To Fly, Fight and Win in the 21st Century

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Thank you. Mike (retired Lt. Gen. Michael Dunn), I appreciate that warm introduction and a career-long friendship as well. General Dunn and I have had wonderful opportunities to operate alongside each other in a variety of places, from Geneva to Pyongyang to Eglin and Langley and a variety of other places. My friend, you're in the right place at the right time and I appreciate it. Thank you for that introduction.

And thanks again for the entire Air Force Association for the great work you have done this week that you do everyday for Airmen and that you continue to do. These conferences are powerful, not only because they bring friends together, to reunite friendships or to make new friendships but they also give us a wonderful opportunity and a vehicle to learn to share, to grow, to argue, to conclude, to think, just time well-spent. We all value this opportunity and these opportunities and cherish the exceptional relationship that the United States Air Force and the Air Force Association have had for more than 60 years, so Mike and Association, thank you.

Secretary Wynne, General (Duncan) McNabb, General (Frank) Klotz, senior leadership, General (Norton) Schwartz is here all the way from the cornfields out in the Midwest, Chief MSgt. of the Air Force (Rodney) McKinley, senior civilian and military, civic leaders from around the country, AFA chapter members, DVs, and I was going to say my wife Jenny but I don't see her over there, but I'll say that anyway. She will ask some of you if I said that, and so I did. Before I get into the meat of what I want to share with you I want to begin today with a topic that's near and dear to my heart about publicly acknowledging an outstanding leader within our U. S. Air Force.

A couple of years ago we began presenting the Senator Ted Stevens Award to a numbered air force commander that has demonstrated the most outstanding leadership in the past year meeting a variety of challenges. And Sen. Stevens was not picked just in random because he is a senior senator of the United States, but because as a young man, as a lieutenant, he flew C-46s over the "Hump" for months and months and months, out of India across the Himalayas into China and back, supplying efforts of 14th Air Force operating against hostiles inside China. So Senator Stevens is an Airman, he is one of us, and so we offer an award in his name for that leadership and that commitment. And I'm proud to announce today that this year's award for outstanding leadership goes to the commander of 2nd Air Force, Maj. Gen. Mike Gould. Mike, would you please come up?

General Gould's leadership has been instrumental in preparing our Airmen for their highly technical jobs and for ensuring that our Airmen deployed to the Middle East in our "in lieu of' tasking" duties are ready for the combat environment that they will face. We're sending these young Airmen, these young women and men, to perform non-traditional roles and in many cases, driving trucks and manning gun turrets for convoys alongside our Marine and Army brothers and sisters. General Gould makes these Airmen as prepared as we can possibly make them to defend themselves and to represent us proudly, and that's across the Total Force--Guard, Reserve, and active. And along the way, his leadership has touched just about every career field and every functional. His leadership has been invaluable in adding credibility to the concept of reachback, preparation and training. So my friend, thank you for your outstanding leadership, for your great service to the Air Force and the nation, for all you've done for these Airmen. There's an unknown number of lives you've saved, not only Airmen, but also Soldiers, Sailors, Marines and Coast Guardsmen by the training that you've provided. Ladies and gentlemen, there couldn't be a better numbered air force commander in the Air Force today to receive this award than Maj. Gen. Mike Gould.

As I begin my third year as Chief of Staff in partnership with Secretary Wynne, I see the nation and our Air Force at a strategic inflection point, a watershed, so to speak, in our history. Yet you'd hardly know from the things we see or read in the media to the extent that the public focuses on national security and the fight in Iraq and Afghanistan seem to be only center stage. I would offer to you that such target fixation ignores the realities of the bigger world that we live in. if we focus solely on this tactical piece of Iraq and Afghanistan or fixate solely on providing expedient tactical solutions, we put our nation's security in danger. Instead we must open, I believe, our apertures and see the larger issues that concern us. We must consider strategic issues and develop long-term plans to address and solve these challenges. A week ago we marked the 60th anniversary of the U. S. Air Force becoming a separate service with a specific mission: to deliver decisive effects through the third dimension of air.

