Future force: transforming operations.

Air Force Chief of Staff General John P. Jumper 

Remarks to the National Defense Industrial Association, Arlington, Va., April 1, 2004

It is great to be here. I see many familiar faces out here in the audience today and it's always good to see you. Many of you will have heard much of what I have to say today, but education is made by repetition so bear with me on these things.

There's a lot going on in your United States Air Force, a lot going in the world, a lot going on with all the services out there. I spend a lot of my time every week working with the other members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and I think it's safe to say; at least we credit ourselves with probably being the group that sees more things in common than any group of Joint Chiefs than we've had in recent history. We work these issues of joint concepts of operations very hard.

I think it's important for us to dwell on this just for a second because it affects the way we do business. Many of you have heard me say it before. The services are very good at being fairly parochial and promoting a service vision. Global vigilance, reach and power--who can argue with that? The angels sang, the crowd parted, the sun shines through, it's all marvelous stuff. From the sea--what can be bad about from the sea?

Everyone has its vision out there. The problem is you get your vision up on the wall and then the next person through the door is somebody that's got a program that they want to contribute to global vigilance, reach and power. I can't think of one program that would not contribute something to global vigilance, reach and power because it is, after all, world peace. It does solve world hunger. It does all of those things.

The problem we have is, not only as a joint community but as an Air Force and as individual services, is that we have not taken the time to write down in detail how we plan to fight jointly before we go out and start buying the things we're going to fight with. So that's what we've taken the time to do in this business of writing down concepts of operations.

In the Air Force we have chosen six mission areas that we think are going to be the most difficult things we're asked to do and we've actually written down how we plan to do that, how we plan to join with the other services, how we plan to join with coalition partners to get these things done.

We're in the process also of working this at the joint level, at the Joint Staff, at the Joint Chiefs, to put down on paper how we plan to do these things together. There's still a lot of work to be done, but what we plan to do is then work that into how we go buy things.

If you walked into an Air Operation Center today--many of you have heard me say this before--you walk up to a position in the Air Operation Center, you'll see somebody sitting there with three work stations in front of them. You say "why do you have the three screens in front of you?" "Well I need to get this information off of this one, I enter it into this one over here, and that will give me information I have to enter into the third one."

"Why don't you have them all together?" "Well of course this company makes this software, this company has this one, and this company has this one."

"Why don't you make it so that it serves your needs?" "Well hell, I don't know. Can we do that?"

The answer is "yes," you can use a very simple organizing principle that's called cursor over the target. It is elegant in its simplicity. It means that the sum of the wisdom of the manned, unmanned and space platforms that you have control over up there or on the ground or on the surface of the ocean, the sum of the wisdom of those platforms in machine-to-machine level conversations ends up with the cursor over the target. Once you've got the cursor over the target you can decide what you want to do. You can kill it, you can save it like we do in humanitarian operations, or you can decide you want to do something more about it.

The problem that we have right now is these platforms that we use, that we need to do this are used for many different things. If you're talking about a satellite, while the satellite is on the back side of the earth coming up over your target area, you've got a committee voting about whether you're going to get to use that or not.

If you do get to use it you probably get to use it for the whole pass which is probably much more time than you really need it, but it's constrained that way because it takes the committee that long to vote.

We've got to come to this notion of how to interweave these platforms. All I need you to do is tell me if this thing is what I think it is or not. It's going to take five seconds of your time then you can go back to doing whatever else somebody else wants you to do. Just give me that.

I need the system to tell me well, you're asking for this thing, but this isn't the best thing to do that. This thing over here is. Okay, let's ask that. And get yourself into the situation where the person that sits behind the console is not an intelligence person or a communications person or a computer person. The person that sits behind the console is a targeteer. When that cursor is over the target we don't care one whit about how it got there.

