Heather “Lucky” Penney: ​[00:00:00] Welcome to the Aerospace Advantage podcast brought to you by PenFed. I’m your host, Heather “Lucky” Penney. Here on the Aerospace Advantage, we speak with leaders in the DOD industry and other subject matter experts to explore the intersection of strategy, operational concepts, technology, and policy when it comes to air and space power.

This week, we’re going to dig into one of the biggest threats facing the Air Force and I’m not talking about China. This is an internal problem, a chronic shortage of pilots. For over two decades, the Air Force has been unable to produce and retain enough pilots to meet all of its requirements. It faces a continual 2,000 pilot deficit for years.

While all mission areas are affected, there’s an especially pronounced one when it comes to fighter pilots, and this poses a serious threat to the Air Force and America’s security interests at large. If we can’t fill cockpits in times of peace, we’re going to implode in a big [00:01:00] fight when we have to face the reality of combat losses.

We’ll be going to combat spread too thin, and we won’t be able to generate enough trained pilots to backfill attrition losses. And added to all of that, we don’t just need pilots to fly airplanes. Their experience is critical at headquarters and the various commands that help develop strategy, operational concepts, guide investment decisions, and provide basic expert oversight.

We’re spending billions on generating tomorrow’s air power, but we simply don’t have enough combat pilots to ensure the right warfighters are at the table to guide key decisions. People filling the gap mean well and are trying, but first person expertise counts for something. Last time I checked, if you want a good outcome in surgery, you go to the right doctor, not a plumber or a lawyer.

But here’s the deal. We can fix this. It’s not unrecoverable, but we have to start now. And like we often say, no bucks, no Buck Rogers. The solutions are inextricably linked with a chronic underfunding that’s [00:02:00] afflicted the Air Force since the end of the Cold War, and all of the cuts. It’s not like Air Force leaders want to have this problem.

They’ve been trying to fix it for years. The fundamental root cause is the result of playing funding shell games for too long. Current efforts are falling short, and it’s a complex issue. But on the other hand It’s not. It comes down to having enough planes, people, and ensuring they’re getting enough practice.

And that requires enough resources for the Air Force. We’re here because the Air Force is too small. That’s why we don’t have enough pilots. So that’s what we’re here to discuss today. The Air Force’s pilot shortfall problem, why it matters, and how the Air Force, the Department of Defense, and Congress can work together to fix it.

I just finished a report on this topic, and so we’ll link that in our show notes. So to help me better explore this issue, I’m really excited to welcome back Lieutenant General Gus Guastella. As you know, he’s a career fighter pilot who retired as the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations at the Headquarters Air Force, [00:03:00] the A3.

And we’ve also got another incredible leader and personal friend who I hope becomes a regular on the podcast, Lieutenant General Mark Sasseville. I was fortunate to grow up in the 121st Fighter Squadron with Sass, and he was a key mentor and commander. He recently retired as the Vice Chief of the National Guard Bureau.

Gentlemen, welcome.

Lt. Gen. Joseph Guastella, USAF (Ret.): Thanks, Heather. And thanks to the Mitchell Institute. I’m really happy to be part of this, uh, part of this effort.

Lt. Gen. Mark Sasseville, USAF (Ret.): Same here. Great to be with Mitchell again, and thank you for inviting us, Lucky.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Thanks Sass. So, okay. Big picture. Help our audience understand why it’s so important to maintain a healthy pilot base.

What does it mean at a strategic level, operationally, in a unit, and for an airman individually?

Lt. Gen. Joseph Guastella, USAF (Ret.): Well, I’ll take the first stab at it. You know, we need we need every single airmen to do the mission, but, you know, pilots are overwhelmingly the combatants for our service. The combatants in war, you know, the army, infantry and tankers are the combatants and the Marines it’s infantry, the combatants, [00:04:00] but in the, in the US Air Force, the primary combatants are the pilots, you know, the pilots that go take off from the base. Go across the cross the line, go into enemy territory. Uh, sometimes they’re shot down. Sometimes don’t come home. Primarily, the volume of force that does that in the Air Force are the pilots percentage wise by far.

And so without sufficient numbers of pilots, you can’t prosecute a campaign. You know, at the tactical level, you’ll feel it right away in the squadron, you know, and at the operational level, you won’t be able to send a pilots or man that the ops centers to plan and direct the campaign. And certainly it’s a strategic level it could result in the misapplication of air power. The improper use of air power and failure to deter and worst case, you know, failure in the war.

Lt. Gen. Mark Sasseville, USAF (Ret.): So, my two cents again. Thank you, Lucky for shining light on this wicked problem. The Air Force has been struggling with this for a [00:05:00] long time now. So, bringing it back up at this time is especially important.

So, thanks again to you and Mitchell for doing that. The only thing I’d like to add, I think Gus has got it exactly right. You need pilots and you need the experience at all 3 of those levels that you highlighted there. One, just one thing to add. There’s some conversation about UASs and drones and so forth and so on.

And I think in the end, we’re all going to realize that it’s a balance. You need a balance of unmanned and you need a balance of pilots that if, if you don’t have a certain amount of experience to train the new pilots, and if you also take a part of the force and put them into drones, you will start to choke off your ability to feed the operational and strategic level with the human experience. The human understanding that people to explain the value of air power to senior leaders.

So, it’s not really clear yet how that would come to pass. [00:06:00] If we go with a complete drone force. I know nobody’s advocating for that, but I think some people envision that in the very simple conversations.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Yeah, no, we’ve heard in the public conversation discussion, especially, for example, with Elon Musk, saying, hey, why are we having manned, manned aircraft at all in our military? We should just go completely towards drones.

And here at Mitchell, we’ve done a lot of studies on collaborative combat aircraft. So, these combat drones, right? And we found that they really do change the calculus for us. They tip the scales in our balance when we use them, right. We use them to detonate, disrupt, deplete, degrade the adversary forces, but when they do that in conjunction with manned fighters, because I think one thing we’ve seen, and I’ve personally been out to a lot of these autonomy companies that are working on the agents or the brains of these drones. And they’re doing some incredible stuff, but they don’t come anywhere near the, the wisdom, the airmanship, the creativity, the [00:07:00] innovation, and the ability to act through uncertainty that humans have.

So, I still believe that the cognitive element of humans, human cognition in the battle space, will continue to be our asymmetric advantage, because Americans, the way we fight, not only is it disciplined, we’re very good at what we do, we’re very professional, but we’re also very creative, we can improvise, we can do things that the adversary doesn’t expect.

And that kind of surprise, I think, will be a core element of us achieving that combat advantage.

Lt. Gen. Mark Sasseville, USAF (Ret.): Well said.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Well, and.

Lt. Gen. Joseph Guastella, USAF (Ret.): Amen.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Both you both you gentlemen, you brought up the notion of experience, and I think that’s really important and one of the reasons why I embarked on this project was looking at experience within the pilot corps, because not only do we have a shortage of pilots and a dire shortage of fighter pilots within the Air Force right now. We’ve been suffering that for years and the shortage goes all the way back, you know, 25 plus years.

Um, but the experience [00:08:00] element is really crucial because that’s where you get the expertise, the wisdom, the airmanship. And if we go in the way back machine and put that into some historic context the cost isn’t just about having too small of a pilot force. It’s about not having enough experienced pilots, right?

So, when you look at, for example, World War II. Happens to be probably the clearest evidence and case studies for this of the German Luftwaffe and the Japanese Air Forces. They imploded not just because of chronic pilot shortfalls, they had the inability to replace their combat pilots, but they didn’t have enough experienced combat pilots after they went through enough years of attrition.

