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We want to welcome to VeteransRadio today Heather Penny.
She is a senior resident fellow at the Mitchell Institute of Aerospace Studies.
We have her on because of her extensive pilot and deep thinking about the Air Force.
We've got an interesting topic to talk about.
But Heather, welcome to VeteransRadio.
Thank you so much.
I'm so pleased to be here.
Well, let's start at the beginning because your whole life really has been centered around
flying and things related to flying.
But how did a nice girl from Reno, Nevada end up with such a passion over aviation?
I'm afraid I came by it honestly.
My daddy is a fighter pilot in Vietnam.
He flew A7s as a Sandy.
So we did the combat search and rescue mission, picking up down pilots and air crews.
And then when he got out, he continued to serve by flying for the Reno Air National
Guard doing the recce mission in our Air Force.
So I grew up around military aviation and I just loved the fighters.
They were fast.
They were mean looking.
And they just felt so strong and purposeful.
But I also fell in love with the community.
The pilots and my dad's squadron, they were full of purpose, the brotherhood, the connection
and community they had.
And they were focused on excellence and doing their mission well.
And plus, when they would tell their stories, it sounded like the greatest adventure story
that you could go on.
So I was hooked on aviation from a very young age.
And of course, being in Reno and my dad racing, I grew up around all kinds of aviation.
So it's just something I couldn't get out of my blood.
Well, I've read a lot about you online, but that part of the backstory isn't generally
told.
So I figured there was a family connection to military aviation.
So thanks for telling it.
But here's a better story that you're not going to find anywhere else, listeners.
And we're talking to Heather Penny.
I asked Heather earlier, hey, how did a nice girl like you end up at Purdue University
where you picked up both your bachelor's and your master's degree?
And there's always a story too, how that happens.
How did that happen here?
I can't believe you're making me fess up.
I am.
They won't take back your degrees at this point.
Oh, thank goodness.
It was the school with the latest application date.
I was terrified about the process.
I didn't really understand how to navigate college applications.
And it was the school with the latest application date.
So I am so fortunate they took me in.
But I am very much a proud Boiler Maker.
And I'm happy to say that my youngest daughter is following in my footsteps, not in the
aviation realm.
But she has been accepted into Purdue.
She accepted her admission.
And she'll be attending Purdue as a rising freshman this next year.
Oh, that's great.
We in the Midwest think highly of Purdue University.
It has a great engineering school.
And we know a lot of proud alumni from there.
But from there you went on and said, OK, I've got my degrees.
Let's get into aviation.
Tell us about your time in the service.
Well, actually, part of the reason why Purdue was on my list was because they had the ROTC
department.
And I wanted to be a fighter pilot.
And when I arrived on campus and I contacted ROTC, they're like, no, no, no, no.
Girls can't be fighter pilots.
Because at the time, in 1992, they couldn't.
The combat exclusion for aviation had not been lifted by Congress until later.
So that's when I ended up going into the humanities into the College of Liberal Arts, where I got
my bachelor's and my master's.
So I was in the middle of my master's degree studying American Studies, which is an interdisciplinary
field, when I learned that Congress had indeed removed that exclusion.
And I could apply to become a fighter pilot.
And so there I went to the Air National Guard Route, not the active duty.
And the reason why is in the mid 1990s, the Soviet Union had fallen.
It was the end of history.
The Berlin Wall had crumbled years earlier.
And so our nation was trying to reap this peace dividend.
They didn't think we were the only superpower on the globe.
So why do we need to have a military anymore?
And they literally cut our Air Force in half.
And so the active duty, their planes cut in half.
They were doing a reduction in force.
So they were actually forcibly exiting pilots from the service saying, thank you very much,
but next year you're not going to be in the Air Force anymore.
Go find a job.
And so because I wanted to fly fighters, it was really high risk to go into the active
duty.
So because my dad had been in the Guard, I knew that if I was hired by the Guard, if
they had fighters on their ramp, and if I was good enough, if I was qualified and I passed
all the check rides, if I was good enough, I could control my destiny and go fly fighters.
And so I was hired.
It's important.
I want to point out, Heather, it's important this 1990 experience that you went through
about that reduction, because it's going to come back when we talk about the issue on
which you're quoted in the Defense News article that caught my attention.
But that's why you got yourself into the Guard.
And tell us about your time in the Guard, your overseas deployments.
Yes, I was fortunate to be hired by the DC Air National Guard, the 121st fighter squadron
in Washington, DC.
And they fly F-16s.
So I went through NJET, which is the Euro NATO Joint Jet Pilot Training in Texas.
