Future force: adaptive air and space power.

Remarks to the 2004 Air Force Association Air Warfare Symposium, Lake Buena Vista, Fla., Feb. 12, 2004

Thanks, boss. It is great to be here and to be here in the presence of our distinguished present and past leaders. It's especially good to see the crop of guys that taught all of us here in the front row--General Joe Ashy, General Jimmie Adams, Jack Gregory and Chuck Horner, along with our colleagues Fig Newton and Tony Robertson. And the boss is right. It's those guys who brought us the force that we have today. It's those guys who put the force in the air that did so well in the skies over Iraq. To them, let me do it one more time. We owe them a great debt of gratitude. Thank you guys.

I'd also like to echo the boss' praise of the Air Force Association. It has been extraordinary over the last few years to watch the way the Air Force Association has been able to help us put forward our themes of integration to do the analysis of the conflicts and the contingency operations we've been a part of and to do it in an objective way that gets the message of air and space power out to the rest of the world. Thank you John, Peto, Pat, and all the rest of the leadership of the Air Force Association. Thank you very much.

What an Air Force it is. Saddam Hussein buried his airplanes in the dirt rather than come up and face the air power of this nation. That's a fair amount of respect, gang, and we're not going to let it wane. We're going to make it better. That's what the boss is talking about and I'm here to talk about a little bit more of it.

This time last year we were on the brink of a war that we really couldn't characterize very well. We didn't know what to expect. We went through that war while continuing operations in the Balkans and many other places such as Liberia and the Horn of Africa. In all those conflicts we've taken lessons forward as we did from Desert Storm and from Operation Allied Force and the many contingency operations we were a part of during the decade of the '90s.

We've learned the value of things such as networking, and we got to play them out in Operation Iraqi Freedom, during the dust storm in particular. Lance Lord's satellites told us exactly when the dust storm was going to arrive, exactly how long it would last, and time for us to completely redo the air tasking order, and to put in the skies over Iraq the sensors we needed--the Joint STARS, the Rivet Joint, the Global Hawk, and the kinetic forces we needed to deal with the situation.

When the dust storm arrived as reported by the guys on the ground, you couldn't see your hand in front of your face, but the Joint STARS was tracking the Iraqi forces coming south out of Baghdad attempting to reinforce the Medina Division. The boss and I got interviewed several times during that period of time and the theme was uh oh, the dust storm has hit, there's a strategic pause, the plan is falling apart. I remember answering at one time, "I'd like to interview the commander of the Medina Division right now who is getting his butt kicked, on if he knows exactly when that pause took place because I don't think he noticed any pause."

As the boss said, we saw the value of that networking. Now that networking was crude. It was machine-to-machine interfaces but it was crude. Our kids did it on the chat networks at the speed of typing, not the speed of light. But they put together the information they needed to make sure that the Rivet Joint that picked up the cue was passing it off to the Joint STARS and the Joint STARS was getting to the Global Hawk which got the precise coordinates to the bombers, and they were doing that all in a way that got the job done but not in the way that we need to do it.

We saw that value and we learned from it.

As the boss said, we saw the value of working with the people on the ground from Operation Anaconda and Operation Enduring Freedom. We saw that we had not done the planning right in Anaconda. We had not gotten the U.S. Army, the U. S. Air Force, the Joint Force Land Component Commander, the Joint Force Air Component Commander together at the right level to do the detailed planning needed to make sure the resources were there when that operation kicked off.

But we didn't hide from it; we didn't make excuses. We tried not to point fingers, although there was some finger pointing done. What we did was get the senior leadership of the Air Force and the Army together and we laid it all out on the table. What do we need to do better? How did we screw this up? What we decided was over the generations since Vietnam we had not done ourselves the service we need to do to make sure that we understand thoroughly the way each other goes to war.

Generations of people at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin watched airplanes overhead while at Nellis Air Force Base every day of the year we put close air support into Fort Irwin. They watched airplanes for years appear to support, but because they wanted to make sure that the ratios between the opposing forces on the ground, enemy forces on the ground and maneuver elements of the Army units were being tested in the right ratio, air power was never allowed to have an effect on the opposing force, on the Red Force. So generations of Army officers learned they could look up and see the airplanes and think, 'they never do anything good for me.' We're going to fix that. We're going to exercise our air and ground together in ways that assure that our Army leaders understand and know what air and space power can do for them.

We've had some painful times in the last year and a half as we've tried to shift our thinking away from program and platform centric thinking into effects-based thinking. We've tried to get away from the notion that we're going to start with a bumper sticker like global vigilance reach and power which is always good, but the next guy through the door is the guy who's going to tell you what to buy to give you that. Well, there's hardly anything I've seen that doesn't contribute in some way to global vigilance reach and power. What we had failed to do was write down the concepts of operations that guide our thinking about how we're going to fight before we start deciding what we're going to buy to fight with.

