Toward new air and space horizons.

Remarks to the 2005 Air Force Association Air Warfare Symposium, Feb. 18, 2005

It is a pleasure to be here, and thanks "Pete-O" (retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Donald L. Peterson, AFA executive director) and Pat (Condon, AFA chairman) and the leadership of the Air Force Association who do such a marvelous job every year of sponsoring this event.

I'd also like to take a moment to share Pete Teets' (Acting Secretary of the Air Force) recognition of our former four-star leadership in this audience and to thank them for having built the world's greatest Air Force that they have turned over to us. Their leadership has been instrumental in the many successes we enjoy around the world today. Thank you all very much.

I'd also like to acknowledge Mr. Pete Teets. As was said earlier, he's got a separate closet for all his hats. He is the busiest man in the Pentagon between his job running the NRO (National Reconnaissance Office) and his duties as the Acting Secretary of the Air Force, as the senior contracting official, and on and on and on. He is the busiest guy I know. And he's joined by a very capable group of civilian leaders that we have had in the Air Force that have stayed with us the entire four years of President Bush's first administration. These people have been absolutely superb in their leadership, their heart is with the Air Force day and night. Mr. Nelson Gibbs (Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Installations, Environment and Logistics) said farewell to us at CORONA earlier on this week, and said for him in all of his experience this has been a life-changing event for him to be a part of the United States Air Force and be with the Airmen that he has been able to see out there every day.

So I'd like to just take a second and acknowledge the great leadership we have in our civilian leadership in the United States Air Force.

Confident and strong are good words that Pete Teets used and I think that's what we are. I'm going to talk just a little bit about some vectors I think we need to keep in mind for the future, sort of strategic level goals we need to keep in mind to get our Air Force where it needs to be.

It is based on the fundamental fact that air and space will be contested in the future. There are those who think it will not. There are those who think that because Saddam Hussein buried his airplanes in the sand that today the need for air superiority is over and that we don't need necessarily to put any more effort into dominating the skies.

That is wrong. I think that we will look forward to the time as we see it happening today, that modern day fighters being built today, being delivered today; modern day surface-to-air systems being delivered today, being built today, and challenges to our space connectivity emerge in ways that have to be confronted so that we can do our job as the United States Air Force to command and dominate the global commons of air and space and cyber.

Everything that we do enables other operations. You can't have sea basing, you can't bring people ashore, you can't do any of it if you're under the threat of attack from air or your networks are being threatened through space.

So let me go over quickly these eight sort of strategic goals that I think are necessary for the future. The first one we've all seen is, I call agility.

We've seen in the height of Operation Iraqi Freedom and the operations we've seen around the world over the last ten years, we've seen the need for us to be able to get anywhere we need to go, to get there quickly and to be able to persist there is a growing reality of our U. S. Air Force. At the height of Operation Iraqi Freedom we had more than 36 bases open. Today we still have 14 bases open.

There are those who think that access is going to be a problem in the future, and we point out the fact that when sovereignty issues or national values are threatened, access has rarely been a problem.

Our Air Expeditionary Force, as Pete Teets said, we have 30,000 Airmen deployed today all around the world. We have certainly over 200 sorties a day being flown in Afghanistan and Iraq, but we have countless other mobility sorties in the air bridges that are set up around the world, keeping our supplies and our people flowing to various places where the nation needs us to be.

The second strategic goal I want to keep in mind for our future is the goal of operationalizing space. We've talked about this many times before.

I used to talk about space guys much differently than I talk about them today. We used to talk about the guy with the thick glasses that lived in the basement and had no life. I didn't know where he was. I knew he probably belonged to the NRO, he lived somewhere that nobody knew, and he had my picture that I needed as the fighter pilot trying to hit a target. Lance Lord (Gen. Lance W. Lord, Commander, Air Force Space Command) a took offense at that. He got eye surgery. He can bench press 300 pounds now, and he gets 100 on his PT test, so he's no longer the guy that has no life. He has a life and he doesn't wear glasses any more.

I remember at the AFA Convention in September we wanted to get a couple of these guys that we used to talk about at the AFA Convention because during Operation Iraqi Freedom we'd actually found these space guys and put them and their kit in the Air Operations Center. The difference was unbelievable. They were able to bring space power to bear not only in a collection mode but in the real time targeting mode. We couldn't find any of those guys, not because they were in the basement but because they were deployed. That is how far we've come as we talk about operationalizing space.

