Q&A : General Donald J. Hoffman
Written by Jeff McKaughan
Delivering War-Winning Capabilities - On Time and On Cost
General Donald J. Hoffman
Commander
Air Force Materiel Command
Hoffman is a distinguished graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy with a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering. He received a Master of Science in electrical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. Hoffman was a distinguished graduate of Squadron Officer School and Air Command and Staff College, Maxwell AFB, Ala. He also attended the National War College, Fort Lesley J. McNair, Washington, D.C., and the National Security Management Course, Syracuse University, Syracuse, N.Y.
Assignments include T-37 instructor, check pilot and squadron executive officer, 89th Flying Training Squadron, later, life support officer, 80th Flying Training Wing, Sheppard AFB, Texas; F-16 pilot, flight lead, instructor pilot, flight commander and assistant operations officer, 10th Tactical Fighter Squadron, Hahn Air Base, West Germany; air staff officer and executive officer, Directorate of Avionics and Electronic Combat, Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Headquarters U.S. Air Force, Washington, D.C.; T-37 instructor and squadron commander, 98th Flying Training Squadron, Williams AFB, Ariz.; chief, Aviation Section, Office of Military Cooperation, CENTCOM, Cairo, Egypt; executive officer to the commander, Headquarters Air Education and Training Command, Randolph AFB, Texas; commander, 14th Operations Group, Columbus AFB, Miss.; special assistant to the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, Mons, Belgium; assistant chief of staff for Operations, Headquarters Allied Air Forces Northwestern Europe, NATO, Royal Air Force High Wycombe, England; deputy commander for NATO affairs, Headquarters 3rd Air Force, RAF Mildenhall, England; commander, 52nd Fighter Wing, Spangdahlem AB, Germany; commander, 31st Fighter Wing and 31st Air Expeditionary Wing, Aviano AB, Italy; director of Requirements, Headquarters ACC, Langley AFB, Va.; and military deputy, Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, the Pentagon, Washington, D.C.
His awards and decorations include Distinguished Service Medal with Oak Leaf Cluster, Defense Superior Service Medal, Legion of Merit with Oak Leaf Cluster, Defense Meritorious Service Medal, Meritorious Service Medal with three Oak Leaf Clusters and Combat Readiness Medal with Oak Leaf Cluster.
Hoffman is a command pilot with more than 3,400 flying hours in fighter, trainer and transport aircraft.
Q: What does your job as commander of Air Force Materiel Command entail? What is the mission of AFMC?
A: As commander of one of the most diverse and dynamic organizations in the Air Force, I have responsibility for more than 74,000 people involved in research and development, test, acquisition and sustainment of existing and future Air Force weapons systems and their components. That’s the aerospace power needed to defend the United States and its interests—today and tomorrow. Our mission is to deliver war-winning capabilities—on time and on cost.
Q: What are your focus areas and goals for the coming months and year? And how do these fit into Air Force requirements?
A: I recently met with our command senior leaders and established five command priorities. They are:
• Reinvigorate AFMC’s role in the nuclear enterprise.
• Implement effective and efficient integrated life cycle management to support the warfighter.
• Training and retaining a high-performing work force.
• Nurture and protect our people and families.
• Be good stewards of government resources.
I’ve charged our senior leaders in AFMC to focus on these priorities every day because they support the Air Force as it tackles its overarching priorities.
But it won’t be easy. To meet these priorities, we have to overcome some long-standing challenges—including cultural and process changes related to nuclear sustainment and operations, the current high operations tempo that’s challenging both our people and our aging fleets, resource constraints that are making it imperative to re-analyze and prioritize our needs, and the need to continue recapitalizing our fleet.
These challenges are easier to understand if you recall that the Air Force has now been in sustained combat operations for more than 19 years, with aircraft that are averaging more than 25 years old. Our bombers average 33 years in age and our tankers more than 44 years. Sustained operation of these old aircraft has resulted in a 17 percent decrease in readiness across the board.
But AFMC is making a difference. Take nuclear sustainment, for example. We’ve reorganized all continental U.S.-based nuclear sustainment under our Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center at Kirtland AFB, N.M., providing unity of command in acquisition and sustainment. And we’re implementing more stringent tracking and control systems for nuclear weapons-related materials. In fact, we’re improving supply chain management processes across the board. AFMC personnel are deployed in support of operations Iraqi Freedom, and Enduring Freedom and other operations around the globe. We have more than 1,300 airmen deployed at any one time— most in CENTCOM.
New technology remains critical for today’s fight and tomorrow’s, and we must keep the right balance between basic research and more mature technology that is ready to move into weapons systems. Our researchers and scientists have transitioned technology that better enables us to anticipate, find, fix, track, target, engage and assess enemy activity anytime, anywhere.
I am extremely proud of our acquisition work force—military, civilian and contractors—who work at our product, air logistics and test centers as well as at our headquarters here at Wright-Patterson AFB. Their contributions are key to delivering capabilities to the warfighter, and I am focused intently on growing our work force with the right skill sets and experience.
Over the past year we’ve strengthened acquisition source selection by making changes to several source-selection processes for training, reviews and governance. We’re also working with the Air Staff and are using commands to strengthen the requirements process so that the acquisition team has a clear demand signal.