Trying to get our thinking shifted has been difficult. We started with a new series of meetings that we call the Capabilities Review and Risk Assessment (CRAA), the CRAA process, where we try to define exactly what effects and capabilities we need to look at before we decide which programs we're going to make fit those capabilities. With the indulgence and patience of my colleagues here on the front row, we came together in Washington several times for aborted attempts--aborted attempts--to try to put some intellectual rigor into such a process.

Finally we've got a formula that works and it's paying off large for us when we bring our processes and programs to the third floor [Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Staff] for debate. We can tie them to operational results. From this painful birth I think we have a process now where we can talk about the concept of operations, talk about how we're going to fight, how we're going to hook in with our sister services, how we're going to hook in with command and control above us and below us, and how we're going to make a transition to going after programs that work to make those effects happen.

The boss gave the example of some of the things we're going to do in close air support. Again, emphasizing his point. Remembering that close air support is not just the thing that's down there close to the ground. It's not just the A-10 or the fighter forces. It is now the B-52 from 39,000 feet with a precisely guided GPS bomb. In many cases more accurate than some of the weapons that can be delivered by other means.

It's the sergeant on the ground with the laser designator that can get those precise coordinates up to that bomber or into that cockpit, and do it in a timely manner. There are now multiple ways to do the mission of close air support.

But you know this Air Force that we built over the last few years fits very well into our strategy. What we've been trying to do is take this Air Force that we built and articulate it in the joint world with joint Concepts of Operations (CONOPS). If we think writing CONOPS for the business that we understand well was difficult, it has been most difficult to try and write joint CONOPS in the joint world in the Pentagon. But there are several elements that we're pressing forward on to make this happen.

We're trying to work the problem of high demand/low density assets. Not by just buying more platforms but by making sure that we have proper control over the appetite for those platforms. We're trying to work in the Joint Staff a joint presence policy that tasks us a year in advance for those things that the regional commanders are going to want as far as contingency operations, deterrent operations, engagement operations, and training and exercises so that we can plan our Air Expeditionary Force to do that properly.

Our Air Expeditionary Force fits well into this process. Our AEFs have paid off. At a time when we had more than 600,000 people in our Air Force back in 1988, only 80,000 of those were then coded for what we then called "mobility." Those were the Airmen that we planned to use to fight the Cold War.

Now we have a force of 359,000 and more than 270,000 of those are in our AEF buckets.

To fight Operation Iraqi Freedom we called forward eight of our 10 AEF force packages. As we reconstitute [our AEFs] we've taken the [AEF] residuals and made two Air Expeditionary Force packages that will carry us into getting back into our 90-day rotations that will begin next month.

During Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom we opened 36 bases--36 bases around the world.

Today we are still operating from 14 of those bases around the world. At the height of the conflict we didn't have one tent left in the Air Force.

Today we flew 160 sorties over Iraq. We flew about 60 sorties over Afghanistan. We are still engaged. We still have a large portion of our support forces deployed working in the AOR as we sit here today.

One of the things that the Secretary of Defense has told us to do is to work this notion of a standing Joint Force Headquarters. One of the initiatives that we rolled out to deal with that is the Future Warfighting Construct. The Future Warfighting Construct is designed to put our Numbered Air Forces directly in the planning processes of the Joint Force Commanders on a daily basis. To use our AOC [Air Operations Centers] weapons system, to network and set up those AOCs around the world 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to network them and have them in close coordination daily, working with also the 14th Air Force, space capabilities, and the 8th Air Force information warfare capabilities.

They would be set up so that when we deploy forces in the Air Expeditionary Force, it would be these AOCs that monitor the deployment of the Air Expeditionary Forces into an AOR just like they would if they were in combat. They would be connected down to the wing level to monitor training, right down to the squadron level. They would use the software and the work stations that they use in combat so that we don't have to set our combat command and control systems aside until the time that we go to war. We're practicing with them every single day.

In the new structure the units that now report to Numbered Air Forces would report directly to the Major Commands so that the numbered Air Forces could concentrate solely on their wartime missions.

In the lessons that we have learned from our CONOPS and our analysis products, we have learned that it will be the E-10A that will be a lynch pin to be able to put together the command and control and the battle management that will link to these operation centers to get rapid decisions in the machine-to-machine and the global networking interfaces. We will, in the future, make this AOC weapon system smaller and lighter until we get to the point that we articulated before--where when you deploy an AOC it's a bunch of people getting on an airliner with a laptop tucked under their arm. They can set up virtually anywhere.

