From the Crows' Nest | Sustaining EMS Superiority

In this episode, host Ken Miller sits down with Col. William “Dollar” Young, Commander of the USAF 350th Spectrum Warfare Wing to discuss how the Air Force is addressing the challenges of achieving and sustaining EMS Superiority.

Show Notes

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Creators & Guests

Host

Ken Miller

AOC Director of Advocacy & Outreach, Host of @AOCrows From the Crows' Nest Podcast

Producer

Laura Krebs

Editor

Reese Clutter

What is From the Crows' Nest?

This podcast features interviews, analysis, and discussions covering leading issues of the day related to electromagnetic spectrum operations (EMSO). Topics include current events and news worldwide, US Congress and the annual defense budget, and military news from the US and allied countries. We also bring you closer to Association of Old Crow events and provide a forum to dive deeper into policy issues impacting our community.

Ken Miller (00:10):
Welcome to From The Crows' Nest, a podcast on electromagnetic spectrum operations, or EMSO. I'm your host, Ken Miller, Director of Advocacy and Outreach for the Association of Old Crows. Thanks for listening. All right, on today's episode, I have US Air Force Colonel William Young, call sign Dollar. He is the commander of the 350th Spectrum Warfare Wing. And for our regular listeners, you'll know that I was able to sit down with Dollar back at AOC's convention last year. It was a great conversation. Unfortunately, it was a little too short and so I wanted to have the opportunity to sit down with him for a more in-depth conversation.

Ken Miller (00:46):
Unfortunately, he's a very busy man, but I was able to grab him at our recent Dixie Crow conference that took place a few weeks ago back at the end of March. And we had a good conversation, so I wanted to bring that to you today. Before we get to the conversation, however, this has been a very busy spring, defense conferences pretty much every week, and as you're listening to this episode, I am currently at AOC's Electromagnetic Warfare Gaps in Capabilities Conference out in Crane, Indiana. And so, I'm sure that there'll be many good conversations to have out there and that I'll bring to you in future episodes.

Ken Miller (01:20):
But the last few weeks, I had the opportunity to go to Directed Energy Professional Society Science and Technology Conference, and actually had the opportunity to run a session on EMSO out there. As some of you may know, we've had a longstanding collaboration between the two organizations, DEPS and AOC, for a few years now. And it's really to basically improve cross-pollination, just bringing our communities together, cross-pollinating some of the information and thoughts. And it's funny, the first year that I went there, I had a lot of people come up to me and whisper like, "What are you doing here? You're EW, we're directed energy. We're not the same."

Ken Miller (02:00):
And now, just a few years later, hopefully, in part, because of this collaboration, but it was really interesting that the entire conversation the whole week was about EMSO. It was about how directed energy and electronic warfare have to work together for spectrum superiority. So it was a really refreshing week, great conversations, and I had the opportunity to run a session on that, and we basically talked about how EMS superiority is really the backbone to mission success. No matter what you want to do on the multi-domain warfare front, you have to have EMS superiority first.

Ken Miller (02:34):
And you can dance around all the terminology you want, but at the end of the day, what we do here with EW, electromagnetic spectrum operations, is critical to mission success. But a lot of the conversations we had there, some of the presentations were how electronic protection is critical. We have to really be intentional and invest in that area, bring that into the community a little bit more clearly, work with directed energy. When you talk about multifunction systems, getting that system that can do both electronic warfare and directed energy all the way from ... anything from radio frequencies to HPM, to high energy lasers, that's the way of the future.

Ken Miller (03:14):
So, I really applaud DEPS for their work on that front and the path that they are on. I had a great chance to go to a new conference, Society for Military History, to basically share our sister podcast, The History of Crows. If you have not heard that podcast, I'd encourage you to go to crows.org to download and listen to those episodes. But what was really interesting out of that one was the simple fact that an organization we've had no engagement with over the years had presentations that they were talking about how important electronic warfare and electromagnetics spectrum operations were to 20th century warfare. So I had a chance to talk to a few folks there, and hopefully, we can begin a more collaborative relationship in the future.