Another thing we did in these past few days in CORONA is to approve a set of space wings. Space wings that will be worn to connote space operators. In order to be in the space business you will have had to come through an operational space tour to know how we fight with space, to understand the effects of space before you go out in the world and start buying things for space. It's the same way we look at operational skills in the rest of our Air Force. You will earn these wings in a rigorous progression of operational duties that will be recognized by the rest of our Air Force.

We need to be more responsive in space, and I don't mean responsive in the terms of what now takes weeks and months we need to take just weeks; I mean responsive in hours, maybe days. We talk about joint warfighting space. That means putting the warfighter in the loop, in the real-time loop using space assets, and to talk more about effects than we talk about platforms. I think the journey we're on with operationalizing space, with having space operators is going to put us in a mode where each and every space professional understands the warfighting effects they're having on the battlefield, in the battle space, and how the space piece fits.

Responsiveness, I hope to be able to get through our efforts in joint warfighting space, and this again, we're working with Lance Lord and others to get concepts where we can launch in a matter of hours or days. We can take mini-sats, micro-sats and small sats, put them up and concentrate over a specific area of the earth; be able to network properly at the machine-to-machine level with National Security Space, but also to be able to take those effects and put them right into the hands of warfighting commanders on the ground and in the air.

We need to protect our assets. Many of the capabilities we describe today and all of the business about networkcentric warfare depends on space communications. It must be robust, it must be protected, or all of this business about networkcentric networking and reachback is for naught. As Mr. Teets says, we have plans to put things like laser communications and other robust communications capabilities into space and those, as we build them, will have those more robust capabilities.

And then the Air Force needs to take this and present it as a force that is useable by other regional commanders around the world. We see the standup of Strategic Command. We see Lance Lord as the component commander of the Strategic Command, and in the operations center, Air and Space Operations Center that will function for Strategic Command we will find the functionalities of air, of space, of cyber, information warfare, airborne and all the other aspects that we use information warfare and ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance), presented to the STRATCOM Commander for use around the world.

Next, a principal I call "we need to grow jointness from within." My good friend Chuck Link (retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Charles D. Link) is very articulate on this subject. One of the interesting aspects of Goldwater/Nichols (Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986) is that it assumes that jointness is external to the services and that somehow someone who is from within a service must be infused with jointness because they're unable to create it on their own. I think that we need to overcome that and we need to be able to demonstrate in all the services that true jointness can really only come from within as we figure out among ourselves how to create effects on the battlefield in multiple ways.

The service chiefs today are discussing a series of Centers of Excellence where we would put together our command and control, our UAV, our battlefield Airmen, close air support. Centers of Excellence where we develop those concepts and procedures together instead of developing separately and then meeting once a year to fight about which one's the best. This is something that we will continue to work on and I think will enable us to bring true jointness along with a few other concepts, the concept of interdependencies. We see today the United States Army is abandoning a great deal of its artillery and its air-based defense, depending on joint fires to be available to deal with those aspects of the battlefield.

Next we need to be able to focus technology directly on solutions and solutions to our most difficult problems. We have for a long time said that our most difficult problem is hitting moving targets in and under the weather, I don't think I've stood before you one year since I've been the Chief and not mentioned the fact that we still need to be able to hit moving targets in and under the weather.

Well, we just demonstrated--Dave Deptula (Maj. Gen. David A. Deptula, Director of Air and Space Operations, Headquarters Pacific Air Forces) and Paul Hester (Gen. Paul V. Hester, Commander, Pacific Air Forces) over in the Pacific. Dave was running the program--just demonstrated the ability to hit moving ships and boats on the water at significant speeds. The capability is there now and we have to be able now to turn that into something that we put out into the field, make reliable, sustain it and continue to make it work.

The fact that we do this rapidly in a demonstration, proves success, and then want to acquire it rapidly and put it in the field is not the way we normally do things, so the system resists it. We find those, just like my story that everyone in the room has heard me tell about the Predator, that the minute you turn your back on it they will take the laser designator off the Predator, they will take the Hellfire off the Predator. The system will not want to do anything that's not in the program.

We can do better than that, and all of us have to work together to make sure that we focus this kind of success and this kind of technology on the places that it is needed the most.

The same thing applies to networking. We will get the greatest leverage that we can possibly get by proceeding to network in a machine-to-machine way the platforms we already have. We can talk about the future, we can talk about 2020 and 2025, but in fact in 2020 and 2025, 70-75 percent of what own today will still be in the inventory.

