Air Mobility Command: Making a difference to the warfighter

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First of all let me say thank you for being here this morning and joining us. I am delighted to be here. I tell you, this is so magnificent. You can't come in here and not help be humbled. Come in here to the Senate and sitting in a place like this and getting a chance to be with some great Americans. Lot of old friends out there, and I appreciate all of you being out there. Some of you all that I do not know as well. I did in fact stack the audience. I said if this goes south and I need help, I have a lot of friends out there that came and said, "You'll do alright." In fact I got some folks who know this a lot better than me, I just saw Gen. H.T. Johnson, one of my predecessors, who actually stood up the Air Mobility Command; where is General Johnson? Over here, and actually I have the senior mentors, the four stars out, come give me help so if I screw anything up, it is all on them.

What I thought I would do today is to give a little feel for what the Air Mobility Command is doing, because in many cases, what I find is that we have a lot of discussions about programs, a lot of discussions about things that are going on, but in many cases we haven't told you, "Here's is what the program has done and here is what we are doing in the Air Mobility Command to serve the nation, not only bring the folks to the fight but also bring in the humanitarian nature of the United States and the care that we want to show and the compassion to the people of the world and how we do that." Of course Air Mobility Command stays very busy doing that. I mentioned to Stan O'Conner (Professional Staff on the Senate Armed Services Committee) that I sometimes call this the time of the Perfect Storm. I used to say as the XP, in about two years you're going to have the time of the Perfect Storm in three years from now, I hope I am not the XP anymore.

And here we are - we are actually in that time now where you have a collision of forces that include a Global War on Terrorism that is truly about the future of mankind, truly is about that. How do we deal with that? You have transformation and recapitalization pressures that basically we have to take care of. We have a very aging air fleet in our Air Force and in our mobility forces. I'll talk a little about that and at the same time you got the baby boomers coming of age in 2010, so Medicare, Social Security and all those things go off the charts. Time of the Perfect Storm. If you remember the movie, The Perfect Storm, you will remember the heroine screaming into the mike, you know she is calling on the phone to George Clooney, "You are going right into the teeth of the monster!" You remember that? And here we are. I will say that this is also the time you can make the most change. If you have got your stuff together, this is the time to lead; this is the time to be there this is the time to make a difference. Because no other time have we had such a combat ready force, never have we had the kind of lessons learned that we can shape the force in ways that you can't do during normal peacetime or normal contingencies. You are sitting back and being able to see things and say, "What needs to fit in for the warfighter? What do we need to do to take care of this? What are the things that we need to make this whole system better?" And then go test it and say, "Well, that worked pretty well" or "If we tweaked this it will work even better." So I think you will see that as we go through this.

'Unrivaled Global Reach for America Always' is our vision and I will tell you that the reason we say that is, its not only today, but we have to think about tomorrow. It's the tomorrow portion that also gets in there. As you come to Washington, you know you have a lot of people that are totally focused on the war and you have a lot of other folks that are saying, "I'm focused on the future," and what we got to do is say, "Well, we've got to do both." And so how do you do that and how do you make sure that it all links up and have a consistent approach on how we do that. But I will tell you that in my own sense, and of course I know that this is a little parochial, but I will tell you that Mobility Command is in fact one of America's crown jewels, because it gives us our strategic ability to move. It allows us to speed up events or slow them down, to play or not to play, and nobody else in the world has it. And so it gives you tremendous leverage on the world stage. And I will tell you, it's huge. It's huge. So this is the part that we want to continue to do because, again, it allows us to show the compassion, or take the fighter to the war.

Our Chief has talked a lot about this. We think about 9/11. I was in the building (Pentagon) on 9/11 when the airliner came in. And we talk about being at war now longer than World War II. But when you think about since Desert Shield and Storm, all the operations that went on and you'll see that as those went through, the ones in bold are the ones that are kinetic, where we took bombers and fighters and ground troops - we took them into harm's way. All the rest of them are 'relief' or 'compassion,' showing the United States the compassion to the world. Making a difference. Saving lives. Doing those kinds of things. So the Air Mobility Command is constantly doing those kinds of things. So in the middle of doing a major re-supply effort to Iraq or Afghanistan you might have a Lebanon NEO (non-combatant evacuation operation), where they say "Hey, by the way, we've got citizens in harm's way. We need you, without missing a beat, to take care of the war, and at the same time, get our folks back to the United States." All that has to happen and if it's going well, nobody even knows how hard it is. But I'll tell you what, it's not easy. It's not easy. We just sometimes kind of make it look easy, and if we're doing it right, that's exactly what we're doing.

This is what we call our "six-pack slide." I just throw this out to let you know that this, if you looked on here, it says what each of the regional Combatant Commanders, you know, the sorties that we have in there. It shows you here's what we have today, and here's kind of the average for the last six months. And I will tell you that goes between 800 and 900 sorties a day. Every day, day-in, day-out, 365 days a year, 900-plus sorties equates to about every 90 seconds to two minutes, an airplane is landing or taking off with that American flag on that grey tail, representing America. As our folks go all around the world, when they land there with that great American flag on that tail, they are just not representing America, they "are" America. When those evacuees coming out of Lebanon got on those C-17s, and it lifted off, they knew that they were back in the United States. Pretty awesome.