It's just like we all get sucked into in this computer world, we're sitting there asking, when we buy our PC, our next desktop, what questions are we asking? I want the e-flat, double clutch, 1.2 gigahertz processor. Why? Hell, I don't know, because it's the biggest, fastest one out there. I want 80 gigabytes of memory. I want all the stuff. See this long list of stuff when you go to Dell? That long list of stuff, I want the longest list.

Then what are you going to do? You're going to buy this computer and then what are you going to do? You're going to plug it into your wall and use it as a communication device. They have sucked us in.

Take your cell phone. You look at that cell phone and you punch the number up in it and you make a phone call. Do you know what kind of processor's in there? Hell no, you don't care because this little sucker works.

That's the place we've got to get to in command and control. We've got to understand that command and control, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, it's all, the lines are all fuzzying up and we've got to figure out a way to get these ISR assets to cross the line seamlessly between collect, analyze, report, and find, fix, track, target, engage and assess. To be able to use them in real time the same way we're using them in serial fashion to go find things. We've got to learn how to get away from this notion of pure discovery.

These arguments about well, I need bandwidth because the Global Hawk can send down 145 billion terapixels of information. Now reflect upon the stupidity of that remark. That means that ever pixel has an equal opportunity of divulging the target you want to see. Oh, I'm going to check here on the side of this clip to see if that SA-20s there. It's not going to be there, gang.

So when you do the right delimitations and you know what you're looking for and you know the question to ask, that bandwidth requirement goes down dramatically. It's putting that discipline at both ends of the system that's going to get us where we need to be.

There are a few things we're working on and that's what I'm going to tell you about here today in the Air Force among the many things and we'll get to questions and answers here. But the first thing that we're going to do in the Air Force is we're going to pay attention to the Secretary of Defense who says we're going to do standing joint force headquarters out there in the regional commands. We're going to reconstruct our traditional numbered Air Force warfighting organizations to put emphasis on their componency and make these components available 24 hours a day, seven days a week to the regional combatant commanders and their standing joint force headquarters to do planning and be ready to execute.

We're going to stand up Air Operation Centers in each of the theaters and in the United States for space and for information warfare, to be able to serve and to network globally Air Operation Centers around the world. And we're going to practice supporting relationships. So if you have a conflict in Korea and that AOC goes down for some reason, the one in Guam can pick it up. And we're networked with the space guys at 14th Air Force and the information warriors at 8th Air Force back in the States so that we're getting the support from them 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

When we have intelligence issues on targeting or BDA we're able to federate those out to each of those Air Operation Centers around the world and get help so that everybody has the opportunity to be engaged in whatever is going on in the world and to back each other up all the time.

This is a step that goes along with our notion of the Air Operation Center weapon system which has us getting down to efficient use of crew positions and the standard disciplines in the Air Operation Centers that are going to pay off for us in terms of manpower and taking advantage of miniaturization. All that is coming to pass.

We're also working an initiative we call Joint Warfighting Space. This is going to be taking a look at rockets that we can actually get airborne in a matter of hours instead of days or weeks. They carry about a thousand-pound payload that can put microsats or small sats up over the top of specific areas of operation dedicated to the Joint Force commander, certainly networked with National Security Space, but at the disposal of the Joint Force commander. We're going to look at what we can do with these small satellites. Certainly communications. Certainly things like Blue Force tracking. But also what sort of apertures we can get up in thousand-pound payloads and there will be a kinetic dimension to this too. A 1,000-pound warhead that we can put against hardened, deeply buried targets with technologies that we will go out and explore, and we're going to start some of this in the '06 POM (program objective memorandum).

We're taking a look at the next generation of long-range strike. Notice I didn't say replacement bomber. The next generation long range strike will probably be something that's through or from space, we're not sure yet; and there may be another generation of manned bomber that we have to go after to bridge that gap but we're trying to get to the point that we can truly get to something that's halfway around the world in a matter of minutes to do whatever the nation needs to do. And those, again, those issues are also ongoing some of which we plan to address again in our '06 program.