So as we reflect on these 60 years and 100 years of military aviation, to me these anniversaries are occasions for both celebration as well as reflection; for pride and introspection. Last night at the Smithsonian, most of us here enjoyed not only a wonderful show sponsored by Northrop Grumman and some very, very talented people that wear the uniform as musicians in the U. S. Air Force, but along the path that we walked following the musicians and the band and the show, you walked by Gen. Billy Mitchell's personal aircraft, Spad. He flew that airplane in combat in World War I, but before he had that airplane, he was the first American officer to fly in combat in uniform. He was the first American officer to command aerial units in combat. He was the first to plan and execute for the air weapon on a theater scale. In fact, he was the first CFAC for the offensive at Saint Mihiel. He was, from those experiences, the first American to visualize the strategies in the theater impacts of airpower, the first to defend his convictions and his vision regarding the future of the promise and the strategic impact of airpower. 

Now we delight in these past accomplishments and feel humbled by these giants on whose shoulders we stand; giants to include Trenchard, Mitchell, Eaker, Spaatz, etc.  We look to the future with hope and optimism and indeed some trepidation for it's the present that bridges our glorious heritage to a boundless horizon. What we do today not only builds on the legacy we've inherited, but also shapes the world that we leave to those that will follow us. With all that in mind, and while we have also heard from outstanding presentations from our global air chief partners, I propose to lay out for you a vision for this Air Force and its missions in today's very dangerous and dynamic international environment and explain our ongoing initiatives looking to ensure dominance in air, space, and cyberspace well into the 21st century.

Airpower, as we know it, was born in the crucible of World War I, which was one of the most ineptly fought wars in history. By opening the vertical dimension, airpower promised to restore maneuver to the positional stalemate and break the intellectual deadlock that condemned Europe to four years of unprecedented death and destruction. It opened and offered a viable alternative that would minimize, if not avoid altogether the loss of life and treasure inherent in a continual land war and to sidestep the horrific costs of this systematic attrition. Yet even after aviation's potential was conclusively established in the Battle of Saint Mihiel, it took a decade and ultimately another World War to fundamentally transform entrenched constructs.

In the interwar period, visionaries began to realize the full potential of the air weapon. They saw it revolutionizing the character of war by opening direct paths to the centers of an enemy's means and will to fight and by causing strategically dislocating and paralyzing effects on a global scale. A decade later, the promise of rocketry in space was recognized and the Air Force began a quest for the ultimate high ground on the shoulders of a fellow named Bernard Schriever. Today, the Air Force dominates in air and space and is rapidly expanding its capabilities in the domain of cyberspace, the electromagnetic spectrum and the ream of technology. Today it is a universally recognized source of national strength that is the linchpin of our national security. Today your Air Force provides our nation true global vigilance, global reach, and global power. Today, our nation relies on the U. S. Air Force to reassure our friends and allies to deter, to detect, to dissuade and to defeat. But our ability to accomplish this all in the future is at risk.

Every day brings new threats, new combinations of threats, new challenges, new combinations of challenges, and every day our existing equipment ages another 24 hours. So even while we're fighting this existential global war, we are simultaneously undertaking what amounts to be a revolution within the Air Force to better position our total force for the challenges of the 21st century. Let me tell you a short story to illustrate; it's actually a metaphor for what the entire U.S. Air Force is undergoing right now, fighting a war with the most combat-tested and combat-proven force in history, working feverishly to keep our current old and in many cases obsolete systems flying and fighting, while at the same time preparing for the roles the nation will ask of us to accomplish in the future. Here's the story. Three weeks ago we lost an Air Force Special Operations Command MH-53 Pave Low helicopter. Thankfully, there were no serious injuries to the crew, but there easily could have been a different outcome. The helicopter pilot was able to get it back to a landing zone before he made impact with the surface.

Like many of our vintage MH-53s, this particular helicopter has a heroic combat history. From its tail number, 695794 you can tell it was manufactured in 1969, making the aircraft 38 years old. Airmen flew this machine on the mission to recover the crew of the USS Mayaguez during the combat operations on Koh Tang Island in 1975. The helicopter suffered 35 holes when extracting the U.S. Marines on the island trapped by hostile fire. Airmen also flew this helicopter, 695794, during Operation Frequent Wind, which was the evacuation of Saigon. I'm guessing that there's some of you here that weren't yet born when that happened in 1975. But anyway, the helicopter has 12,000 flying hours on it, over 1,000 above the inventory average of 11,000, which is you all know extremely high for a helicopter. And this helicopter most recently deployed to Iraq from May 2006 to June 2007 for a 12-month deployment. That deployment was its fourth rotation to the combat theater. 

