The future Air Force.

Gen. John P. Jumper, Air Force chief of staff

Remarks at the Air Force Association Air Warfare Symposium, Orlando, Fla., Feb. 13, 2003

It is a pleasure to be here this afternoon with my boss, Dr. Jim Roche, our Secretary of the Air Force, for lots of reasons. But the main reason is that he loves our airmen. It doesn't take much to see that when he is out amongst them. I was out at Nellis Air Force Base (Nev.) with him last week. When you see him interact with our airmen, you realize how richly blessed we are in our United States Air Force. He is just the kind of leader our Air Force needs and, boss, we appreciate the way you do care for our airmen.

And he is joined by a superb staff of civilian leadership in our Air Force that I get to see working problems for our airmen, day-in and day-out. They work them personally. They are invested in our airmen's problems and Air Force problems. I couldn't be more pleased to be associated with them.

I can tell you that it is a thrill to be here today and to look out on these faces that make so much difference and have made so much difference to our Air Force. I see General Mike Ryan out there along with General Jimmy Adams, General Joe Ashy, my old boss and mentor, General Dick Hawley, General "Fig" Newton, General Tony Robertson and General Jack Gregory (all retired). And, as always, I am pleased to see that (retired) Major General Johnny Alison is here. What a great hero of our Air Force. And the fact that he makes it a point to be here every year is reassuring to us all. All of you gentlemen have helped to make us the greatest air and space power on the planet. And the current generation of leaders that you see in the first few rows up here intend to make sure that it stays that way. Because we are part of the greatest nation on Earth.

Let me add a thanks to our industry partners who are here. Along with our industry partners, we are working hard to make sure our acquisition process, our requirements process, our operators and our testers, are integrated in the right way to make sure that we are properly trained and equipped for the future.

And, of course, the Air Force Association--Mr John Politi, what a great introduction, and I've already acknowledged Lieutenant General "Pete-O" Peterson. These gatherings provide us a great forum to truly understand the work that we do and the work that we will continue to do in the Air Force, from the aircraft and the weapons to the people and to the organizations.

Regardless of your affiliation with the Air Force Association, whether it is military, civilian, contractor or media, I hope you take home a confident and proud feeling that America's airmen always get the job done and they do it well, whether through new technology, new concepts of operations, or good-old American ingenuity. They just do it; they get it done.

We are on the edge of a new frontier in warfighting. The annual Air Warfare Symposium is the perfect place for this critical interchange of ideas to demonstrate the technologies and discuss how the world's greatest Air Force is meeting these challenges today and into the future. And we are meeting them in several ways.

First, the Air Expeditionary Force. When we first started off with the AEF concept back in 1994, it was just a test. General Mike Ryan made it a core part of the Air Force in 1997. In 1997, we had 80,000 members of our Air Force that were traditionally on "mobility orders," as we used to call them. Today the number of airmen eligible to deploy in the Air Expeditionary Force packages is more than 250,000 active duty, out of a population of 359,000.

We are working our whole Air Force into the rhythm of the Air Expeditionary Force to include Professional Military Education (PME), creating PME modules to allow greater flexibility instead of tying everyone to a summer to summer cycle, coordinating assignment cycles with our professional education, and force packages that we've taken down from the wingsized force packages of the Cold War into small bite-size force packages that we deploy today. Today we have more than 35,000 airmen deployed and many more enroute to deal with the contingency world that we live in today.

The AEF is allowing us to highlight our stressed career fields. We are able to pinpoint them and able to size the level of our stress. We are now in AEF 7 and 8. Normally, in a steady-state condition, that would be about 17,000 airmen. We had to keep over 500 airmen from AEFs 5 and 6 in-place, some of them staying as long as 135 or 179 days. And we've had to pull 23,000 airmen forward from AEFs 9 and 10 to cover the shortages. Our critical career fields in civil engineering, medical, security forces, communications, and many others are highlighted to us in ways that allow us to shift resources more rapidly to cover those shortages.

We are working hard on trying to right-size our force. We all know we've seen our force shrink by about 40 percent over the last 12 years. But outstanding airmen find a way to get the job done and quite frankly that is always part of our problem. We make up for our shortages by the brilliance and hard work of our airmen. I'll talk more about that in a while.