Close air support and the battlefield Airman. We're going to create a more disciplined process for growing and career path for our battlefield Airmen. These are the Airmen that live with the Army or Marine Corps on the ground in times of conflict who are dedicated to the mission of close air support, that are schooled in airspace control and deconfliction, that have the right kit between the white world and the black world, the combat controllers and the ETACs that are with the Army all the time--the right kit. We've managed to cut the weight of what they have to carry around with them in half already and we're still working on improvements beyond that.

The larger notion of close air support and how you use modern technology to get target information directly into some of our larger platforms, our bombers, some of the best close air support missions we had in Afghanistan was B-52s directed by a combat controller who was riding around on a horse, giving precise target data through laser goggles up through a B-52 dropping JDAMS from 39,000 feet and taking out large numbers of enemy formations. That is as much close air support as is an A-10 when you use it in the right way.

For our A-10s, we're going to take some of our A-10s, the plan is to take some of them, go about re-engining and digitizing the avionics in the A-10 so that it has a good long life and then supplementing those with STOVL versions of the Joint Strike Fighter that we'll buy after the turn of the decade.

The STOVL version of the Joint Strike Fighter, we're not interested as the Marine Corps is in the vertical part of it. We're interested in the short field capabilities, and by doing this short field version we will open up thousands more airfields around the world for us to be able to operate from. That's of course in addition to the conventional version that we already plan to buy.

We will continue, of course, our emphasis on the F/A-22. It's interesting to read the press articles on the F/A-22. The kids that are out there flying that airplane today are getting their eyes watered. Every one of these kids is a combat pilot. Every one of them is a weapons school graduate. Every one of them is very hard to impress. And they're being flown against by people that are just like them flying the airplanes that we have in the inventory today. So far in the test program, the best that we have haven't found the F/A-22 to kill.

Now it's coming none too soon because we have generations of Russian-built airplanes, some of those are being delivered around the world today. We have the next generations of surface-to-air missiles up to the SA20. The 10, the 12 and the 20 being delivered around the world today. We're going to have to be able to deal with these threats and this is the airplane to do it.

We talked about concepts of operations before. We have the U. S. Army's new concept of operations on brigade combat teams. This CONOPS calls for the Army formations behind enemy lines, deep in enemy territory. We're going to have to keep open the corridors that will resupply those Army formations. We're going to have to keep the skies clear over the top of them in places were we might not have had time to take all of the threat out yet. It's the F/A-22 that's going to do that.

We're going to have to deal in the future with threats that haven't emerged yet like cruise missiles. As we take delivery of the F/A-22 it's going to have a very good cruise missile capability. That's going to be the next threat that we face in the very near future.

We're also going to have to deal with the problem of moving targets on the ground and under the weather. As the F/A-22 matures that capability will come to the F/A-22 as well.

So it's a matter of air dominance as a prerequisite. In every war including the one we just fought we had the distinct, we were distinctly flattered that Saddam Hussein buried his airplanes in the dirt rather than come up and face the air power of the United States of America, and it's a good thing he did because we would have kicked his ass. Which we did before.

We were able to put all those sorties that we would have used to work to help the guys on the ground get up the road toward Baghdad which I think we all did in superb fashion working that problem together. We're going to take those concepts and the revitalized notions of close air support that we demonstrated and take those to a new level as we continue to work this problem of close air support and the battlefield Airman.

Of course Special Operations is also going to play large in the future as we work this global war on terrorism. Our role in that, in the traditional roles that the Air Force plays in intel and extel operations and combat search and rescue, that we'll continue to have to modernize with the right kind of vehicles to do that. The replacement gunship, the next generation of personal recovery vehicle, and of course as we bring on the CV-22 and its role in special operations, all of those things are in the work.

I could go on and on but let me just close quickly by saying none of us in any of the services that wears any uniform do any of what we do without the magnificent people that we're able to attract to the uniforms of our nation.