I applaud the efforts of the companies represented here today because virtually every company that I have visited has made an integration center. The boss and I have been out to see almost all of them where they focus on this problem of integration. I think it has caught on well and properly that this horizontal integration, this notion of horizontal integration, of manned, unmanned and space platforms, is going to be a great leveraging capability that we need to pursue and I thank you for the work that you've done on that.

Along with this integration we are introducing the notion of how we do this better in space with a program we call Joint Warfighting Space. This gets to the idea that military organizations with military space capability, rapidly launchable rockets with payloads that are probably micro-SATS [satellites] but other payloads as well, standing by and ready to launch with a focus on a specific area of operations for communications and other sensors. They will be networked properly with National Security Space systems and we will continue to leverage our space capabilities and our command of the high ground to the advantage of the joint force commander at the operational and tactical level of war. This will operationalize space power with features we value most in military organizations, speed and responsiveness. This responsiveness to the Joint Force Commander I think will be leveraged even further as we network this with platforms like the E-10A and with capabilities like our Air Operations Center weapon systems. Oriented to the AOR, oriented to the tactical and the operational level, and networked with UAVs, E-10s, National Security Space. I think it's a powerful combination and a combination that we need to work on starting in the '06 POM.

That won't happen overnight. This will unfold over a period of time in the normal programming and budgeting process, in the analysis of alternatives; and in this particular case we want to take a very special look at a kinetic capability also on these rapidly launchable rockets. The kinetic capability, conventional kinetic capability that again would be focused on our attempt to get warheads on targets halfway around the world in minutes or hours rather than days or weeks. This will take some time, this will take some development, but this is where we intend to go.

It blends with our next series of objectives that have to do with Long Range Strike. Ron Keys, the Air Force XO, brought together a series of 34 studies that have been going on out there talking about long range strike. We need to resolve the product of those studies to understand whether we're going to go with a manned or an unmanned platform, whether this is a replacement bomber, or whether it goes through or from space, and these are all dependent on how we think these technologies can mature and when they mature. But it adds to our existing portfolio of bombers. Secretary Roche is always talking about portfolios and the power of having options and portfolios.

We brought the B-1 to the point now, and I just got to fly the most modified B-1 with the block E upgrades about three weeks ago at Dyess (AFB, Texas). We have done amazing things with that airplane. We've integrated the GPS capabilities with the Ground Moving Target Indicator radar to improve the situation awareness inside the airplane.

But we have a long way to go. There are other things we still need to do to that airplane for it to realize its full potential as we bring on the Joint Air to Surface Standoff Missile (JASSM) and other standoff capabilities to the B-1 it will enter, continue to be playing first string in the contingencies we look at in the future.

The same is true with the B-52. It has its standoff capability, plus once we have air superiority along with the B1, it is able to go in deep as it did in Operation Iraqi Freedom and take care of a large part of the target set, while reserving the B-2 for those most difficult missions where penetration is required; and as many of you know we tested a bomb rack on a B-2 just a few months ago that dropped 80 individually guided 500 pound GPS bombs from a single B-2. That capability is leveraging and will help us deal even better with the fixed target sets that are out there as part of the war plan.

But we have to consider the portfolio and what needs to be done. One of the elements of deep strike is the fact that if you have ground forces on the ground, deep behind enemy lines as the new Army Brigade Combat Team CONOPS says it will, then you need to have something close, overhead, and within one time of flight of the problem areas you have to deal with. In this case we look at a bridging capability between where we are now with our portfolio of bombers and what we might need to help us penetrate with a significant bomb load in those situations.

There are competing technologies but one answer to this might be a regional type bomber of the type that we would evolve from the F/A-22 called the F/B-22. An F/B-22 that would carry some 30-plus small diameter bombs, have a range of about 1,600 miles, and be able to persist behind enemy lines and penetrate with some element of supercruise and still have some element of maneuverability and the ability to protect itself. This will be a part of what we will look at in the very near future as we look at our options and our timetables for Long Range Strike.

Finally let me touch quickly on the thing that are most important to Secretary Roche and I and that's our people.

As we came off of stop loss last summer we were looking very closely at what the result would be. In the Air Force today we are at high levels, meeting or exceeding all of our goals in retention, meeting or exceeding all of our goals in recruiting. By the time we ended the last fiscal year we already had 43 percent of our recruiting goals in the bank for this fiscal year.

People are worried about the Global War on Terrorism. They are excited about the mission of our Air Force. They are coming into our Air Force and they are staying with our Air Force and I couldn't be more proud to see those results.