Ken Miller (03:59):
And then last week, I had the opportunity to go to AOC's Cyber Electromagnetic Activities Conference with the army up at Aberdeen Proving Ground. Once again, one of our signature conferences, great time to get out and learn where the army is going. And a lot of the conversation really focused on this trend from coordinated EW systems to collaborative systems to intelligent EW systems, and really what the army has to do across organization training investment. So it was a good time.

Ken Miller (04:29):
I think the army is on the right track, and I think that all the services are doing some really good things. I think the challenge moving forward, of course, though is accountability and making sure that the dollars and the authorities flow into the programs and operations as we talk about at these conferences. So, I applaud the army for all the work that they've been doing, and I hope that success continues, and hopefully, we'll be able to bring you some more information on that in the near future.

Ken Miller (04:58):
But with that, I'd like to get to our interview with Dollar Young. Again, this was from Dixie Crow, but it was a good conversation where we sat down. We were able to go a little bit more in depth on what the Air Force is doing to ensure that it can provide its piece of EMS superiority in multi-domain operations. So, Dollar, it's great to have you back on From The Crows' Nest. Thanks for joining me.

Dollar Young (05:22):
Thanks, Ken, for having me and as always, thank you to the Association of Old Crows for all the great things they do for the nation and the war fighter.

Ken Miller (05:30):
I always enjoy hearing you speak for two reasons. Number one, you do a great job at really bringing the problem to the forefront and talking about what the Air Force is doing, but what we need to do across the services, but then also the Air Force has made some tremendous strides over the last year, and there's still a lot of question marks in terms of where things are going to go in the future, but the work that's been done is very encouraging because it feels like the Air Force is understanding the problem at hand and really making some bold changes.

Ken Miller (06:01):
When you started your presentation, you talked a little bit about a new initiative that's about two weeks old. Your position, the commander position of the Spectrum Warfare Wing is now identified as Crow One. And a lot of this had to do with making clear the identity of the Spectrum Warfare Wing and that organization. I wanted you to start off talking a little bit about this designation, because I think it's really important when we get into the discussion of culture and identity.

Dollar Young (06:31):
Yeah, Ken, I think that we are very, very fortunate to have Brigadier General TC Clark as the leader in the A26L at headquarters Air Force. We recently had a meeting in San Antonio, where he brought together all of the ecosystem in the Air Force that focuses on EW, EMS operations. And a little bit about his past, his wing commander job was as the 8th Fighter Wing commander at Kunsan, affectionately known as The Wolf or Wolf One.

Dollar Young (07:09):
One of General Clark's lead initiatives has been to focus on culture and to advance our culture as a group of EW, EMS professionals. He designated the 350th Spectrum Warfare Wing commander as The Crow or Crow One, and I think it's a very, very important step forward because it really does get to our identity as a body of EW, EMS professionals, and it's not about me as Crow One, but rather it recognizes the fact that, organizationally, we in the United States Air Force now have a wing that is entirely focused on the delivery of EW, EMS capability.

Ken Miller (07:55):
And identity is such a critical piece in culture. When you're talking culture change, you have to first know who you are, and I think that's been something that has been really lacking in DoD, especially in the Air Force probably since the early '90s. There isn't a real set identity for a Crow in the Air Force or in DoD. And so, this is a new step, but it's actually a really positive recognition that identity and this notion of bringing an organization together with a shared problem and a set of at least acceptable or shared solutions under an identity, that's a huge motivator for a future change.

Dollar Young (08:39):
Yeah. Absolutely. To the point of identity, let me give you a concrete example of what that looks like in our United States Air Force. Our wing has electronic warfare officers from several different platforms, and if you were to ask one of the electronic warfare officers that flew Strike Eagles, which again, General Clark did this, asked him, "Hey, do you identify yourself as an F15-E WSO, or do you see yourself as an F15-EWO?" And the individual said, "F15-E WSO."

Dollar Young (09:16):
And then he thought about it. And he said, "Well, actually, sir, probably a better answer is the F-15 EWO." And again, it's that identity? I believe it's Carl Builder wrote the book, The Masks of War, where he analyzed the cultures of each of the services. And he talked about the United States Air Force worshiping at the altar of technology, his words, not mine, but I think his point is important because we associate ourselves with our platforms increasingly. And the challenge with that becomes their electronic warfare, electromagnetic spectrum operations is not a platform, it's something that crosses across multiple platforms. It's something that we can't do even at the pointy edge without the support of a broad ecosystem.