And this is a key reason why they lost the war.

Lt. Gen. Mark Sasseville, USAF (Ret.): You’re exactly right. And the and back in the day when, when I was in this business and, and Gus, you know, more than I. I think the magic number was right around 55%, which is not intuitive. If you have 55 percent experience [00:09:00] in your fighter squadron, that is a sustainable number.

If you start to get less than that, it starts to erode your ability to actually do the training. To do all the other things that you need, need to be able to do across the board, and that’s the beginning of the death spiral. And if you’re doing that in peacetime and you haven’t, you haven’t stabilized in peacetime, you’re going to get there much quicker in a high end conflict.

Uh, and you’ll rapidly start to lose air power if you don’t start off on the right foot. Gus, do I have that about right?

Lt. Gen. Joseph Guastella, USAF (Ret.): I think you’re absolutely right. I was in a squadron once where we had 21 lieutenants, you know, in the squadron with only about 40 total, you know, pilots, 45 pilots. So we were right maybe at the water line below that 55 percent number, maybe 49. And I tell you what, it was, we had fun, but we weren’t very good if you know what I mean. Fortunately, we weren’t, we weren’t called on to do [00:10:00] anything other than just train. And throughout about a year’s time, we built our experience levels up, but that’s just an example of a risk that you take in peacetime that may be acceptable, but it wouldn’t be in war.

Lt. Gen. Mark Sasseville, USAF (Ret.): Absolutely.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: So, the 55 percent, Sass that you mentioned, that actually comes from a RAND study, and is a series of studies that they began in the late 1990s. Um, they were looking at the pilot shortage and why squadrons were breaking. And Pope was an A 10 unit that they looked at specifically, where they realized that the reason why the unit lost its combat ready status was because they didn’t have enough experienced pilots to be able to absorb the new kids that were just coming qualified out into, out of the A 10.

So they couldn’t create experience and upgrade these new A 10 pilots. And that was where they came up with the 55 is the minimum. 60/40 is actually the optimum and you both mentioned this is a peacetime number and why does this matter? Because we talked about experience, but experienced pilots and the Luftwaffe in [00:11:00] the Japanese are an excellent example of this, is that experienced pilots have better mission outcomes and better survivability rates.

And Sass, you alluded to this, like if you don’t have enough, if you don’t have enough experience, you’re not going to be able to be successful. And that’s what it comes down to is, can you complete the mission successfully? And do you come home safely so you can go fight the war again tomorrow? And if you don’t have enough experienced pilots in combat you don’t, you begin to lose that capacity, it degrades over time. And as you flow those inexperienced new guys that are the replacement pilots to the front, they just get shot down faster, and they have less successful missions, and so you begin to lose the war from that, from that level. And you know, we saw that, in World War II, the Japanese, that’s one of the reasons why we were able to really take over the Pacific there from the naval front and then in the eastern and in the European theater operations, how we established superiority.

The Luftwaffe was producing more fighters at the end of the war than they were at the beginning of the war, but they couldn’t control their [00:12:00] skies because they didn’t have experienced pilots.

So, you both grew up at the end of the Cold War when we had a far larger pilot bench, more airplanes, and folks were getting a lot of flying hours. Can you talk to me about the type of air power that delivered for the nation?

Lt. Gen. Mark Sasseville, USAF (Ret.): So, quick story time, since you’re offering me the opportunity, I was at Torrejon Air Base in 1987, that was my first operational assignment after going through the pipeline that we’re talking about.

And in those days we had 3 or 4 squadrons in Germany, 3 or 4 squadrons in England, ours in Spain, I think 1 or 2 in maybe Italy. Each of those, I’m sorry, bases, I think I might have said squadrons, I’m talking bases. Each of those bases had multiple squadrons and so for ours specifically at Torrejon we had 72 airplanes, 3 squadrons, 24 primary jets, each a [00:13:00] couple spares, but 72 primary airplanes on the ramp. Which is just unbelievable by today’s standards.

And I want to say that at that time, our crew ratio, meaning the number of pilots assigned per airplane was pretty close to 2. 0. And that’s really what you need if you’re going to fly around the clock 24/7 which was the plan back then. So, if you can imagine almost 130 pilots of all different demographics, the old guys, the guys from Vietnam, the young guys like me, just showing up, right?

I bushy tailed ready to get into something, not really having any clue what what was going on. It was just, uh, incredible that at Torrejon we used to practice bombing missions. Uh, we also used to do counter air missions and specifically at Torrejon we had a nuclear alert mission. So, we would send crews, uh, a group of guys, a handful of guys on a [00:14:00] rotational basis to both Italy and Turkey to sit nuclear alert.

I won’t spend much time on that, but that is something that was at the forefront of our minds during that time frame. We used to fly almost every day of the week, sometimes multiple days, especially when people got sick or somebody had to go to a pop up meeting that they didn’t want to, but they were in leadership so it was their turn. It was just a, it was just a great environment. Now some context though. This was again, 1987. This is really before we started getting the benefits of, um, assault breaker, right? So this is before precision guided munitions. This is really before precision navigation systems and some other things that came along.

Uh, this is at the end of the Cold War, but we didn’t know in 1987 that it was the end of the Cold War we were approaching it, right? We’re still going gangbusters and you know, four years later it would end, but [00:15:00] we really didn’t know that. And the Air Force was almost twice as larger back then as it is today.

Just a little bit over 600,000, which again is kind of mind boggling to us in today’s environment. But that was the scenario back then.

Lt. Gen. Joseph Guastella, USAF (Ret.): That was a great, great answer. And very well said, you know, around the same time, maybe a couple of years, I was at Ramstein in 89, right before the Wall came down in the middle, during the middle of cold war.

And interestingly, you know, this, I checked this out but my tail number, which was, I believe it was 87464 was the tail number is still in the Air Force’s inventory now, 36 years later and it was built even before then. It’s still out there flying. I don’t think there’s many, you know, tanks and frontline vehicles in the army that are that old, but we still have aircraft that are very, very old.

[00:16:00] But you’re absolutely right. You know, we were, we were able and flying enough to be ready to fight tonight. We would fly almost every day, sometimes 10 sorties a week. You know, that today guys are sometimes aren’t even getting, they’re not even getting 10 sorties a month. Some of the squads and we were getting 10 a week.

And so, you know, and we also had the ability to sustain air power with the spares and maintenance that you said to really be able to cover down on on 24/7 ops. And that’s just something that we are, very challenging for us today.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Well, the 24/7 op capability is crucial when you’re actually fighting the war, you know, I mean, it might not seem like a big deal with if you’re in garrison, if you’re at home base, and you’re just doing training operations.

But if you’re in combat, you need to be able to have that sustained combat generation, mission generation. And you need to have the numbers to be able to do the scale and scope of combat operations, especially in the Pacific, like Sass, you’re talking about the number of jets and bases and squadrons that [00:17:00] you had over in Europe. to fight Russia, you know, Soviet Union during the Cold War. I think we can all agree that we were still smaller than the Soviet Union at the time. And we relied on that training, on that expertise, on that experience and wisdom so that we would be better than the adversary at the time.

And that was, that was going to be our combat advantage. But how can we have that if we don’t have it, Gus, as you mentioned, that kind of training and that kind of experience today? Because if we’re only, if we’re only flying less than 10 sorties a month, we’re not going to be able to absorb and experience the young guys that are coming into the force today at the rate that we need them to be able to assume flight leadership, mission leadership, and squadron and operational leadership positions, uh, when the time comes.