We can talk about grand visions of brand new things, but the biggest leverage we're going to get is to network the things that we own today and doing it in ways that produce the effects that we need.

Another example is the gunship. We have to think of the future of the gunship and the vulnerability of the gunship and what is this going to look like in the future? Does a gunship have to look like a gunship? Or can it look like something else that produces the effect that the gunship produces today? Does it have to be a C-130 that's got heavy artillery poking out the side, or can we find another way to do it?

Electronic warfare. When we talk about electronic warfare the assumption is that the definition of electronic warfare in the air is the replacement for the E/A-6B. We've talked about this before. When in fact there are other alternatives that would give us persistent electronic warfare and the one that we put forward to be able to help do that is a concept for putting such capability on a B-52 without taking any of the other capability away from the B-52. And then joining that with the other aspects of information operations that might create the same effect without carrying anything on a platform. This is the way to think about focusing technology where it needs to be focused.

We were talking about another one today that I added to my list just today, the notion of layered security so that our coalition partners can join with us in our Air and Space Operation Centers during conflicts, during contingency operations. Again, a great deal of effort going on in this direction. It has been going on in this direction for a very long time, and we need to start seeing results on the layered security problem that we have in our Operations Center.

We need to be careful that we don't over-rely on technology. There's a lot of opposition out there to the E-10. As a matter of fact it's humorous to me to hear the reports I get back that as soon as Jumper is gone the E-10's going to go away. It's an interesting notion because we are not ready to give up yet on the need for line of sight command and control, the need for line of sight apertures and processors and sensors.

You can't deal with the latencies that you have to deal with in long reachback when you're dealing with sensors that depend on a real-time reading of sensor feedback. And if we didn't need line of sight then we would just tell the Army or Marine company commander to put his people ashore and he could just command them from back in Washington.

In fact, if you were worried about the reachback, the dependability of reachback in your communications relays, then you'd better have a line of sight option so that you have the reliability in hand to get that job done.

So when we talk about putting command and control in the air and being able to read directly what the sensors are telling us in real time, there's a need to do that. We've got to be able to make sure we don't over-rely on technology when technology would not serve us well.

Another principal I think we have to pay a lot of attention to is understanding our industrial vulnerabilities. An interesting exercise is to take the price of the C-130B we paid in 1964, inflate it to 2005 dollars, the price comes out to be about $11.5 million a copy in 2005 dollars. Compare it to what we're paying for a C-130J today. The increase is over 500 percent. The capability is certainly better, but it doesn't carry 500 percent more and there's all sorts of reasons why this goes on but the purchasing power of the defense dollar today is only a fraction of what it has been in the past.

It makes us think about what sort of a national debate we have to have on this. I sat in hearings the other day and listened to a very long debate on shipbuilding. I don't hear the debate about airplane building and the aerospace industry. We need to have that debate because if I count them right I think we have more shipyards in this country than we do factories that produce airplanes. We need to think about that very carefully.

And where we need to go in this business of industrial vulnerabilities and the need to create new partnerships in industry and how we think about this is the concept of effects-based programming. We've talked about effects-based thinking, effects on the battlefield, but the big step is going to be when we get to effects-based programming. When we can take the effect we're trying to create and we can program and buy around it. When the buying of things that we do is not based on platforms, it is based on what we're trying to do and the effects we're trying to create.

We shift from worrying about platforms and then architecture to get to the point where the architecture is at least as important as the platforms, and when you think about the effect you put the platforms where you need them to create that effect.

Another example of this goes back to the space strategic goal, is the concept of near space. We talked about joint warfighting space, but what goes along with this networking is how well can you lever the orbital space and your flying platforms that fly in the air with something that can hover in about the 100,000 foot regime over a place in the sky, put two or three of those up there to create a network and be able to leverage your very expensive orbital platforms to create an effect like signals intelligence or imagery or GMTI.

It's my best example of bad effects-based thinking. Most of us guys who wear wings, we talk about zero to 65,000 feet, and above 65,000 feet there's not enough molecules to support combustion so we don't talk about it. The space guys don't start talking until 300 kilometers because below that you're not going to put anything in orbit so we just don't talk about it. Here's this no man's land. The problem with it is that the thing that exists there is not very pretty. As a matter of fact, it's ugly. It looks like a big dirigible, it's full of gas or something and it's hard to get off the ground, it's impossible to get back on the ground, and once you get it up it will stay there for months but there's nothing very attractive, you're not going to have an air show and attract a big crowd by having the near space air show at your local airbase. But that's where we've got to go. That's where the effect gets the greatest leverage. We're going to head in that direction as we consider this joint warfighting space, this near space idea, and we put this together with an effects-based programming idea that will get us where we need to go in creating the networks that we need to do our job.