My qualifications got me above the threshold to attend this undergraduate pilot training,
which is pretty exclusive.
If you graduate from there, you're going to get a fighter.
It's kind of an all or nothing gamble.
And then I went through my F-16 training and showed up to my fighter unit and became combat
mission ready in early 2001.
Well guess what happens next?
Thank you, Clay.
So on 9-11, Mark Sasseville and I were sent in unarmed F-16s on a suicide mission to Flight
93.
As you can imagine, this was unprecedented times for our nation.
And we are very fortunate that the passengers on Flight 93 are true heroes.
I mean, they took their fate into their own hands to protect our nation.
And this led to the last several decades, couple decades of the long wars in the Middle
East.
And I've got two combat deployments underneath my belt.
One was initial combat operations to Iraqi Freedom, where my unit, our wing, we were
tasked with hunting scuds.
So it was primarily a nighttime sked hunter.
And we went back and then did more.
And then I transitioned from the fighter head to leave it as a single mom to little
girls that couldn't sustain the deployments.
And so I was fortunate to be able to fly the DV airlift mission.
And then I retired out of the Pentagon, out of the National Military Command Center.
But during that time, I also, as a guardsman and then as a reservist, worked within the
defense industry.
So I understood the defense industry.
And I'm now a senior fellow at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, which is
a think tank that focuses on air power and air force issues.
And that's really what got us to this article on MeTrack.
And you, down to talk about, you mentioned the defense industry, and you had various
positions with Lockheed Martin as the director of different air force programs.
So you had both the military service, the contractor, defense contractor information
experience, and now this think tank experience.
And that kind of gets us to this article that I guess I hadn't thought about and probably
met many veteran radio listeners have not thought about.
And that is the stress both on the fleet and the force that the air force has experienced
because of these long wars that you mentioned.
Set this up for us.
Tell us what the looming problem is as you see it.
The looming problem is that our air force is, I'm just going to say it's in a death
spiral.
So in the 1990s, we cut the force in half.
And like for example, the fighter force literally cut in half, just divided by two.
So you've got 50% of what you had.
And then we go into operations in the Middle East.
Well now you have fewer aircraft, but the demand signal has gone up dramatically.
Now even though we had been doing operation Northern Watch and Southern Watch, so everyone
else got to come home after Desert Storm.
The air force did not get to.
We conducted airspace control operations over Iraq, both the southern side and the northern
side to protect the Kurds and also to prevent further aggression from Saddam Hussein.
So the air force never came home.
But now suddenly they're doing more with less.
And so not only do you measure the age of aircraft in terms of chronological years,
but you measure it in terms of flight hours.
So we are just flying the hell out of these airplanes.
And they are dying sooner than they had been planned.
Most of the aircraft that were built in the 1980s.
Now you remember the Reagan era buildup.
He didn't actually grow the air force tremendously.
What he did was he did a complete turnover of the air force.
So all of the Century Series fighters and Vietnam type fighters that we had, he recapitalized
with the modern 4th generation fighters that we're familiar with seeing.
The F-15, the A-10, the F-16.
During the 1980s we were buying these aircraft at 200 to 300 a year.
So now they're 20 years old as we go into Operation Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom.
And not only are they at least 20 years old, but now suddenly we're flying them much harder
than they were ever planned to be.
So instead of 4,000 hours, we're now flying these aircraft to 8,000 hours.
So you can imagine how sort of long in the tooth and tired they are.
As a matter of fact, in I think it was 2015, and you could probably double check the actual
year, but an F-15 is flying over St. Louis.
It's doing a normal training sortie and it just breaks in half because the metal was
very distressing.
Yeah, metal stress, yeah.
Fatigue.
Yeah, yeah.
It was so fatigue.
So even though we can modernize these aircraft with new widgets and new radars and new data
links and all that good stuff, the airframes are still old.
And while numbers don't tell you the whole story, the numbers here kind of do give you
a little shocking view of this is it's predicted that the fleet's going to drop, the Air Force's
fleet is going to drop below 5,000 fighters, bombers, tankers, the whole thing in 2025.
And it's never been that low if I understand it.
It's never been as low as it is today and it's getting even smaller.
The Navy has actually bought more fighters than the Air Force has in the last 20 years.
And even since we started Operation Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom, and we've been continuing
this combat operations, the Air Force has continued to get smaller even though the demand signal
is going up.
Somebody in Congress must be looking at this and saying, hey, we're paying attention to
how many ships we have in the Navy because of the China situation.