So, when did you start to see this change from, you know, the posture that you just both described to where we are today?

And, you know, you both mentioned we’re half the size that we were back in the Cold War, not just in terms of manpower and [00:18:00] end strength, but also in terms of aircraft, right? Less than half the fighters today than what we had back then, um, because we executed a major reduction of force that impacted not just the force structure, but the pilots as well at the end of the Cold War, and we kept getting smaller and smaller.

Uh, you mentioned peer threat training took a major hit when in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq kicked off, and then there was another major set of aircraft cuts that shed 250 fighters around 2009 in an effort known as CAF Redux, the Combat Air Forces Reduction. We canceled the F 22. And flying hours have been slashed with the Budget Control Act in 2011.

And that actually extended for the rest of the decade. And all the while, we have not been buying enough new fighters for the last 30 years. You know, Gus, you mentioned your F 16 was still flying. Sass, yours and mine are still flying today. And types like the F 22, F 35, F 15EX, these aren’t coming fast enough to offset the divestments of these aging aircraft.

Can you [00:19:00] gentlemen walk us through that little span of history and help our audience understand what this did to our pilot core?

Lt. Gen. Joseph Guastella, USAF (Ret.): Yeah, I can give you my perspective and I know Sass, you have one as well. You know, the, in addition to, you know, hemorrhaging all those fighters for CAF Redux, which by the way, continued, you know, well beyond that original, uh, year or two that it was envisioned. We replaced larger numbers of older airplanes with much fewer numbers of advanced airplanes. And so our overall capacity came down. But no matter how good the airplane is, it can only be one place at one time.

And.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Thank you for saying that.

Lt. Gen. Joseph Guastella, USAF (Ret.): Yeah, we’re feeling that, you know, we’re feeling that acutely right now, you know, but we’re focusing this discussion on the pilot shortfall. And so while we cut all those fighters and a lot of other aircraft out of the inventory, you know what, what else we cut? We cut [00:20:00] pilot training bases.

Those bases are the engines that produce our new pilots and we overdid it. The Air Force overdid it in terms of cutting pilot training bases, and therefore the deficit of pilot, the shortfall, grew larger and larger. And so then what we have is an Air Force with some newer airplanes, but it’s too small in its overall size, capacity, which I know we can talk about later in the podcast. And we have too few pilots to fly those airplanes and then therefore we result in very diminished flying hours and diminished readiness. And that’s what I’ve seen happen in the last 10 years.

Lt. Gen. Mark Sasseville, USAF (Ret.): You’re exactly right, Gus. I have the same perspective.

I’d only add that I think, if you look at all of this objectively, and you stand outside the Air Force and try to reconstruct what happened, you might also observe that there is a [00:21:00] beginning of a deprioritization of, as you put it Gus, the combat arms, right? And so when you start to pull that much combat capability out of your service it sends a signal not only to the service itself, the members inside of it, but the people outside watching, industry, Congress, whoever. And it starts to shift your values, and the reason I mention that is because I think that’s probably part of why we’re in this situation we are today, it’s just not, it’s not a high enough priority to, for the Air Force to focus on.

And, and I hate to say that, but I think that might be a contributing factor. These death by a thousand cuts, you know, not a thousand obviously, but these big trims here and there leave you with the situation that you got. You didn’t really want it, but that’s where we are right now and [00:22:00] now we have to reprioritize it if we want to save it, is the bottom line, I think.

Lt. Gen. Joseph Guastella, USAF (Ret.): That’s right.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: You know, that’s really insightful that by, through all of these cuts, we begin to deprioritize our primary combat arm, combat aircraft, right? Uh, you know, those pilots, they don’t feel like their mission is valued anymore. They don’t feel like they’re valued anymore. They don’t get the flying hours that they need.

And we wonder why we’re not able to retain experienced pilots when they hit the end of their active duty service commitment. I mean, that’s, I think that really gets to a core piece of the Air Force’s retention problem. Um, but when it comes to the training piece, there’s really kind of, you know, three variables, right?

And you both have talked about them. You’ve got the pilots, the planes, and the practice. The pilots, it’s, you know, their training, how many, how many of them we have, what their qualifications are, their experience levels, the planes, it’s their readiness rates, and, you know, 2024, all of our readiness rates went further down for the most [00:23:00] part. And practice, the number of flying hours we have, and the quality of training missions that we get, right? So, could you describe a little bit more for our audience the interactions between these three?

Lt. Gen. Joseph Guastella, USAF (Ret.): Yeah, I can take a stab at it first, you know, for starters, you know, the planes, okay? It may sound obvious, but you need them in sufficient numbers and they have to be capable and effective in doing the missions that they’re assigned.

So, a new jet with newer systems may have that capability, but you may not have them sufficient numbers. So, you have to have the numbers required and they have to be good enough, all right? So, that’s key. That’s kind of foundational. And then secondly, we, I think we’ve already talked about it. You know, the pilots are core to all of this, but you know, you need pilots at different experience levels, just like a football team, you know, that wins the Super Bowl.

They’re not all rookies. There may be a couple of rookies out there, but you have a lot of mid level players and veteran seasoned players. All of those combined to create a winning team. So, you need pilots of all experience levels [00:24:00] because the newer generation or baby pilots, if you want to call them, those folks will be experienced and they’ll become the leaders later on.

So, you need the right cross section of experience across, across your units. And then lastly, you, you hit the nail on the head. Practice is everything. You have to be able to practice the missions assigned. It’s one thing to be qualified in an aircraft. It’s another thing to be really good at employing it.

And then, you know, I can tell you from my experience, I know you probably feel the same way, Sass. It takes about six to eight years in a fighter squadron before you’re at your best level and it really does take that long. It may, I think it doesn’t take quite as long in other, I know it doesn’t take quite as long in other airplanes, but that’s how it is in the fighter community.

And so it’s a combination of the airplanes having the pilots in the right experience levels. And also, the practice needed to really be effective to fight our nation’s wars.

Lt. Gen. Mark Sasseville, USAF (Ret.): So, just to pick up where Gus left off here, I want to add [00:25:00] one more thing on the planes, pilots, and practice. And I think that’s a great way to do it. And that is the flow, no doubt about it. Interestingly enough, programmatically, that needs to be planned, right? And so these things just don’t show up by magic.

They do start with the planes. And that’s why these force structure decisions are so important because once you know how many planes you’ve bought and where you’re putting them, then you calculate how many pilots you need. Then you calculate how many pilots you’re going to train. You’re going to calculate how much they’re going to practice, how many hours.

That’s going to calculate how much gas, how much range space, where are you going to practice? And so that’s how this whole, the math works and the money, which is the most important thing works on how you take a young fighter pilot and get him all the way through, uh, as Gus was [00:26:00] saying, a Super Bowl winning quarterback.

One of the key parts is the absorption, right? And the way I look at it, my mental model, each of these steps is a section of pipe that feeds the next one and they kinda telescope down. So, you’re at the beginning of the pipe you’re going to have people who come into the Air Force, they get down selected to go to pilot training. Not everybody makes it out of poly training, by the way. At least that was my experience. Then you’re going to go into a different set of training. You’re going to learn how to fly your airplane, you’re going to go to survival training, uh, so forth and so on. And then you end up in the squadron. And the part that we have traditionally been challenged with is how they sit in the squadron and how they get experienced. And this is the practice every day like you would as a football team for [00:27:00] years before you are combat ready to go out and actually do a mission. Before you’re trusted and deviating from the analogy a little bit it’s kind of like a residency for a surgeon, right?