And they're out there going to places that when you think about it - Antarctica - and we've got airplanes landing in Antarctica, and all across the '-stans,' into China, down to South Africa, into South America, into places that in some cases are very austere, that don't have a lot of support. And we've got to make sure that that goes fine. And sometimes it is in a place where it's pretty hostile, where they're firing at you and we've got to figure out how to do that, day-in and day-out. And I will tell you the thing that is probably most impressive about this period of time, is that our safety record is better this year than it was last year. And our safety record is better last year than it was the year before. And you think about the places that we're going and how much some of these bad guys - how much they would love to take down one of our airplanes. You think about that, and yet we're being able to operate in there, and that is crews coming back.

I tell a story that I checked out in the C-17. That's what I'm qualified in. And I go down to Altus (Air Force Base, Okla.) and I've got 5,000-plus hours, and I've flown a lot of air-drop and special ops, and done a lot of flying. And here comes this captain instructor, and he comes over here and he starts telling me about flying into Kandahar (Afghanistan), into Bagram (Afghanistan), into Balad (Iraq), and he comes over and puts his arm around me and says, "Come over here kid, let me tell you how we fight the war." Pretty humbling. But I'll tell you - they're out there figuring it out. And a lot of folks in this room have flown with our C-130 and C-17 crews primarily being taken in and out, and you watch them do the spiral in; defensive systems are important, but it's the tactics, techniques and procedures and all those things that allow them to do that. And again, they're being shot at as they're going. And they've got a foe out there that's just dying to shoot them down. So, pretty amazing stuff.

So what I thought I'd do is take you through a couple of vignettes and let you have a feel for the kinds of things we do, and break down those 900 sorties and say, 'Here's what this is all about.' Now I'm going to take just a second before we go into that. Now when you talk about OIF/OEF, you hear a lot about sorties and over 3 million passengers moved. But let me get down to this -- 4.4 billion pounds of fuel. Air refueling. I'm going to talk about the air bridge a little bit later, but let me just talk and try to put that in context.

Let's pretend you never had air refueling. Okay? You never heard of it and it's a new concept. And we came, and said: "We got a new idea. Here's what we're going to do. We'd really like to extend range and payload and so what we're going to do is we're going to take two big airplanes and we're going to put them about 10 feet apart., at about 400 knots. You know, 400 miles an hour. We'll put them up there. And I know, I know, we'll do it so that we'll pass fuel between there - highly volatile fuel between those two points, and we'll try to figure out stabilization, but we're going to make it even harder. We'll do it at night. I know, I know, let's do it in the weather - we'll do it in the weather and in turbulence - at night in the weather, and okay, here's the best thing. We'll have an 18-year-old boom operator at one end that's going to be directing all that and a 22-year-old fighter or bomber or airlift pilot on the other end, or a Navy pilot taking fuel."

How many of you all would say, "That's a great idea, let's go do that."? And here we do it, 4 billion pounds worth, about 3 million a day. That's what we do everyday, day in and day out. And you never hear about it. But it gives our Air Force range and payload. It is that part that is just amazing. So you think about some of the things that we kind of take for granted. But it is not easy stuff. What a difference it makes. Okay, one departure every 90 seconds to two minutes, every day, 365.

We're going to break this down and I'm going to use these vignettes to talk about it. Okay - Pakistan. In each one I'll kind of say, "Here's what the situation was, here's what we did, and here was the effect." You all know an earthquake happened in Pakistan - and we said to our contingency response group commander, who had just come back from New Orleans Airport to McGuire (AFB, N. J.), go to Pakistan, don't pass go. Just get over there, and get things set up and start receiving all the supplies from other countries. We had C-17s that picked up helicopters out of Afghanistan and delivered them right in there. And those Army and Marine helicopters, they actually started carrying the relief supplies, because all these villages and roads are wiped out. There's nothing else, you've got to do this by air, there's no other choice. And it is some pretty tough terrain. So how do you do that?

There were three million homeless. So we put the 18th Contingency Response Group in there and received supplies from 20-plus countries, countries from all around the world that brought in their supplies, but it was our Contingency Response Group that had to bring it all out and then distribute it, make the distribution chain work with the Army and Marines and others going out and getting the supplies to the villages. Huge effort. One of those countries was Iran, who sent an ambulance bus, said that's what they would send, but they sent it on an airplane that couldn't offload it. So they kind of sent it in, and said, well, they'll figure out how to offload it, and course, we didn't have any plans for that. And it kind of gets into that systems of systems, we don't just send an airplane, ....the system that makes it work, it's the loading, it's the travel through, it's the off loading, it's the command and control, its all of those things that make it work. So they sent it in and it was on one of the Russian airplanes. So they said how are (you) going to get this bus off of this airplane. Well, they ended up taking one of our 25K loaders, and they drove the bus onto this 25K loader, and then they took two forklifts, and came in off the sides from the 25K loader, lifted the bus, the K-loader drove out, from underneath, and they dropped that bus down. That's how they did it. And that's the kind of stuff our young Airmen are out there figuring out how to do.