Dollar Young (10:08):
That ecosystem includes, of course our flyers, but it includes the maintenance professionals that maintain the equipment. It includes the intelligence specialists that prepare the intel that we need to effectively engage. It includes the acquisition professionals that acquire the systems that are on the platforms. It includes academia that does the research that will lead to future capabilities. It includes industry that provides the raw materials and those systems that we within the Spectrum Warfare Wing are fortunate to be able to integrate and deliver as capabilities to our war fighters.

Dollar Young (10:50):
All of us have to work together, and it's just so happened that, again as the Crow, I'm privileged to lead the team that's on the pointy edge of pulling all that great capability, all those great ideas together and putting them in the hands of our frontline war fighters.

Ken Miller (11:08):
And that ecosystem is growing exponentially, it is not just the sectors that are involved, but what each of those sectors is responsible for doing that is, in some ways, growing faster than maybe we can keep up with. But I wanted to touch on that just a little bit more, because I think before we started recording here today, I was interviewing for The History of Crows, we were talking about back in Vietnam story related about an EWO on a particular platform in Vietnam, and the EWO was saying, "You don't want to hear from me or know that I exist during the operation, because if you do, something's wrong."

Ken Miller (11:47):
That's true, but that speaks to a really almost narrowly defined role that EW or the EWO played in the Air Force or in the military services at the time. Today, that's not the case because it's much more than survivability, it touches every aspect of operations and will continue to grow in its importance in operations to the point where we can't expect to go in and succeed or have an advantage unless we start with the EMS.

Ken Miller (12:17):
So, I wanted to get your thoughts on this notion of, when we talk identity, we're not just talking how we used to think of ourselves, but we're coming up with a new interpretation or image of ourselves moving forward, and trying to put that into or fit that into an organization has got to be a really difficult task.

Dollar Young (12:37):
Yeah, it is a massive challenge, but I'm blessed to have a great team both of leaders and a multidisciplinary group of amazing airmen officers, enlisted civilian and contractors that help me lead it, but they do all the hard work in terms of a specific example of this broader use of the electromagnetic spectrum, and it's imperative to war fighting and competition. What I will point to is the Air Force's recent rollout of the framing of what Jazzy 2 looks like. It was about an eight page paper that was released a couple of weeks ago, but it talked about Jazzy 2 at the heart of it being the ability to sense, make sense and act.

Dollar Young (13:31):
And what I would point to folks and highlight is the fact that we sense almost entirely through the electoral magnetic spectrum. So there's no way that you can do Jazzy 2 without the ability to sense. And you have to be able to sense accurately, and adversaries will try to contest our ability to sense. That's the history of warfare. It's just that now we've elevated it to such a level where that ability to sense is absolutely fundamental and critical. And we are the organization that is charged with ensuring that our war fighters have the tools that are required to do that sensing in and through the electromagnetic spectrum. But not just sensing, but then action.

Dollar Young (14:22):
So if you consider the fact that our orders and directions for how we integrate as a war fighting team are almost exclusively delivered through the electromagnetic spectrum. I joke about the fact that if you look on your operational view one or your OV-1, you'll find a bunch of lightning bolts. Prior to 25, June of '22, there was no single ... I'm sorry, of '21. There was no single organization that was charged with making sure that those lightning bolts were there in time of conflict.

Dollar Young (15:00):
So, coming back to Jazzy 2's process model, if you want to call it that of sensing, then making sensing and acting, the sensing is almost entirely through the electromagnetic spectrum. The action, once we've made sense of things, the action or the direction, or the guidance that's given to integrate and connect all those individual capabilities into a single war fighting entity is delivered through the EMS.

Ken Miller (15:26):
One step further, the making sense piece of it is also because you're talking a lot of the cognitive machine learning AI, that's really kind of the focus of future EW spectrum technologies that you can't really sense accurately unless you have the technology to make sense of it. I mean, all three of those equally play a role in that.

Dollar Young (15:50):
Absolutely. And thank you for bringing that up, artificial intelligence and machine learning, that is going to be fun. It's fundamental today in the commercial world, and it will increasingly become fundamental to the nature of warfare. We know it, our adversaries know it. And so it's a competition, but I think that ... I'm glad you brought that up because your ability to make sense it's though garbage in garbage out, and your input is coming from sensor data, which requires sensor engineering of the platforms, which again, is what the professionals in the 350th Spectrum Warfare Wing do day in and day out.