We have issues with the age of our air and space systems. At 23 years of age, our aircraft are older than we have ever seen in our U.S. Air Force and we are dealing with issues that we have never had to deal with before: in corrosion, in skin replacement, in frayed electrical wiring, in unanticipated component failures. Just a few examples: the A-10 is now 21 years old, the F-15C is 18 years old, the F-16 is 13 years old; and so on and so forth until we get down to the KC-135Es that were brought into the inventory during the Eisenhower administration.

The need for modernization is so urgent that it is difficult to set priorities. The KC-135s on the depot line at Tinker AFB (Okla): you can peel the skin layers apart and powder comes out the middle. Corrosion is overtaking these airplanes and fatigue cracks them in ways that we have never been able to anticipate.

In the F-15, we've had structural failures where the tail has actually come off the aircraft, and we are beginning to see major cracks in the wing structure of the aircraft. We've already had to place restrictions on its maneuvering and speed. And to retrofit, to correct for some of these problems, will cost a minimum of about $650,000 per aircraft.

Engine-wise, for the F100 engine in the F-15 and the F110 engine in the F-16, we've added 18 additional inspections, requiring 197,000 man-hours just to keep up with the fact that we have not properly funded the safety modifications and the life extension modifications and the reliability modifications that we needed to fund over the years. It has also cost us 126 new technicians we've had to put out in the field to comply with these inspections. If we don't do something about the engine problem, this will increase three-fold by 2010.

Compare that with our more reliable engines of the type we have on the C-17: we have an average on-wing time on the C17 of 5,500 hours, more than twice as much as we get off the C-5, almost four and a half times as much as we get off the C-141. And just for engines alone, the availability of the C-17 is five times that of the C-5.

In the A-10 we are finding more and more structural defects than we had planned for. The repair time for an A-10 is planned to be 99 days. And yet we are experiencing repair times of 180 to 200 days at the depot. The wing refurbishment alone was planned to be 74 days and we are finding that it is at least double that much, with implications for time, aircraft availability and, not the least, great increase in cost.

To deal with some of these problems, we have energetic programs under way. For our tanker problem, we have proposed a lease for the Boeing 767 tanker that is now being studied by the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD). We have tried to put together a deal that makes economic sense for the nation and avoids the costs of keeping the KC-135Es, those oldest of our KC-135s going, [where] operating costs are advancing at 10 to 15 percent each year.

All of this comes together to make us question how we judge the airworthiness of our aircraft. Dr. Roche has suggested, and we will soon implement, an Air Worthiness Board to verify and to certify the airworthiness of these aircraft, which are flying much longer than we have anticipated.

On the space side, we applaud the magnificent efforts of our space community and their successes in launch. I am knocking on wood. We are not going to go any further than that, but to applaud that great success. But they, too, struggle with degrading systems: old ground systems and range-control systems. The growing inability to service on-orbit and bandwidth issues. The DSP (Defense Support Program satellite) system is 32 years old and the Minuteman III system is 30 years old. We think of space as new and modern; we don't think of it as aging the way aircraft age. But, in fact, these systems are aging.

We are on our way to working these problems. It always begins with people. I've had occasion to travel over to Southwest Asia and I love to tell the story of the young engineer on the ramp at one of our bases over there who comes up with his chief master sergeant and salutes and says, "Sir, I am Captain so-and-so and this is Chief so-and-so. We are putting in this ramp here. We've been working on this for several months and I just want you to know they want me to rotate next month, but I am not leaving until it is finished." And the chief said, "Me, either."

Story after story like that of great people. And you know what? You don't know if they're active duty, if they are Guard, or if they are Reserve unless you ask the question. I love to tell the story of going up to the bomb dump in Incirlik (Air Base, Turkey) and getting saluted by this sharp master sergeant and he is standing there with a sharp tech sergeant, and I say, "How are you? What base are you from?" And I'm expecting to hear, well, Lakenheath or Mildenhall or something like that. He says, "Sir, I am the sheriff of Little Rock, Arkansas." I reply, "You mean you are THE sheriff of Little Rock?" And he says, "Yes, sir." I said, "You took a pay cut," and he tells me, "You bet I did. And this guy works for me." I said, "Well, who the hell is guarding Little Rock?" They are great airmen and proud to put on the uniform and serve.

We've instituted a program called the "E" Pin. We send a letter to the employers out there and we thank them. We thought this would be a nice gesture, Secretary Roche and I did, that would, you know, make people feel good. I cannot tell you the, not hundreds, but thousands, thousands of letters that we get.

