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The View of the Future Air Force -- A View From the Top

It is a pleasure to be here and to be able to talk about the greatest Air Force on the planet and the people who occupy it and I couldn't be more proud to stand before you today.

Not only in this blue suit that represents Airmen around the world, but as a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff where I'm privileged to be able to visit around the world and visit Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines at work and doing the nation's bidding.  We'll talk about that just a little bit later.

I want to get right into this and start talking about the world we live in.  The first thing we need to know about the world that we live in is that we are absolutely lousy at predicting what that world is going to be.  I think back to the days at the end of the Cold War and the end of the '80s when we were just coming out of the Cold War era and starting to get the first waves of sort of globalization in our face.  We were looking at a robust Japanese economy and wondering if we were really competitive or not after we came out of the oil crisis of the '70s.  We had never heard the name Slobodan Milosevic, we never heard the name Saddam Hussein, we never heard the name Usama bin Laden.  We were sitting there trying to predict, and we read in the paper that by the year 2000 we're going to be a second-rate economy, we'd be second to the Japanese economy by the year 2000.  All these things that we were seeing as we put ourselves back in the late '80s and put ourselves in the environment.

Did anyone predict that the whole decade of the '90s would be dictated by the likes of Saddam and Slobodan and Usama?  No, not really.  We didn't predict it very well at all.

As we go into the summer of 1990, August of 1990, and we start Operation Desert Storm we again catch ourselves in a Cold War configuration.

Just like when you throw a pile of work in front of anybody in uniform, we figured out how to do it but it wasn't very pretty.  We were cumbersome, we were in a Cold War configuration, we were ready to go to, and this is what we practiced, we practiced going over to Germany and fighting 100 Warsaw Pact divisions across the North German Plain, or going over the Pacific and dealing with a Korean scenario.  That's what we practiced for a living.

When a contingency came up, we had a very small portion of our force detailed to deal with contingencies, so here comes a big contingency we called Desert Storm, and we are fairly flat-footed.  We'd get a small number of contingency-related forces over there and what we're facing with it actually, the only rapid thing we have is a bunch of airplanes we sat over there, really sort of a handful, facing 43 divisions arrayed across the Kuwaiti and the Saudi border.

Well, we get through that okay, but we learn some ugly things about ourselves and that is typical of which, the example I always use, is the air tasking order we used to put out the air power plan every day in Desert Storm, we had to fly on an airplane out to the aircraft carrier because we weren't able to transmit it from the shore to the sea. 

We get through that.  We end up fighting like we always fight.  We fight pretty darn well and we did the job.  We come out of there and four years later in 1994 there's Operation Vigilant Warrior.  Here comes Saddam again, south with about 12 divisions.  It looks for all the world just like it did in Desert Storm.  We start to react again.  I'm in a front row seat here; I've just taken over duty as the guy who's the air component commander for Central Command Air Forces.

We put together a force list, launched a bunch of airplanes over there, get a bunch of Soldiers out of Fort Bragg (N.C.), the carrier battle group's, the George Washington carrier battle group's coming out of the Mediterranean.  We turn them around; send them back toward the Gulf.  But once again, it was clumsy, we were not agile.  As a matter of fact we weren't very much better than when we tried to do it back in 1990.  I took a look at that and said this has got to change.

I took a briefing to the four stars at our CORONA where the Chief of Staff of the Air Force and all the four stars met.  It was about the Air Expeditionary Force.  We got the Air Expeditionary Force going to give us some agility and to practice it a few times before we made it a part of the Air Force culture in 1997.

At the turn of the decade, in 1990, we had an active duty force of about 650,000 people in the U. S. Air Force.  Of that 650,000 people, 80,000 of them were on what we called mobility orders at the time.  That was the force that was sort of carved out to deal with contingencies.

Today we have an active duty force of 360,000, and 290,000 of them in this contingency force are in the force structure packages that make up our Air Expeditionary Force.  We used it for the first time in Operation Allied Force in the Kosovo conflict in 1999.  We did okay.  We were ready to go.  We actually did some major adjustments after that.  And for Operation Iraqi Freedom we actually had 10 AEF force packages, we called eight of those forward to go fight that war.  We reset with the residuals and tried to get back up to speed in about March of 2004.  We really didn't, the demand has been much higher than we anticipated on that force structure, especially in the support forces, and we have about four AEF equivalents deployed today out of our 10 AEF force package.

All to say that this has been a major cultural change that the Air Force has been undertaking since we started doing it in 1994.  We made that change and we think that we have put in the agility to respond to anything that happens in the world today.