Q: What are some of the big successes that AFMC has had in the recent past? How have they helped the Air Force? How do they help with the joint fight and war on terrorism?
A: The command has had several significant successes in the logistics arena alone.
AFMC stood up the Air Force Global Logistics Support Center in March 2008. That center is now integrating supply-chain processes into one end-to-end enterprise, helping the Air Force reduce annual operating support costs by as much as 10 percent and increasing equipment availability. AFGLSC has been working closely with major commands, AFMC’s air logistics centers and Defense Logistics Agency to ensure we have the most current data and standard processes to effectively identify repair requirements for the warfighter. Throughout this past year AFGLSC/DLA integrated process teams have addressed issues spanning the full spectrum of DLA supply-chain support to the Air Force, including processes, roles and responsibilities for joint support of distribution planning, enterprise-level metrics, integrating fusion centers, reducing inventory, collaborative planning process for consumable items, sourcing strategies, mitigating stock-outs and developing weapons systemspecific availability targets.
We’ve further implemented Centralized Asset Management, centralizing programming, budgeting and execution for Air Force weapons-system sustainment within AFMC. With CAM, we’ve fundamentally refocused how the Air Force manages weapons-system sustainment requirements and funding at the logistics enterprise level.
As we centralized sustainment funding, we faced challenges in developing future budgets due to significant Air Force modernization demands and corporate bills. However, while CAM surfaced the challenge, it also provided the solution by clearly articulating the impact to weapons system availability—which resulted in restoration of $1 billion to the CAM account.
The CAM process, which saves time and resources by eliminating multiple requirements reviews and by integrating wholesale supply and depot maintenance operations, also was able to return $550,000 to the Air Force to fund high-priority requirements.
We’ve begun final planning for the Expeditionary Combat Support System, a critical component of the Air Force’s eLog21 initiative. ECSS is based on a commercial software technology and will merge base-level and wholesale logistics systems into an enterpriselevel approach, replacing more than 250 legacy computer systems while giving us real-time visibility of assets worldwide. In so doing, ECSS will provide a single source of authoritative information for decision-makers.
We’re also piloting high velocity maintenance at all three of our air logistics centers. HVM allows us to shorten total down time for maintenance by conducting pre-induction assessments with the user. This, along with more, but shorter, visits to the depots allow for more predictability in the work and material requisitioning.
We’ve also made significant progress certifying our fleets to fly synthetic fuel blends. We’re on track to have all systems approved to use the 50 percent synthetic jet fuel blended with JP-8 by 2011 and are now looking to include use of bio-based fuels.
Q: What are the biggest challenges facing Air Force Materiel Command logistics planning in: supply chain management/asset management; performance-based logistics; RFID/asset visibility; and Lean Six Sigma?
A: Let me reiterate that one of our biggest logistics challenges is going to be maintaining our aging aircraft. We know we’ll be sustaining our legacy fleets for decades to come. We simply can’t replace all of them as quickly as we’d like, so we have to find new, creative ways to sustain existing aircraft.
A few of the approaches you asked about certainly play a role, although they come with challenges of their own:
Supply chain collaboration/integration: Our Air Force Global Logistics Support Center is working with major commands to ensure the most current operations tempo is communicated across the supply chain to identify accurate warfighter needs for depot support. In addition, as I’d mentioned, AFGLSC is working with air logistics centers to standardize the application of business rules to identify ALC repair requirements.
Planning consumable support: In addition to integrating our supply network, AFGLSC is working closely with Defense Logistics Agency to improve demand planning, supply planning and forecast accuracy for DLA-managed consumables required to support Air Force organizational, intermediate and depot maintenance activities. It’s very important to us in AFMC to build strong relationships with our suppliers—to ensure we’re exchanging key information to strengthen decision-making across the supply chain.
Performance-based logistics: Funding can be a challenge under a PBL environment since it requires managers to enter into formal documented agreements with major stakeholders earlier than other traditional strategies—sometimes even before final budget decisions. That funding must be available at the right time to pay for the agreed upon level of performance, plus any improvement incentives.
PBL funding strategies are best executed when they strive to establish long-term contracts or agreements. These types of agreements provide contractors the ability to invest in longer-term reliability improvement projects. However, long-term funding agreements can be difficult to negotiate due to the uncertainty of Air Force budgets and the possibility of execution-year budget cuts. We work to build flexibility into performance agreements to allow for inevitable priority and funding level changes.
Another challenge of PBL is in the data systems arena. While each PBL strategy is unique and tailored to that particular program’s needs, some level of standardization is necessary for Air Force sustainment data systems.
RFID [radio frequency identification]/asset visibility: In this area, our big challenges include the accreditation cycle for advanced RFID technology, which can be lengthy and is affecting wide-scale implementation across the Air Force. The Air Force Automatic Identification Technology program management office is pursuing an enterprise approach to Air Force AIT implementation that should shorten this cycle.
