You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast on strategy, defense, and foreign affairs.

My name is Ryan Evans. I'm the founder of War on the Rocks, and I was recently happy to travel to

Ramstein Air Base in Germany, where I sat down with General James B. Hecker of the U.S. Air Force and

Air Marshal Johnny Stringer of the Royal Air Force. They are respectively the commander and deputy

commander of Allied Air Command at NATO, and they had recently concluded a special

invite-only expert-packed conference on what Western militaries should be learning so

far about air power and space power given the experience so far in Ukraine.

I hope you enjoy the conversation.

So I'm catching you two gentlemen on the tail end of a major conference that you convened on air power space

power lessons especially from the last year of what we have observed in Ukraine

why was now a good time to convene this group of people I believe something

around 200 people ended up showing up for it including some of the worlds

certainly NATO's leading experts on air power.

Well Ryan first thanks for the opportunity and we both really appreciate to be

able to talk to you today.

This was actually an idea that Johnny came up with as we are

trying to get more prepared in case Russia continues to do bad things like they're doing right now.

We need to make sure that we're ready for them.

And one way to do that is to get a lot of intellectual think tanks and people together at one time and talk about lessons learned and that's

exactly what Johnny got set up for us.

We had four different panels with a lot of different variety of people coming from all different

backgrounds that we're able to discuss lessons learned out of Ukraine and we learned we learned a lot over the last day and a half. It's been really really nice.

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