(radio interference) - Roger flight 807, approaching runway seven bravo. - The Air Force has announced the creation of a new information operations technical training school. (warping sound) - The First Command simply must arm our Airmen to out-think, out-perform, out-partner, out-innovate any potential adversary. - Air Force basic military training has an updated curriculum with a new focus on readiness and lethality. - This is the Developing Mach-21 Airmen podcast. (booming) Hey hey everybody, welcome in to the show, thanks for the subscribe, stream or download however you might be listening in as you drive home from work, or you're getting in that workout at the gym. We definitely appreciate you taking time out to give us a listen, if you get us a chance, we'd certainly appreciate the review, or even a few stars thrown our way as well, we always take time to listen to your feedback as we try to make this show a little bit better for ya. My name is Dan Hawkins from the Air Education and Training Command Public Affairs office, and your host for this professional development podcast dedicated to bringing total force, big AM and inside tips, tricks and lessons learned from the recruiting, training and education world. Episode number 15 of the pod today, and it's gonna be a great one as Lieutenant Colonel Eric Frahm, director of the AETC, Integrated Technology Detachment, which is based at the Capitol Factory in Austin, Texas joins the show, and he's gonna talk about innovation in the multi-domain operational environment, technology, Learning Next, how PTN got started, and a whole host of other topics. So it's gonna be a lot of fun as we go through this process today, and really, as a Command, AETC has been on a journey over the last few years to reimagine what the recruiting, training and education enterprise looks like, and how it operates, developing and inspiring Mach-21 Airmen who can step in right away into a multi-domain fight in a highly contested environment, and meet combatant commanders needs is vital to the Air Force's ability to execute its part of the National Defense Strategy. So innovation and training, as well as working towards a smarter and faster Air Force in terms of acquisitions, and producing those lethal and ready Airmen, is a huge part of how we, as a Command, are working towards the reshaping of how we do business. During the conversation, Colonel Frahm talks about his role at the ATID, which is AETC's piece of the AFWERX Austin hub, helping lay down the infrastructure, tools and resources that teams need to innovate inside their work environment. He also discusses how the ATID works in conjunction with numerous other innovation entities inside this innovation ecosystem to include the AETC staff and the A29. So it's really awesome, all the partnerships that happen, and in fact, Colonel Frahm talks in depth about the awesome partnership between AETC and the Air Force Research Laboratory to support this emerging innovation mission. One of the really interesting pieces, right out of the gate, that we talk about is how Pilot Training Next got its start after a joint collaboration on a paper at Air Command and Staff College about the potential of re-imagining pilot training through the use of virtual reality and artificial intelligence made its way into a MAJCOM commanders hands so you don't wanna miss that. Another great portion of the pod comes when Colonel Frahm talks about how the organizational structure needed to attack innovation, needs to look like. And his explanation of betting bigger on each step of the Pilot Training Next Program is simply eye opening as he describes on just how you build upon one success by rolling that success over to, in essence and in quotes, "bet bigger" and work towards that next success. We close out with Learning Next, which is critical to the multi-domain fight and centers around building Airmen with the required competencies who can make effective decisions very quickly inside the mission space. Individualized and immersive learning, both elements of the Learning Next concept, and Colonel Frahm explains how far students can go when they control learning, and he goes deep into explaining how this process is being used to help us learn, how Airmen learn. So strap in, acceleration to Mach-21, episode 15, starts right now! (whooshing) Colonel Frahm, tell us a little bit about yourself. - So, Eric Frahm, originally from Washington D.C., been in the Air Force, went to the Air Force Academy in '98, graduated in '02 and went to pilot training on a brand new aircraft called the T6, and the last class of the first fiscal year of the T6, moved from there to Offutt, where I flew the RC-135 for about five years. And then over to Beale where I did a way too brief stint with the U2's and the T-38's over there and then had the ability and the privilege to stand up the MC-12 program and took that program from pretty much its first deployment, I think I was on its second deployment, but we were back at Beale getting everything going, and so I was out in Iraq for a little while and then came back up as Initial Cadre, all the folks that became the permanent party for it, and then we took that one to its ultimate place, which is now in the Reserve Command, but we were doing the counter-insurgency fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, played a pretty significant role there we were pretty proud of. From that program I moved into the strategy world in about 2012, no 2014, and moved over to Air University, where I was initially at the Wargaming center, and at the time, Air University was undergoing a transformation with General Kwast to try and increase its operational impact. So we did a lot of work within Wargaming to speed up the Wargaming process, we took a one year process down to about 45 days, and we started focusing it on very specific emerging technologies to evaluate from an operational perspective