General John P. Jumper
Commander, Air Combat Command
AFA 17th Annual Air Warfare Symposium--Orlando
February 15, 2001
General Jumper: I think we should all stop for a minute to recognize
General Shaud's contributions to these events. He puts together a
spectacular program and the way he handles the audience and the
questions and gets through this as smoothly as he does is outstanding.
Thank you very much, General Shaud.
We've been through an unbelievable decade, a decade where we
transformed ourselves from an intellectual construct around the
stability of a Cold War. In that Cold War stability, we watched it
transform itself into what I call the "New World Disorder." But we
hardly new what to anticipate or what to expect. But we learned quickly
as we went through that decade of the 1990s and we went through many
transformations. In the middle of the decade we began this
transformation—and with General Ryan's help when he became the
Chief—into an Expeditionary Air Force. With that transition came many
other types of transitions as we changed from a static way of thinking
to a more dynamic way of thinking. We saw many things change. Our
outlook about space—we heard Ed Eberhart tell us in Los Angeles about
the challenges of space that have to do now with an enemy from which we
can no longer keep our secrets. In the near future, perhaps an enemy can
challenge us with military capabilities from space.
We see in the transformation of information warfare, from something
that was just a bumper sticker that few of us really understood, to what
is now a comprehensive way of thinking about how we prepare and execute
combat operations. Information operations not only at the strategic
level, but at the operational and tactical level as well.
We have seen the miracles associated with things like the Airborne
Laser. Who could possibly imagine being able to shoot a laser hundreds
of kilometers through the atmosphere and hit a target only a meter or so
in diameter? I know I didn't believe it. No, I was the biggest skeptic
in the world and I took my leather jacket and my white scarf right out
to Kirkland, sat my butt down and said, "you guys are going to have to
prove this to me." I left there saying, "amen, brother," because it is
going to work.
UAVs. As we came out of the ACTD for the Predator and it sort
of got thrown over the transom to the U.S. Air Force and we caught this
thing and tried to turn it into an operationally suitable vehicle from
its research and development configuration. We still struggle with that
today. In the meantime, throughout the decade of the 1990s, it has
proven itself, from Bosnia to Kosovo and now in Southern Watch. Its
agility, its ability to find targets, its ability to help close some of
those seams in the find, fix, track, target, engage and assess loop has
been absolutely invaluable. Soon we are going to put Hellfire missiles
on the Predator and demonstrate that capability.
Soon we'll have a UCAV. We will be challenged with how to employ that
UCAV in an agile way, looking for niches; perhaps see a connection with
directed energy to make it most useful and most credible.
Command and Control. As we watch this new era of high-speed
computational capability turn our command and control into much like we
envisioned a cockpit of an F-15 or an F-22 [looking]—able to lock onto
targets virtually displayed and get instant feedback about the nature
and the type of threat that exists there.
All of this talk is about platforms. It is about programs. But how do
we put it together? How are we going to fight this force? How far out
should we be thinking? Is it 2025? Is it 2020? What about the threats in
the rest of this century? What about the things we have coming on board
now? What have we learned in the decade of the 1990s that is going to
propel us intellectually through the rest of this decade?
Tomorrow you are going to here General Dick Hawley who is going to
give you a great presentation on a concept called Global Reconnaissance
Strike. It is a joint concept. It tells us how to deal with this
challenge of access and other challenges that we face today and into the
future. Today I am going to talk to you about an Air Force contribution
to that concept called the Global Strike Task Force and how we might be
able to extract from our expeditionary capability those forces that can
deal with the anti- access problem and other problems that we learned
from the decade of the 1990s. What were those problems?
The Global Strike Task Force is the next phase of our transformation.
If the Expeditionary Air Force was the first phase, then the Global
Strike Task Force is the second phase. It applies the lessons we have
learned by being present for duty in the decade of the 1990s to counter
the threats that might keep us from being as effective in this decade.
If you look at where we've been through the decade of the 1990s, more
than 99 operations, the large ones, are the ones that persisted for a
year or longer. In some of those years they turned non-shooting events
into shooting events. And, in those shooting events, everyone we went
through taught us something different, something new, about this era of
instability in this New World Disorder. But every time air and space
power was present for duty, on the front lines of each of these
conflicts
Particularly instructive were the lessons we learned and the ones
that I'll review with you today and we'll extract some lessons and how
those might apply to our current situation.