You wouldn’t want a surgeon to come in and start cutting on you and performing surgery on your body without fully completing his or her residency. It’s the kind of same thing with fighter pilots in combat. You don’t want to send young kids into combat, risk themselves or their squadron mates because they don’t have enough of the training.

And so, that time where the young pilots sit in a combat squadron doing training missions every day, small train deployments, that is crucial to our process on how we put together a world class combat effective fighter force. And so that’s why we can use the reserve component.

I think we’ll get to that in a bit, but that’s what we can lean on the reserve component for if we plan it out [00:28:00] correctly.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Well, let’s just go ahead and talk about that right now, because the reserve component, which comprises both of the Air Force Reserve and the Air National Guard. Let’s talk about their role in the, that’s this absorption equation, because traditionally these units are comprised of highly experienced pilots that have left the active duty, right?

They’ve left the active component, the end of their service commitment, but they still want to serve. So they’re getting out. And this is actually pretty crucial because this means that we might have more elasticity in the reserve component to on ramp and season these new pilots. And so I think that there’s a lot of additional elasticity and capacity within the reserve component to season these new pilots.

Lt. Gen. Mark Sasseville, USAF (Ret.): There is. And I think that exists for a couple of reasons. First off, from a strategic perspective, over the past 20 years, the reserve component has gone from the Cold War strategic reserve to a operational reserve. And that’s because we cut so [00:29:00] many, the supply went down, but the demand didn’t, and the only place for the Air Force to go to, to get missions done, to get deployments accomplished to support the combatant commanders was to reach into the reserve component. And that’s where there was existing capacity that over time became very operational, very effective.

It didn’t used to be that way, but it certainly is that way now. The other thing that we haven’t talked about yet is also in those squadrons is not just experienced pilots, but you’ve got experienced maintainers. And you can’t have. I’m sorry?

Lt. Gen. Joseph Guastella, USAF (Ret.): That’s absolutely right. I was just going to pile on maintainers.

Go keep going, Sass.

Lt. Gen. Mark Sasseville, USAF (Ret.): Yeah. So the, the other thing that the reserve component brings in addition to experienced pilots is a cadre of experienced maintainers. That’s the value as at least of the National Guard. I’m not going to talk about the reserve. I don’t have an experience there, but just like any other skill [00:30:00] set, you’ve got experienced maintainers that have been in that unit for a long time. They’ve been working on that equipment. They know the equipment. They know all the tricks that aren’t in the tech orders. They know how to save parts. And that really, I think, is a key component of producing not only combat power, but in this case, and what we’re talking about, the ability to accept the active component, some of the active component pilots and fly them with higher, uh, aircraft availability rates.

That’s one of the metrics that the maintainers use, that the commanders use. Is how, how many airplanes are actually available to fly because that’s a key function. So, that’s why I think the reserve component writ large is a good solution to help with that section of the pipe.

And if you don’t account for it, it’s going to artificially restrict. If you go backwards to the intake, the larger part of the telescoping piece. If [00:31:00] you, uh, if you don’t account for that bigger piece at the end, it might artificially, uh, constrict your ability to intake and larger numbers, which is all key to, in addition to having more bases, more real estate, more capacity.

That’s going to be the key to increasing our pilot force and getting it back to where we need it to be.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: So, we can really use the reserve component, um, and the experienced pilots that exist within the reserve component to help with the absorption problem that the active component has right now. Because especially as they’re converting to F 35 and I contend within my report that we need to grow the fighter force as well.

That actually has an adverse effect on experience within squadrons. So, if we’re, we’re trying to both grow the force and convert to more modern type aircraft, whether or not that’s an F 15EX or an F 35, we still need to we still need to continue the absorption process. And [00:32:00] the reserve component can help with that.

Lt. Gen. Mark Sasseville, USAF (Ret.): Absolutely. And the key to that is to stop closing reserve component squadrons. If you start, if you continue to close reserve component squadrons, that talent, that capacity is gone for a decade. You’re not going to get that back anytime soon. So, it would be good for the Air Force to think of creative ways to keep those, you know, A 10 is a perfect example.

That’s the one that we’re all looking at right now. We need to have creative ways to keep the number of fighter squatters the same, figure out a way to do it so that when new iron comes in, they’re ready and in place and current qualified to help with this absorption capacity.

Lt. Gen. Joseph Guastella, USAF (Ret.): If I can just pitch in, you know, we count, we have to count on our Air National Guard and our Reserves to do, to do a lot. First and foremost, they will be fighting our nation’s wars. Period, dot. [00:33:00] They will be fighting our nation’s wars and they will also be helping the active duty with the absorption issue. The fact that we’re so inexperienced and have too few pilots, they’ll be doing both for the sake of the total force.

You know, but just looking back, you know, when I said that the Guard and the Reserve are going to fight our nation’s wars, look at Desert Storm. Desert Storm involved a lot of Guard and Reserve forces. Iraqi Freedom, the major campaign involved a lot of Guard and Reserve forces. The decades of employment across CENTCOM in the Middle East has involved a Guard and Reserve forces. In the absence of that Guard and Reserve force, to fill that capacity that we needed for those major campaigns, to do that out of the active would have stripped all the fighter for structure out of Asia. It would have stripped the fighter for structure out of Europe and send it all to the Middle East. There, we would completely be without a deterrent posture elsewhere in the world. And so our Guard and Reserve is going to fight our nation’s [00:34:00] wars, and they’re going to help with the absorption problem.

It’s a team effort here, and we all have to be pulling together to make this right.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Well, Gus, I think you hit on a really important piece there, which is that the active component has become too small. It’s important that the Guard and Reserve is there because they do capture the experience that leaves the active duty because they do offer the ability to solve some of the absorption issue and because they provide that really cost effective and experienced force multiplier.

We got to grow the active component as well. But I think it’s really important to go back to what Sass said is that we can’t continue to close Guard units and Reserve units because those reserve units are the landing spot for the experienced pilots that exit the active component. When I was doing my research, um, you know, the active component, their retention rate is about 45%.

That’s been stable for about five years or so, which means that less than half of the pilots that are eligible to stay in the Air Force do. [00:35:00] Let me rephrase that. More than half of the pilots that are eligible to leave the Air Force do, so if we want to keep that talent within the total force, we have to give them somewhere to land, and that’s only going to be within the Guard or the Reserve.

Lt. Gen. Mark Sasseville, USAF (Ret.): Absolutely. And the other aspect or another aspect of this whole, uh, absorption issue is that the Air Force has done this before. They’re, Lucky, you remember on 9/11, Brandon Rasmussen, who was with us. He was an active component pilot that was flying in our squadron. He was assigned to us for a whole assignment, and this is back, you know, 25 years ago.

So, the Air Force knows how to do this. They know how to take advantage, and they should, of reserve component experience and maintenance and sortie production. Experience their guys, and then put them back into frontline fighter units. [00:36:00] Uh, for an assignment or two, put them on the staff, wherever they go.

And then, you know, they fleet up through the operational and the strategic levels, hopefully. And so this isn’t new, they’ve done it before and actually they’re doing it now, right, Gus? I think the, we were calling it the 4 and 40. Four pilots and 40 maintainers. Augment Guard units and participate in the absorption thing.

So, we’re not trying to convince anybody to do anything that they haven’t done before. I think the conversation is if you close Guard units, you’re not going to have that capacity. You need to, you need to fill it and you need to fill it with new equipment and maintain it. Right, Gus?