what its utility would be. And then that converted into a couple of different projects at Air University, which ultimately became a job up at Air Force Research Lab. So, I had the great privilege of going up there to work in an office called Strategic Development Planning and Experimentation. And, so SDPE does what we call experimentation campaigns, to explore emerging technologies and strategies for the Air Force. So was the co-lead for experimentation within the multi-domain Command and Control ECCT, Enterprise Cross-Capability Collaboration Team, I think it is, and I'm probably wrong on that, but ECCT. So we were a roving band of misfits from around the Air Force traveling around for the better part of a year to produce a report on how the Air Force should pursue MDC2. And as that was closing down, some friends of mine from back at AU had written a paper that I had provided a little bit of advice on for basically a way to remake pilot training, to bring virtual reality and artificial intelligence into it, and it turned out General Kwast had liked the paper so much he wanted to go and try it. So that became an opportunity to get involved with this thing we call Pilot Training Next. Which then turned into an assignment down in Austin to lay down the infrastructure that these sorts of innovative teams need to operate effectively. So we at SDPE viewed it as a sort of a experimentation campaign to say "Okay, well how would a MAJCOM "innovate across a MAJCOM mission?" So these are very large scale problems, and we viewed it as a gap between the various innovation organizations that were getting stood up, that the MAJCOM's were not being given the tools or resources that they needed to pursue innovation at their level. And here we had a Commander who had a very broad, bold visionary statement to address. A long term unsustainability within the pilot force, and he was taking action, and we in SDPE were charged with essentially cleaning up what happens when we don't address those problems over a long duration. And we were able to make the case, successfully, that here wad a MAJCOM commander who was being very proactive and thinking ahead and devoting actual resources to that problem, and who are we to not help, if that's the case. So that's what we did. So I am actually still on a billet from AFRL, and this whole effort, this whole enterprise we've stood up, is a result of a deep partnership between Air Force Research Lab and AETC to support this emerging innovation mission and one of the things that I'm really proud of is that AETC and AFRL have put aside a lot of bureaucratic interests that come with trying to get credit and have really focused on how do we just be very effective. And I think we have started to prove out that case, and we're starting to see the other MAJCOM's take notice of what's going on down here, and starting to duplicate that model. So that's been a big part of what I'm trying to do is produce this as a model that others can follow and can make their own. And I think we've had some success at that. The other things that we've been doing across this innovation ecosystem that we've created here are trying connect these products into a cohesive whole that advance the MAJCOM's interest and that use resources very efficiently. - So you're at Austin, you talked about it, the Capitol Factory up there, AFWERX Austin Hub is up there, so it's a pretty lively bunch up there in Austin, but, for those that may not know, can you talk about the ATID, the Technology Integration Detachment, what it is, what the goal is? - Yeah, so and that is another partnership what I didn't even mention. So half AAI is AFWERX. AFWERX is the innovation arm of the Air Force. It is a more Airman focused version of that innovation arm that half has stood up, the other half being AFWIC, which I would say is more of a half focused, gigantic Air Force service level problems, is what AFWIC works on. AFWERX works on empowering Airmen. So AFWERX stood up a hub in Austin, and we at AETC were essentially the launch customer for that hub, and we devoted that hub to being very project focused. The ATID is AETC's representation at the AFWERX hub, the ATID stands for the AETC Technology Integration Detachment. So we have a very small band of very, very talented people, that we have begged, borrowed and stolen, from around the Air Force. And, again, deep partnership with the Texas Guard, Major General Ferrell has been extraordinarily supportive of us and has given us the cream of the Texas crop to get after all these problems. So she's given us seven of her top people. Everything from Public Affairs support to Force support officers to logisticians. And then we've also gotten assistance from AFICA, the Air Force, boy I'm gonna screw this one up too, Institutional Contracting Agency, I believe, which is part of Air Force Materiel Command. And they have given us one of the top contracting officers in the Air Force. So we've aligned financial management with program management with contracting support, with the developmental planning that Strategic Development Planning and Experimentation brings in, to tie these products together, to provide a staff liaison, to make sure, ultimately, that we put the MAJCOM's resources to work after these innovation projects and to get after these objectives that we've set down. So we do not control any of the projects. We advise the projects, we advise the Commander, we advise the staff on best practices and we advocate for the projects, but the way that AETC has structured itself around these products is to appoint somebody that we call the Slew, we named them after Slew Vicars who did PTN, so we appoint the Slew who is the project lead to go after a defined set of objectives. So with our Maintenance Next project, we're looking at how do I create a fantastic troubleshooter out of the maintenance crew force at a very, very young age? Well that's great for