Next, as I've mentioned already, we need to leverage what we already have. Seventy percent of what we already have is going to be here 15 or 20 years from now, and the conventional threats don't go away.

It's interesting how we categorize things. The F/A-22 some say is built to dogfight old Soviet era airplanes. Well, yeah, it does that with one hand tied behind its back, but it also does a whole lot of other things. It gets to anything you want gotten to anywhere on the earth and nobody will know.

So there I was. Sitting on the runway at Tyndall (Air Force Base, Fla.). My wingman is a squadron commander, a bright young lieutenant colonel, BamBam Stapleton's his name. We take off in two F/A-22s. This is the old guy's third flight in the airplane. I went down there, I had ten days to devote to this. We went about four and a half days of academics and simulators. I said I'll do as much as I can do and no more. We're not going to push it.

The third ride. Take oft; go up to the area, accelerate to supercruise. Put the nose down 20 degrees, light the burners, accelerate to 1.3 mach, take that calibrated air speed, it's about 600, hold 600. Pull the nose up 20 degrees, nose high, going through 40,000 feet at 1.76 mach. We come out of burner and go just below 50,000 feet, stabilize at 1.76 mach military power.

On the scope before you is a picture even the old guy can understand. It says you've got a bunch of Eagles down there. You've got an SA-10 over here on the far horizon. The Eagles are trying to see you, but they can't. You see your wing man building his shoot list, you build your own shoot list. They can't see you, they can't see you, they can't see you. Let's let them go. Okay, we'll let them go. Go down, you approach the location of the SA-10 site, as you get close to that, and these particular training versions didn't have all of the air-to-ground software, but the newer versions will have air-to-ground software. As you get closer you get this envelope that tells you get the target in that envelope and let the bomb go.

You turn around. When you turn around, it says, I think they can see you now, they can see you, they can see you, they can see you. They can't see you any more.

By that time the Eagles are still trying to find you. You build your shoot list, shoot all the Eagles, light a Lucky, and go home.

Now this, by some, is called strategic overmatch. "It's too much. You don't need that much." And like Mr. Teets said, I think if we talk about the full array of being able to deal with the hardest things in the air, the hardest things on the ground, being able to win back contested airspace no matter where it exists--and remember, contested airspace isn't just above traditional Soviet-style linear warfare. It's above anything that goes on--urban warfare, terrorist activity, anything in the world where this airspace could be contested that you think you have to get to and you've got to get to it quickly. This is the thing that can do it every time as far as we can see into the future. As well as dealing with the thing that we still have to pay more attention to, and that's the threat of cruise missiles. Cruise missiles can come at you from 360 degrees. They do not obey the laws of Newtonian physics, and we have to start considering this a threat not only to deployed forces but in the Homeland Defense context as well.

And as Pete Teets says, this is not an argument about the capability, it's about how much of this you need. And as we lay this out in the Quadrennial Defense Review we will make this case for F/A-22s.

We also have to think about this capability in the context of the new Army Concept of Operations that are being developed. The United States Army and their brigade combat team concepts, they put forces around the battlespace. When these forces are arrayed around the battlespace they can do a number of things, but if they're engaged in conflict against any sort of an enemy, the ammunition expenditure, the food and supplies that are needed to keep that maneuver unit going are going to be substantial. Corridors are going to have to be kept open. When they get in trouble, people are going to have to get back to them quickly. This is the kind of capability again, that the F/A-22 excels in all of those things.

We need to think about how we deal with unmanned air vehicles. Again, something we've talked about before, in the '06 budget the United States Air Force was able to take the lead in the development of the JUCAS, and as we look forward to how we might do this one of the options that is before us is to first of all leverage all of the great work that's been done by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). To be able to stand together with the United States Navy and get the development effort, get the basic things right. Develop the engines, the landing gear, the avionics, the architecture, the control laws, the things that you need to put these things together. But perhaps the biggest shape is the variable depending on what the mission might be. Whether it's an ISR mission or a mission with conventional munitions or both.

