Jared Isaacman

So the history behind this is the US used to have organic aggressor capability, and they still do.

But they used to have a lot more of it in the during the Cold War.

And, and the reason was, is they could use their own aircraft to do it, generally speaking.

And in order to handicap

like, say, an F-16 so that it could simulate, I don't know, a MiG-29, for example.

in the early 2000s and the 90s, maybe they wouldn't use Afterburner.

Or maybe they would set their radar scope to like a 40-mile scope or something.

And everybody still got good training out of it.

The pilot who was being the red air, the Russian or the Chinese or the Iranian or something, was still getting good training out of it.

The problem that started to develop over the last 15 years or so when we created this business in 2011

is the fourth-gen platforms like F-15, F-16, F-18 were reaching the end of their service life, and the replacements continued to keep slipping to the right, the F-35.

So every hour remaining on that airplane became precious.

You didn't want to waste it.

being the bad guy when you might need it for national security reasons.

Second, because they're old, they cost more.

So it cost a lot more to use it as red air.

And then third, our capabilities had developed to such an extent that in order to simulate being the bad guy, you had to turn off a lot of systems, so much so that it became negative training.

And then when fifth gen came, so stealth fighters like the F-22 and F-35,

It was even more negative training to take such an airplane that costs like 80,000, 90,000 an hour to operate and pretend to be a Russian MiG-29 or something.

So all of this was the demand signal for kind of a dedicated force of red air where it was our jets, so it didn't matter how much time we used against it.