Ken Miller (16:29):
Now, I promised you before we started that I wouldn't go through your entire presentation because your time is limited, but your first slide, you had a slide ... here's where we're going, and you said that the statement was to deliver ad hoc, novel, kill webs on demand. That's great. A lot of keywords though, that I don't know how familiar DoD military services are with, the notions of ad hoc and novel, and of course then on demand.

Ken Miller (17:01):
So, I wanted you to unpack that statement because I think it's a great statement, but how are we prepared to really execute that statement, and what is the role of the 350th in changing the way so that in future combat, we can on an ad hoc basis deliver novel, kill webs on demand?

Dollar Young (17:23):
We could actually circle back to how it fits into the Jazzy 2 concept or process of sensing, making sense, and then action, whereas where the kill web is how we're going to be able to action things. So I think folks generally understand that, where we're talking about the capability to be able to connect sensors to shooters, again, there's far more to it than that. So I won't, for the sake of brevity, go into all that. But if you look, that's what we really want to be able to do is to be able to prosecute a fight at a point in time of our choosing.

Dollar Young (17:59):
But if you look at the nature of ad hoc, that goes to the ability to go beneath the skin of our various platforms and be able to view the individual line replaceable units and increasingly the reprogrammable multifunction arrays and the software defined radios that are on all of our platforms and be able to now not be limited to that platform itself, but be able to look at platform A, that's got some set of software defined radios, reprogrammable multifunction arrays. Platform B, which has its own set of software defined radios, and reprogrammable multifunctional arrays, and platform C, which has its own individual composition of software defined radios and reprogrammable multifunctional arrays.

Dollar Young (18:53):
And then now be able to take some of A, some of B, some of C and compose those into a new system. And when I say system, what I mean is that, it might be that the sensing capability of platform A, combines with the sensing of platform B to provide a queue to platform C, the ad hoc nature is based upon the fact that before now, platform C would've had to do everything by itself. And so, the only way to make platform C more effective in combat, would've been either upgrade it or by a brand new platform C, which our acquisition professionals are working very, very hard to be able to do that more rapidly, but you're just limited by acquisition physics. I'll call it in terms of how fast you can get new hardware and how fast you can get new operational flight programs onto the systems.

Dollar Young (19:53):
But what we're talking about here is the ability at, let's say, an A space to forward as the Air Force begins to really integrate that concept and present targeting problems for our adversaries to be able to now compose or force package at the component level. I'm a weapons officer, we study the ability to force package at the platform level. How do I put together strikers and bombers with seed assets in order to kill a target? But what we're talking about here in terms of ad hoc is to go within the skin of the platforms and just pull together those capabilities we need in order to solve the specific tactical problem for today. Idea being, that we'll do it again tomorrow and the day after that, and the day after that.

Dollar Young (20:43):
So that's the ad hoc nature. So now let's talk about the novel. The novel means that we can present things that have never been seen before by an adversary. So returning to my example about combining the software defined radios from platform A and platform B to support shooter platform C, the novel nature is platform A and platform B might be two different airframes that have never worked together before to deliver that capability, maybe platform A and platform B have supported platform C in some ways, maybe they're provided fighter cover, maybe platform C is a bomber, and platform A and platform B are fighters.

Dollar Young (21:30):
So yeah, in terms of escort or fighter cap, they've done that, but taking sensor data or sensor engineering data from platform A and platform B to be able to provide threat warning for platform C or targeting data may never have been done before.

Ken Miller (21:51):
One of the challenges that we've had from AOC perspective with advocacy over the years is trying to get leaders, stakeholders comfortable with the familiar, being able to trust the familiar, whether it's the legacy system, or even just the capability that we have in the field today, trying to get people to understand the role that traditional EW plays. How do you then change the thinking and the culture so that the stakeholders, the upper echelon commanders are comfortable and trustworthy with the novel, not just the familiar?