The CRG, the Contingency Response Group, is set up and is standardized across our Air Force, we have eight Contingency Response Groups, one in Europe, one in the Pacific, three on each coast, and these CRGs are about 113 people that can then be tailored to whatever - from an austere base where you send it in and secure the base,. Or, much more tailored where you are just going to send in the aerial porters and so forth. Those are the folks that went in for Katrina, they are the ones who go in here, but it becomes the Swiss army knife. It becomes the thing where you go, "Hey go in there, sort it out, you figure out what we need to do because the supplies are going to start running." It is the end-to-end process that we deliver that is huge.

Here's one of the things that a lot of folks didn't realize was the approval rating in Pakistan, and you think of how key Pakistan is to us. And the approval rating for the U.S. prior to this was 23 percent, and after we showed the compassion of the United States - 50 percent plus. That's effect. That's huge effect. And here's what General (John) Abizaid (Commander, U.S. Central Command) said: "Never in history have such a small group of people made such a historic impact on the impressions of the United States." That's those details; that are those people out there making things happen, making friends, and showing what the United States is all about. Huge.

Tsunami relief: You all remember the tsunami, as you sit back and you think about a 9.0 earthquake; 186,000 dead; one of the deadliest catastrophes in history. Everybody remembers it, and you remember as it unfolded, "How do we get relief into these very austere places - these places where they do not have large airfields." How do you do that?

So we had six C-5s and four C-17s that went down there to join the Joint Task Force, and basically they were shuttling the stuff in. We worked out of Thailand. That first 10 days, 1.7 million pounds of supplies. That's that first part where you're just trying to make sure you're getting them food and water, just so they can survive until we can get them more. Think of how important that is, and then as, as you get the supply lines on the surface come in ships and others now you start bringing the mass in. But that initial portion of saving lives, and what a difference that makes. The total airlift ended up being about 5.8 (million pounds), but just think about that first 10 days when there was nothing else getting there. It's just steaming towards there.

So countless lives saved. And I would just tell you again, as the world watched, they went, "Wow, this is amazing."

Katrina and Rita: I was the J-4 during Katrina and Rita, on the Joint Staff, and I will tell you, all of you remember this. It was just 13 months ago. Eighty-one billion dollars in damages. Again, the whole network, the whole surface, you know the port was clogged, they didn't, you couldn't get in except by air. So that first part had to be done by air, and know matter what you say, that's what happens. And I remember talking about Katrina, again as the J-4 and folks will say, "Why did it take so long?" And I'd say, "So long...compared to what? Compared to nobody in the world can do these kinds of things?" Because if you remember Tuesday is when we figured out the levees broke. Tuesday evening, our CRGs started arriving into New Orleans airport, but again you're arriving into an airport, you don't know what the damage is, you don't know what the lighting is, you don't know all those kinds of things. They have to set up operations, set up helicopters, and the Air National Guard with their MOAs between states was already arriving en masse doing a tremendous amount of work. And we have 50 AMC airplanes that were on alert, and basically we're going to pick up whatever Admiral Keating at NORTHCOM said this is my next priority. So we brought boats in. C-5s arrived with boats on them so we could start saving lives. And I remembering saying that if you think about relief, and you think about how we do that, the only sin you can do during a disaster is just push things forward because you clog the arteries.

And everybody goes "Huh?" And you go, "Think about the 14th Street Bridge." Think about, now, I'm going to use Virginia as the example: you're coming from Virginia and the 14th Street Bridge goes down except for one lane and there's something right by the Jefferson Memorial. The worst thing you can do is say "Everybody get on I-395, right?" It's the worst thing you can do because then you can't get anything through. So the best thing to do is, to tell folks to take capabilities and put them in the parking lots, like Pentagon City, like the Pentagon -- the different malls. And when we say go, when we say bring that forward, you come on up and you zip right on through. That's the best way to do it. And the first thing you do is bring life-saving things. To save lives. The next thing you do is you say, "I have to open up the bridge." So you bring in stuff to open up the bridge, make it one lane, two lanes, three lanes, four lanes, and now you start really flowing things in. But boy, that first two days is critical that you prioritize that. But that's what Admiral Keating at NORTHCOM did, and what we did then they say we want the 82nd Airborne. Well, now you've opened up the airfield and now we just flow it on in. Huge, huge, difference what they did.

Here's what we did - 13,000 passengers were moved out of there. Again, when you think about New Orleans airport it had no VFR, it wasn't day/night it was basically trashed. We had to get in there, open that up, get it all sorted out, and we set up an air medical staging area, the helicopters would come in. Think of how hard that is. You sit there and you talk about it and you think about just coordinating all that, and yet that was all done. And this was when we moved 700 patients. CRGs opened six vital airfields: Gulfport, Keesler AFB, New Orleans were three of the main ones. And they go in there, they open that up and then they began going from day VFR to day/night VFR to IFR and now they can get the sequence much quicker. And so that's what they did in that first couple of days.