Are we paying, is Congress paying any attention, is the public paying any attention to what's
happening to the Air Force?
I don't think there's as much attention being paid to this as it should be because, now,
fortunately, we do have some members in Congress that are blocking the Air Force from divesting
more aircraft without a plan.
But if you think about it, the United States military has operated under a veil of air
supremacy since 1954.
They haven't had to worry about enemy bombers, enemy fighters, enemy missiles, or things like
that since 1954.
And so I think they take air power for granted.
They just assume that the Air Force is going to continue to be able to completely control
the skies.
And I wish there had been more of a wake-up call when our base in Iraq was attacked this
past year by Iranian ballistic missiles because that should have had people go, whoa, whoa,
wait a second, maybe we need to pay more attention to air control.
Because if you think about what's going on in Ukraine, which feels a lot like World War
I, right, with the way that the lines are, it's just a battle of attrition and atrocity.
Yeah, ground pounding, yep.
Yeah, I mean, and that is primarily because neither side has real air power in the way
that we have shaped our joint force to employ.
And so it is at the end going to be just a matter of who has bigger numbers of bodies
and bullets the way they're fighting Ukraine.
And what a horrific way to fight war.
Well, sometimes when we have these discussions, people say, well, we don't need to be as big
as we have been or are to maintain, for example, air supremacy because we have allies, we have
friends.
That's part of the argument about the Navy.
And Australia is going to be there for us and Japan is going to be there for us.
We'll see.
But is that the argument that the U.S. Air Force doesn't need to be of its size because
you've got NATO or something?
What is, what's the explanation for letting the Air Force fleet wither on the vine?
I would say there's three factors.
And, you know, one is, is just simply budgets.
The Air Force has not been provided the necessary resources to recapitalize the way that it
needs to.
And you know, some of this is if you look at, if you look at the last 20, 20 years,
you know, the Army has been the preponderance of forces in, in the Middle East.
And so the Air Force has been funded to, as a comparison, $1.3 trillion less than the
Army over the last 20 years.
At the same time, that has forced them to cut their recapitalization plans.
So where their force is right now is they basically have to recapitalize every single
major weapon system they have now because they have been limping everything along as
long as they possibly can.
So they have to recapitalize helicopters, strategic deterrents.
So this is, they have to recapitalize and replace the Minuteman III, which has been our
ground-based nuclear deterrent for the last 70 years, right?
They've got to recapitalize bombers.
They've got to recapitalize fighters.
They've got to recapitalize their specialized, what we call them, Havas, the high-value assets,
everything from AWACS to JSTARS to Rivet Joint to all of these other aircraft, all at the
same time.
So that's a huge bill because they've been deferring this for so long because of budget
pressures, right?
Yeah, that catches up to you and that's what's happening, right?
Well, yeah, and there's two more pieces.
One, so that's a main causal root cause.
But there's also this belief in third offset technologies, that's the buzzword for your
listeners.
They want to sound like outsiders where the more exquisite and the more sophisticated
the technology is, the more effective we can be so we need less stuff.
But that only works to a point.
And that's, for example, one of the reasons why air power is able to be so dominant in
desert storm that the Army was just basically able to walk right up to Baghdad is because
of these advances in technology and how we employed that.
But the problem is that twofold.
One, technology is no longer the unique domain of the free world and specifically of America.
There's a lot of really smart engineers and software coders and technologies out there,
right?
And two, one thing can only be in one place at one time.
It doesn't matter how effective it is.
So that's sort of like the Battlestar problem, right?
Is that you have one widget, it might be incredibly effective, but you cannot cover the entire
breadth of the Pacific with it.
You cannot cover, you cannot feel the force of the small amount of things.
So scope and geography is now, and also now that we're facing more, I would actually call
them peer threats, right?
Where China, Russia, and other nations are becoming, they're getting better at what
they do.
We need to begin to account for attrition as well.
So that's really, and so Secretary Kendall right now is, he is embarking and has been
divesting older platforms so we can invest in research and development.
But the problem is it creates this bathtub where you're getting rid of the aircraft that
you have to a very, very small force in the hopes that future technologies will arrive
in the 2035 timeframe that will be relevant to that timeframe.
So Kendall's trying to transform the air force, and I don't disagree with his intent,
but what I'm deeply concerned about is this, the next decade of how the air force is becoming
so small that we will not be able to meet the demands of our national security interests.
We won't be there for our joint partners, and how do we grow when we've gotten too,
too small?
It's a death spiral.