Dollar Young (22:31):
Yeah. I think that novelty is a blessing and a curse. Novelty provides the ability to increasingly place adversaries on the horns of the dilemma. Part of the nature of the dilemma that you pose is something that's never been seen before. So, today we're limited by our TTPs, but what we're talking about going forward is the ability to throw new capabilities at them. It's the equivalent of being able to have a new app, for example, for your iPhone, that gives you the ability to behave in a way that you've never behaved before.

Dollar Young (23:19):
I know when I get new apps, I start to change my behavior. And if you use that as just a rough microcosm of what it is we're talking about, if we could put the equivalent of new apps on our airplanes that maybe, for example, use a new wave form that's never been used before, or couples or a couple of different wave forms off of different platforms to produce a synergistic effect on a target, that's novelty.

Dollar Young (23:50):
So the blessing of that is, bad guys haven't seen it, and if you look at the ability to use that novelty or newness to counter AI, because it's new, you cannot be almost certain that it was not in the training data used to equip that AI. AI's awesome, but I would argue it's basically an idiot savant, it does the things you built it to do in the existing environment that you had all the data for, it does it really fast and really well.

Dollar Young (24:23):
But what we're talking about through novelty is the equivalent of forcing a checkers expert. That is the world's greatest checker player that overnight tomorrow I'm going to tell you, and again, automation. Now I'm going to make you play chess. All you know how to do is play checkers. That's novelty. And the way we deliver that, again, hypothetically is through the introduction of new wave forms, new combined capabilities that have never been seen before. That's the novelty. So that's the positive side, very, very effective and cause placing adversaries on the horns of a dilemma, especially when coupled with new tactics, techniques and procedures. That's the positive.

Dollar Young (25:08):
Now the challenge is, and I think this kind of goes to your question, is how do we make sure we introduce more confusion on the adversaries than we do to ourselves? And the only way to really get after that is through practice. So we have to be very, very deliberate in terms of making sure that our war fighters are getting the opportunity through sets and reps, to be able to practice these new things and be able to get after what ifs that provides them the opportunity to gain familiarity and ultimately trust with these new capabilities. And that also speaks to why initiatives such as the virtual test and training center initiative that the Air Force and my boss, Major General Cunningham is championing in the warfare center is so important.

Ken Miller (26:01):
A lot of that does get into ... we were talking a little bit about the iPhone aspect, because I think there are some parallels too that ... I have 150 whatever apps, I know which ones I'm going to use because they're the ones that update automatically. And so, when they're updated, I know I'm conditioned to be more comfortable using them because I trust the app provider, Apple to update them as necessary. And when a new capability is introduced and they say, "You need this." I'm more likely to say, "Okay, yeah, I do need that because I know how it's going to be updated, I know that based on my behavior this is what's necessary."

Ken Miller (26:39):
So, when you try to translate that a lot of this notion of trust really goes down to acting and you were talking about introducing that and getting people familiar with it, using it, whether it's testing, training, getting people to understand that the app that they have there is there for a reason, and they can use that with the understanding that it's going to work and do what needs to be done. We don't ever sit back and think how these apps work, but we know that they work and we then realize we need them.

Ken Miller (27:09):
So, what are some of the ways that we can do to get our war fighters across platforms, across mission areas to be more comfortable using EMS technologies in the field so that this level of trust is built up, which would then, in theory, allow the Spectrum Warfare Wing and your partners in other services to provide these capabilities with immediate effect in the battle space?

Dollar Young (27:37):
Again, Ken, a great question. And let's maybe walk through a hypothetical use case or value chain of what that might look like. So you can imagine industry partners coming up with a capability, maybe it's a new algorithm, maybe it's a new wave form, and that wave form could then come into what we are calling the attack app store. So it's very much similar to the way you think of the app, your metaphor with the iPhone. And so, the Apple has its universe of developers, we will have our universe of developers.

Dollar Young (28:19):
The capability or the app, whatever form it takes, comes into, like I said, what we're calling our tech app store inside the Spectrum Warfare Wing. Once it gets to us, we've got to host, test, integrate and deliver. And so the hosting is what occurs on a tech app. And then what we've got to do is test it to make sure that Apple doesn't just take anybody's app and put it on the app store. It goes through some level of testing to make sure it adheres to the standards, you can expect to see some time in the very near future, a set of mission wear standards aligned to, of course, the open architecture such as SOSA, but also compliant with things like Big Iron software framework, for example.

