Air and Space Dominance

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Good morning, everybody.  It is a pleasure to be here. I've got 15 minutes in which to deliver what would normally be an eight hour, all-day seminar. So I will get right to it.

Of course the thing that's on everybody's mind is F/A-22 as we look forward to that program, what might happen to that program.  We'll be laying all of the arguments for the F/A-22 out in the Quadrennial Defense Review and be able to put the analysis back into our consideration of that program.

Two weeks ago I was down at Tyndall Air Force Base (Fla.) and I got checked out in the airplane so I'll be able to sit before Congress this year and talk about it in first-hand terms.

When I went down there, of course, I'm an old guy.  I do have about 5,000 hours of flying time, but I don’t get to go fly the fighters as often as I'd like to.  I had four days of academics and simulator and I told them we'll go as far as we can in the time that I have to fly three sorties in the airplane. On the third sortie we took off, we were not using afterburner, 1.7 Mach.  We were contested by about eight F-15s.  They never saw us.  We bombed the SA-10, they never shot us.  We came back out, the F-15s never saw us on the way out, and we were able to do this mission on the third sortie.

If there's going to be contested airspace like that out there in the future somewhere we need to consider whether we need this sort of capability or not, and how much of it we need.  Those are legitimate questions.  We have been asked those questions many times before during this program and we will stand the scrutiny of answering them again.  We don't mind being asked those questions. 

We look at the world as it's arrayed out there today.  Anything we would have to do in contested airspace including fighting urban wars or any sort of business we have to do in or through contested airspace, we better be able to get the access to that airspace.  If we're going to have an Army that is networked and on the ground, distributed around the battlespace, we better have the means to be able to resupply that Army on the ground that's engaged.  To resupply them, we'll require corridors that have to remain open for us to put C-17s through.  We will have to invent things like precision air drop and be able to air drop to our Soldiers and Marines on the ground with the same precision we deliver bombs.  And we'll have to be able to get to that soldier or marine or special operator perhaps deep in enemy territory or under contested airspace and we'll have to be able to do that reliably.

So those who continue to insist that the F/A-22 is all about dogfighting obsolete Soviet airplanes are just flat wrong.  It's about being able to dominate the airspace and gain access to airspace around the world wherever it might be.  And we owe it to ourselves to put the array of airplanes that we're spending money on today on the table and ask which ones can do that mission and do it reliably, and then how much we need to balance that investment between and among different kinds of platforms.  That's exactly what will happen in the Quadrennial Defense Review.

The Air Force is banking on the fact that we will be able to bring on these modern kinds of aircraft that are very much more capable than the current inventory.  Our plan had us asking for about 381 F/A-22s and we'll replace about 800 legacy aircraft.  Similar numbers for the F-35.  We're prepared for the Air Force to get smaller with that increased capability.  That's part of the plan in the program we continue to plan to argue for our Air Force.

There are other things out there that we think are extremely leveraging.  One of them is the E-10.  The battle of ideas that goes on between how you integrate and how you go about bringing legacy systems together is an interesting debate.  What we think is that systems like the E-10 are the systems that you can put up there in a battle management situation.  It happens to have a very capable sensor on it and is able to use line of sight communications to be able to manage whatever is going on the ground or in the air, be able to integrate networks as they come together, and be able to in real time in the line of sight communications be able to manage those events.

I get a lot of comments about the E-10.  We just put the sensor on there and then just reached back to do all the battle management stuff.  The problem is it's the same vulnerabilities that our Marines and Soldiers on the ground tend to avoid.  They don't put their regimental commander back in Washington, D.C. while they put the troops ashore.  Why?  Because when you're in a close fight, close line of sight communications is very important.  It's the same thing for any sort of battle management.  You need to have the reliability of line of sight to be able to manage that fight.  That's what we will continue to try to argue for, and the E-10, of course, gives you some other capabilities that are unique to the ground moving target environment and when networked with things like the space-based radar, I think will give leverage to our commanders and bring the attributes of space-based radar, operationalize it and put it in the hands of commanders on the ground.  This is a bit of a different way of looking at our space capabilities, and when you combine the space-based radar with something like the E-10 and something like the concept of near space.

Now the concept of near space is an almost perfect example of platform-centric thinking and why we haven't exploited this.  To guys like me who wear wings, we don't think of anything above 65,000 feet because there are not enough air molecules to make motors run.  Space guys don't think about it because it's below 300 kilometers which is about the lowest you can go and make something work.

So what is involved is a no-man's land where if you think about it the right way you can put lighter than air sort of machines up there that can hover for months and months and give you the persistence that you otherwise try to get with a fossil fuel flying thing or an orbiting thing.  With the orbiting thing, if you're going to really be able to get coverage, you need to have about 40 or 50 of these satellites in low orbit, and with the airborne thing you need to be able to get there.

The reason we don't like this space between 65,000 feet and 300 kilometers is that it takes a large ungainly poopy bag sort of thing that nobody likes to deal with on the ground, inflate it, and get it up there to do its work.  There's nothing sexy about it. 

