Gen. Jumper: time to change traditional program advocacy.

The chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force wants the service to stop doing business by advocacy" and to take a fresh look at funding priorities in its weapon procurement budgets.

That has been the persistent message from Gen. John P. Jumper during the last several months. As it plans its modernization budgets, the Air Force must change some of the old "tribal" approaches to funding programs, he said, because the top priority now is "integration."

"How many budget lines and dollars are dedicated to integration?" Jumper asked during a recent industry conference. The answer, he said, is zero.

The Air Force today is a "community of stovepipes," he said. "We have formed antibodies to integration." Each aircraft program constitutes a tribe that fights for dollars and clout, and speaks its own language. Tribes, said Jumper, are not necessarily bad things. But they are not conducive to the type of "horizontal integration" that Jumper wants to achieve. He describes horizontal integration as the ability to fuse data from every Air Force platform into a single repository of information, such as crews, planes, targets and loads. The idea is to be able to accomplish the entire "kill chain" from a single source of information. The kill chain, according to Jumper, is a combination of "find, fix, track, target, engage and assess."

The lack of integration lengthens the time it takes to plan combat missions, he said. "We have a 72-hour ATO [air tasking order] planning cycle, because we aren't integrated very well," Jumper said. "Instead of using Post-it notes, why can't we input the data digitally?" The Air Force often rakes a bad rap for the 72-hour cycle, and the bureaucracy gets all the blame. But the reality, Jumper said, is that the way the Air Force funds programs is one fundamental reason why it's difficult to compress the "kill chain."

The integration that Jumper envisions is "all within today's capability," he said. "Instead, we budget by a system of advocacy." Typically, program officials who brief Jumper start their presentation by saying, "We've already briefed this to Speedy [Gen. Speedy Martin, commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe] and Homburg [Gen. Hal Homburg, chief of Air Combat Command], and they loved it." Such statements, said Jumper, imply that "if you don't [love the program] you're a scumbag." This system of advocacy hinders the integration that Jumper advocates.

"There is a 0 percent chance that we have this 100 percent right," he said. "People have tried integration before and failed miserably." Jumper is hopeful, he said, that some changes will begin to take shape in fiscal year 2004. About two months ago, he appointed Lt. Gen. Leslie Kenne as deputy chief of staff for integration. To begin the job of "building the right packages to fund," Jumper also created seven task forces that will serve as "champions" for specific mission areas. Rather than just look at what programs are not funded, these task forces also will be asked to assess whether the dollars already in the budget are funding "the right stuff."

Jumper's task forces are still evolving. So fur, they include the following:

* Global Strike: Will serve as the initial, "kick down the door" force. It will pave the way for joint air, space, land and sea forces by rapidly rolling back enemy anti-access threats.

* Homeland Security: Will integrate Air Force capabilities into joint and interagency operations to prevent, protect against and respond to threats within the United States.

* Global Mobility: Will organize the capabilities necessary to support humanitarian operations to assist victims of natural and manmade disasters. It will also be prepared to evacuate non-combatants.

* Air and Space Command, Control, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C2ISR): Will focus on achieving horizontal integration of manned, unmanned and space systems, eventually through machine-to-machine interface of ISR and C2 to provide decision-quality knowledge to the commander in near real-time from anywhere.

* Global Response: Will contribute to antiterrorism operations. Relying on real-time intelligence, it will respond to threats on short notice, with the ability to launch and receive updates en-route to the target.

* Nuclear Response: This is the deterrent umbrella under which conventional forces operate--and if deterrence fails, will execute a variety of nuclear attack options.

* Expeditionary Air and Space Forces: This is the overarching concept of operations to provide joint force commanders with ready and complete air-space force packages that can be tailored to meet various types of contingencies.

Budget Planning

These task forces will be composed of the "people and the platforms" that currently form the so-called "air expeditionary forces," Jumper said. The rotational AEFs are slated to be deployed for various missions, so they "come together in certain ways and train for specific types of scenarios," he explained. "In the future, for example, the B-2 and the F-22s will train together in this 'kick-down the door' scenario with the space C2ISR task force doing time-critical targeting."

Asked how he expects that these task forces will influence future budgets, Jumper said that they will "put certain emphasis on certain things," especially on command and control technologies. For instance, the global strike task force will push for a "smart tanker." The smart tanker will not just refuel airplanes, Jumper explained, but also will serve as an information gateway that will translate messages back and forth between air, land and sea forces to platforms in the air and "facilitate digital-level conversations between manned, unmanned and space platforms."

As each task force writes its own concept of operations, he said, they will "find that those things are critical and [therefore] put additional emphasis on our C2 budget."

Improvements in C2 capabilities--which enable "time-critical targeting"--make the Air Force more "deadly" in combat, Jumper said, even though "you are still subject to the fogs and frictions of war."

Increased emphasis on C4ISR programs, ultimately, should help Air Force survive a series of major Pentagon reviews that are scheduled through September, in preparation for the fiscal 2004-2009 Defense Department spending plan. The C4ISR content of weapon systems is one of four major reviews planned, said a senior defense official who briefed reporters in May. "If we don't do it [C4ISR] right, what we're going to have are a lot of discrete units that fly around, collect information, but we don't merge it properly," said the official. "The implications [of the review] in terms of cost--dollars is quite high."

The Pentagon reviews this summer also will address the possibility that the Air Force and the Navy may co-fund a joint multi-mission aircraft program, to satisfy requirements by both services for surveillance and reconnaissance, as well as emerging needs for joint operations.

"The Air Force and the Navy particularly are very close in talking about these programs," said the defense official. There are many details to be worked out, he said. "Do we need more than one airframe? What about the avionics on board the aircraft? Can we have one set of avionics that they can all use?" The idea is to figure out whether the Navy and the Air Force can have a group of airplanes that can be "interchangeable for surveillance missions."

RELATED ARTICLE: Pacific Rim: Lots of 'Great Friends' for U.S.

During a conference at senior Air Force officers and defense contractors in Danvers, Mass., Gen. William J. Begert succinctly described the state of the U.S. relationship with various nations in the Pacific Rim region.

Begert is the commander of Pacific Air Forces, under the U.S. Pacific Command. Based at Hickam Air Force Base, Hawaii, Begert oversees 45,000 airmen and women serving principally in Hawaii, Alaska, Guam, Japan and the Republic of Korea.

Following is a summary of his comments during the conference:

Australia is a "great friend with a small, high-end air force."

Indonesia is a "real challenge, an area of the world where anything can happen."

Singapore is a "great friend of the U.S. with a very sophisticated air force."

Malaysia has been "quietly helping us take care of Al Qaeda cells."

Thailand has "always been a great friend."

The Taiwan straits "continue to be a flash point. ... Unpredictable."

Japan remains a "great ally and friend."

Korea is "our day-to-day readiness issue. ... Unpredictable. No one knows how this is going to turn out."