Now the MH-53 is a great airplane; we purchased and modified 41 of them for special ops purposes. But we've been retiring a few of them each year; we've lost six in combat, and now we have 21 left in the inventory. And over the course of the next year-and-a-half, we'll eventually retire the remaining MH-53s which will boast 40 years of flying and fighting for this country. As the 53s are retired we will remove the last ones from their combat roles in the Central Command Area of Responsibility.  In fact, there's a good chance that the last MH-53 sortie will actually be flown in combat, a fitting final mission.

These helicopters were to be replaced by CV-22s, but delays in appropriation, production and delivery leave us currently with only six CV-22s. In light of the slow production rate, we are looking at options to deploy the CV-22 pre-initial operational capability.  In fact, to prevent a mission impacting loss on U.S. Special Operations Command in its vertical lift and covert and searching capability.

So in this case and more broadly, we must balance current imperatives with future requirements, because now and in the future our joint force commanders, the President, and the nation rely on us to accomplish basically four fundamental indispensable tasks: first, Airmen give our political and military leaders the ability to surveill the battlespace. From satellites tens of thousands of miles above the surface of the planet and from ground stations distributed around the United States and around the world, Airmen maintain a constant, unblinking eye. Airmen provide our political and military leaders analysis and context for the strategic decisions, while other Airmen provide tactical overwatch and inputs that spawn direct action from our nation's joint military team. 

The second task for Airmen is to span or range the entire surface of the Earth. For any target or activity, Airmen can continue to surveill it, hold it at risk, strike it kineticly with pinpoint accuracy at the speed of sound and soon non-kinetically at the speed of light; supply it rapidly and accurately with a GPS-guided joint precision airdrop system, rescue isolated forces, or equally important provide humanitarian and disaster relief no matter where on the planet that activity or that target might be, Airmen can get there in a hurry, link with our coalition partners, and respond from one end of the spectrum to the other.

Another brief story: General (Arthur) Lichte this morning talked about a C-17 aircrew from Charleston (AFB, S.C.), who in July aeromedical evac'ed a U.S. Army sergeant directly from Balad Air Base, Iraq, to Andrews (AFB, Md.), to get him to a neurosurgeon for care. Our C-17 crew members worked with KC-135 tanker crews from Incirlik (AB, Turkey) and from RAF Mildenhall (England) en route, saving the soldier's life. And what's really powerful in the case that Gen. Lichte described for you was that this was a complete Total Force makeup from beginning to end--Air National Guard, Air Force Reserve, active, civilian, across major commands, an unbelievable demonstration of the utility and responsiveness of airpower. 

At the other end of the spectrum, our Airmen can also reach out and strike enemies with devastating effects. Then majors, now lieutenant colonels Troy "VB" Van Binlen and Ray "Jersey" Cher led the well-known 45-plus hour long B-2 missions that struck Taliban targets in Afghanistan. These Airmen of the famed 509th Bomb Wing, and of course last night those of us that were there had an opportunity to see the Enola Gay, which was also a part of the 509th Bomb Wing in earlier times. These Airmen of the contemporary 509th took off from Whiteman AFB, Mo., were rerouted and retargeted in-flight, something that had never been done previously in the stealth world, and dropped 67,000 pounds, 67,000 pounds of ordnance precisely on 32 different critical targets, and recovered their (inaudible) aircraft on an expeditionary air field in the region, 45-plus hours. VB and Jersey clearly and dramatically demonstrated the unbelievable range and payload that we boast today.

The third task for Airmen is to have the unique ability to command and control air and space activities around the world by seamlessly integrating airborne, ground, space, and cyber-based platforms; to detect, to identify, to track targets on the surface, at sea, in the air, and in space, then battle-manage available assets to deliver the desired effect. Once tracks of interest are detected, command and control systems share data through a series of data links to ensure actionable and potentially predictive information is available to all joint warfighters from the joint terminal attack controller to the combined force air component commander to the joint force commander and to the national-level leaders. These command and control capabilities ensure friendly force tracking, minimizing potential for fratricide. They speed progress through the kill chain by delivering precise, timely, and accurate information even on mobile and fleeting targets. They enable centralized control of the air, space, and cyberspace operations while maintaining decentralized execution, a doctrinal tenant that will be even more critical in tomorrow's uncertain environment, and they enable us to act to react quickly across the spectrum of conflict and around the world.