I'm also very proud of the relationship we have with the Air National Guard and the Air Force Reserve and their help with helping us shape our force in new and different ways. Danny James and Jimmy Sherrard have done yeoman's work in helping us lead the thinking in how we reshape our force. We've seen innovations such as the California-Nevada Air National Guard coming together to go over and augment the Predator operation at Indian Springs in Nevada.

We've seen the growth of the blended wings, the Joint STARS unit that has Air National Guard and the active duty serving together in the same unit. We begin to see the benefits of having Air National Guard as members of the active unit that can robust and surge to increase crew ratios and increase the availability of platforms engaged in combat, either through volunteerism or through mobilization.

We're going to take those benefits and do what we can, reasonably can, to move those benefits into other platforms such as the fighter world. We have lessons that we continue to learn and take benefit from the great proportion of Guard and Reserve people that we have in our airlift and our tanker forces that have worked for a long time and continue to be the keystone to our global power.

We have some problems as well. We have a force, as read in the Air Force Times, that is about 16,000 people over strength and it's worth taking a minute to explain that.

The fact is that we are 16,000 over what's called our authorized end strength, and we have been for some period of time. There's a bunch of reasons for that. The cuts that we were taking in the 1990s, we didn't take all of those cuts that we were supposed to take. We got away with it because the world was a busy place. While we have 16,000 people over our end strength we're still suffering chronic shortages in other career field. So as we adjust this force we're going to take from those 16,000 and fill those chronic shortages; and we're going to robust up the training needed to get them there, and we're going to look at reasonable ways to size our force while still taking advantage of everybody who wants to serve. It is our intention that we do not want to make anybody leave the Air Force that does not want to leave, but offer alternatives to service and force shaping options that get the force that we have that's so dedicated and performing so superbly over into our chronic shortages.

We have many other things underway in our Air Force. On January 7, got all the general officers in the Washington, D.C. area out to Boiling AFB for the PT test. It was 20 degrees and 20 knots of wind. There wasn't insignificant whining, there was significant whining, but we did it any way. We all agreed that the people at Minot (AFB, N.D.) would have very little sympathy with us if we didn't get out there in the 20 degree weather at a time when they're out there in minus 20 degree weather.

We're about to issue a new set of fitness gear, workout gear, as part of the fitness program that will be coming on during the summer time. It's going to put the social aspects of fitness back into our Air Force where we exercise together as units and the statistics are already telling us the fitness center usage is up 35 percent, smoking is down considerably, and I think we're already seeing the fruits of our labor.

We are on a path to make sure that this force is fit to fight and we're putting this program in the command chains and not in the chains of the orderly room or the flight surgeon to make sure it happens properly. We're going on with that and it's going to make a big difference in our force. I'm getting some superb feedback.

I tell you every year and I'm going to report to you again this year, one of the great benefits that Secretary Roche and I have is to go out and visit these airmen in the field during these crises. Our kids are absolutely magnificent. I tell them when I stand in front of them that they never cease to amaze me. I've been doing this now for 38 years. You go watch these youngsters in action and they are dedicated, they are patriotic, they want to serve, they are proud. And I'm so proud of them. We are all so proud of them. We do have the greatest Air Force on the planet.

This is a time where we need to pull all this stuff together. We are faced with an enemy with whom we have nothing in common, no room to negotiate. They've demonstrated the willingness to come over and kill our citizens. They killed 3,000 of our citizens on that day in September, but if it could have been 30,000 or 300,000 or three million they would have killed that too with little or no remorse.

You talk to the people who are dealing with those down in Guantanamo and people who are captives down there say don't let me go because if you do I will kill you. We should not lose sight of the importance of our mission. You've heard the President say it many times and I've heard him say it many times. One of the reasons we have stayed focused on this problem is because the President and the Secretary of Defense have allowed us to stay focused because they are focused. There's only one answer to this. We tracked Saddam Hussein down in a hole in the ground. That's where Usama bin Laden is, somewhere out there in a hole in the ground and we're going to find him too. And when we find him and his colleagues there's going to be one answer and one answer only. We're going to take them out.

I see that fire in the eyes of our airmen and our soldiers and our sailors and our Marines out there when I go out there in the field. They also believe that.

So ladies and gentlemen, our task together, our task together is a tough one. We've got improvements we still have to make. We are so much better than we were and yet there's so much left to do. As the boss said, I hope nobody thinks that this team is out of energy because we're going to pursue these. We're going to get to where we need to be and we're going to continue to make this Air Force the very best Air Force there is.

God bless each and every one of you. God bless this great nation, the United States of America. Thank you all.

Air Force Chief of Staff General John P. Jumper