Now you remember on Tuesday, where we were, by Friday - remember Wednesday, Thursday you saw all those horror pictures - and then on Friday General Honore (Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honore, former Commander, Standing Joint Force Headquarters - Homeland Security, U.S. Northern Command) said "I think we're going to be OK. I think we got enough flowing now that we're getting ahead of this." But remember, it took about three days. Pretty amazing. So when somebody says, "Why did it take so long?" Again, I would just say, "Compared to what?" Who decided you could do this in two days? I don't know. Maybe somebody has done a lot more disaster relief than I have, but I sat there and looked at this. We safely conducted the largest evacuation in U.S. history, American lives saved; aid delivered.....this was huge. And then as we opened up those supply lines, got the trains open, the roads open. All that happened and then you saw that the flood of relief started flowing in and then things turned around.

Lebanon: We're in the middle of one the largest troop rotations, we're moving things, and I would tell you that when you look at this, you all know what happened but here we're going to take folks out of Beirut, they primarily come out by ships and some by helicopters. They went to Cyprus and to Turkey, and then we would do follow-on transportation from there. When you think about how, what a huge issue this was, like stepping on the LCU is like being adopted by a compassionate family after spending time in abusive foster care. Again you think about the Joint Force, think about the Navy being there, think about the helicopters, again you think about what they feel like when they get back under the care of our military, and then, they would get them over and we would take them either by commercial and then if we didn't do commercials then we did bring in C-17s to help move them.

But when you think about that, think about saying, "We're going to move a bunch of folks coming out of Lebanon back to United States," and you think about families that have been under a lot of stress. They've got kids, you've got to think about diaper changes, you've got to think about food, you've got to think about how do you make sure that these folks who are pretty rattled, how do you take care of them? And it's huge. We took them on the C-17s, we took them back to Ramstein (Air Base, Germany) and then we'd fly them into McGuire. At McGuire they had the Department of Homeland Security, they had Red Cross, and they had all of the volunteers that were brought there together at McGuire. You had to work out immigration and customs, and think about the follow-on transportation. So every one of these families was met by a military member that would then help them through it, whatever they needed, they would be there to take care of them. And you all remember, this all happened and it was like - you didn't - it was an emergency but then it was done. And I'll tell you, I was just up at McGuire and boy, the teamwork that they did was just huge. It was just huge -- 243 sorties; 720 tons of cargo transported; this was huge. This is the McGuire folks.

Ramstein and McGuire were the C-17s. We pulled the C-17s out of doing air supply in Afghanistan and Iraq, had them go into Cyprus and then we replaced those with C-5s that then we stepped up the pace of C-5s and you never missed a beat for the warfighter; for General Abizaid.

Twelve thousand evacuees repatriated. The majority of those were done by commercial, but again the commercial was done with our Command and Control where we would say, here's your sequence, here's your load plan. We had the folks on the ground that made sure that all went well. American families brought to safety. The Airmen at McGuire will help you get home and evacuate and say "I am home." Pretty amazing stuff our young folks get to do. You can see all the pictures, see the loading. You know, it's just incredible.

Iraq. Some of this is old news, but I thought it really steps through the fact that what we bring to the war fighter.

Northern Front: If you remember Turkey, you know, we were going to do two fronts, and then Turkey said "Well, I'm sorry, you can't operate through us." And so it ended up that as the 3rd Infantry Division went up the left side and the 1st Marine Division went up the right side, we were concerned that Saddam Hussein would be able to reposition his forces to the south, because he was thinking we would come from the north and he had quite a few divisions up north. And so what they came up with, well, let's open up the northern front but let's do an airdrop. And lets go into Bashir, and we'll do an airdrop and he won't know how large that is, but ideally, he won't be able to reposition his divisions. But you can see, from Italy, the 173rd Airborne Brigade, and we're going to take it into Bashir. Pretty long, pretty far distance and I would tell you that when you add air refueling in there it becomes a bit more dicey.

And so a 15-ship initial night airdrop from Aviano (Air Base, Italy), pretty awesome when you think about what that meant. And so they go in there, we ended up flying, what we do is we take down the airfield, they open that up, the Army opens that up. We had 20 of our Airmen go in with them to do the airfield. You know, what you need to do on the airfield kinds of things, the combat controllers, that kind of thing. They went in there, they secured the airfield and then they began the air-land flow right behind that, so the C-17s just cycle back and forth and began taking the rest of the brigade right on in. Over 60 total missions in just a few days; 35 air refuelings; 1,000 paratroopers. Think of the combat effect that had.

And here we sit, froze two Iraqi divisions from moving south in the after-action reports.

Wouldn't you like to be doing that kind of airdrop? Okay, convoys off the road. General Abizaid asked us, General (Norton) Schwartz (Commander, U.S. Transportation Command) and I -- whatever you can do to get convoys off the roads, we would appreciate that. You know, we know you're doing lots of stuff, but if you can help us in any way. So we did a couple of things. First of all, we started looking at how we might employ our airplanes differently. I'll tell you, at this point the C-17 came of age because, it was not just a strategic airlifter, it was also a tactical airlifter and we could swing it which ever way we needed to. So that's what we did. You all know the number one cause of combat death in the Global War on Terrorism? One thousand killed, so this is what he asked us to do.