People ask me all the time, do you guys feel your job is threatened? No. Because the things this is going to do are going to be things you can't do in a conventional airplane. You can't stay airborne in a conventional fighter for 24 or 30 hours. But in order to make this work we're going to have to make it do things that conventional airplanes do like air refuel. We're going to have to make it do things that make it worthwhile to invest all this money in making an unmanned vehicle that can air refuel, it's got to be able to carry a lot of weapons, and it can be in direct contact with our battlefield Airmen on the ground that dials up the kind of weapon that he or she needs to be delivered, hits enter, and watch that weapon be delivered using the organizing principle we like to use called one time of flight.

I get a lot of questions about why don't you just stand off with standoff cruise missiles from a ship or an airplane and shoot those things from hundreds of miles away? You could do that for a fixed target, but consider the time of flight. Time of flight is measured in hours when you're doing that. Versus the thing that is orbiting stealthily overhead that is 35,000 feet in the air with the rule of gravity that says it will drop 1,000 feet per second. You're never more than about 30 or 40 seconds away from having a weapon on the target. The principle of one time of flight is a principle that we need to make sure we keep track of.

So it's leveraging what we have today and being able to make sure that we bring the capabilities in that take best advantage of the things that we can't do with what we have today.

Another example of that, of course, is our mobility forces. What we have today of course is airplanes, airborne all the time. A 150 countries a day, John Handy's (Commander, U.S. Transportation Command) airplanes are out there in those countries every single day. We've watched the C- 17 do things in Afghanistan that only special operators did just a few short years ago. Now it's routine.

I've flown with the C-17 crews into Afghanistan and into Iraq and watched what they do. It's quite amazing.

As we look at our tanker force, we'll replace eventually a tanker force of more than 500 with something, I don't know, about 350 or 400 tankers. The analysis will tell us what that really is. We'll be able to equip those tankers in ways that allow us to use them as communication nodes in the air. Each one an IP address of some type. Because where are they when you need them the most? They're as close to the front lines as you can possibly get them. They're scattered around the battlespace. If you look at where those orbits were in Iraq they are all over the battlespace. Take advantage of the position and not just get focused on what they were primarily built for.

The next strategic goal we need to keep in mind is we need to have a human strategy for our U. S. Air Force. For each 10,000 Airmen we have in uniform it costs us $1.2 billion a year. We need to make sure that we have the right people in uniform and no more than what we need to do our job.

We have more than 700,000 people of all types--Air National Guard, Air Force Reserve, active duty, civilians--in our Air Force. We need to make sure they are doing the right things. You've heard a little bit about some of the initiatives that are out there that we've got to continue. This notion of the battlefield Airmen, so that the Airmen that are on the ground with maneuver forces on the ground are the Airmen that thoroughly understand the flow of air power, the effects of weapons, how to get them in in a timely fashion, and how to work the newest weapons that we've got, and how to pass information to ground battlefield commanders so that they can get their job done.

Our Airmen are all in demand. We have 30,000 people deployed. We have 7,000 Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve, about, and 2,000 of those are volunteers. It's a wonderful Air Force we're in. They understand their mission, and when you go to visit them and you look at their skills it is unbelievable what you see out there. You've heard me say it many times before.

Seventy percent of our Airmen throughout the United States Air Force are engaged every day. That doesn't mean they're deployed, but remember, they're sitting in missile silos, they're John Handy's people that are deployed around the world in the mobility world, they're living forward in areas in the Pacific and in Europe and in other places around the world, engaged, doing the business of combatant commanders day in and day out.

These Airmen live our core values, especially the one that says service before self. And the ones who don't we're asking to leave. There are those out there who only want to stay at one place and not move, and when you ask them to relocate for the good of the Air Force they resist doing so. That is not a part of our core values.

We're asking people to be fit, and the fitness program has taken root throughout our U. S. Air Force and it's going to get tougher, not easier. We're going to report fitness as a part of the evaluation system. We're going to hold squadron commanders accountable for the fitness of their units. And today we're developing the tools to be able to track that and to do that. The payoff will be huge.

So we continue in our human strategy to develop Airmen that demonstrate the core values of our Air Force day in and day out. Sometimes we have deviations, and in the press you will find people who are talking about the Air Force Academy or this problem or that problem within our Air Force. The issue of sexual assault. The issue of religious tolerance at the Air Force Academy. The reason that they are writing about it is because we are visible out there attacking it and not hiding it. We're taking it on head-on. Some choose to depict it other than that, but the fact is the reason it's visible and in the press is because these are problems that we're addressing and not hiding.