One of the things I get to do as a member of the Joint Chiefs is travel around and I get to see all the services in action. I've been doing this now for 38 years and it never ceases to amaze me the competence and the loyalty and the dedication of these young soldiers, sailors, Airmen and marines that we have out there doing the nation's business.

I like to remind audiences like this that I talk about the B-52 and the kid on the horse. The kid on the horse is a young staff sergeant named Markum. He had in his command a laptop computer with a small satellite dish and a pair of laser goggles and a datalink up to that B-52. They put this system together on a shoestring and made it work because they're so very smart about how to work today's technology. We're surrounded by them.

During the dust storm--the end of March a year ago--during Operation Iraqi Freedom when the Iraqis were trying to reinforce their major maneuver units that had been worn down by our ground forces and our air power. During that dust storm the Iraqis thought we couldn't see them any better than they could see us.

We saw that dust storm coming and we put the right sorts of platforms overhead and we put the Joint Stars that could see ground movement, we married it up with the Global Hawk that could give precise coordinates, and we put all of that into a network that could get those precise coordinates directly to bombers. And in this network, again put together by our young people who are comfortable with today's technology, the networks they were using were not the speed of light networks that we want to get to, they were the speed of typing networks that exist in chatrooms today. They were using chatrooms that exist over our classified networks to pass this information around. We were able to put many thousands of bombs upon these enemy formations as they came out in these very tightly packed formations trying to get up in the dust storm to reinforce the major maneuver units, and we were able to take out a great many of them with just the intellectual power of being able to know what information technology can do to you as we put together these ad hoc networks of our platforms in ways that leverage our power in so many ways.

In the western desert as we were working up to the conflict we were able to put our special operators, all of our major platforms that were going to be working the SCUD-hunting problem, put them together out at Nellis Air Force Base, (Nev.) and rehearse exactly how we were going to do this. Between the first rehearsal and about the fourth or fifth rehearsal that I went out there to see, it is absolutely amazing what these youngsters were able to put together and make themselves do. I can guarantee you, anything that moved out there these kids saw and we were on top of it very, very quickly.

We can't talk about everything, but it was an amazing feat that we just picked all of those people up and we transported them over to western Iraq and did a heck of a service for the Joint Force Commander over there with the combined forces of--It was a joint and coalition operation that did that.

We watched these youngsters, I was over at Walter Reed just last week, and again I stand up here with this uniform on but every uniform that's represented by this nation's military has a story like this or one even more profound. We walk into the room with a young Airman that had stepped on a mine while he was out on patrol, lost his foot, and you walked in the room and there's his mom and dad. The first thing he does is look up and says to Secretary Roche, "Sir, don't let them kick me out."

Now these kids are all over the place. All they want to do is serve. They're every bit as dedicated and as patriotic and as committed as any generation that ever served and we can be very proud of that because they're all our kids. So thank you all for that.

Let me say one final thing. Many of you in this room have people who work for you or your companies that have been allowed to go off and mobilize and put on the uniform and be activated as part of the National Guard or Reserve forces. Your sacrifice we acknowledge is profound. Many of you take steps to match the salaries while they're gone away, the same salaries they would have had if they had remained with the company. For that we are deeply grateful.

We know the sacrifice that the companies make to do this, but let me tell you, we couldn't do our job without those people that are members of the Air National Guard and the Air Force Reserve in my service. Twenty to 25 percent of our Air Expeditionary Forces are made up of Air National Guard or Air Force Reserve.

We activated, by the end of it, at the height of it, we had activated about 36 percent of our Guard and Reserves forces. We still have about six percent activated today. When you travel around you cannot tell the difference. They are proud to serve and I'm very proud of each and every one of you here as you represent the companies that are doing without them today. But believe me, they're off doing the nation's work and they're doing it superbly.

So thank you all for inviting me here today. Thanks very much for your attention. I look forward to your questions, and God bless each and every one of you. Thank you.