Lean Six Sigma: Our commandwide use of process improvement tools over the last few years has resulted in significant improvements in our depot maintenance performance. For example, from FY04– FY08, our ALCs delivered 96 percent of repaired aircraft on time or ahead of schedule. And in FY08 we met the organic aircraft quality defect rate goal of 0.22 defects per aircraft for the first time.
Q: If defense budgets are reduced, how will this affect the Air Force Materiel Command’s sustainment mission?
A: As one of our command priorities states, we need to protect, conserve and consume our resources so we can perform the mission over the long haul. I tell our troops to treat every dollar, and every dime, as if it were their own. We are all taxpayers ourselves so indeed it is our money. While consumption of resources is necessary, the command must do so responsibly.
It’s equally important to use human resources responsibly and the command has some challenges in that area. We have to get existing vacancies filled as we adjust the skill sets in such areas as systems engineering, contracting and cost pricing to meet our acquisition excellence goals.
Recapitalizing our acquisition work force is a multiyear effort to recruit, train, reward, and hence retain, our professional work force. As we recapitalize the fleet, we have to acquire and develop costeffective weapons systems. We know we can make combat-effective weapons systems but they also need to be cost-effective. Sustainment of these new systems—as well as our legacy systems—may go decades past their original design lives, so we have to continue to figure out new and creative ways of doing this with potentially fewer resources.
Q: How is AFMC helping to transform logistics processes?
A: Under the Air Force eLog21 transformational initiative, AFMC is improving combat capability by increasing equipment availability and reducing operations and support costs. These initiatives also support Air Force efforts on behalf of Smart Operations for the 21st century, known as AFSO 21.
We will never stop trying to improve our business. We team with the Department of Defense to find common solutions to common problems. We participated in a week-long DoD-sponsored event in early February to jointly develop improved methods for requirements determination. We will continue to work with the other services to the fullest extent possible.
Q: How is AFMC helping to project the logistics arm of the Air Force and Department of Defense across the global stage?
A: The United States is one of the largest providers of military equipment in the world. Our allies and partners have a choice, and they overwhelmingly choose the U.S. They do this because we provide a good product, but more importantly we stand behind that product. Our logistics processes become their logistics processes. Our supply chain is their supply chain. We work to constantly provide the best mix of organic and contractor support as well as the best commercial practices. When we go to war with our allies, we not only depend on common equipment and training, we depend on common sustainment.
Q: How is AFMC working to boost partnering with private sector companies in streamlining acquisition across the Air Force and other military branches?
A: Starting in 1998, AFMC responded to DoD initiatives encouraging the use of public-private partnerships to perform depot-level maintenance on our aircraft. We recognized that new laws enacted under United States Code Title 10 offered us the opportunity to reduce the cost of maintenance, repair and overhaul operations while reinvigorating our sustainment capabilities. Partnering with industry gave us all access to robust manufacturing prowess and infused the depots with state-of-the-art aerospace skills, technologies and processes.
To make partnering effective requires a dedicated work force and industry partners looking for strategic opportunities. Then the difficult work begins. They must transform that opportunity into a beneficial partnership and nurture it. AFMC established a dedicated team within the Strategic Plans, Programs and Analyses Directorate to seek out depot partnering opportunities and ensure the goals of U.S.C. Title 10 are met.
Our AFMC Business Integration Office is a cross-functional team of subject matter experts knowledgeable in logistics, contracting, program and financial management, business case analyses, and strategic planning. This team is mirrored at each of the air logistics centers where depot-level maintenance is performed. These AFMC business offices ensure that public-private partnership philosophy is transformed into effective, real-world, enduring relationships that streamline acquisition across the Air Force and our sister services.
Today we have nearly 100 active or completed partnerships accounting for more than $3 billion in revenue and $36 million in private sector investments within the Department of Defense. Public-private partnerships have grown from small, individual efforts such as those supporting LANTIRN infrared targeting pods to over-arching, multiservice and international partnerships like the one being established for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. What is most beneficial, however, is that proactive and early identification of strategic needs for both the government and our industry partners has resulted in improved acquisition and sustainment practices that directly benefit our war-fighters by providing them more reliable weapons systems at a lower overall cost. These are truly good-news stories.
Q: Are there any big initiatives AFMC has in the works?
A: To name a few: the organic depot maintenance community has improved its relationships with the acquisition community. Our air logistics centers are now postured to accept increased F-22 workload as that system is fully fielded and are preparing to accept F-35 and joint cargo aircraft work. Whenever possible, our depots embrace new technologies. One example is the ability to assess structural aircraft health prior to inspection, minimizing disassembly of the aircraft. Another is laser depainting, which is more environmentally friendly and cost-effective than chemical stripping and is being prototyped in depot maintenance operations.
Another of our major focuses in FY10 is development of performance- based outcomes for weapons system sustainment. We’re working with our major command customers to identify standards, or PBOs, for their most critical capabilities for their weapons systems. These PBOs will provide the road map for program managers to prioritize limited resources to meet the greatest needs of the warfighters.
Q: Would you like to add anything else?
A: I’m optimistic about the future of AFMC and our continuing contributions—as well as our ability to rebuild our work force, conserve and make the best possible use of our resources, and execute our mission. We are committed to our priorities and committed to providing war-winning capabilities to the warfighter. ♦