Dollar Young (29:07):
So it's now made available to [inaudible 00:29:09] So once we've hosted it and tested it, then we need to integrate it. So making sure that it can fit on particular platforms. So maybe this particular mission where app is applicable to Compass Call, and maybe you can put it on an [inaudible 00:29:25] So that's the integration, making sure that that works. And then we deliver it and make it available to the war fighters and then they could take it and download it, load it on the jet and go fly it on new, we'll call it a [inaudible 00:29:41] for example, in New Mexico, gives a great example for them and their daily sororities to [inaudible 00:29:47] to be able to gain that familiarity with those mission wear apps.

Dollar Young (29:52):
And it does a couple of things. Number one, war fighters get familiar with the individual apps. So they're seeing their developing tactics techniques and procedures to optimize its capability, but perhaps more importantly, they're gaining trust in the process. So it requires that individual wing commander to figure out, "Okay, am I just going to let my line cruise download the particular apps that they want to load up and fly?" Probably not. There's got to be some internal wing process. So, it provides a venue for my fellow wing commanders at the pointy edge for the operational units to then figure out what's their part.

Dollar Young (30:31):
So we're going to make it available to them, but in terms of how you develop the TTPs to employ it, what the processes are, that's got to be figured out, and that's their responsibility to do. My job is just to provide the capability. And if you'll allow me, let me just say a little bit about how what we're doing fundamentally I believe, changes how EW, EMS capability is delivered. If we look at it today, I build a radar warning receiver because I need threat warning, or let me say that back a little differently. I need threat warning. Everybody would acknowledge that. And so I build a radar warning receiver to provide threat warning.

Dollar Young (31:15):
And what you have is you start with the function or capability, threat warning, and then we go figure out what the radar warning receiver needs to be looked like or built. And that's the form. And many of your listeners have probably heard the adage form follows function. And today that's what we do. But what I'm proposing and what we're working towards is the ability to break those things apart. And what I mean by that is, we'll return to my earlier example about capability off of platform A supporting platform C, maybe platform C lacks the ability to have threat warning in a particular band, but maybe platform A has that capability. So it can see in that particular band and provide the threat warning, again, functionality or capability that platforms C needs.

Dollar Young (32:12):
Where we're going is the equivalent, and in this case of threat warning as a service, and so now if I'm in the jet, do I really care the form that delivers the functionality? I would argue that generally, no. What I really care about is the functionality or the capability. That's what I really need. And so where we're going with this is increasingly software defined capability that now you get that threat warning as a service, but it could also be targeting as a service. It could also be assessment as a service.

Dollar Young (32:45):
Again, you just need the war fighter to make, providing the war fighter the ability to make sense of the situation. The second part of the Jazzy 2, again, make sense. And we're providing that increasingly through software defined capabilities, which won't necessarily limit us to a single platform.

Ken Miller (33:06):
And that gets into the multifunction effort that is really sweeping the space. You talk about some of the initial operating capabilities that you're delivering mission wear, which is stitches, which I won't make you go into the acronym, but stitches. And then of course, AI cognitive EW. I don't want to take up too much of your time, but maybe you can go in just briefly and talk about each of those, because that's part of your three pronged strategy to build an organization, reach those IOC capabilities. And then, of course, provide support, all three of those you're pursuing at one time.

Dollar Young (33:45):
Simultaneously.

Ken Miller (33:45):
Simultaneously.

Dollar Young (33:46):
Yes.

Ken Miller (33:47):
So how do you know when to focus your energies on one or the other, because they all need to be developed at the same time and they can all hold each other back at the same time, if not done properly?

Dollar Young (34:02):
Yeah. It is a problem of interactive complexity where the complexity, it would be complicated each of the three pieces by themselves or each of the three lines of effort by themselves. But as you point out correctly, they're all highly dependent upon each other, which generates a significant degree of interactive complexity overall, and the way my team and I work through that is largely through the rapid development of prototypes and ideas.

Dollar Young (34:35):
So let me use a specific example of what we're doing for stitches. Stitches gives us the ability to tie together components that were never met to work together, and what we're doing in our labs to facilitate not only our understanding of stitches, but being able to improve our capability delivery internally is, we've done an experiment, and we're at the point of a basic prototype where we've been able to automate our testing process in one of our squadrons, by taking two totally different industry devices, that again were never meant to work together.

