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All across America and around the world, this is Veterans Radio.

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This is Veterans Radio.

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Welcome to Veterans Radio.

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I am Jim Fausone.

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I'm the officer of the deck today.

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We've got some great programs for you.

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I think you'll find very interesting.

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We always want to remind you you can find more about Veterans Radio at its Facebook site

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or at the web.

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VeteransRadio.org is our new URL, VeteransRadio.org.

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Where we're on the web 24-7, you can find a lot of our podcasts there as well.

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We post new ones every Tuesday, so you can get a new story, a new interview, something

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you didn't know before by going to VeteransRadio.org.

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And before we get started, we want to thank our sponsors.

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First up, we want to thank National Veteran Business Development Council, NVBDC.org.

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It was established to certify both service disabled and veteran owned businesses.

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You'll find out how they can help your business by going to NVBDC.org.

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We want to thank Legal Help for Veterans.

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Legal Help for Veterans fights for veterans disability rights all across the nation.

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You can reach them at 800-693-4800 or on the web at LegalHelpForVeterans.com.

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We want to welcome to VeteransRadio today Heather Penny.

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She is a senior resident fellow at the Mitchell Institute of Aerospace Studies.

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We have her on because of her extensive pilot and deep thinking about the Air Force.

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We've got an interesting topic to talk about.

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But Heather, welcome to VeteransRadio.

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Thank you so much.

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I'm so pleased to be here.

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Well, let's start at the beginning because your whole life really has been centered around

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flying and things related to flying.

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But how did a nice girl from Reno, Nevada end up with such a passion over aviation?

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I'm afraid I came by it honestly.

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My daddy is a fighter pilot in Vietnam.

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He flew A7s as a Sandy.

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So we did the combat search and rescue mission, picking up down pilots and air crews.

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And then when he got out, he continued to serve by flying for the Reno Air National

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Guard doing the recce mission in our Air Force.

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So I grew up around military aviation and I just loved the fighters.

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They were fast.

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They were mean looking.

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And they just felt so strong and purposeful.

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But I also fell in love with the community.

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The pilots and my dad's squadron, they were full of purpose, the brotherhood, the connection

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and community they had.

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And they were focused on excellence and doing their mission well.

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And plus, when they would tell their stories, it sounded like the greatest adventure story

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that you could go on.

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So I was hooked on aviation from a very young age.

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And of course, being in Reno and my dad racing, I grew up around all kinds of aviation.

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So it's just something I couldn't get out of my blood.

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Well, I've read a lot about you online, but that part of the backstory isn't generally

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told.

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So I figured there was a family connection to military aviation.

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So thanks for telling it.

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But here's a better story that you're not going to find anywhere else, listeners.

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And we're talking to Heather Penny.

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I asked Heather earlier, hey, how did a nice girl like you end up at Purdue University

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where you picked up both your bachelor's and your master's degree?

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And there's always a story too, how that happens.

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How did that happen here?

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I can't believe you're making me fess up.

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I am.

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I am.

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They won't take back your degrees at this point.

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Oh, thank goodness.

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It was the school with the latest application date.

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I was terrified about the process.

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I didn't really understand how to navigate college applications.

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And it was the school with the latest application date.

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So I am so fortunate they took me in.

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But I am very much a proud Boiler Maker.

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And I'm happy to say that my youngest daughter is following in my footsteps, not in the

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aviation realm.

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But she has been accepted into Purdue.

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She accepted her admission.

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And she'll be attending Purdue as a rising freshman this next year.

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Oh, that's great.

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We in the Midwest think highly of Purdue University.

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It has a great engineering school.

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And we know a lot of proud alumni from there.

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But from there you went on and said, OK, I've got my degrees.

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Let's get into aviation.

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Tell us about your time in the service.

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Well, actually, part of the reason why Purdue was on my list was because they had the ROTC

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department.

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And I wanted to be a fighter pilot.

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And when I arrived on campus and I contacted ROTC, they're like, no, no, no, no.

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Girls can't be fighter pilots.

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Because at the time, in 1992, they couldn't.

