LOTTMAN: Tell me a little bit about your involvement in the F-22 program while you were on active duty.

PICCIRILLO: OK. At that time it was known as the Advanced Tactical Fighter Program. The program was actually initially funded by Congress in 1981, so it goes quite a ways back. And studies were actually going on in the mid- to late 70s that culminated in the assessment that it was necessary to start the development of a new air-to-air fighter, an air superiority fighter.

So the program was funded in '81, and one of the early activities involved developing a new engine, which at that time was called the Joint Advanced Fighter Engine Program. And the reason for that was it was felt that we needed a new engine to exploit the ability to supercruise--cruise supersonically in non-afterburning power--which of course is a criteria, or component of the current F-22. And that engine evolved into the F-119 engine. That work started in the '82-'83 time frame--1982, 1983. At the same time it was felt that it was time to form a program office, a system program office, what the Air Force calls a SPO, and I was the first program manager, program director of what then was called the Advanced Tactical Fighter SPO.

And I was there from the period 1983 to early 1987 when we went through what we call the concept development phase--defining what the system was going to be, exploring the kinds of specifications--not specifications so much as the operational requirements--that were necessary to meet the needs of the Air Force well into the 21st century. And also work with industry to assess different concepts that were being proposed, which we did. We developed in-house designs, which we bounced off designs that industry was presenting to us.

That phase culminated then in a contract award to all of the companies that were then involved in building airplanes. It's interesting to look back--at that time there were seven; we're essentially down to two today, so there has been a tremendous consolidation of the defense industry. But at the end of that phase we put together requests for proposals for the prototyping phase, what was then called Demonstration and Validation. And the same companies all submitted proposals. We went through a major source selection in the 1985-86 time frame, while the engine work was going on.

And I forgot to mention there were two engines being developed competitively. One was the F-119 that currently is in the F-22. The other one was the YF-120 engine which was being developed by General Electric. The F-119 was developed by Pratt & Whitney. In 1991 or so the Air Force decided to go with the Pratt & Whitney F-119. The F-120 is still progressing, though, as a possible alternative fighter engine for the Joint Strike Fighter. So it's again very interesting, the engine work that's still ongoing goes back really to the early 1980s.

At the end of this phase I mentioned where we put out this request for proposals we got all the proposals in, we assessed them--all the companies looked at versions of their airplanes that could take either the General Electric or the Pratt & Whitney engine because we were gonna flight test those airplanes. And those airplanes became the YF-22 and the YF-23, the YF-22 by Lockheed, the YF-23 by Northrop. So Lockheed and Northrop were selected to build and fly these concept demonstrator aircraft--YF-22 and YF-23, in fact, there are models of them over there, you've probably seen pictures of them--and at the end of a period of a number of years, going from '87 to '91, the Air Force selected Lockheed YF-22 as the basis for the F-22 program.

During that phase, one of the things that was done also was that in addition to the flying prototypes, there was a tremendous amount of work going on in the avionics systems. There were ground prototypes built by both Northrop and Lockheed, and both companies actually put their avionics test-beds into large airplanes. Boeing used a 777, and Northrop used a British Bach 111 airliner, and essentially they went out and flew the kinds of avionics, prototypes of the kinds of avionics that would eventually go into the F-22. And that included AC development of radars, infrared search and track systems, all kinds of advanced processing systems, and integrated avionics devices that are going into the F-22 today.

LOTTMAN: So when they transplanted those test beds, the pilots could interact with that plane as if it was (sic) an F-22?

PICCIRILLO: That's right, the pilots were flying in those flying avionics laboratories, and they simulated operating the system as though they were flying the F-22. That's true. Of course it was in a big test bed, rather than in a fighter, so there were several phases. One was performance assessments: could these airplanes, the YF-22 and the YF-23, get out there at high supersonic speeds and cruise along in non-afterburning power, that was part of it. Could they have the kinds of very high maneuverability levels, especially in the transsonic and supersonic regime, that the Air Force was looking for? That was the main purpose. And they had to have, be able to do that in the kind of shaped, stealthy-shaped airplane that they would build for the actual production airplane.

That stealthy shape includes internal weapons bays, rather than carrying the air-to-air missiles under the wings like we do on a conventional airplane, they are carried on an internal bay, for reasons of stealth. Theyre ejected or put out in the air stream and fired in a very brief period of time and then the doors are closed and the airplane is highly stealthy. So all of that was kind of done during that period.