Another brief story: in response to a catastrophic hurricane along our own Gulf Coast, in response to a deadly tsunami in the Pacific Rim, or in response to a devastating earthquake in Pakistan, Airmen responded quickly, capably, and with quality. On Oct. 8,  2005, the earthquake registering 7.6 on the Richter scale rocked the northern reaches of Pakistan. The quake's epicenter lay in a rough and rugged terrain about 100 miles north of Islamabad. Nearly 80,000 people were killed in the earthquake and another 70,000 were injured, making it Pakistan's worst natural disaster since becoming an independent country. The destruction encompassed an area that measured approximately 62 miles by 186 miles and left 2.8 million people homeless, as winter was about to begin. Many nations rallied to help, and within 24 hours of the earthquake humanitarian aid began flowing into Pakistan from around the world as part of Operation Lifeline. Within hours of the quake, Air Mobility Command's Tanker Airlift Control Center, or TACC, directed the 621st Contingency Response Wing to deploy an element to Chaklala Air Base, Pakistan, near Islamabad, to manage the intense and heavy flow of U.S. military and civil aircraft soon to descend on the airfield. 

Col. Richard Wahlberg commanded that unit, his 46-member team including aerial porters, maintainers, communications specialists, finance, vehicle maintenance, public affairs, contracting specialists, command and control. By the end of November, he and his team provided the full-theater command and control to successfully unload 250 aircraft and nearly 14.5 million pounds of humanitarian cargo from the planes of more than 30 countries, including the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Iran. Globally, by the end of December the TACC had tasked U.S. Air Force C-5s and C-17s to fly 169 missions and 510 sorties from and between locations in the continental United States, Europe, U.S. Central Command, transporting nearly 7,000 short tons of cargo. The Pakistani air chief at the time subsequently told a U.S. Airman that the sight of a U.S. Air Force aircraft, Airmen, and the coalition partnership of other Airmen delivering supplies and relief did more to foster the positive image of the United States and their partners from Pakistan than anything else we have done.

Finally, the fourth task Airmen have is to have the ability to assess kinetic and non-kinetic effects in real-time or near real-time across the Air Force's warfighting domains, because accurately assessing effectiveness at achieving objectives is absolutely critical. The roles for Airmen are growing exponentially and the ability to see and understand and assess is fundamental. Another quick story; take, for example, Capt. Amanda Fejurora, the analysis infusion flag commander of our 13th Intelligence Squadron at Beale AFB, Calif. During the first two weeks of August in conjunction with the largest application of airpower since Operation Anaconda and in concert with coalition ground forces, Amanda served daily as the ISR package commander. While the Air Force surged combat air patrols of high altitude coalition platforms, Amanda led a team that cross-cued the central packages to assess strikes. Within moments after each strike, Amanda and her team nominated targets for re-strike to the Combined Air Operations Center to a forward location in Southwest Asia, which directed fighters on station to immediately re-strike hostile targets. Captain Fejurora,  thus expertly, efficiently, and lethally reduced the assessment cycle to mere minutes, in dramatic contrast to the weeks it would have taken decades ago or the days that it took during Operation Desert Storm.

The Air Force is the only service asked to accomplish these four missions, anywhere, anytime, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, daylight or dark, weather, clear, across the spectrum of conflict from peace to crisis to war. These indispensable missions epitomize the range, the payload, the speed that are the heart and soul of airpower. And our nation depends on Airmen to fulfill them now and in the future. Yet given the growing number and complexity of challenges in the international security environment, many of which we've heard in the outstanding presentations to date and the increasingly lethality of global threats, we recognize we must adapt the way we do business and operate this Air Force. Simply put, it's a dangerous world out there that we all live in.

Therefore, we must look at changing the way we organize, train, and equip our service. Incremental change, modest initiatives, and unilateral solutions simply won't do. When I became the Chief two years ago, alongside Secretary Wynne, we didn't set out to redefine airpower or revolutionize the U. S. Air Force, we just wanted to leave our service healthier, better, stronger, and prouder than when we found it. 