And let me read one from an employer who says, "Dear Dr. Roche and General Jumper: Thank you for your kind letter acknowledging the service in the Air Force of our employee Ray Cawley. I value and appreciate my citizenship in the United States and thank you for the dedication that you and millions of others serving in the Armed Forces give to assure our safety. We are pleased to support Ray and others like Ray who serve double duty as an employee and as a member of the Armed Forces. May God bless our country and its leaders to preserve freedom with integrity and interest in the lives of others. Sincerely, Sidney Paulson, President and CEO of IAC Health Plans Corporation in Lake City, Utah."

Just one example of the gratitude. And you can see them [E-Pins], if you walk around today. I saw one on George Muellner. You'll see it on others: that E-Pin on proud employers. We are now going to extend this into a "P" Pin for the parents of young airmen, young airmen who graduate from Lackland AFB (Texas) in basic training, families and parents of our ROTC and our Air Force Academy graduates, and other people who come into our Air Force in various ways, so that the parents can feel this special pride as well.

Technology is going to allow us to use our people more efficiently. The way that you help with some of your people shortages is through technology, especially in things like security forces. And security forces are coming up with innovative ways of the type that you see here to patrol the perimeters of our bases. Dr. Roche and I saw this in action the other night and it works very, very well. Ways to control entry points and to help us with our shortage of about 8,000 security force members. Many of you may know, we've had to go to the U. S. Army and ask them to activate some 7,500 Army Guardsmen to come help guard our bases during this period of our shortage.

I am excited about the future as we are gaining efficiencies with our other services and our coalition partners. We are looking for ways to keep from duplicating efforts and to search out redundancies. We are trying to implement an effectsbased planning, programming, and budgeting process that starts with a concept of operations and defines requirements that flow from the concept of operations so that we define how we are going to go fight before we decide what we are going to go buy to fight with.

The teams of the concept of operations are cross-cutting so they will guide our thinking and our tactics and our programs. One such example is the global strike concept of operations, which talks of capabilities like predictive battlespace awareness, that allows us to take our horizontally integrated, manned and unmanned and space platforms and use the power of information technology to create tools of prediction.

It emphasizes stealth, an airplane that can deal with any generation of fighter that we know might emerge in the future. And we know that fighters are being built throughout the world that are being delivered today that equal or better the technology of the United States Air Force inventory. You've heard me say it before that we've had our hands on these airplanes from time to time and our guys flying their airplanes beat our guys fighting our airplanes every time. The F/A-22: although a great air-to-air fighter, its great forte will be in the air-to-surface role, as it is able to penetrate and to deal with the next generations of surface-to-air missiles. The F/A-22 will be the only thing that we know that can deal with the emerging cruise missile problem, a problem that we have not fully come to grips with yet. But a problem that we have to deal with along with the growing ballistic missile threat. Cruise missiles in their deployment can be stealthy. They do not have to fly ballistic profiles. They can sneak in through the back door and the F/A-22 is the only thing that we will have in the future that will be able to deal with this problem.

In the area of global mobility, we are working on a concept of operations that takes us from the initial phases of a rapid deployment, entry of data into the joint deployment, the loading of aircraft, the enroute visibility of what is on the aircraft, and the changing of the missions while enroute, to the ability to go from a concrete runway in the United States to a dirt runway somewhere in the middle of a contingency area, with all the information that has to pass enroute to make that safe.

When you arrive, it is important to know how to bed down the equipment and the people at the other end, where to put the bomb dump, where to place the tent city, how to set that all up in a rapid way so that you can get operations underway as quickly as possible.

To do this, we will inaugurate a program we call "Eagle Flag." It is already underway at McGuire AFB (N.J.) and it will be the equivalent of Red Flag for the combat support world, so that our combat support commanders will be able to go to a place and actually practice in the field the skills that they will have to employ when deployed.

We also looked at CONOPS (concept of operations) as a way to instruct and to guide us into the future, throughout a spectrum of contingencies that we are not fully conversant with today. If you look back 12 years ago before the beginning of Desert Storm, and you look at the predictions of the soothsayers back in those days, you will quickly realize that we wouldn't have gotten anything right. Who would have ever predicted we would be at war with Iraq? Whoever knew that there was even a place called Kosovo? Who could have named two out of the ten?