My involvement ended when I retired in early 1987, so I was there just about four years on the program. It was kind of the culmination of my career and it was a very exciting time, of course. And the program has continued to move forward to the point where now the full-scale development airplanes are in flight test phase which will go on for a number of years, and eventually we'll see the production airplanes on the flight line in the middle to late 2000's.

LOTTMAN: Compared to the concepts you were drawing up in those early phases of the program, when you were a responsible officer in the directorate--just with those in mind, what do you expect today will be the unique, new, relevant, salient capabilities of the F-22, and how has that changed or evolved since you were an officer in the program?

PICCIRILLO: OK, good. Well, that's a good question, and I can talk to that. In some ways, the program has changed remarkably little. That involves the kinds of performance we were looking for, and the Air Force is still looking for, the ability to supercruise, far, at high altitude, in non-afterburning power, that of course will save fuel and cover large ranges; the ability to maneuver, as I mentioned earlier, not only at slow speeds but also transsonically and supersonically, very aggressively, which of course is very important in a fighter; stealth--high degree of stealth, not only from the front but in all aspects, because this airplane--they're now calling it an air dominance fighter--but the point of it of course is its control of the airspace over the area of the battle. And today we talk in terms of the battle spaces that are very extended.

And well-integrated with the operations of the land and naval forces--we see more and more joint services operations--and I think all of the forces are gonna have to rely on the capabilities that are gonna be provided by the F-22 to provide the degree of control of the air that's necessary if we're gonna face first-class opponents.

And it has to do that on the enemy's side of the battle as well as on our side, which means it's gonna have to face, perhaps, advanced surface-to-air missile threats that could aimed at it from many directions. So the kind of stealth we're talking about involves threats that could be looking at you from the side, the front, the back, and so forth. I'm pretty confident, very confident that that will also be an element of the F-22.

At one time, one thing that did change, we were looking at the ability to use thrust reversing on landing to reduce landing distance to a very short distance. That was deleted during the final phases of the flight demonstration program, deleted from the formal requirement because, I guess, you could say it was gonna make the airplane much heavier, it was gonna probably influence the nozzle design, it may have affected the stealth characteristics of the airplane so it... It was one of the requirements that was deleted. Some of the other things were obviously refined as the program went along, to try to maintain control on cost and weight. So there have been continual refinements of the requirement but the general concept has not changed too much.

There is obviously a requirement for a single pilot only to operate a very sophisticated airplane, so the kinds of things, that's what we were envisioning in those days, that are coming to fruition now in the F-22 were continuations of the same theme, but with much more capable technology to apply then of course we were even thinking of in the early 80s. A lot of that has come out of progress in the commercial world.

The things that have changed are probably more on the programmatic side. The program is stretched out, we were actually talking at one time, early-early in the program, of an initial operational capability of the first ATF's--as then we called them, because we weren't sure which airplane was gonna be selected--but in the mid-90s, right now. And as we know, that's moved well out there into the 2004-05 time frame. The numbers, of course, with the change of the political situation, the world political situation, the numbers of aircraft that are gonna be produced have been reduced because the budget's gone down and the force structure's gone down and the threat has probably changed.

Right now the focus is still on of course the air superiority airplane, but even in those days there was the requirement for some degree of air-to-ground capability, and I think the F-22 will be looked at very hard, eventually, for evolution also into a deep strike airplane of some kind, with some specialized sensors and some specialized air-to-ground weapons, for certain types of missions, because it will have that capability in it.

LOTTMAN: So you see it, in the future, being adapted to more of a multi-role [mission capability]?

PICCIRILLO: I think so. It may be another version; just like the F-15, you know, we have the A and B models we upgraded those the the C and D models, better avionics, more sophisticated air-to-air capabilities, AMRAAM missiles, and then the F-15E was developed with the air-to-ground capabilities--and retaining its air-to-air capabilities, but giving it a good, all-weather, night-attack capability. I can see that same thing as eventually maybe coming out of the F-22 program. So the number that is currently being talked, which is 338 or something like that, we originally were talking 750 airplanes, so you can see it's way down from that, that number may go back up somewhat if the Air Force replaced some of the F-15Es and the F-117s and airplanes like that that do that kind of mission now, with perhaps a version of the F-22 we could see some additional production.

Beyond that it's hard to say, whether this is the kind of airplane that could be sold overseas, or a version of it could be sold overseas, I don't know if that's been resolved yet...