So we set priorities, which lead to a series of initiatives. Each initiative adds another facet to a new mosaic, in fact, a new tapestry of capability, each built upon another, fueled toward thrust, vex, add it up and a new synergy began to emerge. This holistic picture is of a new Air Force, proud of its heritage, of innovation, of valor, of combat, faithful to that legacy, and ready for the unpredictable challenges of the 21st century. To fulfill this promise of airpower as envisioned by the great captains of yesterday, we are working today, resourcing today, nearly 150 of these innovative initiatives to ensure that we are prepared to fulfill our role and our missions across the globe and across the three warfighting domains. We can look at these initiatives as ways to proposed ends or we can look at them as waypoints on our flight plan for organizing, training, and equipping the Air Force of the future. I consider them together to be a radical redefinition of U.S. airpower, in fact, a new calculus for the 21st century. 

If the 20th century was defined as the sum of effects created through air, space, and cyberspace, now the whole of airpower is much greater than the sum of its parts. We see the 21st century, airpower being the product of seamless integration across our warfighting domains, multiplied by relative advantages in the air, space, and cyberspace, and multiplied by our ability to affect other domains and as we consider our ability to achieve cross-domain dominance.

Given the uncertain nature of the world and the full spectrum of threats that we face, these initiatives are key to the priorities, which are warfighting, taking care of our people, and recapitalization. These initiatives will also ensure our ability to fight and win the current war while ensuring our readiness for future combat operations. They are the concrete steps toward better-developing our Airmen and taking care of them and their families and they will allow us to act upon the imperative to recapitalize and modernize our aging air and space inventories. They will take us to where I believe we must be. 

First, we are in the midst of the Air Force's biggest and most important recapitalization and modernization effort in history. In scale, and in complexity, this is much tougher and much bigger than moving from Piston engines to jet. Our Airmen must have state-of-the-art air, space, and cyber capabilities, a need which requires us to retire old and obsolete aircraft and replace them with fewer numbers of dramatically more capable systems. Every one of our major satellite systems must be replaced. Today our aircraft inventory is the oldest it has been in the history of the service--average age of this inventory is 24 years old and growing older. And this equipment and your Airmen have been in combat solid for the last 17 years. These years of flying and fighting have taken a toll on our people, our machines, and our organization. Our amazing Airmen work miracles to keep these aircraft flying, but we've gone well beyond any engineering data to know what will happen to such an aged fleet.

With Secretary Wynne, I fear that the MH-53 story that I related earlier will only repeat itself with increasing frequency as this inventory continues to age. These machines are harder and harder and more expensive to maintain. They require a larger footprint when they're deployed, and more importantly, they're significantly less combat-capable than the new designs. We simply must provide America and our coalition partners with air, space, and cyber capabilities for the 21st century. We must field these fifth-generation platforms with increased stealth, survivability, standoff, reach, integration, speed, lethality, and precise precision capabilities if we are to maintain dominance in tomorrow's battle space, and if we are to maintain partnerships and interoperability opportunities alongside the air forces represented here by the global air chiefs. 

Our recapitalization priorities, the new jet tanker, the new combat search and rescue helicopter, new space systems, for early warning, communications, timing, and weather, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, a new bomber that we'll field by 2018, are but a step in the right direction. The full spectrum capabilities for the Total Force, Air National Guard, Reserve, and active we'll need in the future demand that we also purchase and field more C-130Js and the Joint Cargo Aircraft, more and better medium- and high-altitude unmanned aerial vehicles.

Second, our initiatives are shaping our operational concepts, how we see ourselves flying, fighting, winning 21st century conflicts in the air, space, and cyberspace, but equally important how we partner and operate alongside our coalition partners; how we continue to detect, deter, dissuade, and defeat our nation's enemies no matter who they are, where they are, or what are there weapons. I suggest we cannot be the garrison force of the last century. In the last two years we've taken very serious the initiatives to ensure 100 percent of Airmen are able to deploy because ours is an expeditionary force. Ours is a force that must be capable of seizing an austere base, setting up and flying combat operations and redeploying once we've achieved our intended effect all in real-time and in partnership with our coalition brothers and sisters. Yet ours is also a force that is capable of projecting power into a theater from locations in the United States, even through cyberspace. And innovative Airmen are everyday working on other initiatives to make our impact from our bases and our fighting positions even more decisive.