Part of that transformation is what we call the Future Force structure.  It's the way that we are working with the Air National Guard and the Air Force Reserve to bring them into the missions that are relevant today, into the missions such as UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles), space, command and control, information warfare.  We have many of these Guard units are responding very well, from California, Nevada, Utah, Texas, Arizona, Virginia, Vermont, New York have stepped up and said we want to be a part of these new missions and they are taking part in this transformation as well as others, to try and get Guard and Reserve units mixed in more closely with the active duty units on a day-to-day basis doing the missions that are in demand today.  That's also working very well.

In this whole notion of transformation, though, it's as much about the way we think about things as far as I'm concerned, than it is what we buy.  Eighty percent of the force that any of the services have in place today will still be with us 15 years from now, so we’d better be paying as much attention to integrating what we already have as we do the thoughts about doing away with what we have and replacing it wholesale with something that fits more perfectly with the world that we live in.

We see that ongoing on a day-to-day basis.  More of an effects-based way of thinking than we think about platforms and programs.  Starting off with concepts of operations and being able to put those concepts of operations -- thinking more about how we're going to fight, rather than what we're going to buy to fight with, and thinking about how we're going to fight first before we think about what we're going to buy to fight with.  All of those efforts are going on within the services and within the joint world itself.

I'm dismayed from time to time when I get a question of, “What does the Air Force need with the information they're getting from the UAVs?”

The Air Force doesn't use the information it gets from the UAVs.  We put it together with other information, in this case, in the modern context, in the contemporary context, to deal with what's going on on the ground in Iraq.  In other contexts it's to find things that we need to find for intelligence purposes.  But it's never for what the Air Force needs.  It's for what we need in the joint and coalition context, and that's the way we have to think about these things.

Of course what I do most of the time in my job is try to break people out of old ways of thinking.  I call myself the "rut control officer."  We're in these ruts and we're trying to get ourselves out of these ruts.

We have elements within our service that affect our service, that affect the joint force, that affect the coalition force, that are tribal entities that we work hard to get integrated better than we do today.

If I go into an Air Operations Center today it's not unusual to walk up, actually we're getting a lot better so I'll say three or four years ago, walk up to a place where you have one person sitting behind a workstation with three or four workstations and three or four screens in front of them.  Those three or four screens produce information that is much better than we had 10 years ago, but still you find yourself entering information on one screen, extracting the information, reentering it on another screen, and you go through all four of these screens before you have the answer that you want. 

You ask why is that?  "Well, it's because this company makes this product and this company makes this product.  This is an application from this company, and so on."  Instead of demanding that the programs that need to come together to produce the effect that that person needs is put together and produced the way we might want it.  We don't know how to ask in many cases for what we want, and we reap those inefficiencies.

Organizations like the NRO (National Reconnaissance Office).  Think about it -- 15 years ago you couldn't say N, R and O in the same sentence without going to jail.  We're used to calling the guy that has thick glasses, lives in the basement and has no life.  We didn't know where this guy was.  He was an NRO guy, he lived somewhere, but we didn't know where.  But we knew he had the picture of the target we needed to hit.  We knew that picture was too classified for the pilots flying the airplane to see it.

In Operation Iraqi Freedom we found this guy, we located him, we got him out of his basement, we brought him with his tribal kit, we put him in the Air Operations Center, and we put the space assets into the real-time fight.  And the result is quite amazing…not only that, it fires them up too, because they are relevant now to the fight that's going on.

Another example of ruts we're in is the world we live in day to day in the Air Force.  The tanker world is a good example.  We have Air Force tankers that go up, and their job is to refuel fighter airplanes mostly.  They go up as close as they possibly can to the front lines and they orbit.  Now what do we do to take advantage of the fact that you've got a great big airplane with lots of space on it up close to enemy airspace?  What do we do, for instance, to create for each one of those their own IP address in the sky to be able to do communications relay, Blue Force tracking, and other sorts of things that you could take advantage of that very large airplane that just goes up there and orbits and its job is to refuel.

If you go into the system today and say, "Listen, I want to put stuff on this airplane that will make it a communications relay and do the sort of data link transmission that makes it truly useful to the commander," you run up against a bureaucracy that says you guys are gold plating this airplane.  It's got nothing to do with refueling.

