Hawk Carlisle.

Retired Air Force Gen. Hawk Carlisle is the president and CEO of NDIA and the former commander of Air Combat Command. He also served as the commander of Pacific Air Forces; the air component commander for U.S. Pacific Command; and executive director of the Pacific Air Combat Operations Staff.

I think the big change in the next 25 years, and what we are undergoing today, is the digitization of warfare and the time element that's involved with that. The next discussion is in sensing, what's going on in command and controlling your forces and creating effects. We used to talk days to hours to maybe minutes, and now you're talking speed of light, nanoseconds with the digital age.

And if you look at technology and where it's evolving with hypersonic weapons--that's a time element right now. You cut down an adversary's ability to react because the flight time becomes so much significantly reduced. You look at quantum and AI where now you have the digitalization, and things that a machine can do faster than the human can you turn over to the machine.

The evolution I see in the next 20 years is keeping everything that we've learned in mechanization, precision and all those things. And now the next layer on top of that is the digitization and the time element being drastically changed.

Look at data analytics. As a human, you look at all this information you put in your brain and you try to analyze it. Well, think about machines that can do that at a pace that the human mind can't. I think we'll continue to evolve in that respect.

We'll bring new capability on, but we're not going to totally change our force. Nobody can afford to do that. Stuff we are developing and producing today will be in the fight 25 years from now. I guarantee it. And the capability we're able to spiral into it, combined with new capability and other platforms that make the legacy ones even better, is going to be key.

Fifty years from now, the domains will be considerably more contested. I mean, you talk about space and cyber, that's so hard to predict in today's evolution of capability.

I think climate change is a factor for the future and national security, and there's going to need to be effort put into that. I think energy...