We said all passengers - you know normally you would move all the troops by buses - we said all passengers will go on C-130s. So all passengers now go on C-130s. And that's been happening for a couple of years -- took all those buses off the road, of course that was kind of a no-brainer. But I'll tell you what; it put a hell of a lot of weight on the 130s. Then we said what we will do - so 130s carry all passengers - the next thing we did is instituted 'theater direct delivery. This means using C-17s and C-5s with defensive systems going directly into airfields that in the past we might not have gone to. We designed the C-17 to do that so, it worked out well, but we started saying, "Well instead of just doing part of the strategic shuttle and then you stop one time, we're going to have you go just back and forth." Whatever General Abizaid needs - you need to move armor from the port in Kuwait, you need to move that north - we're okay, we're going to do that. So that's what we did. So C-17s, C-5s routinely, we changed how we worked with CENTAF and General North (Lt. Gen. Gary L. North, Commander, U.S. Central Command Air Forces) and General Buchanan (Lt. Gen. Walter E. Buchanan, former Commander of U.S. Central Command Air Forces). So we sat down and said, "How do we work this so that we help you, you help us, you give us a requirement, you know we can do things very quickly," and what a dividend it paid. Thirteen-thousand plus sorties we've done now. And we've been doing this for about a year-and-a-half, and I'll just tell you that we're carrying things like armor that you can't put on a 130. Things like Strykers, some of the really heavily armored stuff. All that armor stuff came by air. This is how we did it. And then, once we had the C-17s in theater we said, "Well listen, let's change it." We've never before taken a strategic airlifter and said we're going to put that in theater with two squadrons and fly it like C-130s. But we have now. And we did that last summer, we put two C-17 squadrons fulltime, said you're over there for 120 days, the rest of the C-17 system takes care of the rest of the world. But while they're there, they're there for 120 days and it has paid huge dividends for us and what a difference that's made.

Equivalent of more than 3,390 truck about 9,000 personnel per month out of harm's way - you think about that: 9,000 personnel per month out of harm's way. One of our dock chiefs just came back and he said in the beginning of September - Al Taqaddum and Al Asad, if you think about the Marines, primarily they rely on the Army, but they have their own convoys between Al Taqaddum and Al Asad, and they have gotten it down where they just had a few routes. And then this September we took all of their routine resupply convoys off the road. Huge, when you think about what that allows them to focus on. They still have convoys for the combat portion. Just think of what a difference that makes.

Armor Movement: I was the J-4 and I got asked to help with this and I remember being told, "Whatever we can do to accelerate armor to the theater, I want you to do." In fact I got asked to come see the Secretary of Defense and he said "Okay, what are you going to do?" And he said, "What do you think your mission is?" And I said, "If we can save a second on getting armor to the troops, if I can save a minute, or a day, or a month, or six months, that's what you want me to do." And he goes "Pretty good, like the Berlin airlift." So that's what we did. We started figuring out it is going to be installations, it's going to be transportation and it is going to be production. Those three parts and we are going to keep upping those and make a difference. But you think about how heavy armor is, you're not going to carry that on 130s. So basically we moved all of the kits, and a lot of the armor plating by air and then we go ahead of the supply chain we started bring some in by surface to Kuwait and then we take it the rest of the way by air. Huge difference.

But when you think about massive kits like this and how do you do that and think about scheduling and how you would get it to the installers so you can get that all done. Think about how you would do that. Joint EOD rapid response vehicles, they are the latest ones, so as we figure out the next thing to get to our troops so we can keep them safer, we start moving that.

Do you see the air force base? Look at these buffaloes, look at these suckers, think of moving that stuff by air, but that is what we do. Pretty amazing. (Brig. Gen.) Paul Selva, he's done it, he was right in the middle of all that stuff. But I'll tell you - 63,000 tons of armor by air. We never would have done that before because it is pretty expensive to move that stuff by air. But it is not as expensive as losing lives, so that is what we did.

Aeromedical Evacuation: You talk about a true success story, air medical evacuation. We had a system - Doc Roudebush (Lt. Gen. (Dr.) James Roudebush, Air Force Surgeon General) is back there, (retired Lt. Gen.) Peach Taylor (former Air Force Surgeon General), (retired Lt. Gen.) P.K. Carlton (former Air Force Surgeon General) - those were the three heroes that basically envisioned a small expeditionary way. I will tell you in Vietnam what we did is we had large hospitals forward, they would make sure someone was stabilized and only when they were stabilized, they would put them on an airplane to bring them home. Many of them never stabilized and never got to come home. If you think about Vietnam, it took about 30 days to get back from theater. In Desert Shield and Desert Storm, about 10 days. Now we have it a little bit faster. And we basically had dedicated airplanes that would go on a scheduled routine.