Dollar Young (35:17):
And in partnership with our industry partners, we're able to gain the insight into both devices, and then we basically built a way to translate between the two. So our test generator and our testing mechanism, we tie them together. And before what was required was we would have to burn the data on one and then manually translate it ... I'm sorry, manually transport it to the other system.

Dollar Young (35:45):
But by being able to automate the process by connecting the two things or stitch them together, that's given us the ability to exponentially decrease the amount of time required to run a full gamut of tests. That's a significant breakthrough capability, but that goes to how we're able to build a prototype and then put it in the lab and then start to learn from it, and so the insights we're gaining from that is now tied to our mission data, which is another one of our capabilities is helping us develop mission data faster.

Dollar Young (36:19):
But we're also understanding then in the decision making process, there's opportunities for the insertion of machine learning capabilities, but that also ties to how we are able to build out our future infrastructure and what that might look like, because now if I can connect a bunch of stuff, then that alleviates the need for certain things that I might otherwise buy, potentially I can also decrease my manning, not overall, but I can decrease the manning for that particular task. The folks that ... there was a human who's part of their daily workflow is transferring the data between those two systems. That's wasting that human's bandwidth.

Dollar Young (36:59):
So I can repurpose those folks to be able to get after the work queue for all the other stuff that we know that we need to be getting after. So see how it provides one particular prototype testing in the lab, provides us the opportunity to sense and learn about a whole bunch of other things within the wing. And then we take those learning points and then that gets built into our plan going forward. And we just step after step after step after step.

Ken Miller (37:28):
Repurposing of people is an interesting notion because we've often talked about when new organizations stand up or new missions stand up, we're like, "Well, who's actually going to do it because we have to have the training, we have to have the people, the intellectual capital there." How much of what Spectrum Warfare Wing does?

Ken Miller (37:46):
One of the things I'm very interested in is this notion of embedding war fighters or people in different missionaries into your efforts so that they are familiar with the capability at the prototype level, at the lab level, so that when they go back out to the field, they might be a pilot, they might be an infantry, they might be something else, but they have experienced seeing what you're doing at the prototype lab level. How's wing approaching something like that, where you can get embed and repurpose other people to let them see what you're doing so that the first time that they're interacting with novel EMS capabilities, it's not in the field, but earlier in the development?

Dollar Young (38:29):
Let me give you a concrete example of how that's playing out in terms of our engineering career force. There's several programs that are open today that seeks to take engineers and place them into organizations that have an operational focus. And we've been taking advantage of that at a very low rate, just in terms of throughput and trying to get our process tight. But we were able to take an engineer from the test world who we brought in for about four months to work with our team and help us develop and advance the ball on our machine learning.

Dollar Young (39:11):
And then he went back to his organization equipped with those insights. And now they're better able to test not just today, but the future capabilities that we think are coming. And so it speaks to how we can tighten that connection between operations and the test community. So that's one concrete example, I'll give you one more. Our wing has several employment officers. These are individuals that have a flying background, but now they're a little bit further on in their career, and they're brought in to be the user representatives for the particular weapon systems that we support inside the Spectrum Warfare Wing, and their role is to do exactly that. We are still a large, heavy engineering organization.

Dollar Young (40:00):
And so these mission employment officers are able to help explain to the engineer, here's how that capability we think it would be used in combat or here's how the frontline war fighter is probably going to use that. And so, that individual gets a tour in the Spectrum Warfare Wing, and then they're going back out to ops at some point in terms of their career progression. So it provides them having spent time in the Spectrum Warfare Wing. Now they're very attuned with not just how we do it today, but they've had a glimpse behind the curtain in terms of where we're trying to go. And my hope is, that they'll be able to use that insight to then continue to connect with us and help us build what right looks like in the future.

Dollar Young (40:48):
I'm one of those people that I don't like to study something. What I'd rather us do is build to learn. And part of that build to learn process is ensuring that we've got folks that represent a broad cross section of ideas and backgrounds, and that's how we're able to build something and learn, and then figure out what the next step looks like.