The idea, I think, is to continue the program, get them operational, and again, they're gonna be around for a long time. The world may change a lot in the next 15 years or so, 20 years. It will change a lot if history is any indicator. And we have options, I think, or the Air Force has options with this airplane; because of the kind of technology that was built into it, will ensure that it retains its robust ability to face threats out there for a long, long period of time, it's the obvious stepping off point for other developments, I think.

LOTTMAN: I have kind of a split question about the unique capabilities of the F-22, the first one being: since we're not talking about a large number of planes, and all the investment and all the time and effort that's been in developing this plane, and this occurred to me because of what you said about the avionics being tested on other aircraft...

PICCIRILLO: Exactly.

LOTTMAN: Is it gonna have a lasting impact on aerospace in general?

PICCIRILLO: There's no question because this, really, is the first stealth airplane that's gonna be built in quantity. I mean, it's rather interesting when you think about it, you know, you had stealth Have Blue and Tacit Blue flying starting in the mid-to-late 70s, F-117 coming in in the early 80s and eventually the B-2, but you can still count the number of stealth airplanes probably with the number of people in this room, you're talking not a heck of a lot of airplanes have been produced. They were kind of specialized airplanes, highly focused on special missions. This will be the first airplane that really introduces stealth in the context of a fleet of airplanes. And the technology coming out of this is of course extremely relevant to the Joint Strike Fighter and whatever else comes in the future.

I think what we're seeing in the F-22, and that's a good question because it's extremely relevant to all future combat airplanes, we're now seeing stealth becoming a way of business for fleets of combat airplanes, a way of life in other words. And it's gonna have to be more reliable and more maintainable, definitely, than it has been in the past with specialized airplanes. That's a major aspect of this program and it's something that was, there's been a strong attempt and I know it continues to drive reliability, maintainability, supportability into the design, so that when we get this fleet of airplanes out there, they can be maintained by the kinds of people that maintain other airplanes out in the field, like F-15s and F-16s and so forth, obviously with some specialized training. But I think that's the big, significant difference.

The avionics should be very reliable compared to some of the earlier avionics. The engines are very high performance engines, but reliability has been a major aspect of the development of those engines from the very beginning. And because they've been in development for a very long time, they've been extremely... they've been tested tremendously. Huge numbers of hours. There have been some modifications and redesigns that have taken place in the engine.

So, the context of the development, stretching of the development, actually, has good aspects because we've been able--we being the industry and the Air Force and everybody involved in the program--able to resolve a lot of those technical problems without so much urgency to field the airplane because of some of the delays that have happened, mainly driven I think by the reduction in the threat and the downturn in the budget. So the product that comes out when it gets on the flight line will be better, there's no question about it, than it would have been if it were pushed out there as fast as possible like in the past we've had to do with other airplanes, and then had terrible problems in reliability and maintainability and having to do a lot of redesign and product improvement that was unplanned--because of the urgency to get something out there.

That's the argument that's used against the program to a certain extent now, is that the pace of flight testing hasn't been as aggressive as maybe some people would like to see it and maybe the schedules are not as sequential as some people would like to see them.

I'm not intimately involved, so I don't know, but I do see that, I think, there's a very measured approach to the testing program now. That involves doing things right rather than taking risks, and making sure things are working before you take the next step. The question is always, when do you think you have enough test data? When are you confident enough to make decisions, when have you proven beyond reasonable doubt that you can take the next step. Those are always tough decisions, but they're moving along in the testing program now, and there are quite a few years between now an initial operating capability--capability dates, which may or may not change again, but there'll still be unknowns, there always are.

LOTTMAN: What about non-combat aerospace, are there applications for that? Because even that's becoming a much bigger deal, more and more as time goes on.

PICCIRILLO: Well, I think, clearly from the avionics aspect there's going to be cross flow into, I assume, the commercial world. Some of the things that were pioneered in the military, heads-up displays and things like that are now in commercial airplanes. Glass cockpits, I guess you could say, have happened simultaneously to a certain extent. And in some cases, commercial developments, especially in the electronics area, are ahead of the military sometimes, and they flow into the military system, so there's a cross-fertilization for sure that goes on.

Some aspects, stealth, I guess it would be hard to say that there's any commercial aspect of that, and that's definitely a major part of the effort in developing the Advanced Tactical Fighter and the F-22. Supercruise, just developing advanced engines of any kind benefits the commercial world eventually. And typically the commercial airplanes have exploited military technology, technology developed for the military and eventually proven enough that they could use it in a commercial aircraft with a low degree of risk.