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The combat exclusion for aviation had not been lifted by Congress until later.

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So that's when I ended up going into the humanities into the College of Liberal Arts, where I got

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my bachelor's and my master's.

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So I was in the middle of my master's degree studying American Studies, which is an interdisciplinary

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field, when I learned that Congress had indeed removed that exclusion.

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And I could apply to become a fighter pilot.

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And so there I went to the Air National Guard Route, not the active duty.

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And the reason why is in the mid 1990s, the Soviet Union had fallen.

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It was the end of history.

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The Berlin Wall had crumbled years earlier.

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And so our nation was trying to reap this peace dividend.

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They didn't think we were the only superpower on the globe.

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So why do we need to have a military anymore?

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And they literally cut our Air Force in half.

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And so the active duty, their planes cut in half.

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They were doing a reduction in force.

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So they were actually forcibly exiting pilots from the service saying, thank you very much,

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but next year you're not going to be in the Air Force anymore.

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Go find a job.

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And so because I wanted to fly fighters, it was really high risk to go into the active

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duty.

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So because my dad had been in the Guard, I knew that if I was hired by the Guard, if

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they had fighters on their ramp, and if I was good enough, if I was qualified and I passed

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all the check rides, if I was good enough, I could control my destiny and go fly fighters.

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And so I was hired.

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It's important.

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I want to point out, Heather, it's important this 1990 experience that you went through

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about that reduction, because it's going to come back when we talk about the issue on

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which you're quoted in the Defense News article that caught my attention.

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But that's why you got yourself into the Guard.

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And tell us about your time in the Guard, your overseas deployments.

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Yes, I was fortunate to be hired by the DC Air National Guard, the 121st fighter squadron

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in Washington, DC.

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And they fly F-16s.

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So I went through NJET, which is the Euro NATO Joint Jet Pilot Training in Texas.

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My qualifications got me above the threshold to attend this undergraduate pilot training,

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which is pretty exclusive.

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If you graduate from there, you're going to get a fighter.

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It's kind of an all or nothing gamble.

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And then I went through my F-16 training and showed up to my fighter unit and became combat

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mission ready in early 2001.

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Well guess what happens next?

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Thank you, Clay.

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So on 9-11, Mark Sasseville and I were sent in unarmed F-16s on a suicide mission to Flight

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93.

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As you can imagine, this was unprecedented times for our nation.

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And we are very fortunate that the passengers on Flight 93 are true heroes.

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I mean, they took their fate into their own hands to protect our nation.

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And this led to the last several decades, couple decades of the long wars in the Middle

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East.

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And I've got two combat deployments underneath my belt.

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One was initial combat operations to Iraqi Freedom, where my unit, our wing, we were

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tasked with hunting scuds.

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So it was primarily a nighttime sked hunter.

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And we went back and then did more.

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And then I transitioned from the fighter head to leave it as a single mom to little

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girls that couldn't sustain the deployments.

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And so I was fortunate to be able to fly the DV airlift mission.

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And then I retired out of the Pentagon, out of the National Military Command Center.

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But during that time, I also, as a guardsman and then as a reservist, worked within the

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defense industry.

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So I understood the defense industry.

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And I'm now a senior fellow at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, which is

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a think tank that focuses on air power and air force issues.

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And that's really what got us to this article on MeTrack.

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And you, down to talk about, you mentioned the defense industry, and you had various

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positions with Lockheed Martin as the director of different air force programs.

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So you had both the military service, the contractor, defense contractor information

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experience, and now this think tank experience.

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And that kind of gets us to this article that I guess I hadn't thought about and probably

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met many veteran radio listeners have not thought about.

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And that is the stress both on the fleet and the force that the air force has experienced

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because of these long wars that you mentioned.

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Set this up for us.

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Tell us what the looming problem is as you see it.

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The looming problem is that our air force is, I'm just going to say it's in a death

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spiral.

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So in the 1990s, we cut the force in half.

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And like for example, the fighter force literally cut in half, just divided by two.

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So you've got 50% of what you had.

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And then we go into operations in the Middle East.