When people break the core values they will pay the price. One acquisition executive highlighted in the news lately is in jail. And those who think at the Air Force Academy you can break the rules or somebody's not going to look, or you can call your relatives, your powerful friends and get you out of it--not going to happen. We will maintain the standards of our U. S. Air Force, those standards will be high, and we're not going to back away from the glare of reporting that puts it in another light. We're taking it on head-on, it's not going to change.

The next one I'm going to talk about a little bit, from CORONA, is the principle of what I call "rut management." Make no mistake about it, it's easy to get into a rut. And I've spent most of my tenure as Chief of Staff of the Air Force, along with my four-star leadership right before me here, blasting things out of ruts.

But it's like the old Predator story I've told many times that the minute you turn your back on it, they're going to take the laser designator off the Predator or they're going to take the Hellfire off the Predator, because it wasn't in the program.

There's an analogy out there in each one of our career fields where we tend to drift back into ruts. I started talking many years ago about the need to integrate. Let me congratulate the industry partners we have arrayed before me here today for the job you've done in creating Centers of Excellence for integration. You've done that. It's enabled us to do some marvelous things in the course of battle and to do them quickly.

If you look at what we've done with things like the Rover, the television set that sits in sort of a laptop sort of a screen that takes streaming video direct from a Predator and from pods that are mounted on aircraft directly into the hands of people on the ground. An enormous leveraging capability.

If you look at the quality of some of the pods we're carrying on our aircraft today and the fidelity of them, it's absolutely outstanding. If you look at what went on in the western fight, the integration that went on between our airborne platforms and sensors, our ISR sensors, between them and the fighters and the special operators on the ground, the integration is unbelievably good. We've got to stay focused on that. We've got to keep ourselves out of ruts. We've got to remember what it is we're trying to do and we've got to keep focused on the results, on the effects. Get out of our platform-based mentality, not care whether it's manned, whether it's unmanned or in space, whether it's afloat or on the ground. Not be enamored with building the platform and then thinking later about how we're going to get the results of that platform, whatever it is, to the person who needs it the most, making the platform less important than the effect. When we're able to do that we will have arrived at where we need to be and I think the reality of budgets and the like, the need for jointness is going to dictate that we go there.

Finally, let me just touch one more time on our people. You have all heard me tell the Lackland AFB (Texas) story. I got requests for it again. I'm not going to tell it again. I've told it way too much. My wife's sitting out here. She'll shoot me if I tell it again. But parents are proud of their kids that graduate from Lackland into our U.S. Air Force every Friday morning. These kids go over and deploy and I get to see them deployed whenever I visit and it's incredible how dedicated they are. They're dedicated because they know that the people of America believe in what they're doing and they have that support.

When I was down at Tyndall (AFB, Fla.), I was out on the flight line one morning and a young Airman, a young avionics troop is out there with his dad and his supervisor came over and says sir, I've got a young avionics troop here with his dad. He'd like to come say hello to you. I said absolutely. So the dad and the young Airman come over and I shake their hand and talk to them. Just casual conversation.

Finally I asked the kid the question I always tell you that I ask the kids when I go to Lackland, are you proud of yourself? I asked the dad, are you proud of him? The dad breaks down weeping. He said you have no idea what this kid was like two years ago. You have no idea. You have taught this kid a skill that he will have for the rest of his life. He believes in things that I never thought he'd believe in. He is proud of himself, of his country, he's now a part of the family. All of these things he was never before, and if we weren't here in public I'd give you a hug.

That's what we produce out there, ladies and gentlemen. In our U.S. Air Force, the other services as well. Every service, every service chief would stand up here and tell you the same exact story. I tell you that all the time, too. We take these kids out of a contemporary culture, we show them pride and a little bit of leadership and they do marvelous things for our nation.

This Association makes sure that that tradition continues. The leadership you see in the front row here makes sure that the standards remain high. And all of us participate in making sure that the core values of this U. S. Air Force remain a top priority for all of us.

I thank you all for the privilege of being here. This will be my last Air Force Association presentation here in this uniform in my current capacity. It has been a remarkable privilege to be associated with all of you in the Air Force Association. For the rest of you, you are not rid of me yet. We've still got a lot of things to do. But I do appreciate all the courtesies that you have shown me over the years, and God bless each and every one of you and the United States of America.

Air Force Chief of Staff General John P. Jumper