You could take it a step further.  Each one of these airplanes has a giant cargo door on it.  You take that giant cargo door and on the outside of that door you put these electronic sensors arrays, the ESA arrays we call them, that are able to both transmit and receive; you hook them into the signals intelligence network; you put them in four or five of these orbits that we have in each one of these conflicts.  You now have an aperture that's probably 300 or 400 miles wide, feeding back into a processing airplane.  We call it the Rivet Joint that does our signals intelligence for us.  And you have the ability not only to listen but to triangulate off of that.  All you did was put these arrays on the doors of the tankers that are up there orbiting anyway.  But in the current system if you go forward with a proposal like that, again, that's gold plating the system.  It doesn't have anything to do with refueling airplanes.

We've got to get our way of thinking aligned with the effects-based way that we all plan to fight.

Another example of the ruts that we're in is the Predator UAV.  Many of you have heard the story of the Predator, as it happened in Kosovo.  I was a commander in Europe at the time that Kosovo was going on with U.S. Air Forces in Europe.  The Predator UAV is up there.  It's orbiting and it's considered an intelligence asset so it's in the intelligence stovepipe.  We have intelligence officers that are getting the information and putting those up through intelligence channels.

Predator UAV sees the forces on the ground that are the bad guys in real time, it's got streaming video, it can do this 24 hours a day.  The A-10 or the other aircraft that have bombs on them can do something about those forces that they find, they're in close proximity, within five miles, even closer in many cases, but there's no way for that Predator UAV to communicate this to that airplane in the sky because the Predator is in the intelligence channels and the airplane's in the operational channels.

So I said, let's put a laser designator on the Predator UAV.  Well, the whole system goes berserk.  One of the questions I got was, “We can't do this, who's going to oversee it?  The intelligence committees or the armed services committee?”  That's one of the questions I got.

We put the laser designator on the Predator and we sent it back over there and it was able to designate.  We put warriors at the controls so that they're responsible for the laser designation spot they put on the ground that we were going to put a bomb on and guide it precisely.  Then I come back and my next job is Commander of Air Combat Command at Langley Air Force Base (Va.). In that job I have oversight for a lot of these programs like the Predator, etcetera.  I asked when I got back, how are we doing with putting laser designators on all the Predators?  "Oh, sir, we stopped doing that because it's not a part of the program."

I said, well, I've got an idea.  Put it back on, and while you're at it let's put Hellfire on there so we can find them and designate them, but we can also shoot them.  The system again, once again rebelled, and we got ourselves through that.  Today we have Predator UAVs that are very effective up there flying.

Now the Predator has its limitations.  It goes 70 miles an hour, so you're not going to streak across the country to get from one crisis to another.  Where it is pretty much where it's going to stay, and the guys who fly it say if you've got a 70-knot wind you can go or come back, but you can't do both.  So you have to look at it for the limitations that it has.

The B-52 -- you will recall during Operation Enduring Freedom over Afghanistan, the picture of the kid on the horse.  Here's the sergeant -- Technical Sergeant Markham – who was the guy who had his picture in the paper, riding a horse in Afghanistan.  He's with the special operators and they're going around with some of these Afghan warlords and they're engaging some of these al-Qaida fighters.  Here's Sergeant Markham.  He's riding a horse, he's got the laptop computer on the saddle horn of the horse and he's got the laser goggles bouncing off the butt of the horse and he stops and sets that all up and does the laser sighting of the enemy on the far ridge line that they're taking fire from, gets precise information, data links it up to the B-52, the B-52 drops GPS-guided bombs.

Now think about this.  We stopped riding a horse in the U. S. Army Cavalry in 1932.  Sergeant Markham phones in and says "You know, you guys didn't teach me how to ride a horse.  Not only that, these guys use these wooden saddles and they're very uncomfortable so I need a leather saddle and some Vaseline -- those are the two things I need right now.  I'm getting some blisters."

But you've got the horse from the by-gone days.  You've got a B-52 that was built by Curtis E. LeMay in the '50s and '60s to fly into the heart of the Soviet Union and drop nuclear weapons, now being used for what?  Close air support.

And when you sit here and think about it, it's Sergeant Markham and his genius and people like him who put these things together to make old equipment work in new ways to have the sort of revolutionary effects.  That's the way we need to be thinking about it.

Later on in Iraq, Operation Iraqi Freedom, we put a laser designator pod on a B-52.  You take the B-52 off that's got about 70 or 80 bombs on it.  You say your job -- once you get air superiority and freedom to roam around in the air.  You send the B-52 out and say here is the command and control network of Iraq, go bomb it today and one target per bomb.  You go from com link to com link with a laser designator.  You designate it, you bomb that one.  You go to the next one and take that one out, and by the next day the whole command and control and communication of the Iraqi system is taken out.  The B-52, designed to go to the Soviet Union now is in the business of precision bombing in ways that we never expected it to be before.

