“If you look across our history, I would argue that the place that… the U.S. military has been so successful because of the technological advantage that we’ve given our warfighter.”
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Cooley oversees a $4.9 billion budget in an agency with a workforce of about 10,400 employees at 40 sites worldwide. Sixty percent of the employees, or about 6,250 people, work at AFRL headquarters at Wright-Patterson. Throughout the entire workforce, nearly 90 percent are civilian workers — both civil service and contractors — and 6,400 are scientists and engineers.
For AFRL, developing hypersonic missiles, directed-energy weapons and autonomous drones are priorities in what defense observers have called part of the Third Offset, or the third wave of milestone technology advancement in the military. Russia and China reportedly have made gains in the same technologies in recent years.
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One obstacle is competing for talent with the fast-evolving commercial technology sector. One way the agency is trying to compete is hiring candidates faster.
AFRL has special congressional authorization to use “direct hire authority” to bring in new employees more quickly than under the traditional bureaucratic process. Under the authority, a newly hired scientist or engineer candidate is typically on the job in 58 days compared to 116 days without using the authority, according to the Air Force.
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