Lt. Gen. Joseph Guastella, USAF (Ret.): You’re absolutely right. No, the Guard and Reserve had been tremendous help to the active component with the, I think we call them active associations with the 4 or 5 pilots that are being quote “experience that are absorbed.” They’re young pilots that are coming into the Guard units are active duty pilots going into the Guard units and taking [00:37:00] and having the benefit of flying with the seasoned Guard and Reserve veteran pilots. Same thing for the young maintainers. Uh, it’s a win win. There’s more aircraft generation that comes out of the, our Guard units and Reserve units. And we’re, um, experiencing active pilots, which will be contributing to the total force.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: And this all, you know, getting back to the planes, pilots, and practice paradigm, you know, the adequate, we need to have adequate numbers of aircraft to fit into this equation.

And you both have talked about the mission capable rates, the availability rates of the aircraft directly impact the number of sorties a squadron can generate, which directly impacts how many hours and how many missions, uh, pilots can go fly, which ties into absorption rates and combat capacity and all of that.

And so can you speak to why it’s so important that the total force, whether it’s not the active duty, the guard, the reserve all have modern equipment? You know, in the past, the Guard and Reserve took hand me downs, I [00:38:00] mean, and right now, it seems like everybody has old jets because we just haven’t bought enough new ones, right? And old jets break a lot. They cost a fortune to maintain. And, you know, depending on how they’ve been modernized, they may not be as effective in combat and you can’t train or fight if your jets are broken. So, what are your thoughts on why we need to boost new aircraft procurement?

Lt. Gen. Joseph Guastella, USAF (Ret.): Yeah, I could, I could take that first. You know the total force has to be capable of fighting our nation’s wars. We’ve already talked about the active is too small to do it by itself. So, we’re going to rely on the Guard and Reserve to fight day 1 on the major campaigns. And if you’re going to fight on day 1, you need to be ready.

You know, the one thing that we’ve gotten away with over the last 20, 30 years as the air, as an air force employing over these very land centric campaigns where we’ve established air dominance like in the first days of these wars and then they were never threatened again. [00:39:00] Uh, we can pull off some of these missions with older airplanes.

We can do the job because it’s we’re doing close air support. We’re providing armed overwatch. We’re doing things that an older aircraft can do because we’re flying with impunity. Uh, we’re flying uncontested above Iraq and Afghanistan. And that is what our nation has gotten used to, but that is absolutely not what’s going to happen against a peer, in a peer fight. You’re going to be fighting someone, a nation that, nations that are capable of meeting us, head to head with technology, with pilot readiness, with training, and as a result, if we don’t have what America has had and enjoyed for our lifetime, which is a technological advantage. And even though we may not have a numerical advantage, we’ve always had a tech advantage and a training advantage. And if we don’t provide that to our active component and our reserve component, then we will suffer horribly in a peer fight. And that’s what has me most [00:40:00] worried is that the aging fleet that we have combined with a pilot shortfall and the readiness issues, combined with the insufficient capacity, is going to put us in a heck of a problem.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: That’s a mic drop moment right there.

Lt. Gen. Mark Sasseville, USAF (Ret.): Yeah, absolutely. That was a great answer. The, it’s funny how generals often get blamed for fighting the last war, right? And they say, well, you know, you, you built equipment and you’re focused on the last war. Well, that’s kind of what happens when you don’t equip yourself for the next war.

So, the pilots that are flying with the old equipment, assuming that they can get it up in the air are using the old weapons, the old sensors, and the old tactics, and they don’t have the opportunity to get ready for the next war because they don’t have the equipment that is being built in too small quantities, being built and fielded in too small quantities to actually distribute properly and get us a ready force that we need.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Yeah, we need to boost the aircraft inventory, boost the number of [00:41:00] pilots we have and boost the number of readiness dollars, both for sustainment and for sortie generation, so we can train more because the security environment is driving the need for growth.

You know, we face concurrent threats in Europe, given Russia’s aggression. Things are never stable in the Middle East, and we all know what China’s doing in the Pacific. And a lot of folks also don’t appreciate that distance actually drives another tax on capacity. The longer you have to drive to get to the fight, the more aircraft you need to sustain pressure and sustain operations because distance equals time.

So, all of these threats and demands are happening at the same time. Uh, you know, what are your thoughts on all of that?

Lt. Gen. Mark Sasseville, USAF (Ret.): So, you’re talking about the space time continuum.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Everything everywhere, all at once.

Lt. Gen. Mark Sasseville, USAF (Ret.): There’s very few people understand and CCAs won’t understand, but seasoned pilots certainly do understand, which is again, the need to, to keep a strong, talented, experienced aviators at the operational and strategic environment.

No, you’re [00:42:00] exactly right. And we’ve been focused on Europe through the Cold War. Then we focused on the Middle East for a long time. And if we’re going to look at the Pacific, which we’re trying to do now, that is a completely different battle space with different with different environmental, different threats, different challenges and again goes to what you’ve just said about the need to, uh, change our numbers and change our equipment to rise to the threat.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: So Sass, you just mentioned the need to have this kind of combat wisdom and experience and operational expertise, uh, you know, in the headquarters, right? We’ve heard senior leaders say that there are, you know, there’s not really that much of a problem because there’s no empty cockpits. There’s, you know, we have pilots in cockpits, so the squadrons are all filled.

But Gus, um, there’s a lot of empty billets in the Pentagon at major commands and combatant commands and in our professional military schools. What did you experience and what are the hazards that, that you worry about [00:43:00] not having this kind of combat expertise in these, uh, in these situations?

Lt. Gen. Joseph Guastella, USAF (Ret.): You know, that is a very big risk when you don’t have firsthand combat experience, life or death experience, so that you can provide the best possible advice to our senior civilian leadership about the application of military force, particular air force, right? When you’re asked to give advice about engaging with another country, striking other countries, employing air power, taking out targets.

Causing damage, causing possibly causing collateral damage, explaining the risk to the force. Will you have pilots shot down? Will you have people in the water? Will you have people that are taking captive? What is the chance of success of achieving the probability of success against these targets so that you can give the civilian decision makers the best possible advice?

[00:44:00] You can’t study that in a textbook for years and years and do it. It really helps if you’ve actually flown it and done it. To feel what it’s like in the squadron to being asked to go to war, you know, and then and only then with that experience, can you give the best possible advice. If you just think back to the football analogy, any successful coach, almost all of them have played the game, right?

They didn’t study football in college and get a PhD in it. They were out there on the field, right? And so the same thing applies and for the leadership ranks of the Air Force at the mid level leadership, the staff jobs, uh, certainly at the general officer level and everything in between. And if we only put pilots in the squadrons, we don’t have the ability to put pilots elsewhere in the staffs.

We’re going to have misinformed, uh, and possibly inappropriate application of air power. And that’s why it’s a critical issue to have pilots in the squadrons and at every level throughout staffs.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: [00:45:00] Okay, so there I was time. Could both of you share an experience in your career where your firsthand fighter pilot, uh, you know, knowledge and experience was crucial in one of those staff positions?

Lt. Gen. Mark Sasseville, USAF (Ret.): I’ll share two. It became evident to me. I was in Turkey as a one star for a couple of years and got intimate with what CENTCOM was doing and how they were using air power. And it became very evident to me. Uh, very early on that the combatant commander, uh, was, uh, not really interested in fully exploiting or using air power the way I think the staff should have advised them for whatever reason, right?

Heather “Lucky” Penney: They just couldn’t understand because?

