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than just “cyber” which is a critical subset. Combat leaders can now focus on Command
and Control plus information war. Pilots in the F-35 are Information Warriors.

A fleet of F-35s puts in the air with a 360 degree swath a decision and information war-
fare grid.

This grid is leveraged throughout the battlespace for ground and surface operations
throughout the engagement.

As Mike Skaff the father of the F-35 cockpit states:

The Z axis and the fusion engine graphic captures the essence of the change, or the foundation
from which change will occur.

It points out the advent of the information age.

We’re old enough, and we can remember when there weren’t cell phones. There was a time when
there wasn’t an Internet. We can remember that distinctly.

When these tools show up in the early ’90s, there’s a paradigm shift that we call ‘the information
age’, and now it arrives in the airplane. With the F-35 we enter into the information age in a
new way and we can connect these airplanes just like nodes of the Internet. I’m not saying we’re
connected to the Internet, but it is like that. I like to think of this as information dominance.
When a 5th generation fighter arrives in battle space the pilot has information dominance.

The F-35 was specifically designed to provide the pilot with information dominance through
multi-spectral, multi-sensor, distributed processing and advanced fusion – this is the distinction
and the difference from the 4th generation. This is the paradigm shift.

Because this is software-defined plane built around evolution over time, we know the future is
going to be different. The threats will evolve and everything else.

But initially, these initial airplanes have all of the hardware in place to last for a couple of soft-
ware upgrades. And so, we can redefine the airplane in its missions and how the sensors work
and what they detect. Hypersonic cruise missiles, seeing that the horizon maybe with DAS, who

Second Line of Defense December 2014

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