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Well now you have fewer aircraft, but the demand signal has gone up dramatically.

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Now even though we had been doing operation Northern Watch and Southern Watch, so everyone

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else got to come home after Desert Storm.

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The air force did not get to.

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We conducted airspace control operations over Iraq, both the southern side and the northern

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side to protect the Kurds and also to prevent further aggression from Saddam Hussein.

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So the air force never came home.

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But now suddenly they're doing more with less.

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And so not only do you measure the age of aircraft in terms of chronological years,

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but you measure it in terms of flight hours.

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So we are just flying the hell out of these airplanes.

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And they are dying sooner than they had been planned.

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Most of the aircraft that were built in the 1980s.

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Now you remember the Reagan era buildup.

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He didn't actually grow the air force tremendously.

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What he did was he did a complete turnover of the air force.

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So all of the Century Series fighters and Vietnam type fighters that we had, he recapitalized

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with the modern 4th generation fighters that we're familiar with seeing.

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The F-15, the A-10, the F-16.

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During the 1980s we were buying these aircraft at 200 to 300 a year.

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So now they're 20 years old as we go into Operation Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom.

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And not only are they at least 20 years old, but now suddenly we're flying them much harder

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than they were ever planned to be.

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So instead of 4,000 hours, we're now flying these aircraft to 8,000 hours.

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So you can imagine how sort of long in the tooth and tired they are.

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As a matter of fact, in I think it was 2015, and you could probably double check the actual

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year, but an F-15 is flying over St. Louis.

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It's doing a normal training sortie and it just breaks in half because the metal was

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very distressing.

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Yeah, metal stress, yeah.

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Fatigue.

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Yeah, yeah.

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It was so fatigue.

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So even though we can modernize these aircraft with new widgets and new radars and new data

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links and all that good stuff, the airframes are still old.

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And while numbers don't tell you the whole story, the numbers here kind of do give you

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a little shocking view of this is it's predicted that the fleet's going to drop, the Air Force's

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fleet is going to drop below 5,000 fighters, bombers, tankers, the whole thing in 2025.

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And it's never been that low if I understand it.

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It's never been as low as it is today and it's getting even smaller.

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The Navy has actually bought more fighters than the Air Force has in the last 20 years.

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And even since we started Operation Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom, and we've been continuing

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this combat operations, the Air Force has continued to get smaller even though the demand signal

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is going up.

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Somebody in Congress must be looking at this and saying, hey, we're paying attention to

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how many ships we have in the Navy because of the China situation.

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Are we paying, is Congress paying any attention, is the public paying any attention to what's

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happening to the Air Force?

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I don't think there's as much attention being paid to this as it should be because, now,

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fortunately, we do have some members in Congress that are blocking the Air Force from divesting

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more aircraft without a plan.

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But if you think about it, the United States military has operated under a veil of air

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supremacy since 1954.

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They haven't had to worry about enemy bombers, enemy fighters, enemy missiles, or things like

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that since 1954.

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And so I think they take air power for granted.

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They just assume that the Air Force is going to continue to be able to completely control

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the skies.

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And I wish there had been more of a wake-up call when our base in Iraq was attacked this

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past year by Iranian ballistic missiles because that should have had people go, whoa, whoa,

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wait a second, maybe we need to pay more attention to air control.

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Because if you think about what's going on in Ukraine, which feels a lot like World War

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I, right, with the way that the lines are, it's just a battle of attrition and atrocity.

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Yeah, ground pounding, yep.

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Yeah, I mean, and that is primarily because neither side has real air power in the way

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that we have shaped our joint force to employ.

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And so it is at the end going to be just a matter of who has bigger numbers of bodies

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and bullets the way they're fighting Ukraine.

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And what a horrific way to fight war.

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Well, sometimes when we have these discussions, people say, well, we don't need to be as big

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as we have been or are to maintain, for example, air supremacy because we have allies, we have

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friends.

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That's part of the argument about the Navy.

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And Australia is going to be there for us and Japan is going to be there for us.

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We'll see.

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But is that the argument that the U.S. Air Force doesn't need to be of its size because

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you've got NATO or something?