Lt. Gen. Mark Sasseville, USAF (Ret.): Well, I think [00:46:00] there’s probably a couple reasons for it. I’m guessing and spitballing at this point, but I’ll just say that it’s extremely important, as Gus said, to have air minded people who can speak to other services and explain what air power can do and what it should do and how it should best be used when you go to war and support a joint force commander, because a lot of the staffs are filled with non air force people, let alone air force operators. So, we saw that pretty early on with with how ISR was being used, uh, over in the desert.

More recently, and I’m not going to go into too many details, but some of the meetings that I’d go into the Pentagon were fairly far reaching and impactful, uh, decision support meetings and I look around and come to the conclusion that again, I was the only operator in the room, [00:47:00] let alone the only fighter pilot.

And some of these topics had to do withTACAIR right? Tactical Air Force structure, a tactical air structure, meaning Air Force and Navy. So, it’s extremely important again to be able to have representation up and throughout the entire Department of Defense to make sure that the focus stays where it needs to on the attributes of air power. And advocacy for air power.

Lt. Gen. Joseph Guastella, USAF (Ret.): You’re absolutely right, Sass. You know, I, as a young officer on my first staff assignment, I was in charge of F 35 requirements. This is way back before even source selection. And, you know, and it was key to have, you know, it was called originally called the Joint Strike Fighter, right?

It was a joint fighter. And we, you know, we had to fight for requirements for the U. S. Air Force to ensure that the variant the version we got was going to be able to meet the Air Force’s needs. And you could only do that [00:48:00] in an environment if you knew what you were talking about. You know, while we didn’t get everything right, we certainly made a point to fight for the Air Force’s requirements so we could do our missions because there was a lot of competition with what the Navy needed and what the Marines needed, you know, and and that that same thing exists.

You know, you’re gonna need as we shape this future force and you guys were talking about drones or, Lucky you were talking about it’s, you know, CCAs, collaborative combat aircraft. Who’s going to shape what they do, you know, PhDs? That studied air power or pilots that actually understand, uh, air power and can best craft how this new technology would be employed.

How do we introduce the technology? What, What do we go for first? And then, you know, how can we continue to evolve that? It’s best informed by pilots that have been there and done it. And so whether you’re shaping requirements, whether you’re advising on civilian senior leadership on how to [00:49:00] employ air power, there’s plenty of examples of where experienced pilots were able to provide input and hopefully if it was, if it was taken, uh, you know, change the course of direction.

Just look at, look at Boyd’s book for, as a matter of fact, and those who haven’t read that, uh, you know, some phenomenal what one pilot did in terms of shaping the direction of the Air Force. I know that’s for another discussion, but, uh, anyway, hugely important topic.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Well, and I’ll even share an experience that all of our listeners will be familiar with, which is Ukraine, right? I mean people are talking about how drones are changing the game but if drones are actually decisive air power then either Ukraine or Russia would have decisively concluded this conflict, right?

So, really they’ve not been applying air airpower in the right way to be able to achieve their objectives. And although we’ve started to see Ukraine be resourced [00:50:00] with the capabilities, they need to go do deep strike. They don’t have sufficient numbers and capacity to be able to do that at a strategic airpower campaign level.

So, they’ve not been able to really close the deal. So, I think that Ukraine is an example of what happens when you don’t have real airpower practitioners. Combat fighter pilots. They’re shaping how they execute the campaign.

Lt. Gen. Joseph Guastella, USAF (Ret.): Yeah, you’re absolutely right. You know, really the biggest blunder was with Russia. Their complete and utter misapplication of air power, I think, was hugely a factor in their ineffective initial push into Ukraine. Now it’s settled out into a different type of war, but you’re absolutely right. If you want to study how not to use air power, look at Russia in the opening weeks of the of the Ukraine campaign.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Yeah, which is really just neo Soviet doctrine, right? I mean they they use air powers if it were just airborne artillery and so they don’t use air power in the western way. And we certainly didn’t [00:51:00] empower ukraine either with the resources the capabilities the jets or the expertise to be able to do the same.

And there’s a reason why Zelenskyy was continuously asking for fighter aircraft throughout the last three years. But to get back to how the Air Force fixes it because that’s you know it comes down to our ability and frankly our moral obligation to organize, train, and equip the young airmen today to be able to go strap on the jet, go into bad guy land, execute their mission successfully, and then come home safely What do we do? How do we fix this?

Lt. Gen. Mark Sasseville, USAF (Ret.): I’ll take a first stab and then turn it over to Gus who’s, who’s touched this more recently than I have. Obviously, what we’re doing isn’t working. It’s either because we’re not doing it right or we haven’t prioritized it enough. So, let’s say that we, and it’s not just the Air Force, by the way, right?

I mean, the entire Department of Defense needs [00:52:00] to be supportive to some manner, maybe not the entire, right? But at least key elements of it. Congress needs to be supportive. Industry needs to be a partner in this. And again, this is why it’s so hard and it hasn’t been fixed yet, I think. Uh, but let’s say that we did prioritize it and we wanted to get after it.

The thing that we’ve got working against us consistently, and not just on this, but across the board, is the turnover. The turnover and all of those areas I just mentioned, save industry. That seems probably the most stable out of all of them, but senators and congressmen come and go. Four year presidential election. Chiefs of Staff of the Air Force, secretaries, uh, come and go sometimes four, sometimes on a faster cycle, and then key members of the staff below that.

And this problem is so complicated and the time horizon required to fix it is so long that I don’t think that we will be [00:53:00] successful with a business as usual approach. Now, I don’t think that we need to go to the Admiral Rickover model and have somebody setting in nuclear reactors for a 20 year time span to fix this, but I think you’re going to need to identify, you should consider this is something to be considered.

Identify a leadership team that will be dedicated for more than four years. And nobody likes to do that because that impacts promotions and upward mobility and so forth. So I understand that, but somebody is going to have to in this scenario, somebody has to take the bullet. Somebody who is in charge for 4 to 6 years, so they can see the development, the execution, the implementation.

Of serious fixes across the enterprise to get us where we need to be. If you don’t put somebody in charge, give them the authority, given the appropriate amount of authority, give them a budget to work with, we’re going to be [00:54:00] here in another 5 to 6 years. So, I think that’s going to be the key.

And I think there’s place for an organization like Mitchell to help with some of the thinking. The staffs are so day to day in the grind. They can’t come up for air. Nobody’s got this job as a primary duty. It’s all additional. It’s just another project in an already filled portfolio, um, that’s going to require extra brains, either from inside or outsourced with the right folks in charge to make effective change.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Now, Gus, as A3, you had a team that was looking at this, right?

Lt. Gen. Joseph Guastella, USAF (Ret.): Yeah absolutely. There’s a lot of problems we’ve addressed today, but I think, you know, the focus right now is on the pilot shortfall, and it took us 10 years, 15 years of underproduction or excessive cuts in our pilot [00:55:00] engines, if you will, pilot training engines to get where we are, and it’s gonna take us, frankly, could take us up to 10 years to get out.

But, you know, it, just because this is a daunting problem, does not give us the excuse to keep delaying implementing a fix. Even though it’s going to take 5 or 10 years to fix the problem doesn’t let the Air Force off the hook with fixing the problem. And we’ve underproduced pilots for years and years.

We have a 2000 plus pilot shortfall now. And so they absolutely have to increase production right away. They can’t over produce and therefore not be able to absorb like Sass was talking about with the pipes, but they absolutely have to immediately fix the pilot production so we have a minimum number of new pilots coming out that over time will fulfill that deficit across their career.