maintenance, but it doesn't get after the broader MAJCOM problem, which is how do we get our Airmen ready for the multi-domain fight that's coming and that some would argue is already here. How do we get people to be able to think well beyond their career field, well beyond their training and experience to solve an extraordinarily dynamic problem of synchronizing Air, Space, Cyber in a very highly contested environment where oh, by the way, you're completely cut off from leadership. So mission type orders, how do you move out, how do you integrate these forces together? The future that we think we're heading towards is one where we're gonna ask a Captain in an aircraft to make decisions that are right now reserved, really, at the Air Operations Center level. For a maintainer, how do you turn an aircraft, that potentially have very little experience on, how do you flip it around and get it back into the air as quickly as possible in a very austere environment, yet do it in a way that the airplane's not gonna fall out of the sky? That's a very hard problem. And, right now, we don't have a great ability to do that. And that's just not the way we've structured our training programs. And we don't really know if it's even possible. So that's what we're going out there and exploring and being ready to do. But the problem is is that you put this fantastic person in charge of that project, now they need to learn the acquisition system, they have to advocate for the resourcing they need, and oh by the way they have to go and remake this career field from the ground up. That's a very tall order, and what we wanted to do was provide all the backend services as just a function that makes it as easy as possible. So these folks need advocacy, they need support from the staff and it's a very complex process to work itself through, and if we're trying to do this quickly we have to make that available to them on a very rapid timescale and we need to do it in a way that allows that Slew, that project leader, to just get to work and concentrate on the real problem that we're trying to get at, which is how do we train these multi-domain Airmen for the future? - And really it also ties back, not just to the MDO, but also the Air Force's need for lethality and readiness in the Airmen that we train here in AETC and that are operating out in that operational environment, so really, you guys are a real touch point there. How tough has it been to stand all this up and all the things that come with the stand up and still make some headway on some cool projects and things that are really attacking Air Force problems? - Yeah, it's been a blast. But it has been tough. We have been working really, really hard, our team and I, for the last year or so, to get this off the ground and working for probably a good six or eight months very hard to get to the place where we could even stand something up. We're really proud of the progress we've made. We have some, I know it's trite and everybody says this all the time, but we have some great people. We work very hard to get people who can work with a very large degree of autonomy and start something up from scratch. But it's been a terrific learning experience, I think, for all of us, to learn how to build where there's nothing, but yet move these projects forward simultaneously, it's been an incredibly demanding environment, I think it will continue to be, but we're really proud of the progress we've made. - And on the innovation front in AETC, it's not like you're a one shop band. You also work in conjunction with others, like A29, on the staff. Can you talk about that AETC innovation ecosystem and how you fit in and how it all works together? - That's been another part of the fun, is figuring out how we structure ourselves around this problem. We're very good at operating established programs and squeezing the last ounce of efficiency out of that, it's something that the Air Force really excels at, frankly. But that's a very different problem from "Go explore this concept "and see if it's even valid." And how do you do that, and how you justify spending those resources that have been given to us as a valid expense, when I don't really know what the results are. So it becomes very important to have people who are experienced with the funding process and the personnel process as advocates. And that's what AETC A29 provides to us, is that level of support. It also gives us access to a little bit more rank than we have, so it helps to get peoples minds wrapped around it. It's a challenge being up in Austin, we're only 90 minutes away from Randolph here, but really once you cross the fence, and once you leave the headquarters building, you're on The Moon. So they are the local representatives here, and they are the ones who are working with the Commander to lay out the innovation priorities and to work through this process that they've instantiated that tries to gather all the ideas that are out there and morph them into something that makes sense for the Command to go after. We get a lot of ideas over at A9Z, and through this process we call the I-to-I process, the Idea to Innovation process, and they're doing a great job of calling that down, putting it in front of essentially an advisory board of the Commander and their Generals and all the key players from around the staff to say is this something that fits into this broad innovation vision that we have of what AETC is gonna look like to support this multi-domain enterprise? - And we talk about it all the time at AETC that we have to modernize our learning opportunities to train our Airmen, not just better, but faster and more efficiently. All those things that really matter, especially when we're accountable to the US taxpayer for how we're spending our dollars and how we're keeping pace with our peer and near peer adversaries across the world. But when you look at innovation in terms of lethality