We all remember back in Desert Storm in 1991 when we were all
surprised by that Iraqi build-up. As the Iraqi build-up approached the
borders of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, the coalition forces started to come
together slowly, not knowing exactly how to react to this threat. But as
Saddam Hussein arrayed his forces--43 divisions across the Kuwait-Saudi
border--it became evident that the sovereignty of the Arabian peninsula
could be threatened and the consensus came together to deploy a very
significant force—both air, land and sea—to deal with that situation.
The air portion of that, in the end, generated more than 2000 sorties
per day. When sovereignty was threatened, access was not a problem.
Fast forward to October 1994, Operation Vigilant Warrior. Once again,
Saddam engaged in one of his saber-rattling exercises. This time with a
major movement to the south, he violated United Nations sanctions, and
it looked very much to all of us as if it could be a repeat of Desert
Storm. Again the coalition came together, sovereignty was threatened,
access was granted. We deployed over 150 airplanes from the States.
Admiral Dan Murphy and the George Washington carrier battle group turned
around from the eastern Mediterranean, having just left the area, and
elements of the division- ready brigade at Fort Bragg came into Kuwait.
Saddam Hussein says, "I've seen this old movie, I don't want to see it
again." He pointed his compass to 360 and headed back north again.
Deliberate Force, 1995. The safe areas were violated by the Serbs. A
nine-nation NATO force came together under the sanction of the United
Nations and what we planned to be a one or a two-day operation turned
into an 11-day operation with more than 3500 sorties. Those air strikes,
combined with some rather severe diplomacy, brought us to the Dayton
peace accords. Again, a short duration operation that turned into one
longer than expected. But we were ready and we made it happen.
In September 1996, it wasn't quite that easy. Operation Desert
Strike. In reprisal from Iraqi actions against the Kurds as they
captured Irbeal in the north, the decision was made to take asymmetrical
action and hit command and control and IADs targets in the south. This
did not sit well with our coalition partners and Operation Southern
Watch was not allowed to participate. Instead, we sent bombers halfway
around the world and joined with the carrier battle group. The bombers
with cruise missiles as well as the carrier battle group, and we
completed that mission. But, in this case, access was a problem because
the objectives were not agreed by the coalition.
And, of course, our most recent experience as we combined all of
those lessons pretty much into one final summary lesson in the end of
the 1990s, we saw the forces of the Serbian army mass themselves north
of Kosovo. We watched as under the cover of the Rambouillet peace
conference the forces of Mr. Milosovic invaded. We missed the halt phase
because the peace conference was going on during the invasion. They
occupied right down to the village level, joined the paramilitary forces
already killing innocent civilians at the village level. We were able to
operate from 21 locations, 47 bases overall if you count the support
bases, through multiple axes of attacks. You recall that we started that
bombing on the 24th of March 1999, believing that we would only do this
for three days at the most. Mr. Milosovic had a different idea. He said,
"we'll just hunker down and we'll absorb everything you've got, we only
need a few days to get the job done here," and a three-day operation
turned into a 78-day operation. We started what we thought was a
single-phase operation that the enemy turned into one of much longer
duration, but we conducted again a coalition operation including
information warfare. In our case, we were very much involved in the
urban environment as we hit very precise targets, very tight targets, in
downtown Belgrade and in Kosovo as well, with precision munitions.
We also learned that we could handle the tyranny of distance and
still provide sustained operations. We heard the Chief talk about the
distance from Nob Nobster, Missouri to the highlands of Kosovo in
Serbia, 17 hours one way. Crews spent three days on an aircraft, but
what was less advertised was the bombers that flew out of Fairford, in
many cases around the Iberian Peninsula and up through the middle of the
Mediterranean, 2,600 miles one way. F-15Es out of Lakenheath, across
Germany into the target area, 1,800 miles one way. F-117s out of
Spangdahlen, 1,300 miles one way. To say nothing of our tanker forces
out of Moroon, that provided the bridge for the aircraft deploying into
the theater as well as flying orbits close to the combat area to refuel
the aircraft 1,800 miles one way. We know how to stand off and conduct
air and space operations.