These are the sorts of things we need to think about as we get to, try to get ourselves into effects-based thinking.

Another example again, this is more procedural and organizational, but the convoy business.  We spend lots of money and we were spending lots of money to try and figure out how to beat these improvised explosive devices and the vehicle-borne explosive devices that are being used against our forces on the ground today.  I called up to John Abizaid and George Casey and asked what are we doing to try and get the trucks off the road?  Can we do more of this by air?

And it's this organizational disconnect that had us working with the Army who had this problem to get this big load of stuff from Point A to Point B and certain procedures to do that. And, the Air Force working with the Army, but not really working as efficiently as they could to try and get the trucks off the road because that was not an objective.  We work closely with the Army now and getting trucks off the road is the objective and you take the trucks out of the most volatile and the most deadly routes and work together organizationally and communicate better to get these things done.

We were talking past each other.  It took some outside eyes to figure it out, but we've got to continue to work on these sorts of effects-based ways of thinking about it.

The dust storm -- remember the dust storm at the end of March during Operation Iraqi Freedom.  Our space guys told us the dust storm was coming.  We knew exactly when the dust storm was going to hit.  We got the air tasking order and revamped the whole thing so we knew when the Republican Guard units were going to be coming out of Baghdad to try and reinforce the Medina division down south of Baghdad.  We knew all that was going to happen.

We got the Rivet Joint which is our signals intelligence, our Joint Stars which sees the moving vehicle on the ground with the Global Hawk UAV that goes to 65,000 feet and looks down sort of like a U-2 spy plane does, the Predator UAV.  We hooked them all up with the bombers.  We were ready to go.

Of course what happened is, all of these are from different tribal entities.  So as we're sitting down trying to do the formal coordination between the tribal entities and trying to figure out how to light the peace pipe, the captains are out there on the chat nets between these platforms establishing their own linkages and figuring out what the need to know from each other to schwack these guys, and schwack 'em we did.

What was interesting was, while we were trying to forge the sort of formal irregular relationships that would make this all happen efficiently, at the collaborative level it was taking place automatically.

Now it's not the way we want it.  I like to say we did it at the speed of typing instead of the speed of light.  We should have the machines talking to one another, but the speed of typing isn't bad and it was a good start.  What it demonstrated to all of us, I don't know if any of you have had a chance to see Tom Friedman's new book, The World is Flat, he talks about the world of collaboration.  He calls it a brief history of the 21st century.  But back on his globalization theme again, he talks about the power of collaboration.  As a matter of fact it was my discussion with him about his book that got me to think about this example of the dust storm, and in fact collaboration took over the whole process, it just wasn't very visible.

We need to think about that because it's an inevitable consequence of the world that we live in today and we better gauge ourselves to it and be able to take advantage of it.

Other ruts that we're in.  We have a program we're starting to work called near space.  What is near space?  Guys like me who wear wings; we're real interested in the earth from the air between the surface to about 65,000 feet.  Above 65,000 feet the air molecules are so thin it doesn't support combustion so you can't fly in it any more, therefore we're not interested.  Nobody gets interested again until you start talking to the space guys and the space guys start getting interested at about 300 kilometers because that's the lowest point at which you can orbit a satellite.

Between 65,000 feet and 300 kilometers nobody's interested.  Why?  Because we're platform-centric.  That's the way we think about things.  And the things that exist there tend to be these lighter than air things that are not very appealing.  You never go to an air show to go watch a balloon performance.  They don't put on a very good acrobatic show and it's just not very cool.

But if we can figure out a way to put something up there that hovers over one point on the earth at maybe 100,000 to 125,000 feet, and can sit there for months at a time and be stationary, you just found a very cheap way to one, substitute for a low orbiting satellite constellation that would probably have 40 or 50 satellites; or two, be able to leverage your satellites so that when they come over the horizon they know exactly what to look at and exactly what order and you increase the efficiency of them by several hundred fold.  It's called near space.

What we're doing is we're doing some basic research into how to do this thing.  It's not as easy as you might think.  We're giving that all to the space guys so the space guys get to think about how to leverage their orbiting platforms with their high earth platforms to get the best results out of the orbiting satellites and we'll continue to work this.