What these great docs envisioned was: why don't we build a patient support pallet that we can put on any airplane because the most important thing of value to one of these people that has been wounded is time. So what we would like to do is have a pallet that can go on any airplane and a critical response that can go with it and a critical care pallet that will allow you to do intensive care in the air. Just like you get ICU, many of you are too young to have ICU, but I have been in a few ICUs over the time, but I will just tell you that we are now doing that in the air. So what does that allow? You just got to get them to a certain point and you put them on the next airplane through, you put the patient support pallet and that patient support pallet can go on a C-17, it can go on a C-5, it can go on a KC-135, it can go on a C-130, it can go on a KC-10. So you just pick out the next airplane that is coming through there and you say, "You are now the Air-Evac, you are going to take them, you are going to pick them up in Balad and take them to Ramstein; we will get them over to Landstuhl (Germany). We will do whatever we need to do to make sure that they are again stabilized and whatever else we need to do, then we will get them home. We get them home in the average of about three days. We pick them up on that initial pick-up when the docs say at Balad that they're ready. Our objective is 12 hours - we routinely do it in about four. So four hours from the time they say go we have an airplane in there that ends up taking them across. When they go through this, in many cases we are getting them to the doctor or the hospital, maybe the only one in the world that can save their life, or their eye-sight, or their limb. Think about what that means to the volunteer force. Think about when you know that this country will do for them that have gone in harm's way. This is huge. So we took this from 10 days to three days, small footprint up front. Universal AE (aeromedical evacuation) crews, AE crews can go on any of those airplanes, so they can disperse. AE airlift, what we do - and that means time and look at the survival rate. Over history, you can go back to the Civil War -- about 75 percent is what it averaged. And today it is 90 percent plus. The doctors at Balad said to me, which is just amazing, if you get into Balad Hospital, if we get you there alive, you have a 96 percent chance of survival. You think about the kind of wounds these folks have. I go to Bethesda or Walter Reed or Brook Army Medical Center in San Antonio - the burn center - and I go see them and I will tell you what, I am pretty proud when I can tell them that it was AMC that brought them home. Jackson, Miss., our C-17 unit, UAE is at the forefront, kind of the normal, they are going all the time and we supplement it as we go. And it was a perfect mission for them and they have embraced it. All those critical care teams that doc, primarily in the Reserves, they have that all worked. It's a complete Total Force effort and what a difference it has made. That was Transformation.

Okay, Afghanistan, I am going to speed up a little now.

Marines into LZ Rhino: Project U.S. forces about 400 miles inland. No overland supply routes. When you think about Afghanistan, as General Moseley talks about, you had to take everything in by air. You had to take supplies, and of course we delivered a few bombs, but then you also had to take all fuel and so this is where global reach makes such a huge difference. In this case the Marines were going to do an amphib, they are going to go up by Kandahar and their job is to secure Kandahar. And so we go to project them from the port of Posni and take them on in, I am going to show you that in the next slide. The first part was, from a forward-deployed location in Southwest Asia - they are going to take the Seabees in because they are going to take them into dirt strips that we haven't been doing before. Remember what we were talking about, would we ever take a C-17 into harm's way. Well, we are going to take them into Rhino LZ, which is the desert and the first thing we are going to do is on the first load we will get in there and then we will have the Seabees aboard and they can groom it so we can do the follow-on. So that was the first part. And the second part is to take the Marines from the port at Posni into the LZ Rhino. And we basically did 51 night sorties using NVGs into the dirt, moving close to two MEUs (Marine Expeditionary Units) in eight days. Think of what a difference that makes. Cheapest amphib in history. How many folks knew about that? It's huge. What capability that brings to the joint warfighter.

Refueling: The miracle of air fueling, I talked about this and I am going to speed up here, I am having fun telling these war stories.

Air Bridge: Folks talk about an air bridge, 9,000 miles. What you have is points where you put tankers at all these yellow dots, the blues and squares, those are the air refueling points and what we do then is, where you need the fuel, we put the air refueler. Wherever you want the gas station, we'll put it there. And you have to stretch that out so you can take B-2 bombers from Whiteman (AFB, Miss.) across to deliver messages if required. A B-1 bomber out of a forward-deployed location in Southwest Asia and this is what enables this. If we need to bring detainees back, but we don't want to stop anywhere this is how you do it, and this blue one is the Detainee Ops. So basically air refuel all the way from a point far away all the way back to Cuba and that is how we do it. And they don't want to stop en route so that is why we do air refueling. And if you set this up, this is that miracle I was telling you about -- a 9,000 mile tanker bridge, 4.4 billion pounds of fuel passed. And those gas stations - we end up putting a few more gas stations over Afghanistan and Iraq.

I am going to talk about the tactical portion. Here is the un-refueled radius of a B-1 coming out of the forward-deployed location in Southwest Asia; here is an F-16; here are the Navy fighters. Now the Navy fighters coming off their carriers could make it to Southern Afghanistan, but without air refueling they are not going to have an effect on the rest of the country.

So you put in air refueling all of that stuff comes to bear. Huge on its impact and again it is stuff that goes on day and night, in the weather, in turbulence - what a difference it makes. This is awesome. Plus I wanted to show you these nifty slides. You all know I can't make these slides up don't you, or were you just guessing that? [Editor's note: Slides not available]

AMC tanker bridge brings fuel to the fight and enables the global power. The price of persistence is petrol, and we put it in where it is needed in the world in the air. And then we have of course the Navy coalition, Air Force, that are all trained up to be able to do that on an emergency notice. It's great.

