Verbatim

“What they are doing with what I’ll call counterspace and space superiority capabilities is breathtakingly fast.”

“We’re losing ground on aircraft age and fleet size and are forced to extend some aircraft to the very last year of their engineered lifespan—and in some cases, we aren’t. … We have incredible systems, platforms, and munitions … but we need more of just about everything. We have to keep the quality, increase the quantity, decrease the cost, and accelerate delivery.”

“Not everybody that talks to a [collaborative combat aircraft] is going to be able to tell it to do everything. We come from the culture of [remotely piloted aircraft], where the pilot is in the loop between the airplane and whoever is asking it to go do something. And with CCA, we’re trying to remove that. So it’ll get commands from different people—from maintenance, from air traffic control, from operators, from fighter pilots, from a lot of different folks—and then the autonomy will sort that out using its hierarchy, what we call role-based access, and then figure out exactly what action that the CCA needs to take. So … I don’t need to train every single person cradle to grave on CCA. I just need to train a few people that are already doing their jobs how to do it with CCA. So that’s a huge opportunity … but again, it’s something that we haven’t done before, and so it won’t be without challenges.”

“As a transport aircraft platform, the Y-20 [airlifter] is unique to our country and will play an increasingly important role in the future. The boundaries between transport aircraft and bombers, early warning aircraft, or even electronic warfare aircraft are becoming increasingly blurred. It is possible that all these missions could be accomplished with our transport aircraft platform.”