You can do effects-based thinking and you can talk about effects-based thinking and try to get your arms around a new intellectual approach to this, but if you don't get to effects-based programming and how to turn this into how you buy things, it's not going to do you any good.  So how can we think about this?  What's an example?

Here's one example.  We know intra-theater airlift like we're doing with C-130s is very important.  We also know that in Afghanistan and in homeland security there is probably a need for an airplane that can get in even shorter airfields and do shorter distances, work some of this convoy problem I talked about earlier with a light cargo aircraft.  So as a program, why don't we go in and ask the industry to produce for us a C-130 that's got four engines and a shorter C-130 that's got two engines.  The engines are the same, the propellers are the same, and the cockpits are exactly the same.  If you go out and fly a Boeing 767 or a 757 in the airline industry today the crew that's in the front end of that airplane are qualified in both airplanes.  Why?  Because the cockpits are exactly identical.

So why don't we take advantage of that in the assembly line, I don't know what the efficiencies might be, but the assembly line would spit these out.  You've got a four engine version, two two-engine versions, or if the next year the demand changes you go and invert that to two of the two engines and one of the four engines.  Who knows?  Taking advantage of effects-based programming to go along with your effects-based thinking.

Then how do you take advantage of the unbelievable capabilities we're getting in information technology and put all of that information into the right place?  We talk about the global grid, but what does that really mean?

I had a chance to go get some rides in the F/A-22 here not too long ago.  What I saw there, it was absolutely amazing, the information that you have available to you and how it's presented.  What you have in a flight of two or a flight of four F/A-22s is a combination of what we do now on a Rivet Joint with signals intelligence and an AWACS with radar work that you can put that information into a net and increase the situational awareness of an operating theater by hundreds of percent orders of magnitude. Now, why don't we do that?  It's that sort of capability that exists today or that is coming on board today that we need to take full advantage of and get out of the platform-oriented stovepipe thinking that we're a part of.

Finally, let me just touch on people and I do this every chance I get when I get in front of an audience like this.  As I said I get to go out and visit all the people in uniform -- Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines that are out there serving day in and day out.  It is quite remarkable, the asset that we have in these young people that choose to serve, and we as Americans should be very proud of that asset, whether they stay in the service or whether they get out we are creating youngsters that in this contemporary society have the discipline that you might not normally associate with youngsters as you see them portrayed out there today.

I tell the story about going out to Lackland AFB (Texas) every time I get a chance on a Friday morning.  We bring a thousand new Airmen into the Air Force every Friday morning.  Each service chief could tell you the same story.  It is quite a remarkable thing.  They put on a parade and they march by and they have on their brand new uniforms.

The fun part is to sort of sit back in the shadows and watch them come off the parade field, and it's a pretty big crowd because you've got a thousand of them that are marching out there on the parade field, and you've got about two or three thousand parents and loved ones in the stands watching them and it's a large audience.  And as they come off the parade field, what's fun is watching them come back together with their parents whom they haven't seen in several weeks and you can see it every single time.  Some mom will walk right by their kid and not even recognize him.  Or some brand new Airman in his or her brand new uniform will stand in front of their mother and say, "Mom, it's me."  The mom's saying, "Huh?"

One dad told me, "This ain't the kid I brought here.  The kid I brought here looked like he fell down the steps with his tackle box in his hand with his pierced ears, pierced eyelid, pierced nose and pierced lip."

But it is their kid.  You go around and shake these youngsters' hands and I ask them the same question every time, are you proud of yourself?  The answers you get are really quite remarkable.  "Sir, this is the first time I've ever been proud of anything I've done."  "Or sir, today is the first time my dad ever told me he was proud of me for anything."  And one young lady, 19 years old, in a very wise statement said, "Sir, this is the first time I've felt like I've been a part of something bigger than myself."

We take those youngsters out there and make them into the Sergeant Markhams of the world who go out there and know how to put these things together.  They're very comfortable with the technology today.  They're committed and dedicated.

I tell those World War II audiences that I speak in front of from time to time, you are indeed the greatest generation, but today's generation is no less dedicated and patriotic and committed than any generation that ever served when they're properly led and motivated. That's what we have out there in these youngsters today.  Of all the platforms and programs and everything we talk about, and the network-centric stuff, or the information technology, still the most precious resource we have are our youngsters that put on a uniform and make the decision to serve.

I'm very proud to be the guy in the blue uniform that represents the Airmen of the world, and I know my counterparts in the Joint Chiefs are equally proud of theirs, too.

It's a pleasure for me to be here today and I'd be glad now to take any questions you all might have.  Thank you very much.

 

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