That I think is is front and center. But I’ll [00:56:00] tell you this hasn’t, this isn’t an unknown or new problem. There’s been three or four or five, deputy chiefs of staff for operations before me that have seen this problem, voiced the voice of concern, elevated the fixes and for whatever reason, the Air Force didn’t, didn’t do it.

And now I always say the Air Force, the leadership of the Air Force always does the best they can do with the money they have, right? All of them have every leadership team has done the best they can do with the amount of money that they have. So, the Air Force has been insufficiently resourced for many things.

One of them is modernization, one of them is capacity, and absolutely inefficiently resource for pilot production, but, you know, to take it a little bit farther. You know, while they’ve done the best they can do with the money they have, maybe [00:57:00] the one thing they haven’t done to the best of their ability is to actually take personal risk and fight for additional top line for the Air Force. To explain to the civilian leadership in the Department of Defense and to Congress sufficiently on why the Air Force is in the condition that it’s in.

And, you know, it involves rocking the boat, it involves pushing back, it involves fighting for your service at, at some risk to your own career. But at some point you have to say, hey, when is this bigger than me? You know, when am I doing something for the nation and throwing down the line? And honestly, that’s, it’s hard to find leaders that have done that, but that’s one of the reasons we’re in the condition that we’re in.

It’s one of the, and it’s also paints the picture of what we need to do to get out of it.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: You know, sir, what you said is it comes down to service before self. I mean, making those arguments is core to our obligation to the young men and women who are serving today.

Lt. Gen. Mark Sasseville, USAF (Ret.): And, you know, I would add, [00:58:00] I agree with all that. I think that there’s an element of that. But it’s also helpful to understand where the Air Force sits in the big scheme of things. The Air Force sits inside the DOD, and the budgets are determined by the SECDEF, the DEP SECDEF, and they rely on CAPE to give them recommendations on what each service should be doing.

So the Air Force, like Gus appropriately said, you get what you get and you don’t get upset and you do your best that you can. And I have no doubt that the Air Force does that. But we don’t live in a septic environment where we don’t get influenced and the people that Gus is talking about that need to be convinced of the value of air power back to the strategic level and understand having people who understand that have to engage at the higher levels and have to engage with Congress to get this.

The Air Force can’t win this battle from the inside out. It’s got to come from the other parts of [00:59:00] the department, and it’s got to be an acknowledged effort by the larger ecosystem that gets interested in this as well.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Well, and what you both said is that the Air Force has really been doing the best that it can with its limited resources.

And it’s no surprise that they have under prioritized pilot production because they’ve tried to prioritize the tooth of the force, right? Um, the Aircraft and training and readiness and modernization and so forth, even though we all know that that is also under resourced based off of the demand signal from the combatant commanders.

So, this really needs to be a discussion that’s elevated to the highest levels with as many advocates on, on all sides, because as I’ve often said, if you don’t have an air force, you cannot have a joint force. You know, the entire Department of Defense military effectiveness depends on the Air and Space Force being able to execute air and space superiority.

So, this should really concern everyone. So, [01:00:00] the world’s on fire and even if we dumped unlimited funds on solutions, we know fast fixes are impossible. You know, resetting the force involves a deliberate set of steps. It takes time. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. And in our report, which is in the show notes, you know, we advocate for, you know, clearly we’re focused at this point on pilot experience.

So, the production is a crucial component of that. We didn’t focus on that, but we do have to get production going. But we really have to grow the total force. We’ve got to get and we have to modernize the total force and we have to recapitalize the total force. So that’s growing the active component as well as the National Guard and the Air Force Reserve.

And why I focus so much on the reserve component, the Air National Guard and the Reserves, is that that’s where experienced pilots go when they leave the active component. If we can’t keep them in the active, then we have to grow the reserve if we’re going to be able to retain that experience for the total force.

And that’s the only, that’s the [01:01:00] fastest and I think, um, the most expeditious and cost effective way to be able to begin to reverse the pilot shortfall and ensure that we have the combat experience we need to be successful in war.

Lt. Gen. Joseph Guastella, USAF (Ret.): You’re absolutely right. You know, Sass, you can comment on this to the, you know, the, we are a total force and the total force needs to grow. But you always say, don’t believe me just because I was the Air Force A3 or because I was an air power advocate. You don’t have to believe me just because it’s some old air power advocate saying the Air Force needs to grow. You know who you can turn to are the combatant commanders because every single one of them have demands for air power that are unfulfilled. That are demonstrating shortfalls. You know, if you look at what’s going on in Asia right now, there’s need for more deterrent presence. There’s a need for high end 5th. 6th generation air power there. Look at the ongoing fight in Europe. Look at the ongoing [01:02:00] tensions in the Middle East. Every single area, including homeland defense, has a demand for air power. So, it’s the war, it’s the joint war fighter, like you said, Heather, that’s asking for the Air Force to grow.

It’s not just the Air Force wanting to get bigger. It’s the needs of the nation, right? It’s the aspirations of our National Defense Strategy. The customer wants air power. It’s not just we want air power. And so we have to grow. We have to modernize. And at the center of all of that is our pilot, you know, production and absorption.

And I guess I’ll say one, you know, one last thing to this. One tool that we have that’s really effective is our ability to come with one voice as a total force for this and not just the shoot against each other’s targets between the active, Guard, and Reserve. We have to go forward as one voice for the greater good of the Air Force.

When a Guard unit goes and talks to their congressman and goes to the hill, don’t just talk about the unit. [01:03:00] Talk about how it fits in that broader force. And only that way will this message ever really be received and action to get us out of the situation.

Lt. Gen. Mark Sasseville, USAF (Ret.): I couldn’t agree more. All the interactions need to be based on the precept of having a total Air Force. All active, reserve components, civilians, contractors, you know, all that put together. And one message carries a lot more weight than five or six different messages. The back to the discussion we had earlier about the squadron being like a football team.

When we talk about growing, I think we do ourselves a disservice if we stop the conversation there. I think it’s helpful to the people who would be interested in making things better is if we would carry the conversation through to a logical conclusion. And [01:04:00] again, to use a football analogy our team is skinny. And we need to put on a couple pounds, right? And that’s why we want to grow, right? Our front line can’t hold the, our adversaries front line. Our linemen need to bulk up a little bit, and that’s the reason that we’re talking about growing. We’re not talking about growing just to grow for growing sake, right?

It’s about bulking up and having a, credible force, a sustainable force that will carry through conflict, not just into conflict. So, I think that’s a key point that we need to focus on when we talk to the rest of the environment who’s interested in helping.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Sass, I love how you brought that up because it isn’t, as you mentioned, about peacetime operations and sustaining the health of squadrons in peacetime, or just being able to flow that to the initiation of conflict.

It’s about being able to decisively conclude the conflict in our favor. So with bulking [01:05:00] up, what does healthy look like? You know, what are the markers that you would be tracking?

Lt. Gen. Joseph Guastella, USAF (Ret.): Well, I mean, healthy to me looks like first and foremost reversed the pilot training, you know, situation increase the pilot training. That is step one. That will ensure we’re on the right path to create sufficient numbers of pilots over time, whether those pilots stay for 20 or 30 years, or whether those pilots stay for just their commitment and then transition to the Guard and Reserve, or whether they just leave active, leave the uniform behind altogether. We need to increase that. That’s, you know, step one. We also have to grow capacity or prevent the decrement of capacity first and foremost. We cannot continue to hemorrhage, you know that CAF Redux that you talked about, where they cut 250 fighters out of the inventory so they could grow RPAs and [01:06:00] things like that and reduce money. We can’t do that? We can’t hemorrhage more for structure. Why? Because the Air Force is in demand across the globe, okay? So, stop reducing capacity.