So we tend to stick with our platform-centric thinking and we've sort of abandoned that part.  Well, we're going to un-abandon it and we're going to get ourselves in there.  We're going to use it for networking as substitutes for low orbiting satellite constellations, use it to hook up, if we can, what the Army and the Marines are trying to do, digitize themselves on the ground, be able to do things like operationalize transformational coms and deal with the most difficult problem we have with transformational coms and that is getting all that information to ships at sea and to people in foxholes.  This is the way that we'll be able to break that down.  And it comes about because you take this integration of what's flying, what's in orbit, and what can be in near space and what's on the ground, and you put these things together in self-forming, self-healing networks in ways that everybody has a picture of what's going on.

Now one of the things, back to the F/A-22.  One of the things the F/A-22 does is you put a four-ship of F/A-22s out there, spread them about 40 miles apart, and you have an unbelievable ISR collection platform. 

Now we consider it so secret that only the four people flying the airplanes can look at the data.  That's ridiculous.  We need to find a way to get that sort of information out there in the network, divorce it from its source and get that sort of stuff out there.  When you do that, the quality of the information that is available through this combination that I talked about is unbelievable.  What we've got to do is stop dealing with it in stovepipes and in terms of ownership.  We can do a lot better and we've got a long way to go.

Let me touch on unmanned vehicles.  The JUCAS is a system that the U. S. Air Force, the U. S. Navy have sort of agreed on a general way and a direction we have to take and I think that we're going to be able to start off in that direction here in the near future.  What we have to do I think is to take the wonderful work that's been done by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and continue to advance that work as far as control laws, as far as architectures.  We need to solve some sticky problems like automatic air refueling.  We have to remember that the things that we value the most about UAVs are the things that UAVs can do that men can't do.  We don't want to stay airborne for 24 hours.  You talk to a U-2 pilot -- about 12-13 hours, they're finished with that pressure suit.  They don't want it any more.  They've been wearing a diaper.  That's ugly.  You don't hug your wife when you get down off the steps of a U-2.

So you use these things for what they do best and that is persist and endure.

So we tackle the problem of automatic air refueling.  We do common things like landing gear, engines, avionics and the like, and we create a system where perhaps the independent variable out there is the shape.  So that the Navy can have the shape they want to do the work they want done and the Air Force can create a shape, but everything else is common, all the most expensive things. 

Something like that is what we hope to be able to pursue in the UAV world in working with the Navy and DARPA to continue the work that's been done by DARPA, which by the way is very very very good work.  We just need to continue.

We must remember that we should not buy a UAV simply for the novelty of not having a man in it.  We should buy the UAV that advances the art of war and does things that are profoundly different than we can do today, like -- and endurance is the one that we have proven most valuable in things like the Predator and Global Hawk.  I think the first Global Hawk mission was almost 30 hours and collected on about 600 targets.  Orders of magnitude above anything we've been able to do before.

And with one eye on the watch here, I'm going to touch briefly on the Future Total Force.  In the Air Force we're embarked on a vary ambitious program in the National Guard and the Air Force Reserves to try and create associate programs that bring our National Guard and our active duty units closer together.  This takes advantage of [inaudible], the National Guard and the Air Force Reserve into the missions that are more appropriate for today's environment.  Command and control, unmanned air vehicles, information warfare, and the like.  Space is the other one.

We've gotten a very good response from our Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve and we're working together to see how this migration will take place and into what missions and how that all fits together.  All very exciting and promising work, and will bring us, I think, to an even higher plateau of partnership with our Guard and Reserve forces.

Finally in the area of mobility, I think that probably the biggest winner out there on or above the battlefield is the C-17. We've seen that airplane transition into work that only special operations units used to do at night.  We are working with the Army now to talk about another generation of tactical airlifters that actually are smaller than the C-130 that can help us deal with things of the type that I had to deal with as a second lieutenant in Vietnam.  I started off as a C-7 pilot in Vietnam working for the Army.  We landed into the small special forces camps scattered around Vietnam and we need a platform similar to that now and we're working with the Army to take a look at that.

Of course our global mobility can do nothing without tankers.  We will continue with what the law prescribes, going through an analysis of alternatives on the next generation of the tanker and trying to get that program going as quickly as we possibly can, and we hope to be able to do that in the upcoming months to start to recapitalize our tanker fleet.

One of the young crew members pointed out to me the other day that the last KC-135 pilot has not yet been born.  I hadn't thought of it that way before.  [Laughter].  His Dad had flown it, by the way.

So my 15 minutes is up and I do appreciate the opportunity to be here.  You've got a very good lineup of folks here to talk about today.  Let me just say that we do business with the Army and the Navy and the Marine Corps at the senior levels every day and I think that you'd be proud to know that I have never in my many years hanging around the Pentagon seen a closer group of people than the senior levels of our military leadership today.

QDR tends to bring out the worst in all of us, but I think that this time what you're going to be seeing is a group of people out there looking for cooperative solutions to problems out there, and I tell you, it's proud for me to be a part of that.

So thank you all very much.  God bless you.