliance doesn’t actually own and operate most of its capabilities, which are instead provided to the alliance by the individual NATO nations. So what NATO can and should do is provide that overarching framework that would allow countries to invest their resources in a coherent way, so that the capabilities provided to the alliance are interoperable and additive.” 

While NATO released its own commercial space strategy in 2025, the alliance has yet to articulate capability targets for space in the NATO Defense Planning Process. But that’s also where NATO can look to recent actions from the United States Space Force to create a vision and a demand signal that the commercial space economy can respond to. 

“The NATO Commercial Space Strategy is largely in line with the Space Force’s Commercial Space Strategy, whose approach is to exploit what you have, buy what you can and build only what you must,” Head said. “General Saltzman also recently unveiled the Space Force’s Objective Force 2040 baseline to clearly articulate its capability needs by mission area and geography, with a classified annex, to coherently drive the service’s investments. NATO could provide a similar framework to coordinate Allied investment dollars in a coherent way and develop real value-add space capabilities. There are real operational challenges in space today, and commercial providers are preparing to respond.” 

The Digital Foundation Imperative 

Underpinning all of the capability investments of NATO nations, from air and missile defense to space capabilities, is a digital architecture to synchronize and coordinate the exchange of data and information that has become foundational to any modern fight.  

One primary example that puts this challenge into context is Secretary General Rutte’s projection that NATO will have over 700 F-35 fighter jets available to the alliance by 2032. A single F-35 can generate around a terabyte of data during every flight, which is equivalent to 500 hours of high definition video. 

Consequently, this creates an imperative for NATO to ensure that the hundreds of F-35s provided by its member nations can operate together and exchange data in an integrated fashion. 

“There’s a modernization challenge NATO has where advanced platforms are trying to operate on legacy networks,” said Brig Gen (Ret) Chad Raduege, President of the Cyber, Data and Communications sector at Elara Nova and former Chief Information Officer at Headquarters, U.S. European Command. “NATO needs to create a framework for a digital architecture that will connect all of these platforms. At the same time, NATO’s communications infrastructure is not designed to operate in a contested digital environment that defines modern warfare. So NATO’s biggest operational vulnerability, and threat to the alliance, is that every investment NATO makes is dependent on its digital foundation.” 

Likewise, NATO will require a command and control architecture that will be resilient in the face of the threat. This reality is evident in light of Russia’s cyberattack on a commercial satellite system Ukraine relied upon for command and control at the onset of its 2022 invasion. 

“As it stands today, NATO’s alliance-wide command and control architecture remains fragile,” Raduege said. “Resilient command and control means multiple pathways, such as satellite, terrestrial, airborne or radio frequency means as part of the Primary Alternate Contingency Emergency (PACE) communications plan. This PACE plan requires a zero-trust architecture that always assumes the network is compromised and has pre-delegated authorities for commanders to act upon when connectivity is degraded.”  

As the operating environment evolves across domains, the NATO Summit in Ankara will be a surefire indication of how the alliance intends to respond. It will then be up to the defense industrial base to position themselves accordingly, and that’s where Elara Nova is similarly prepared to support. 

“Right now, there’s a real opportunity because Europe has a desire to grow its defense industrial production,” Goffus said. “So despite the political shin-kicking that’s going on, there’s a lot of American companies that can work with European companies and support NATO nations in achieving their capability targets. One of the things Elara Nova can do is help companies determine which countries and companies to partner with so that NATO nations can spend their growing defense investments wisely.” 

Elara Nova is the trusted global security partner delivering decisive advantage. Learn more at elaranova.com