What changes are coming to the Army's aviation wing?

Welcome back to Defense News Weekly. The Army is evolving its aviation wing and looking to do it quickly

In our first panel from the 2025 AUSA conference, we sat down with some top Army leaders to discuss the advantages and the risks that come with accelerated development. Check it out

The last time I saw all of you together was in May at the Army Aviation Summit in Nashville

and it was right after the Army rolled out their Army Transformation Initiative memo

Lots of big muscle movements there and a lot of surprising and I think not so surprising decisions

So at Quad A, you said that the aviation branch was changing the way it's been doing business

So highlight just top level some of the ways that business is changing for aviation for the Army

There is a lot of change happening. I think you're going to hear some themes that we're going to talk about here that will seed what you're going to hear the rest of this week in terms of what we're doing

So you're going to hear a lot about acceleration, right? Acceleration, Ryan just covered just about everything I think I wanted to talk about

So great job there, Ryan. Acceleration doesn't necessarily just mean twice as far, twice as fast

Acceleration means how we're doing business. And so the Army leadership has been very aggressive in that regard, and industry is moving at pace with us

I saw General Sloser, and I was just talking to Ryan. I said, how are you doing? They said, they're busy

I said, that's a good answer. Like, you know, we are moving quickly to deliver capabilities to the warfighter

You're going to hear the term transformation over and over and over again. Jen just alluded to the fact that, you know, the Army rolled out its transformation initiative in the springtime

and that is fundamentally changing many things, but many processes as well

And so, you know, acceleration and speed do count. That's part of it

And then lethality You know everything that we are thinking about is about how to deliver a more capable formation a more capable soldier and the results that we want And specifically in aviation we talking about changing how we do flight school

We're changing a huge shift across all of the Army from manned to unmanned capability

It doesn't mean we're walking away from manned capability, as we're talking about with the MV-75

That's a huge program for us. So a lot of opportunity out there for us to think about how we're going to fight in this new environment of large-scale combat

I did want to jump right into accelerating, and you talked a lot about going quicker on the FLARA MV75 program

It's quite ambitious. So can you talk about where you are? Since May, we talked about the fact that you were going a lot quicker with building prototypes

and then concurrently also trying to get production aircraft a little quicker and testing as you go

There's a lot of risk in that. So talk about where you see some of the greatest risk in going quicker

now that you've had a little bit more time to evaluate. Yeah, happy to jump in there

And I won't steal all of Jeff Paquette's thunder. It's good to have your PM here with you because that way when you run out of details to share

He can share the details But what I would say is just the foundational elements that we started the program with

Those enable the foundation and the acceleration So when you think about the JMR program like Ryan talked about you think about the amount of open systems

Architecture and approach work that was done before even before we started bending any kind of metal whatsoever or putting code to paper

There's a lot of fundamental cornerstones in the program The JMR program was one

Mosul was another. And then as we looked forward into that, we looked at the right to repair, and we looked

at digital engineering and operationalizing that And so the team been able to do that And I think what I would offer as I hand it over to Jeff is that the scale that we need to do that at right the 300 suppliers at Tier 1 level

over 1,000 suppliers at Tier 2 and below, you have a lot of scale that you need to operate at

for a program of this magnitude, this size. So ensuring that the whole team is rowing together

and up to speed together is something I think that's changed this summer

I think this summer the entire team has leaned forward, keeping those same principles and the same building blocks there

And I think the team is doing some really great work. Thanks, sir

So one of the first things we did when we got that directive from Army senior leaders is we went to Bell and said

what are the things that you need to accelerate? So we sought input from the folks actually doing the work

And they provided that. Big, long list, right? Hundreds of things. And we sat and we talked about that at the executive level, not just Ryan and me, but the CEO, the PEO, and other aviation senior leaders

Most important was, okay, what can we take a little bit of risk in so that we can go faster but not get rid of all the goodness that we really, you know, consider to be the cornerstones of the program

General Phillips meant the right to repair. That, for us, was a non-negotiable, and we made sure the secretary understood that

MOSA was a non-negotiable. But things like the artifacts that we need to receive, maybe we can defer receiving the artifacts

And because Ryan mentioned how integrated we are down there, predominantly in DFW

because my team is there, and when they come back and say, hey, we're comfortable, they're taking the right approach, they're going the right direction

they may not get it all written down and submitted and then reviewed, that's the kind of things that we can defer down the road

As far as details go, sir, yes. A lot has happened in the past four months Thousands and thousands over 3 drawings engineering drawings released over 90 engineering released 5 purchase orders across a supply base of over 360 at this point

So that's real movement on the program because, as we know, Bell doesn't build this alone

There's probably a lot of the suppliers in this room right here. They're certainly here at this convention

And they're a critical part to the program because Bell's the design. They build the fuselage

They build a lot of the big structures, but a lot of the things that make this work are out there somewhere

Small companies, big companies, some of you have heard, some that you haven't heard

And like Ryan said, I've been all over the country meeting with companies that make ball bearings

or that make castings and forgings or that make big tools the size of this room

that facilitate making this incredibly complex machine. So we've seen real movement on the program

Of course, it starts with money. Can we get the money in place so that we can actually go faster

Some of it is bringing money to the left because we were going to do it later

and now we're going to do it earlier. And you mentioned risk. We don't see this as taking an incredible amount of risk

When you are building prototypes and then you go to test and you are also building production aircraft, we said, okay, what would the risks be

The risk would be that you would be building production aircraft, then you find things wrong in test

And then we said, Bell, how can you make us feel comfortable? How can you make me feel comfortable that you're going to be building aircraft while you're in test

And we've come to some agreements at the executive level that say, look, here's the pricing we want to do

and here's what we need you to do once we build aircraft. If they're not where they need to be, what are you going to do to get them fielded

So we have all that in place, and that's how we burn down that risk

We don't see it as risky as in the past. Some programs have done developmental tests and operational tests at the same time

We're not doing that. developmental test, production alongside, and then operational test when the right risk authority

is comfortable putting that aircraft in the air with operators