and readiness, at the end of the day, and developing our total force, how do you see innovation really being so important in that job? - So, I think it's important to note that there are a million different types of innovation, they are all important to pursue and they do not need a dedicated innovation organization to pursue them. I think, though, when you are talking about something that is a truly untested concept, we have to be prepared to set an organization aside. Because these untested concepts will be, by their nature, inefficient at the beginning, halting progress and require a lot of support and care and feeding. And if we're not careful, and if we put it in the wrong place, i.e. a place that's also concerned with continuing operations and doing these activities that are already up and running and effective, and have been run in a very efficient way. We place a lot of rules and procedures to ensure that something is going to be effective. But those rules and procedures get in the way and they become questions that have to be answered that are unanswerable for these newer concepts. And that's why you have to set it aside. As far as resourcing that is concerned, one of the things that we have done, within the ATID and within AETC, is say that before we're going to invest a dollar in these concepts, we wanna see that there's some reason to believe that we can get a 10x return on it. So that would be for every dollar I'm putting in, I wanna see a dollar return. Now, not everything is going to be realizable in financial savings. Some of it could be a mission impact or an effect that we can generate that we can't generate right now. And those are things that are harder to measure in terms of dollars, but we can try and we can get there, and so what we do, before we invest any money, or people, or time, into a project, we try to really discern out what is the opportunity space here and what gives us reason to believe this can be successful? And what that often means is the opportunity is relatively easy to imagine, but the effectiveness is hard to discern. So what we do is we bet very, very small and we demand, I don't like the term, but a quick win. Quick wins, in most people's parlance, is usually a relatively meaningless win, that's what I've seen a lot. But we demand a win that happens quickly. So it needs to be a legit "yeah, this concept is valid "we have some reason to believe in this, "we have some reason to bet bigger on this." And then we take the next little step, and then we take a little bit bigger step after that. And you can see this process unfolding within PTN. We made a very, very small bet out of AU, we wrote a paper. Then we made a little bit bigger bet through AU, we conducted some experiments and we partnered with Columbus Air Force base to take over a sim for a couple of days. But this is still a pretty small bet, we brought some people in and that kind of thing, but it was time more than money. A little bit of TDY. And we said "Oh, hey, we were just able too, "in this pilot program, take people out of the JAG school "who had never flown before "and teach them how to fly pattern in an afternoon." Well that's different, that's something we can't do today. What if we could do that for pilots? What if we took over a pilot training class and just took 20 students through, what's the comparative opportunity? Well the opportunity is, if you did this across all of flying in the Air Force, it's probably a billion or two billion dollars a year. Well, okay, this sounds interesting, but how does this solve an AETC problem? Well we have this pilot crisis, and if we were to go into a high order fight and lose a large percentage of our pilots, we have basically a very low ability to reconstitute ourselves quickly. This could get us there. It could also experiment with these other theories we've had about these aggressive learners, people who can be put into a sea of information and figure it out for themselves, can we do that with this pilot training thing? And all of a sudden it starts looking like "You know what, this is gonna cost us a lot of money, "it's gonna cost us aircraft and instructors "that could otherwise be training "people in a known system, but if this is right, "they're going to be training pilots, "so maybe this isn't that much of a cost, "so what's the money?" Okay, we think this is an affordable bill, but it is a significant bill, so we had some important discussions about that, but we ultimately committed the money. And it was a large bet, and the bet paid off. And now we're continuing that experimentation with a larger bet and we are beginning to talk about how do we incorporate this into 19th Air Force itself and into the way we operate? And that's going to involve a larger outlay of money. But it's still not "Okay, great, we're done, "we've learned a lesson, let's go field it." And we'll just spend a really large sum of money and take a risk with a great operation that's been up and running for a long time, we're making these small halting bets that are experienced based and are based on true, measured effectiveness. - And as we get closer to wrapping up, I just wanted to touch on Learning Next, and we talked about, for example, Pilot Training Next, but that Learning Next mindset. Can you talk about what that really means? Because you hear the term "Next" and it's been applied to a few different things, but it's really part of a broader picture, and that's that Learning Next thought process. So could you just talk about that? - Yeah, so I touched on it real briefly there, within the Pilot Training Next context. What we are interested in doing, and what we think we need for the multi-domain fight, are Airmen who can think very broadly, very quickly, in an area with very little guidance. So Learning Next centers around finding these aggressive learners who can take disparate pieces of information, collect it together, and