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What is, what's the explanation for letting the Air Force fleet wither on the vine?

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I would say there's three factors.

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And, you know, one is, is just simply budgets.

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The Air Force has not been provided the necessary resources to recapitalize the way that it

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needs to.

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And you know, some of this is if you look at, if you look at the last 20, 20 years,

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you know, the Army has been the preponderance of forces in, in the Middle East.

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And so the Air Force has been funded to, as a comparison, $1.3 trillion less than the

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Army over the last 20 years.

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At the same time, that has forced them to cut their recapitalization plans.

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So where their force is right now is they basically have to recapitalize every single

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major weapon system they have now because they have been limping everything along as

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long as they possibly can.

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So they have to recapitalize helicopters, strategic deterrents.

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So this is, they have to recapitalize and replace the Minuteman III, which has been our

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ground-based nuclear deterrent for the last 70 years, right?

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They've got to recapitalize bombers.

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They've got to recapitalize fighters.

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They've got to recapitalize their specialized, what we call them, Havas, the high-value assets,

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everything from AWACS to JSTARS to Rivet Joint to all of these other aircraft, all at the

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same time.

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So that's a huge bill because they've been deferring this for so long because of budget

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pressures, right?

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Yeah, that catches up to you and that's what's happening, right?

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Well, yeah, and there's two more pieces.

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One, so that's a main causal root cause.

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But there's also this belief in third offset technologies, that's the buzzword for your

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listeners.

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They want to sound like outsiders where the more exquisite and the more sophisticated

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the technology is, the more effective we can be so we need less stuff.

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But that only works to a point.

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And that's, for example, one of the reasons why air power is able to be so dominant in

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desert storm that the Army was just basically able to walk right up to Baghdad is because

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of these advances in technology and how we employed that.

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But the problem is that twofold.

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One, technology is no longer the unique domain of the free world and specifically of America.

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There's a lot of really smart engineers and software coders and technologies out there,

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right?

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And two, one thing can only be in one place at one time.

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It doesn't matter how effective it is.

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So that's sort of like the Battlestar problem, right?

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Is that you have one widget, it might be incredibly effective, but you cannot cover the entire

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breadth of the Pacific with it.

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You cannot cover, you cannot feel the force of the small amount of things.

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So scope and geography is now, and also now that we're facing more, I would actually call

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them peer threats, right?

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Where China, Russia, and other nations are becoming, they're getting better at what

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they do.

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We need to begin to account for attrition as well.

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So that's really, and so Secretary Kendall right now is, he is embarking and has been

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divesting older platforms so we can invest in research and development.

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But the problem is it creates this bathtub where you're getting rid of the aircraft that

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you have to a very, very small force in the hopes that future technologies will arrive

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in the 2035 timeframe that will be relevant to that timeframe.

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So Kendall's trying to transform the air force, and I don't disagree with his intent,

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but what I'm deeply concerned about is this, the next decade of how the air force is becoming

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so small that we will not be able to meet the demands of our national security interests.

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We won't be there for our joint partners, and how do we grow when we've gotten too,

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too small?

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It's a death spiral.

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Yeah, trying to ramp back up every business, every team, every whatever you've ever been

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in understands the idea of how much more difficult it is to ramp back up after you've gotten

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that small.

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And we've moved cyber into a new segment, and we have things, you talk about technology

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offsets, I think, do people think drones are, you don't need the air force of old because

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you've got drone technology?

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Unfortunately, people do.

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People are of this belief that suddenly now quadcopters are around, and there's drones,

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there's artificial intelligence, we just put these little unmanned vehicles up there.

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And we're seeing a lot of that in Ukraine, but people are not seeing how these drones

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are falling out of the sky there.

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And so when we look at Ukraine and what's going on in Ukraine and how they're using

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drone technology there, there are uses for these kinds of drones, but then also the air

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force is looking at what they call collaborative combat aircraft, and they should be smaller,

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cheaper, autonomous aircraft that are probably modular.

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They can have different capabilities like jamming or sensing, or they can be missile

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trucks or things like that.