LOTTMAN: Back on the military side, in the dogfight, up there in the air, on one hand we've got a plane with one pilot--he's all alone up there. He's counting on his equipment to help him out. But on the other hand, you have the whole C3I, planning, tactics, sort of orbiting around him. Can you make you make any comparison as to the relative importance of those things? In other words, the advances embodied in the plane itself, could there have been any way to give the pilot the same kind of capability, the same kind of support, from the C31?

PICCIRILLO: Well, in fact the C3I system is extremely important. Because even though the F-22 is an extremely important part of the mission of the Air Force and the battle for air dominance, it doesn't do everything by itself. It's part of an integrated system of systems, if you want to call it that, that are necessary. Because we're not gonna have huge numbers of these, if we're talking about a relatively significant conflict or major conflict, they can't be everywhere. You can't put up combat air patrols and just have huge numbers of airplanes all just orbiting and looking out for one another--which, in some cases has been done in the past. That's a very inefficient use of airpower.

So, there's no question the F-22s will be integrated into the C3I system or network. They'll operate with knowledge of the C3I system and with the C3I system knowing what they're doing. There are technologies that are gonna be embedded in this airplane that will enable it to communicate with the C3I system without disclosing its location, giving itself away. And we're still gonna have cooperative tactics where we have airplanes... It's not just an F-22 out there in the middle of--I don't wanna use the name of any country anymore because it's not as easy to do as it was ten years ago--but you're not gonna put a guy all by himself deep in the middle of enemy territory without any communications or anything else. Because that's not the best way to use that system.

But with the embedded systems that he has in the airplane that can help him identify targets at very long range, tell where friendly aircraft are, where his own members of his flight are, he will be able to coordinate his attack on enemy targets. He will be able to allocate his missiles, and the rest of his flight's missiles so they don't mutually fire at the same targets, to kill as many targets as possible. And he'll be able to coordinate his support or his attainment of air superiority with other aspects of the air battle. Because obviously he's going in there to kill enemy air targets so that other aircraft can get in and do their missions, which involve of course attacking enemy ground forces, other elements of his C3I system, his airfields, and his infrastructure.

So it's an integrated mission that we're talking about, the F-22 is the core of the pointed end, if you want to call it that, or will be, but it's not the whole mission all in itself. I don't think anyone would argue that it's efficient to just buy F-22s and send them out, and that's all you need, without any support or control. Because you're always gonna want that.

The other aspect is cooperating with allied forces, and US forces, because F-22s will be operating in conjunction with Navy forces, of course with our own land forces, and with allied forces. And all of that requires orchestration. There are systems that can help tell you who's good and who's bad, but it's not always perfect, especially when you have allies operating former threat aircraft, as well as your own aircraft, it's not... Even eyeball identification--we've had cases where F-15s shot down friendly helicopters, and there wasn't even a war on. This business over near Iraq, the Kurdish area. It's very difficult, even in semi-benign areas sometimes, to establish positive identification, even with eyeballs. So those are other aspects of the rationale for an integrated system.

But the system can't be so inflexible that the pilot can't do his mission semi-autonomously or at times even autonomously. So you want that flexibility. Ideally he has total support, and in many cases he will. Sometimes, perhaps, against very sophisticated opponents who are doing the best they can to disrupt that--with jamming, with deception, and so forth--then he has to revert to autonomous operations. There are almost certainly going to be cases where all of the sudden, people do get into close in fights, eyeball range fights. And that's why the Air Force insisted on that high degree of close-in maneuverability and capability with the F-22 as well as only the BVR capability.

It's certainly a highly capable airplane. It's a large airplane, it's an expensive airplane. That's a fact and no-one can ever change that. But all those capabilities are in there to give us the maximum degree of flexibility to do this job in any environment.

LOTTMAN: The Air Force is not gonna be composed entirely of F-22s, but to some extent, the concept of the future Air Force is being built around the F-22 and the idea that higher technology, increased capability, and this idea of the Air Expeditionary Unit, that tac-air will break out of the tac-air mold and take on a more autonomous role. Did you have any opinion on that?

PICCIRILLO: Well, of course I... That's an operational question. It's, I think, the approach the Air Force is taking, I mean I'm not involved in that decision process. But it sounds logical to me. The idea that you have a balanced blend of capabilities. The longer-range airplanes, the what we used to call tactical airplanes, all of that's gotten kind of fuzzy. Because as we know, in some cases, in Southwest Asia the B-52s were doing what we used to call battlefield air interdiction or, not quite close air support, but very close to it. And the fighters in some cases, the F-117s, were doing deeper attack missions, hitting the infrastructure, the more "strategic" targets that at one time would have been done by big bombers flying in formation and just dropping huge numbers of bombs--because their precision was so poor, that was the only way they could do it. The WWII paradigm.