America was supposed to be a second-rate economic power, according to some. And look at what has happened. Through that time, our United States Air Force has been able to deal with these situations and these contingencies by being able to adapt the force structures that we have to the situation that presented itself. And we project that out, working with our concepts of operations through the spectrum of contingencies. We can see where our ideas fit, the idea of an integrated space and Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (C41SR) architecture. We have intentionally given this CONOPS a grotesque name of "Space and C41SR" so that everyone will notice that everybody's stove pipe is named in the title, or they would not feel included. But the synergy of those stove pipes, when you put them together, is going to yield us something. Over time, we will learn what that something is and we will call this something besides "Space and C41SR" and not have to take a breath in the middle of its name.

What it means to us is machine-to-machine interfaces, the integration of space, manned, unmanned, surface centers and platforms. The guiding principle is that the sum of the wisdom of that integration ends up with a cursor over the target. Now, when you get the cursor over the target, you have options. You can kill it. You can save it, as in the case of a humanitarian effort. Or you can learn more about it. But the fact of the matter is that you have the ability to locate it precisely, whatever it is and whatever you want to do next. That is the important part. A major feature of this is multi-sensor command and control aircraft (MC2A). And the important thing to realize about the MC2A is that it is more about the integration and the sensors, but mainly the integration. It is much more about that than the platform. The Secretary and I have taken the opportunity to go to the next generation of Joint STARS and hopefully the 767 platform as a way to introduce the MC2A concept, but in fact the integration of those sensors--manned, unmanned, and space--without preference to any of them, is the most important feature of this platform.

That integration takes into account many things. One of them is the Space-Based Radar. Space-Based Radar is an important program that we are working to make sure is properly integrated with the current generation and the next generation of ground-moving target indicator platforms, along with others to include other satellites that we don't normally associate with integration--and I am talking about National Reconnaissance Office satellites, that could speak at the machine-to-machine level with manned and unmanned platforms.

In this day of information technology, it is time for us to do that. But when you say it, there is a lot of china that gets broken, as people contemplate passing on information at the digital level that is really rarely passed on even at the human level. But when you think about it, it makes sense. Why do we have to have a photograph of the target? It is not for the digital accuracy. It is for a human-analog mind to sit and contemplate and then pass on that information to some other human mind so a decision can be made.

In the machine-to-machine world, the same decision is microseconds and the digits don't care what the source of the locating aperture was. It just cares about getting the location and the identification right. It is time to make that step. We are going to push to do just that.

Working with the other services is very important. As the Army starts to contemplate its next generation of concepts of operations, we have to be mindful that the brigade combat team concept calls for troops deep behind enemy lines. Which means that our mobility forces are going to have to be able to penetrate, they are going to have to include things like precision air drop and air land in remote areas, things that now have to go into the global mobility concepts of operations. When you look at that global mobility concept of operations and you put those airplanes in that position, now they have to be fully cognizant of the total threat picture and the total common operating picture just as a fighter or a bomber aircraft would. And when you study the concepts of operations and you see the similarities between and among the concept of operations, it quickly leads to the conclusion that the thing you buy for one ought to be installed on all, rather than having a mobility team create their own situation awareness device. It also leads you to understand things that have to be further developed, like the need for precision airdrop.

It also, in the concept of operations world and as you look toward the future, tells you where you have to partner with others. If the concept of operations for gaining access is stealth, stand-off, and precision, then we go to the other services and take advantage of their stealth, stand-off, and precision and you quickly determine that you have lots of common cause with the U. S. Navy. And you work together to make sure that your concepts of operations are well integrated so that you avoid duplication and redundancy where it is not necessary.

You also take a look at remotely piloted vehicles. We are going to take this whole notion of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and remotely piloted vehicles and change the name of remotely piloted aircraft to RPA, to fully capture the kind of things that you are doing in something like the Predator, where a pilot is required and pilot actions are necessary to take the responsibility for dropping weapons and putting aircraft on targets; the same level of responsibility, we feel, as in piloted aircraft. And then the UAV name can be reserved for things that do not quite require so much of a human interface, such as the Global Hawk.

We have to get it right, on this notion of remotely piloted aircraft and UAVs. One such issue we are dealing with is the issue of the unmanned combat aerial vehicle (UCAV), the conventional armed unmanned vehicle. What we have to get right is that we have to make sure that we fully understand what those leveraging qualities of unmanned aircraft are. And that we are not going out to buy something merely for the novelty of taking the person out of the aircraft. The thing that makes a Predator so leveraging for us is the fact that it stays airborne for 24 hours. It has persistence. It has endurance. It does things that a person could not do in that airplane. The same thing with Global Hawk. So if we are going to take advantage of those same qualities in an armed vehicle, then we should demand an order of magnitude increase in the capability of the vehicle that we go out and buy. And we have to look very carefully and be very cautious of going out and getting something that does not advance the mission and is only attractive because of the novelty of not having a person in it.