make a very effective decision without a lot of guidance. And so that is the environment we're trying to put people in, so we give them access to a wealth of information, and then we try to create a learning environment that allows them to accelerate at their pace. And what we have found through this thing we called individualized and immersive learning, is that that is the key. So the individualized piece is the ability to allow them to move at their pace instead of the pace of a syllabus, which is effectively a lowest common denominator pace, in the way we've implemented it. So that is the individualized piece. The immersive piece is a place where there isn't necessarily a direct go do for the day, there is a series of objectives for the training program, there are some milestones that they need to hit, but essentially there are just competencies laid out and there are real metrics to judge when they have achieved those competencies. But it's up to the learner to determine how best to get there given the information that's available to them. So, in the case of Pilot Training Next, we give them all the information they need, all the traditional phases of pilot training, of contact, instrument, formation, navigation, are open to them at any one time, what we're really interested in is, can you fly a plane? And what we find is they jump to the thing that most interests them right now, which is usually the stuff that's most difficult. It's instrument and formation flying. And they jump right to it, and they start, for themselves, filling in all the blanks that get them there. And so these things that, when I went through Pilot Training took me six months to get too, they're now doing literally on day one. And so we have students who, on their first flight, are flying instrument approaches down to minimums in the weather, and they're not doing it perfectly, they need an instructor, but they're getting it done. And then on their third ride are flying formation too and from the area. This is not tactical formations, they're ready to go fight in a fire, but it's effective formation that gets you too and from an area without a whole lot of maneuvering. These are things that were unimaginable previously. And what we're seeing is, learners exposed to this environment are able to accelerate well beyond, on average, well beyond the syllabus would otherwise dictate. And they're able to train much faster at a much lower cost point, and with much higher levels of satisfaction for their experience. But what we think, more importantly, what this boils up too is an Airman that is much more independent, and much more capable of operating in this environment that we think we're heading towards. - And that Learning Next mindset really talks to the paradigms that we're trying to bust. We're making competencies, that an Airman has, is now the standard for them, not the time, well it's a one year training program, so we've gotta have 'em here for a year. If they can get to those competencies in half of that time, maybe that's the right answer, and that's kind of what we're looking at here, is really revolutionizing how we really view that development of our force through recruiting training and education. - But I think one thing that's really important to note is it's not about cutting cost and it's not about cutting time out of the timeline, those could be outcomes, that's a leadership decision, and it's really resourcing decision. This is about competencies. There's always another competency we can train somebody to do or frankly cut, if we felt like it. What we wanna do is be able to minimize the time and resources it takes to get a given competency. And what that creates, if you were to look at a time based schedule, it creates white space for resourcing. So I can cut time out of the schedule, which would save money or get somebody to the field faster, or I could say "You know what, the timeline "that I have right now is perfectly fine, I'm happy with it, "the resourcing I have is perfectly fine, I'm happy with it, "I'm gonna use this additional time that I've been given, "or this additional white space that I've been given, "to train to a different level of competency, "and now I can get a better Airman "in the same amount of time, or anything in between." So that's what this is about, is how do we get to a competency based system? Which is the effect we're really trying to generate here. How do I get to a given level of competency as quickly and as efficiently as possible, and in a way that generates this next generation effect that we're trying create, which is this multi-domain thinker who is more lethal and ready for these highly contested environments that we hope to never see but, boy, we better be ready. - Absolutely, and just excited times, right. To be an Airman in AETC with innovation and just really looking at how we're doing business with innovation kind of as the cornerstone of how we're doing business, it's real exciting. But I wanna say thank you taking time out of your busy schedule, know you guys got a lot going on, but this was a lot of fun. - Thank you, it's been fun. - Just a ton to unpack on the pod today, truly an in depth conversation centered the First Commands journey with innovation and how Learning Next is impacting how we recruit, train and educate our future Airmen along the continuum of learning as we attack those big Air Force priorities of more lethal and ready Airmen and a smarter, faster Air Force. So, big thanks to Lieutenant Colonel Frahm for taking time out of his schedule to join us on the pod, today. As a reminder, you can follow Air Education and Training Command on social media, including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, as well as on the web at www.aetc.af.mil. From our entire AETC Public Affairs team, I'm Dan Hawkins, so long, we'll talk to you next time on Developing Mach-21 Airmen. (upbeat hiphop and techno music)