That's all changed, because we now have precision strike capability in just about all our combat aircraft. All of them have the capability to communicate, they are all tied into the C3 net, targeting is much more precise, with the stealth airplanes we have the capability to go into the high-threat areas. The idea of the Air Expeditionary Force is, I think, to take all of those capabilities--the guys that can go deep with a high degree of stealth, the guys that are less stealthy that can really bring the firepower to bear in support of the air-land battle, the people who are suppressing the air defense so they can survive--to kind of take all that together, where it needs to go, along with all the supporting tankers and C3 elements and so forth--and the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles that're gonna come in, the reconnaissance aspects supporting national systems which are gonna be space-based in many cases, are space-based--and operate that as an integrated system of systems and capabilities.

I don't know if it's a new idea--when you think about it, the WWII fleet of ships was the same kind of thing--the destroyers, the cruisers, the light cruisers, the heavy cruisers, the aircraft carriers, the submarines, all the patrol aircraft, the COM nets and links.... This is not a new idea. I think it's a new way of exploiting our new capabilities.

LOTTMAN: So the new capabilities are significant enough to start thinking about re-shaping the force?

PICCIRILLO: Well, I think the reason is, of course, we don't have--part of the reason is--we don't have this huge infrastructure of bases and capabilities scattered all over the world. I mean, like we had even ten years ago. We can't go to Europe and expect depots sitting there, infrastructure, hardwired communications, underground warhead quarters, allied base support, fuel, everything stockpiled, bombs, because that's maybe not where we're gonna fight and besides, we've pulled most of that out.

PICCIRILLO: The whole idea, I think today, is the force posture has changed--I don't know about the other services, but I think it has also with them--but certainly in the Air Force, we don't have the worldwide system of bases that we had at one time, certainly during the Cold War. We had depots, we had the infrastructure, we had communication, we had the warhead quarters, we had the bomb dumps, and evrything was ready to accept the airplanes that came in. In fact, that was the concept of operations in Europe: that with some degree of warning we could flood lots of squadrons of airplanes, people, and so forth into there very quickly. Everything else was pretty much in place.

We have good agreements with our allies, we train with them regularly, we practice these reinforcement exercises, and after a period of five, ten days, we could really bring a tremendous amount of force to bear and units would come in and so forth and be ready to go. And even in place we had tremendous numbers of forces. But today, there aren't many bases overseas, and they aren't necessarily where we're gonna have to go.

So, I think with this Air Expeditionary Force the whole idea is to be able to take an integrated combat force that trains and flies together and would fight together, that is really ready to go, get it over there as quickly as possible, ready to go and then have it go to war with minimum turmoil and disruption which is not easy to do. I think that's the whole concept, and of course it affects the new airplanes and systems, because they have to be more reliable, they have to be more deployable, they have to be more easily maintained and operated with less people.

LOTTMAN: Is that against the tide of jointness, or is it just more efficient?

PICCIRILLO: I think it's more efficient. I think you could argue that it's in the concept of jointness, because the Marines have had this concept, with a much more, let's say, focused set of airplanes--their mission was to really support the Marines in close air support and provide a little bit of air cover over the amphibious operating area. It wasn't a theatre-wide mission like the Air Force has, but they've had that idea of the Expeditionary Force for a long, long time. The Navy, to a certain extent, does it with battle groups, and I think the Air Force--it's a move toward jointness, really, I think you could argue that. It's also a move toward bringing the Air Force's inherent capabilities to bear in a theatre context anywhere in the world.

Certainly it's different than what we were postured to do in the Air Force in the 60s and 70s, or 50s for sure, although we deployed airplane but they tended to be by squadrons and unique bases and a more structured sort of mode than perhaps we're planning to do them today. The idea today is to be ready to go--and you aren't sure where you're gonna go--but be ready to go wherever it is fairly quickly, and once you get there operate fairly efficiently and, when I say autonomously I don't mean un-jointly, but without imposing a tremendous burden on everything else that has to come into the theatre.

I don't think anybody is talking about the Air Force just sending an Air Expeditionary Force somewhere without the Army or the Navy or the allies being involved. Everything has to be joint or combined operations in the kind of situations I think we're talking about in the future. The country's just not going to put huge, fixed numbers of forces overseas anymore in the absence of a standing threat like we had during the Cold War.