We are working very hard with the OSD to try to make those definitions and to go after (along with the U. S. Navy, because we have a common cause with the Navy on this program), to make sure we are doing the right thing and we have stated the right objectives.

In the bomber force, the concept of operations that calls for stealth, stand-off precision leads us to some conclusions about the bomber force as we develop the next generation of stand-off weapons and as we arm up the B-2 to go from 16 2,000pound bombs to 80 500-pound bombs and we bring about this notion of a small diameter bomb that will fit internal to the F/A-22 and the Joint Strike Fighter and other systems as well.

As we develop the notion of laser communications to deal with the bandwidth problems (a long way to go here), we have very energetic programs to develop this notion of laser communications into the future. And of course the whole notion of Homeland Security conjures up the notion of what role airpower will play in urban warfare and in the homeland environment, in addition to the traditional things that we have.

The airborne laser is an exciting system that will be rolled out and prove itself--the platform is already flying, and will be over the next few years and give us yet another way to deal with the problem of theater ballistic missiles and perhaps other targets into the future.

It invites us to look at alternatives, like the use of Global Hawk and other UAVs for other things. For example, the notion in homeland security or urban warfare of a hovering UAV that could use something like a short-pulse laser system to map in 3D an urban environment, so you have coordinates not only in X, Y and Z, but in X prime, Y prime and Z prime for the 10th floor of a building, the third window in. And it could hover in close proximity to a place like that with the systems of the type that Dr. Roche and I saw just a few nights ago, very accurately delivering small-armed types of weapons through a window or things like tear gas to disable people that were holding a building hostage or holding people hostage. Things like that are in consideration now for how we cope with future scenarios.

Another thing to consider is the idea of the stealth of the next generation, systems that would lead us to conclusions about what the next generation gunship could look like: how big should it be, can we miniaturize the armaments that we would put on this gun ship so that it could be smaller than a C-130, can it be remotely piloted, can we make it stealthy enough to do that? What are the options? And there are some exciting options in cantilever-wing technology that gives us some alternatives to consider for the future.

Smart tankers. It goes along with the notion that we have put forward that we will never again buy a single mission aircraft or platform. And the idea of a smart tanker is to have these aircraft that always orbit very close to enemy lines, turn them into an IP address in the sky, and use them to pass information just as a computer network would around the battlespace for target information and other vital command and control information.

These tell us also, these concepts of operations, how to use our forces more efficiently. The more efficient deployment and use of our forces means more efficient use of our airmen and more time at home to enjoy their families and loved ones.

Why do we do all this in our Air Force today? It is for those heroes that have gone before us. It is Johnny Allison's greatest generation. It is for those airmen from past wars who have defended their nation and in many cases given their all. And it is for those selfless who continue to demonstrate the high ideals and the virtues of this nation. To Senior Airman Jason Cunningham to Technical Sergeant John Chapman to Staff Sergeant Kevin Vance to Lieutenant Colonel Jim Fairchild to Major Junior Shore, all heroes in Afghanistan. Senior Airman Cunningham and Technical Sergeant Chapman gave their lives.

These heroes persist today. Theresa Cunningham, Valerie Chapman, the wives of our two fallen heroes, who continue to serve bravely in their own way. Theresa will come on active duty in our Air Force this summer.

And, of course, for our most recent heroes, the Columbia Seven, who accepted the risks of exploration in the name of all mankind to keep alive that spirit of adventure that elevates the human spirit in all of us and makes this nation the great nation it is, because it is that spirit upon which this nation was founded.

For those who have gone before us, who have given their lives so that we could have the greatest Air Force on Earth, so that we could enjoy the wonders of freedom and liberty, we pledge our best. And make no doubt that they are with us here today. They line these walls and they fill these aisles. And they look upon us and we ask, "Are we worthy?" And I know the people in the front rows who share the leadership responsibility in today's Air Force with me ask ourselves every day, if we are worthy to lead these great airmen. Because they are the greatest airmen on Earth.

May God bless you and the United States of America.