Retired Lt. Gen. William Phillips, Vice President of Army Programs at The Boeing Company, discusses priorities and opportunities in the current budget during an interview with Defense & Aerospace Report Editor Vago Muradian at the 2018 AUSA Annual Meeting in Washington, DC. Our AUSA coverage is brought to you by Bell, a Textron Company, Elbit Systems of America, L3 Technologies, Leonardo DRS, and Safran.
Mr. Bill Phillips
Boeing Defense, Space and Security
AUSA Annual Meeting
October 2018
Vago Muradian: Welcome to the Defense and Aerospace Report. I’m Vago Muradian here at the very end of the Association of the United States Army’s Annual Conference and Trade Show here in Washington, DC, the number one gathering of U.S. Army leaders from around the world to talk about the service’s future, its strategy, budgets technology and programs and more. Our coverage here is sponsored by Bell, a Textron company; Elbit Systems of America; L3 Technologies; Leonardo DRS; and SAFRAN.
We’re here at the Boeing stand to talk to Retired United States Army Lieutenant General Bill Phillips who an acquisition hall of famer who leads U.S. Army programs here at Boeing Defense, Space and Security.
Wow, what a week!
Mr. Bill Phillips: Vago, it’s been a great week, but what a tremendous AUSA. I think this is the largest one since 2012, and thanks for coming and sharing your time with us here at the Boeing booth.
Mr. Muradian: It’s always an honor, it’s a pleasure. I’m sorry it took us a couple of days for us to be able to do this because of your schedule. We’re still standing, so that’s always a positive thing and I hope you’re feeling better. Knee surgery and you’re doing this, even six weeks, man, that’s commitment. That’s commitment. Whooah.
I wanted to ask you first, sir, what were your priorities here? You guys have systems across the portfolio. What were some of the priorities that you guys had here because it was such an extraordinary opportunity with the whole leadership here. Futures Command has now been set up and General Murray was here. But the entire leadership team was here, and particularly on the floor. It was amazing to see a Secretary spend as much time meeting with companies.
From your perspective, what were the key priorities and the key messages you guys were trying to deliver here?
Mr. Phillips: Well we were honored to have the Secretary come and visit us.
And in terms of priorities, we looked at the Army priorities because we make customer priorities our own. So we went after what the Army’s looking at, long-range precision fires. So we emphasized a lot on our solutions that might be able to help the Army with long-range precision fires.
Obviously vertical lift. And in particular, future vertical lift with our Defiant solution. Our teaming with Sikorsky and Lockheed. We have focused a tremendous amount of energy on that.
At the same time, we are world-class in building the world’s greatest attack helicopter and the world’s greatest lift helicopter, the Apache and the Chinook respectively. So we put a lot of energy and focus on that.
The other piece that we also emphasized was Army services, how we can help the Army in logistics sustainment and training across the board.
Mr. Muradian: What were some of the messages you heard? You were a senior Army leader. There were a lot of messages across the portfolio. I mean literally every talk not only had sort of big bumper stickers but also a tremendous amount of insights.
As the man who helps shape the strategy for this business going forward, what were some of the key messages you heard that’s going to shape your strategic thinking going forward?
Mr. Phillips: The first thing I have to mention is that thanks to Congress we have a budget. That’s the first time that has happened, I believe, in about ten years. So the Army has a budget on time. So that sends a powerful message to industry that Congress cares about how the defense industry can help all the services in terms of their budget.
So now we start to look at the priorities of the service, again, listening to what the Army wants. And my takeaway from this is they’re completely committed to the priorities that the Chief and the Secretary have worked through. One, starting with long-range precision fires. We’re going to put our energy and efforts into that. Also future vertical lift. Not just capability set three, which is the Defiant class of aircraft, but also the future attack and reconnaissance aircraft. We heard them loud and clear that they’re going to go after that capability near term, so we’re putting focus and energy in that as well.
Mr. Muradian: And we heard on both of those priorities from General Rugen, who is the Future Vertical Lift Cross Functional Team lead, as well as from Colonel Rafferty as well, who’s long-range precision fires.
Let me ask you about the new organization. We created Futures Command. It seems as though the whole organization is always trying to find ways around the acquisition system. We had Rapid Equipping Force and we did hear from Colonel Bookard as well. You were a professional soldier but also in acquisition. I mean really an acquisition hall of famer, sir, if I may say so.
So talk to us a little bit about what some of the challenges here are, because there is an abiding concern, and we’ve heard it from CEOs, we’ve even heard it from some Army people which is okay, it’s really great to have this organization but the key is the acquisition process being, really being able to bound what the state of play is on this. There have been some encouraging steps where you see the CFT lead and the acquisition officer right arm in arm as we saw with General Dave Bassett and General Gallagher. A great partnership between the two of them over at Aberdeen. But from your perspective, what are the potential opportunities, and what are the pitfalls to guard against? Because there are some folks over here who say hey look, the proof of the pudding is going to be in four or five years, to know whether or not we’re going to end up avoiding trouble or end up in trouble.
Mr. Phillips: Vago, we can talk about that for a long time, but there are a couple of things I’ll just share with you.
One is if the Army through the Army Futures Command can really focus in on the requirements and work to get them right and to make sure that they’re not reaching more or beyond what current technology can deliver, what I might describe as unobtanium. When you have those kinds of requirements that might be written, especially as a key performance parameter or KPP, those are things to look out for. And that’s why it’s so important to have the PEOs and PMs aligned with the cross-functional teams, underneath the Army Futures Command structure to be able to work through that to make sure that they get their requirements as right as possible. That is key and critical. And how quickly can you do that?
We’ve heard the Army time and time again talk about trying to reduce what may be a three-year requirements process down to a year. If they can work that effectively and drive that forward and actually nail those requirements down, I think it will benefit the Army and then we’ll get a better capability on the back side.
I would also share this. If you want to look at a recent success story, I hate to talk about the Navy, but the Navy just did the MQ-25 award. The way they did that is focus in on the requirements. They only had two KPPs, and one of them was to have the autonomous system actually fly off a carrier, and then actually do the tanker mission. Many of the other requirements were tradable. That allowed industry trade space. The Navy was able to get to that award very quickly.
When the Army looks at this they must look at the ability to drive innovation within industry, not tie their hands with so many KPPs or other requirements that aren’t tradable. And it gets to driving innovation forward within the acquisition process.
I’ll share one other comment with you too. I believe too many times within the acquisition world with PEOs and PMs we hide behind regulations. Regulations are there. Statutory language is there. But in many cases, they give you the ability to tailor those solutions in a way that it helps you be more quick, more aggressive, more efficient. We should look for ways within the acquisition world to be more efficient and not hide behind all the regulations. Tailor them or eliminate them within the process.
Mr. Muradian: And we’ve seen the Secretary do that with a lot of everyday regulation as well.
Retired United States Army Lieutenant General Bill Phillips over here. Head of Army Programs at BDF&S, I guess.
Sir, thanks very much. Hope you feel better soon, and I look forward to talking to you again, soon.
Mr. Phillips: Vago, thank you, sir. And it’s such an honor, and proud to be here with you once again. Thank you for everything you do for our warfighters.
Mr. Muradian: Well, sir, thank you very much for your service, and you continue to serve now. So thank you, sir.
Mr. Phillips: Thank you, sir. Thank you.
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