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But they should help address the capacity requirement that the air force will have in

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future war.

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And also they have the interesting opportunity to change the risk calculus.

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So we did a war game last year at the Mitchell Institute to look at how you might use these

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collaborative combat aircraft.

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And what we found was that operators wanted to use them indisruptive and sort of chaotic

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little ways.

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They wanted to be able to use these drones to be able to detonate adversary tactics,

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force the adversary to react, to deplete the adversary magazine, and to get them off

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their game.

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So that basically then would put our manned aircraft in a position of advantage.

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And let me tell you why humans in the battle space, especially in aircraft, will continue

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to be really important because we don't even have smart self-driving cars just yet.

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And that's a two-dimensional problem set with well-known and well-accepted rules of the

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road in an unchanging environment.

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Fairly unchanging, right?

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The roads generally stay where the roads are.

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Going into a high intensity conflict in three-dimensional airspace is not quite so easy of a problem

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set.

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So having humans being able to make decisions through uncertainty, ambiguity, and improvise

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within the battle space based off of the human mind and imagination and training will continue

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to be a critical component of our combat edge, as opposed to putting a drone out there that

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will call it smart, but still is only as smart as it's trained and doesn't have the ability

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to adapt to deception, doesn't have the ability to adapt to hacking, and could be, depending

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on what goes on with the adversary, could be fairly predictable to the enemy.

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And I guess we're going to run out of time and boy, we could have gone a lot longer.

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But as you cut airframes, you're cutting the workforce.

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Yeah, you're cutting pilots.

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And that's what happened.

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And mechanics and everybody in between.

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Yep, yep, exactly.

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And it's the people that are our combat edge, our combat advantage.

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And so in the Air Force, the end strength or the manpower or the number of workers you

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have is all based off of how many air planes and how many weapon systems you have.

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So for example, in my fighter squadron, we had a 2.5 to 1 crew ratio.

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So we had 2.5 pilots for every single airplane that we had.

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And that allowed us to fly full flying schedule, give people crew rest, train the appropriate

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levels.

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We weren't overman.

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So everyone got the number of training flights and the sorties that they needed.

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And that also drove the amount of intel officers that we had and how many mechanics we had

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and how many weapons troops.

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So the guys that build the bombs and the missiles, how many of those guys we had.

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So when you cut platforms, when you cut aircraft, you cut the workforce.

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And you're usually cutting your most experienced people.

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And experience matters in combat.

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And we know this from history.

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Whether or not it's in Vietnam or you go back to World War II.

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For example, Germany had some of the most experienced fighter pilots at the beginning

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of the war.

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And just through statistics and nutrition, those guys died out.

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So by the end of the war, Germany was building and producing more fighters than they did

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at the beginning of the war.

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But the kids they put in there were so inexperienced, they just got shot down.

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Same reason why Japan had to kamikaze attacks in the end.

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Because they lost their experienced pilots.

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Well we've been talking to Heather Penny, calls on Lucky, who has been helping us understand

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the challenges that the United States Air Force is facing as its airframes dip below

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5,000 in fiscal year 2025.

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And the risk that that causes to the nation our national security.

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Being able to have the up tempo that we are often called to have in the Air Force.

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Heather, this has been a great conversation.

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We appreciate your work here as senior resident fellow at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace

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Studies.

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And you've given us a great insight into this problem, which is something we all should

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be watching.

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Oh, thank you Jim.

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It really has been an honor to speak with you.

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If you don't have an Air Force, you cannot have a joint force.

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I hope to chat with you again.

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And I want to thank everybody for listening to Veterans Radio today.

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I am Jim Fausone.

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It's been a pleasure to be your host.

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I'm a Veterans Disability Lawyer at Legal Help for Veterans.

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And you can reach us at 800-693-4800 or legalhelpforveterans.com on the web.

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00:27:46,760 --> 00:27:51,680
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shows by visiting us at veteransradio.org.

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That's veteransradio.org.

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00:27:59,000 --> 00:28:02,280
And until next time, you are dismissed.

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00:28:06,640 --> 00:28:10,880
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