Ken Miller (41:10):
So last question, since we're here at Dixie Crow, just outside one of Robin's Air Force base, one of your sides, you were talking about the organization that exists today with Spectrum Warfare Wing, but you're already laying out future plans and the chart that you showed had some solid line boxes, but then it had a couple of dotted line boxes of new organizations or groups that are going to be stood up here in the near future over the next year or two. And one of them is Detachment-1 under the 850th Spectrum Warfare Group. You call that wavelength. But the plan for that is to be here at Warner Robins?

Dollar Young (41:49):
Yeah. Wavelength is going to be at San Antonio.

Ken Miller (41:52):
San Antonio. Right. One of those is the 950th Spectrum Warfare Group, and that's the assessment piece. And that is going to ... the plan is for that to come to Robin's Air Force base, then there's another one that is called Wavelength, which is under the 850th Spectrum Warfare Group, that's going to be somewhere else. But could you talk about these two new pieces that are on the horizon for the Spectrum Warfare Wing and what they mean to the overall organization?

Dollar Young (42:26):
Yeah, let's start with Wavelength. Wavelength will activate mid-May as part of the 850th Spectrum Warfare Group. And the purpose of Wavelength is to be our digital engineering service. The Wavelength will accomplish three functions for us. The first is it provides us the capability to centralize all of the wing's software development under a single organization. The unofficial term would be a software factory, but it's far more than that. It also will provide us a digital education capability within the wing.

Dollar Young (43:04):
And what I mean by that is, I really think that we are moving very rapidly towards, every airman as a coder. And if you're not a coder, then we at least need you to have basic software competencies. And Wavelength will provide that across the whole wing so that we can ensure that we're raising the capability and the familiarity with all of our airmen who will be using software capabilities, no matter what their jobs is.

Dollar Young (43:33):
And then the third piece of that is they'll be focusing on innovation and in accordance with the 850th Spectrum Warfare Group's mission of research and engineering, they will provide a readily accessible belly button to be able to plug in and access all of the great capabilities that are going on in terms of this space out in the commercial world, in academia and across the services. Now, the second new organization is a little bit further out starting to get bodies, I believe, the timeline is in FY 23 with the 25 target activation date is the 950th Spectrum Warfare Group, which will be here at Robin's Air Force base.

Dollar Young (44:23):
Their broad missions is the conduct of assessment supporting EW, EMS superiority as well as broader mission assurance across the department. Right now, the plan is to stand up three new squadrons here in Robins or within the state of Georgia, they will begin as detachments and then we will grow them over time. And their planned activation date is in FY 25 for the first squadron that we believe will focus on multi-domain operational assessments. The second squadron will stand up in FY 26, and their primary focus will be fifth gen and beyond assessments.

Dollar Young (45:10):
And then the third squadron will stand up in FY 27, with the objective of focusing on advanced data analytics and continuous assessment. The wing currently has an assessment squadron, the 87th electronic warfare squadron at Eglin, and it is still to be decided by senior leadership, whether that organization will come to Robins or the flag will come to Robins, or it will stay at Eglin again, all that is still being decided by our senior Air Force leadership. So it would be premature for me to speculate on that. But what I will say is that the squadron will be part of the group, the 950th Spectrum Warfare Group, where it actually lives again is pre-decisional, and our senior leaders will decide that.

Ken Miller (46:04):
Well, thank you Dollar, that's all the time we have for the show today. Really appreciate you taking some extra time after your presentation this morning to sit down with me and talk a little bit more about your message to the group. It's great to have you on the show. Thanks for joining me again.

Dollar Young (46:16):
Thank you, and thanks again to the AOC and all of your partners, we can only do this together. This is a whole of nation competition, and we will succeed together as a nation, as a team. So, thank everyone for the part that you play in that.

Ken Miller (46:36):
That will conclude this episode of, From the Crows' Nest. I'd like to thank my guest Colonel Dollar Young for taking time out of his schedule to join me for this conversation. I look forward to many more in the future. If you'd like to learn more about the Association of Old Crows, feel free to visit us on our website at crows.org/podcasts. You can also check out our sister podcast The History of Crows. We are working on a new batch of episodes coming out, hopefully in the coming weeks. So stay tuned for that. As always, we welcome your thoughts on how we can continue to improve both of our podcasts and engage our listeners. So take some time to rate us and comment wherever you listen to your podcast. Thanks for listening.