Yeah, trying to ramp back up every business, every team, every whatever you've ever been
in understands the idea of how much more difficult it is to ramp back up after you've gotten
that small.
And we've moved cyber into a new segment, and we have things, you talk about technology
offsets, I think, do people think drones are, you don't need the air force of old because
you've got drone technology?
Unfortunately, people do.
People are of this belief that suddenly now quadcopters are around, and there's drones,
there's artificial intelligence, we just put these little unmanned vehicles up there.
And we're seeing a lot of that in Ukraine, but people are not seeing how these drones
are falling out of the sky there.
And so when we look at Ukraine and what's going on in Ukraine and how they're using
drone technology there, there are uses for these kinds of drones, but then also the air
force is looking at what they call collaborative combat aircraft, and they should be smaller,
cheaper, autonomous aircraft that are probably modular.
They can have different capabilities like jamming or sensing, or they can be missile
trucks or things like that.
But they should help address the capacity requirement that the air force will have in
future war.
And also they have the interesting opportunity to change the risk calculus.
So we did a war game last year at the Mitchell Institute to look at how you might use these
collaborative combat aircraft.
And what we found was that operators wanted to use them indisruptive and sort of chaotic
little ways.
They wanted to be able to use these drones to be able to detonate adversary tactics,
force the adversary to react, to deplete the adversary magazine, and to get them off
their game.
So that basically then would put our manned aircraft in a position of advantage.
And let me tell you why humans in the battle space, especially in aircraft, will continue
to be really important because we don't even have smart self-driving cars just yet.
And that's a two-dimensional problem set with well-known and well-accepted rules of the
road in an unchanging environment.
Fairly unchanging, right?
The roads generally stay where the roads are.
Going into a high intensity conflict in three-dimensional airspace is not quite so easy of a problem
set.
So having humans being able to make decisions through uncertainty, ambiguity, and improvise
within the battle space based off of the human mind and imagination and training will continue
to be a critical component of our combat edge, as opposed to putting a drone out there that
will call it smart, but still is only as smart as it's trained and doesn't have the ability
to adapt to deception, doesn't have the ability to adapt to hacking, and could be, depending
on what goes on with the adversary, could be fairly predictable to the enemy.
And I guess we're going to run out of time and boy, we could have gone a lot longer.
But as you cut airframes, you're cutting the workforce.
Yeah, you're cutting pilots.
And that's what happened.
And mechanics and everybody in between.
Yep, yep, exactly.
And it's the people that are our combat edge, our combat advantage.
And so in the Air Force, the end strength or the manpower or the number of workers you
have is all based off of how many air planes and how many weapon systems you have.
So for example, in my fighter squadron, we had a 2.5 to 1 crew ratio.
So we had 2.5 pilots for every single airplane that we had.
And that allowed us to fly full flying schedule, give people crew rest, train the appropriate
levels.
We weren't overman.
So everyone got the number of training flights and the sorties that they needed.
And that also drove the amount of intel officers that we had and how many mechanics we had
and how many weapons troops.
So the guys that build the bombs and the missiles, how many of those guys we had.
So when you cut platforms, when you cut aircraft, you cut the workforce.
And you're usually cutting your most experienced people.
And experience matters in combat.
And we know this from history.
Whether or not it's in Vietnam or you go back to World War II.
For example, Germany had some of the most experienced fighter pilots at the beginning
of the war.
And just through statistics and nutrition, those guys died out.
So by the end of the war, Germany was building and producing more fighters than they did
at the beginning of the war.
But the kids they put in there were so inexperienced, they just got shot down.
Same reason why Japan had to kamikaze attacks in the end.
Because they lost their experienced pilots.
Well we've been talking to Heather Penny, calls on Lucky, who has been helping us understand
the challenges that the United States Air Force is facing as its airframes dip below
5,000 in fiscal year 2025.
And the risk that that causes to the nation our national security.
Being able to have the up tempo that we are often called to have in the Air Force.
Heather, this has been a great conversation.
We appreciate your work here as senior resident fellow at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace
Studies.
And you've given us a great insight into this problem, which is something we all should
be watching.
Oh, thank you Jim.
It really has been an honor to speak with you.
If you don't have an Air Force, you cannot have a joint force.
I hope to chat with you again.
And I want to thank everybody for listening to Veterans Radio today.
I am Jim Fausone.
It's been a pleasure to be your host.
I'm a Veterans Disability Lawyer at Legal Help for Veterans.
And you can reach us at 800-693-4800 or legalhelpforveterans.com on the web.
You can follow Veterans Radio on Facebook and listen to its podcasts and internet radio
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