DoD Modernization Exchange 2026: Air Force’s George Forbes on orchestrating capability development

The idea was so simple. What if pilots could pay for fuel for their airplanes or jets using an application instead of carrying around plastic credit cards?

An Air Force squadron worked with a company to create an electronic payment app to replace the crumpled paper receipts pilots had long stuffed into their flight suits and then had to fish out to get reimbursed. The problem with the app? The team developed that prototype outside of the Air Force’s security infrastructure.

The idea was so innovative, however, that the service’s digital directorate picked up the application and figured out how to bring it inside the service’s guardrails. They did this by assigning a sherpa — an expert in software development — to the team that initially came up with the electronic payment concept.

A dev helping hand

“Let’s take your idea and refactor it inside of our domain space so we can scale it up. Here’s a software developer’s kit, which is going to give you all of the pieces that you need to know up front that’ll make you compliant with our authority-to-operate, give you that security envelope and some hacks and techniques,” said George Forbes, who until the end of March was the deputy chief of staff in the Operations Division for Data and IT in the Department of the Air Force, said during Federal News Network’s DoD Modernization Exchange 2026.

“We had a space for them to work inside already. We had a continuous improvement, continuous delivery pipeline for them. We had software that managed the compliance stuff. We didn’t field it, but they were ready within six days to begin the process as opposed to many, many months. We’re just moving faster, taking a custom app, refactoring it inside of our space and having it ready to begin the journey to go to production.”

Using sherpas is a new concept for the Air Force. Forbes brought the idea with him in 2020 when he joined the Air Force after working at the Department of Housing and Urban Development for six years, where he had helped implement a similar concept. HUD borrowed the idea from the departments of Agriculture and Veterans Affairs.

Forbes likes to compare sherpas to conductors of a symphony whose job is to keep the artists creating the music on track.

“What we do know is that our operators, our people doing the mission, know what they need the best, but may not know how to achieve that the best way. So how to achieve that is based oftentimes on their personal experience, a buddy, a YouTube video, a friend, a relative, maybe even their academic background before they came into the Air Force or in their academic training. And oftentimes that might be stale, aged or maybe even biased because they haven’t had the breadth of experience,” he said. “My job, on the other hand, is the converse, to bring the technology, orchestration, and synthesize all those pieces to make their job easier.”

A dozen software sherpas

Sherpas help the mission owners build their technology much easier and faster with all the security standards already built in. Forbes said his office is providing two overarching services through the sherpas. One is to use data as a service and the other is to use software as a service.

“We create those spaces for our people to be safe and ingenious, as well as creative,” he said. “They can rely on somebody who can help them get there and then sustain their application, rather than having to invest a lot of intellect, resources and power to get there. What’s important for us is in the flying operation, I like to say, I don’t ever want the pilot to understand how to get an authority to operate because now they’re not focused on the mission, which is aviation. So these sherpas bring that skill set to the people who need to have a new capability. The idea was to bring expertise and hook them up with people who had content matter expertise to bring them across the finish line — to help them be successful in building an application.”

Over the last few years, Forbes has brought together a team of about a dozen software development experts. About half work day to day with mission owners who want to build applications.

Sherpas at scale

He said there are sherpas assigned to only a handful of applications currently, but there are six to eight others that are ready to move forward with help from these experts. Forbes said he expects the program, which is free to use for Air Force mission owners, to ramp up in the coming months.

“My internal clients come to me and say, ‘I need an app.’ Or, they bring me an app developer, whether it’s off the shelf or whatever, I assign a sherpa to them. There’s no cost, and the reason is we’re harvesting the money that we’re saving by helping them,” Forbes said. “There are hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on developing apps, oftentimes on the same thing. If we can reduce that footprint, we’re pushing money back out to the commands, back out to the operational users. We’re saving money in that way. It’s a very minor investment compared to the return.”

Along with the sherpas helping to build new apps, Forbes said another priority is to create an app marketplace so mission owners across the Air Force can find apps that already have been built.

“Instead of coming to us and saying, ‘We want to build an app, give us some money,’ and that traditional or conventional technique takes forever, you can build an app, put it in the marketplace and show it to us. That’s a different pathway for us to go, and that’s a different technique for how we use our resources. Congress gives us money in five different ways; the research and development money is scarce compared to the operations money. So if I can use operations money to buy a product rather than develop a product from scratch, that’s more attractive to me,” he said.

“What we’re encouraging the industry to do, and what you’ll see from us, is we will say, go build an app, say for managing aircraft generation equipment on the flight line. It really is kind of easy with our software developer kit, which we publish, and you can build one and show it to us. If we like it, and it’s low cost, we’re likely to say, just buy it and put it in production, rather than, let’s start from scratch together.”

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