And then lastly, we need the resources to actually grow and modernize. And so, it’s a series of things that we have to do the most acute, I think, being the pilot situation that can be addressed most affordably. The other ones are harder to address, but it can only be done if we articulate the risks that our nation faces, not having sufficient air power.

Lt. Gen. Mark Sasseville, USAF (Ret.): I think the the idea of growing to a target, first of all, you absolutely need that to, from a simple programmatic perspective, right? You’re going to have to set goals as you go through it. But the real answer to your question is, when does, when do we know that enough is enough? If you look at, like I said, if you look at the family of readiness indicators. And this in itself, how [01:07:00] you measure readiness, that’s a whole nother, that’s a whole nother ball of, ball of wax and something that you can really dig into and look at and dissect and it’s impossible to explain the uninitiated.

But basically, in my simple mind, I think of it as individual readiness, and then you’ve got unit readiness, and then you’ve got joint force readiness. And that’s how you measure your risk along those same levels. And so when those risk levels and those readiness metrics start to change, you’ll know that you’re making progress.

And I don’t think we stop until we see some, some actual movement from a, and I’m not going to go through them all, but just from a basic individual readiness, once the retention rates start changing, once the, the RAP, the ready air crew program numbers start coming up. Once you see the commensurate change and maintenance [01:08:00] statistics. Aircraft availability. Once you see that whole family of readiness measures start to float up a little bit I think you’ll know that, uh, that you’re on the right track.

And fundamentally, I think the depression of the factors that are making all of this a challenging environment for our pilot force don’t go away until then, but they also have an effect on our airmen and their families and that’s even harder to measure. And, and if, people are going to work every day thinking they don’t bring value, they’re getting rode hard and it’s just a thankless place to be. Although intangible, I think that is something that you can measure with just good old fashioned, old school leadership getting out there and talking to airmen and seeing how [01:09:00] they’re doing.

And that would also be a metric or a measurement that I would throw into the mix to know whether we’re making progress or not.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Yeah, so the combination of traditional readiness metrics as well as morale and retention rates are a huge piece of knowing that we’re getting back some positive climb rate in terms of what healthy looks like. But I’ll actually take that up a level as well because, for example, when we look at, when we do wargaming and analysis of peer conflict, oftentimes that only encapsulates about a two week time frame, right?

Well, if we think about the fastest and most decisive conflict we have experienced in the United States, that would be Operation Desert Storm. And that was a 34 day campaign, air campaign, followed by, followed by the land campaign for a total of 43 days.

43 days was the most decisive combat we have ever waged. And that was [01:10:00] riding on the heels of the Cold War force structure. So, as we look to the future and today’s global strategic environment, I really am befuddled why we stop our war games at about 12 days. So what I would say, as a measure of what healthy looks like, is we go back to the beginning of conversation, Gus, where you said it takes about six to eight years to really get to that elite level of, uh, combat capability, experience, and expertise and lethality, right?

So, then, if it takes about six years and to get there, minimum, then do we have enough combat capacity to withstand attrition, feed the fight forward, and still be combat effective for six years? So can I take someone from zero to hero in six years and still be able to wage effective conflict? And that, so that would be, that would be my measure is [01:11:00] can we sustain a successful protracted conflict both in terms of force structure, so numbers, capacity, capability, and pilot experience and readiness?

And do we have the training replacement program, this gets back to the production pipeline guests that you were talking about, to be able to feed the fight with new pilots?

Lt. Gen. Joseph Guastella, USAF (Ret.): I think that’s a great way of putting it, Heather. I just hope whether we use that and those are good metrics and the one Sass threw out are good metrics. I just want to see resources put into the Air Force so we actually have something to measure because right now what I’m measuring is a downward and I’d like to see some money come in that we can actually say, all right, now we have some money coming in. We can actually make the change that, make some of these changes and then we’ll have things that we can measure.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: So, um, to end the conversation on a personal note, um, I’m curious, what are some of the biggest lessons each of you have learned as you’ve worked this issue across your careers? [01:12:00]

Lt. Gen. Joseph Guastella, USAF (Ret.): You know, I’ll just go first, you know, and there’s so many things I’ve learned. I’ve learned a lot across my career and a lot of times by doing, not doing the right thing or having to rethink what I was doing. But one thing I have learned is that, um, you know, once you’ve developed an appreciation for air power and what our incredible airmen can do for this country, what, what they’ve done for this country, what our forefathers and the air force have done for the country, to never stop the fight. To do the right thing for the Air Force and for air power, like you said, service before self.

And the Air Force does so much for our nation. Sometimes it’s recognized. Sometimes it’s not, you know, and I’m not worried about the recognition that the Air Force gets or doesn’t get, but we have to fight for the, for the Air Force’s relevance for all the things that you talked about the capacity of the force, the modernization of the force, and the [01:13:00] readiness of the force.

We have to fight that fight. We have to fight that fight even at the expense of rocking the boat, of being that squeaky wheel and that joint meeting to do the right thing. To in some cases, put our own career progression at risk for the greater good of the service, you know, and that’s, that’s the lesson that I’ve learned and, uh, and, and that’s, I think that’s something that all of us in the Air Force should keep in mind as we get to roles of leadership.

Lt. Gen. Mark Sasseville, USAF (Ret.): That’s a great answer. I think, my notion would be similar. It’s easy to get caught in the daily grind and the heat of the moment and things that aren’t super important or super impactful or super germane sometimes carry the day and it’s easy to get it wrapped up and confused about those.

I think [01:14:00] that over the arc of time, over the arc of a longer career you actually build a little bit more confidence that, that we’re going to be okay. It’s easy to not think that when you’re in it. Uh, but what gives me confidence is the great Americans that we have out there that are still volunteering to serve.

That’s not going to change. Uh, I don’t know many people that started off on that foot and wanted to serve and then at some point get off that, get it off that train, right? So that’s a, that’s a mindset that’ll continue to carry through their, their lives. So I’m appreciative of that. I think there’s enough there that are still interested in doing that.

And like I said, it’s about continuing each little engagement, each little battle, trying to get every, every yard, every little inch of terrain that you can in furtherance of the goal. I think we’re going to be there. I think it’s going to take everybody to do it, though. It’s going to [01:15:00] take focused leadership and priorities and keeping the main thing, the main thing, and I think we can get there. I’m confident.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Well, one thing I liked about what both of you said throughout this entire episode is how important it is that we remember that we are a total force. It’s not the active or the reserves. It’s, it’s everybody together at the same time.

And so, ensuring that we’re able to retain that experience, even if they choose to leave the active component, ensuring that both components, the reserve and the active grow and modernize together, that we’re all one big family. We’re all on the same team.

Lt. Gen. Mark Sasseville, USAF (Ret.): Absolutely.

Lt. Gen. Joseph Guastella, USAF (Ret.): Well said.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Gentlemen, it’s been great. Thank you so much. I really appreciate your time and we look forward to having you back on the Aerospace Advantage.

Lt. Gen. Joseph Guastella, USAF (Ret.): Thanks, Lucky.

Lt. Gen. Mark Sasseville, USAF (Ret.): Thank you, Lucky. It was a blast.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: With that, I’d like to extend a big thank you to our guests for joining in today’s discussion. I’d also like to [01:16:00] extend a big thank you to you, our listeners, for your continued support and for tuning into today’s show.

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