Jared Isaacman

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.

They were foreign aircraft, so they looked different.

which is pretty important.

And the pilots could focus just on being Russian, Chinese, Iranian fighter pilots instead of taking away from Blue Air training.

And out of nowhere, it became this multi-billion dollar industry.

Wow.

Wow.

I mean, Drakken, our peak had over 100 fighters.

And we did air-to-ground training, too, for JTACs.

We supported the Navy special operators at Fallon.

We would drop...

um, you know, um, like Mark 76 and, um, uh, training ordinance for JTAC controllers and such on the ground, because again, you didn't have to use an F-16 or an A-10 that you might need to use in other parts of the world when it was, you know, kind of more about, you know, who you're talking to and what's falling off the airplane than it was the actual airplane type.