We have taken the initiative to train in this new world a bit different. Within the last two years we have refocused and re-resourced the world's most complex and realistic composite force training environment with integrated kinetic and non-kinetic ops and command and control. We've reorganized previously separate exercises in Alaska and Nevada so that they're one with a singular focus. Our new improved Red Flag will still feature venues in Nevada and Alaska, but both venues will offer similar levels of threat presentations and certainly different environments to operate in. They'll also have access to nine squadrons of full-time professional aggressors, including air-to-air, air-to-surface, surface-to-air, space, information operations, and cyberspace, who will incidently come from active duty, Air National Guard, and Reserve squadrons, and who will also hail from a growing number of international partner countries to fully test the blue forces.
Within the last two years we've also taken the initiative to intellectually and spiritually recapitalize our Airmen. Along with the leadership of Air Education and Training Command and Air University, we are totally reenergizing the world's most advanced educational system for Airmen and we are expanding our full spectrum educational opportunities at Maxwell at Air University. We're developing a rapid, adaptable, and more efficient procurement and acquisitions system, stressing full visibility, open competitions, and meeting operational timelines. And we are working to become the department's leaders in interagency, joint, and combined operations across the full spectrum of conflict, across those domains. 

We are also looking to become increasingly interdependent with our land, maritime, and special operations forces, and are pursuing a series of ongoing bilateral initiatives with the U. S. Army, Navy and Marine Corps to that end, and to fully explore and to avoid procuring, manning, and operating redundant systems that only tap limited resources and provide no additional theater or operational capability. We're using every opportunity in our quiver to highlight the significant advantages of interoperable equipment and systems with our joint and coalition partners, and we're confident that the ongoing global air chiefs will accelerate the benefits and offer opportunities that we haven't thought of.

Third, we are changing our organization and culture. Any organizational renaissance always begins with people. Our Airmen, including most of you in this audience, have been the key to the decisive use of air and space power in a myriad of contingencies and campaigns across the globe. But we recognize this uncertain future holds great challenges, and that we must prepare our Airmen for future warfighting environments, to give them the intellectual tools, the background, the curiosity, and the ability to ask the questions that perhaps they don't have the answers for yet. Some specific changes we're making to this culture include streamlining our warfighting staff and command structures, refocusing them on combat and strategic partnering missions and encouraging adaptability, from establishing and strengthening Air Force A2, our Air Staff directorate for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, to creating warfighting air operations centers in each theater focused on each region. And we're seamlessly integrating all elements of our Total Force to leverage to an even greater extent than ever before the capacities inherent within the Air National Guard and Reserves and the experiences and the talent within all of the components. Though the Air Force is already the model for melding its active duty elements with its Guard and Reserve and civilians, there's still more we can do to ensure the governors' and the state missions, the federal missions, are met quicker and with more capacity than before.

And we are looking in every way to expand our strategic partnering opportunities and our interoperability opportunities with our coalition and allied partners. Indeed, one of the constant themes this week has seen is that interoperability is cultural, as well as technical. It's clear that many of our air forces' challenges are similar and that we share a desire to work together to overcome them. Building air force-to-air force relationships now creates synergies that enable global solutions. Next, we are working to better prepare Air Force officers for crucial joint and coalition leadership positions, by providing them the academic and practical expertise to ensure they're unapologetic air, space, and cyber power advocates and can fully articulate its distinctive competencies and capabilities as General Billy Mitchell did through the 1920s.

Finally we're completing the transition away from what I call tribal loyalties to prides shared by all Airmen. We're guided by a strong warfighting ethos every Airman understands and relishes her or his role in accomplishing this mission. At every level of Air Force training, from basic training through (inaudible) tech schools through the highest levels of PME, we're inculcating our Airmen's warfighting ethos and embracing the combat heritage across this Air Force. Basic military training, tech school, Airman leadership school, non-commissioned officer academy, senior non-commissioned officer academy, commissioning sources, air and space basic course, squadron officer school, Command and Staff College, and the Air War College--at every level, and I believe that our new Airman's creed captures this flight path in its powerful 18 lines and let me show you what I mean, if you could run that video, please. (Video plays.)

Wow, that's powerful stuff. That's powerful stuff for the face of your Airmen. General (William) Looney, your guys are awesome putting that together. Years ago, Billy Mitchell established a vision for strategic thinking that's still useful to this day. He said, "Nations nearly always go into an armed contest with the equipment and methods of a former war. Victory always comes to that country which has made a proper estimate of the equipment and methods that can be used in modern ways." 