Wedge DZ: This is pretty cool. We had a C-130 that had returned, they had some weather over their drop zone and I will just tell you that Task Force 7 ended up having an emergency need for an emergency re-supply by air drop. They went through a B-1 that was overhead through the satellite to the Air Mobility Division out at Al Udeid in Southwest and basically Air Mobility Division said okay we got it let's see what we can do, we do have a 130 that is returning we may be able to put them on this, they actually are loaded so that would make this faster.

The map technicians very quickly figured out, okay, here is the drop zone, here is the route in, they did it all at the AMD at Al Udeid, sat back and said, OK, had the Director of Mobility Forces approve it, CENTAF Air Mobility Division retapped the C-130 crew, the C-130 crew goes okay, they did no planning, you think about how different that is, we used to plan for about 24 hours before. They said, "Nope, the plan's all done. Here it is. You guys got it." They sent it to them and about the time they are ready to take off they changed the DZ on them again coming back from Task Force 7 through the B-1.

They checked the weather made sure all that was done en route, and as the 130 went en route we used Combat Track to give them the updated coordinates updated run-ins, did all that, and the air drop successful. All done that way. Think of how much coordination that takes? Huge. Of course those Task Force 7 guys were pretty happy.

JPADs: Joint Precision Air Drop. The JDAM for precision vertical re-supply. This is putting GPS guidance on a steerable chute and being able to deliver things from 15,000 to 17,000 feet. So this allows us to get above the threat and deliver into small drop zones like in Afghanistan up in the mountains. Now it is okay, you see the drop zone is right there, you got it? All you now have to do is give the coordinates "here is where I need you to drop that." They stay above the threat and now watch this come out and you will see what happens. Originally it will start by searching for the GPS signal and that is what it is doing, searching for the GPS, and then you are going to see it stabilize once it picks it up, and then it starts steering to the coordinates that you gave it on the ground. Ah there she comes. Actually I did air drop and I looked like the beginning part of that, jumped out of airplanes. And you can see this square chute and what a difference it makes because think of what you can do now because you can hit a convoy that is going along or a unit that is in action and they say, "Here is where I need you to drop the stuff." And they can just go and all they have to do, they don't have to set up the drop zone. Don't that look just like that person coming into that stadium, you have seen them all go in and go, "God, I wonder if they are going to dive into the stadium, you have seen them come down and land right on the American flag. Well we will know when we have arrived, and it kind of does look like you are doing a tandem jump but instead of, this is you, this is computer stuff. So you can just imagine how much fun that would be. But here they come together, doesn't it look like they are flying in formation, this is really exciting because this will change how we can re-supply the troops out there.

I am going to show you how they come in. This is the part that is really exciting to us, because I think this will as we work with the ground forces and Special Ops and so forth, think about what JDAM did, what it did is made near-precision inexpensive and basically cost-effective and we can do the same thing here. What happens is the larger chute comes out that slows the decent so you don't destroy the pallets coming in. Here is the point of impact that they were looking for. Isn't that cool? I get excited about this. So again you can sit above the threat. Here is one that we did in Afghanistan, our first drop in Afghanistan. You can see the troops where they said, you can see the second one coming in, so basically and we did this Aug. 31, we sped this whole thing up and said, "Guy's we think we can do this and we will continue to get the accuracy better and better and better." But it allows us to get above the threat and still re-supply in all weather and you can think about the difference that makes. And you see the folks coming down here. Of course we're almost getting too accurate. It's getting to the point where we're saying, "Hey, we think we need a little offset."

These are the kinds of DZs that we're being asked to go into. See the size of those mountains. Now if you look at our way of doing air-drop is we come in low. We slow down, we get the DZ, we take a look, and we do our timing off of some point. You go in and you let her fly. Well, if you've got to go up these kinds of valleys to get there, yeah, you're about 1000 feet but you're below the hills and they're shooting at you because there's only one way in and there's only one way out. So you can think about from a tactical standpoint we had a lot of C-130s and C-17s being shot up.

This is one of the ones that we spent a lot of time going into. And this is - I won't mention the name of the DZ - but here's the drop zone: 30-degree slope either side, it's on a ridge line. Here's the camp. We used to drop on the camp, but they were kind of destroying the camp. So this is what we're being asked to do. And to go in there, again, it's this kind of training, and we're just getting shot at no matter how we went in. So you can imagine, if we could sit above the hills, sit about 17-20,000 feet, above the ground threat and then just say "I'm going to put it on those coordinates," how that will change how we do re-supply.

And again, I throw out - here's where we sit. You don't have to be able to have a visual. I could almost do a drop zone. I mean, I could almost do an air drop like this. Cruise out of the threat envelope, point-re-supply the warfighter. Tactics, techniques and procedures simplified because it becomes so much simpler how we do everything. You can imagine a C-17 or C-5 sitting above the threat that's being able to air drop things, wherever it's needed, whatever's required. And you can sit back and say hey, it could be water, it could be ammo, it could be whatever they need, we can just deliver what's required. So this has got great potential. We're really excited about this.