So what are the characteristics we can take away from our experience
of the 1990s? We fought with coalition partners. We were sanctioned by
the United Nations. Success depended on United States technology. And
the issue of access, we learned, is not only a problem for air bases,
but it is also a problem to getting the coalition moved forward in a way
that it can engage and it applies equally to air, land and sea forces.
When access is a problem, it can be a problem for everyone.
Here are some of the abiding lessons we take with us from the decade
of the 1990s: Access challenges can take several forms, both political
and physical. The physical type are the ones associated with weapons of
mass destruction. We'll talk about them more in a minute. The politics
of limited objectives, or the objective of kick Saddam out of Kuwait or
create the conditions in Kosovo for NATO forces to enter, is much more
complex than the simple elegant statement issued to General Eisenhower
at the beginning of World War II—you shall enter the continent of Europe
and totally and completely defeat the Axis forces. It brings a tear to
the eye of this old airman to think of the simplicity of that as I
contemplate the 26 pages of rules of engagement we had for Operation
Allied Force. Limited objectives bring with them concern for low-
collateral damage, restrictive rules of engagement, and minimizing
casualties—and those aren't just civilian casualties and those aren't
just friendly casualties, but it is also concern about enemy military
casualties as we learned on the Highway of Death, when the operation was
called off as a result of our overwhelming victory at the time.
We also, as we deal with limited objectives, and we wait for
triggering events to prompt our action, turn over the prerogative of
H-hour and D-day to the enemy. If Saddam Hussein had exercised it
properly, if he had simply pulled the laniards on the artillery pieces
that were already aimed, casualties in the Gulf War would have been
significantly higher than what we experienced. We have a new type of
adversary, an adversary for whom winning is often defined as merely not
losing, hunker down and absorb the shock, absorb the air strikes.
Downing one airplane, sinking one ship or capturing soldiers can
demoralize the United States and its allied partners and perhaps prompt
a cessation of hostilities. In all of this we learned that sustained,
persistent air operations were required. A continuous presence over the
battlefield to deal with the time-critical and rapidly-emerging targets
became more and more a necessity as our agility grew better and as time
went on. We must rapidly react to those time-critical targets. These are
transforming lessons that we are now applying to our future force.
This is the threat that we usually depict—an integrated air defense
threat. I borrowed these slides from Dick Hawley. You'll see them in a
different version tomorrow. We generally put our capability in terms of
being able to penetrate these threat rings. Now we are complicated by an
advanced generation of fighters—SU-35s, SU-37s—certainly not in
production, but they are flying today and available on the open market
to whomever wants them. New generations of surface-to-air
missiles—SA-10s, SA-12s, the double-digit class—which pose a serious
threat to our air power. Generations of cruise missiles and generations
of new threats to our maritime forces all come together along with new
generations of biological, chemical weapons that pose significantly
different threats than we've had to face in the past.
In a future theater bed-down, we put the notional scenario against
Iran, should Iran ever become a problem again, because it combines all
of the worst aspects of access for all of our forces, where you have
ballistic missile launch ranges that go throughout the AOR and if you
just lay down what we used in Desert Storm, you can see that those bases
are pretty much covered, all the way out to the Red Sea. You can see we
also face another class of threat, as I discussed earlier, as the enemy
is now able to get a hold of commercial satellite data to help in his
precise targeting in ways never available to an enemy before, as well as
those other threats through space that I mentioned earlier. These are
the dangers that confront us.
So, we need to combine our capabilities to provide a rapid response.
That has always been our forte, to arrive rapidly and to do it in a
global way. To be able to get our ISR assets on the scene early. It is
always the first thing that the CINCs ask for in a horizontally
integrated constellation that allows the platforms—space and airborne
and unmanned—to have conversations at the machine level. To be able to
leverage our precision and our stand-off [assets] that then ensures the
access for the follow-on joint coalition and allied forces and then that
access will provide that 24-hour, seven-day-a-week battlefield
persistence as we are able to deploy the forces forward into bases that
give us close proximity to the battlespace. We need a robust,
time-critical targeting capability that turns our response to emerging
targets from hours today into minutes in the future.