I offer to you we're at that strategic crossroads, and whether we look at this problem through an organized, trained and equipped lens or whether we look at this problem through the Secretary and my priorities of fighting the war, taking care of people, and recapitalizing the Air Force, or if you look at this through the lens of transformation, which is changing the culture and the organization, adapting to new technologies, and developing new CONOPS, as you think about that that is effectively a Rubick's cube. You can work that anyway you want to, but the attributes and the elements of this future are the same. Yes, I believe we are a strategic crossroads and while we ponder these global threats, choosing the path of least resistance, failing to change the way we're organized, trained and equipped would lead to failure in our ability to fulfill our roles and missions for the nation in the 21st century. But that is not going to happen to this great Air Force. 

We must continue to harness and exploit these new technologies and adapt our strategies, our organizations, our tactics, our training, to meet both current and future warfighting requirements, to focus on mission -- to focus on mission so that we can and will continue to dominate in all three warfighting domains for the United States of America, her interests, her ideals and alongside our global partners.

Overcoming the 21st century challenge is not a choice, it's a duty. It's not an option, it's our responsibility to bequeath a better force for the Airmen who will follow us in service to our country, the people you saw in this video. It's our obligation to continue to deliver on the promise of airpower the visionaries and pioneers laid out 100 years ago to take warfighting into the third domain, to ensure our equipment and methods give us the capability to reach out a very long way around the planet, in fact, with the right payload, and fast, whether it's global vigilance, whether it's global reach, or whether it's global power. Everything we're doing begins with this mindset. 

Secretary Wynne and I are committed to fly this vector, but success will require steadfast leadership at every level of our service, as well as sacrifice and commitment and understanding from every Airman now and into the years to come, because the magnitude of this task is great, and it will take years to complete while combating global threats. So I call on you now to be a part of this endeavor, to commit yourself fully to this monumental and history-making effort to realize and redefine American airpower for the 21st century.

To the American Airmen in the audience, I thank you for all of your contributions to air, space and cyber, for your deployments, for your sacrifices, for your time away from loved ones and family -- all of you are critical to the defense of this republic, its interests and its ideals, and thank you for being part of a joint team. And similarly, I want to thank our joint and international partners for all you have done everyday on behalf of your services and your nations. 

I'm incredibly proud to wear this uniform and come to work everyday alongside Secretary Mike Wynne to serve shoulder-to-shoulder with all of you as we move toward these objectives. Again, this won't be easy. As we look to recapitalize, as we look to reinvigorate our education systems, as we look to change our organizational construct and address our culture, and as we look to take care of our families and we look for every opportunity for educational advancement and expanding horizons, and as we look to recapitalize this aging inventory and get these systems into the 21st century while we fight a Global War on Terrorism, know this will not be easy.

But again, there's no option to this. We took an oath to defend the Constitution, and that's what this is about. So let me close by one more time telling my brothers, the global air chiefs, what a true honor it is to be able to spend a week with you, to be able to see you in a seminar setting, to be able to see you in a social setting, to be able to spend some time with you, to be able to share some ideas, your countries could not be better served, because of who you are, what you represent, and the expertise that you bring to your nations' security apparatus. 

To the Air Force Association, Bob, Mike, you guys are awesome; couldn't be better. To the civic leaders, I know you guys also have so many things going on and for you to take the time to be a part of this and to partner with this great Air Force and to be here in this setting, means a lot to all of us. We all value your input, your expertise, your counseling and your mentoring. To my fellow officers, senior leadership of the Air Force, civilian and uniform, the Air Force has never been better served by officers of your character and your capability and what you bring to these challenges that we've got today.

Secretary Wynne, thank you again, Sir. It's a pleasure to serve alongside you. If Jenny were here, I would say that about her, so let me get off this stage by saying, God bless you all, God bless our Soldiers, our Sailors, Marines, Coast Guardsmen, and Airmen of all of our countries that are out there this afternoon in harm's way defending the ideals and the principles that we all hold dear and putting their lives between hostiles and their populations. God bless our great nation, the United States of America. Mike and Bob, thank you again for the opportunity to share these thoughts. Thank you.