I've got one more video and I know some of you have to leave, and I'm going a little bit long. I told you I was going to tell war stories and see how long this went. But this is pretty cool: Australia needed, as part of the coalition going into Afghanistan, said, "We've got to get some troops in, and we need to get them into this assault zone that's a little bit north of Kandahar. There is a threat, so we can't go into Kandahar, so we've got to have you go into this airfield." It is an assault zone, kind of like that Rhino DZ, so I want you to see what that looks like. So basically we had a runner run out of a forward-deployed location in Southwest Asia and we were going to go there in this space right by Kandahar and then recycle. And this is the first crew that went in and they were told, "Okay, don't worry; we've got this all set. And don't worry about the assault zone because it's well-marked by white barrels." Okay? White barrels are the key. This is the first crew in, they've done a lot of route study, and they kind of know what they're doing. But they're not exactly sure what they're going to have when they get there. So here it is, and the co-pilot is taking this out of his right window. So it's just like you'd see as a co-pilot. And they're going to take that back, because those crews don't trust everybody. So they want to go back and go to the other crews and say, "Okay, here's what it really looks like, no kidding."

So here's the C-17. I will tell you that he's looking out the window. And remember, white barrels are what they're looking for. And about three miles out is when you want to see the 500-foot box. And you want to land right in there because of the assault and you want to make sure you get this right. And I'll tell you, the DZ - if you look at this little 'v', the assault zone is right in here. But not to worry because you can see those white barrels, right? Not to worry because it's somewhere in there. I'm looking for the white barrels; I'm looking for the white barrels, no worries. All right, still don't see the white barrels. So you're coming down there, and this is what our folks are doing. They're figuring out how to make sure that they do this safely. And they're coming in - because you know the only part that's graded is between the white barrels, you got them? Ah, there's a white barrel! Now if you could hear the crew, you could hear the "Ahhhhh....." and clapping. They're really excited because they've made it in. And like I said, that's what our folks are doing out in those 900 sorties a day. And figuring out and making it happen, and doing it safer this year than they did it last year. This was only about three weeks ago. But you can see the white barrels now; they're really easy to see. Isn't that cool? I just think that's the coolest thing in the world. "Don't worry; we've got white barrels out there." Now when they left and they went back and they took this video with them, and you can see how they do this, but they told them to paint them green. So they painted them green the next time they came in. But that's what they're doing. They're out there making magic happen.

If you guys could give me about three more minutes. Five times a week we are taking hits on our airplanes. That's why we want to get above - want to pull that re-supply where we can above the threat. Defensive systems - it gives us more flexibility. We've done very well. I really appreciate all the help. It gives us more flexibility, but it's also those tactics, techniques and procedures. That's what makes a huge difference.

So that's what we do every 90 seconds to two minutes. That's the kinds of things that your Air Mobility Command is doing for this country. So again, I say it - I know I'm parochial - one of the crown jewels.

I talked about the Perfect Storm. I will just tell you that, as I tell folks, here's that going right into the teeth of the monster. You know, anybody that's working resources right now, you are in the middle of the Perfect Storm trying to figure out how to prioritize all of this. And I appreciate all the work and all the support you've given to the Air Mobility Command. I really do. I know how hard it is to go between the different priorities.

And then this is the last one and I'll get off the stage on this. But the mobility - this is what you'd see if you went into our Tanker Airlift Control Center. It does those 900 sorties a day. They do about 18,000 diplomatic clearances a month, in the TACC. And it only takes one of those to be a diplomatic incident that doesn't go right. And of course I always get called on the one that doesn't go right and they say, "Don't you know how to do diplomatic clearances?" It's usually somebody from J-5, one of those guys. And I go, "Yeah, well the other 17,999 went pretty well, the problem may be on your end." You know that's what I usually say, and then they hang up.

So I would just say that, this is the system that if you pick that up, it does look like a bridge, it's an airlift bridge, it's a tanker bridge. But it's the system that allows us to go in there with the CRGs and say from the beginning to the end, we'll make that happen. General Schwartz is now working on extending that out into the distribution system, you know, making sure that we not only get it out to the final airfield, but that we get it out further. That's going to be huge. But the two things we're trying to really focus on are capacity and mass, and how do we do that through velocity. That's through new weapons systems, that's better command and control, that's focused logistics - do we have it in the right place, ground handling, Tunner loaders, Halverson loaders - sometimes if you can turn that an hour faster, it makes all the difference in the world. Expeditionary reach and support opening, global infrastructure. That's what makes this happen. So if we can shorten ground times from three hours to an hour, that's the same as adding airplanes to the fleet. And that's what we talk about. So that's what we're doing. You'll hear a lot about that. And then targeted delivery, I talk about all these parts, but it's that precision portion that makes every sortie count for more than it did yesterday. And so we as a Command are working everywhere we can to bring more value to the warfighter, with this great capability that you've entrusted us with. Thank you all very much.