We have things we can leverage to give this capability. Super cruise
combined with stealth, maneuverability combined with stealth. Stealth
bombers that have great range and great payload. Advances in precision
weapons and other types of smaller munitions that are being developed.
This horizontally integrated air and space constellation that we talked
about earlier. More precise information warfare capability and turning
information into what we call Predictive Battlespace Awareness (PBA), a
concept that I will discuss a little bit later on. As well as new
concepts for advanced command, control and reach-back.
We need to be able to do these functions simultaneously, rapidly
establish air and space dominance, allowing freedom from attack and
freedom to attack, as the Chief says. Create the conditions for access
so that we can have those follow-on forces come in safely into the AOR
and then provide that persistence early on that we need to cover
whatever follow-on forces are required to do the war-winning piece. The
kick-down-the-door force, that Global Strike Task Force, enables all
that comes after and gives the bad guy, as we have seen in the decade of
the 1990s, an excuse to quit.
The capabilities that are inherent in the force are the capabilities
that go along with being able to penetrate. What we saw before were the
larger rings associated with the current force, the F-15/F-16 force and
what it looks like are the big rings that it has a difficult time
penetrating, and what we have now with the F-22 combined with super
cruise and maneuverable stealth makes those rings look like this.
Stealth super cruise and high altitude provide that reliable penetration
capability. The F-22 can get to any target in that battle space to take
out the threats that could then endanger follow-on forces.
The F-22s coming from outside the threat rings can refuel and they
have the range to refuel and join the B-2s that come from ranges as far
as 3,000 miles away, penetrate into the center of a target area, back
out again. The F-22s refuel again and make it home as the B-2s go out.
So, the tactical range in the target area is enabled by the F-22. The
F-22s' job is take out those threats that would endanger the B-2 as the
B-2 focuses its capabilities on the weapons of mass destruction, the WMD,
their launch, their manufacture, their storage facilities, to reduce
those threats.
As the roll-back continues then, we enable more airfields in the rear
so that coalition and allied forces can come forward along with
follow-on U.S. forces and enable the maritime forces to deal with their
problems, such as mine clearing. The B- 2s take out the shore defenses
that can threaten the ships and our ability to land troops to shore.
They take out those weapons of mass destruction further in and as that
threat rolls back, it makes available the airfields that we are required
to provide that persistent force over the battle field that is the
war-winning force.
So the concept of operations looks something like this: Early on the
CINC calls for those ISR forces, the ISR forces come together, and
remember that under the concept of Predictive Battlespace, which I'll
talk about in awhile, which is just a further iteration of the way we do
intelligence today, we have become familiar with the patterns, the
doctrine, the habit, the training of the enemy. We are inside the
enemy's mind. As he calls those platforms forward, we are able to
predict better what the enemy will do as he disperses and deploys his
forces. Those forces that come forward are a constellation and I depict
them notionally here as some type of a common wide-bodied aircraft that
can do as much as science and technology will allow of what we see done
today with our Joint STARS, our AWACS, our Rivet Joint, our ABCCC, our
Compass Call. We don't know how much capability can go on that platform,
but the platform has conversations at the machine level with
high-altitude UAVs depicted here as the Global Hawk. They work together
as the UAVs do some of the sensor work from forward locations and, in
conjunction with the mother ship, do precise target location and precise
identification. An additional feature of this is it has machine-level
conversations with satellites. So, if you are in an MTOI mode with your
constellation and you can't look through this piece of ground as the
next satellite comes over the horizon, the airborne platforms are having
a conversation with that satellite to fill in the blank. The people at
the console don't know and they don't care from whence the information
is coming. All they know is that they have a complete picture. How much
of this will go in the air—manned, unmanned—and how much will go in
space? This should be a subject of trade-offs that operators and
technologists sitting down at the same table conclude as they study the
alternatives and where the greatest payoffs are. We should do this in a
combined way that takes the best advantage of what we can do from air
and from space.
The Air Operations Centers works into this and in new ways of command
and control, which we'll talk about in a few minutes, and of course,
this whole force is enabled by a robust tanker support that enables the
constant presence of the F-22 and the B-2 over the battlespace, rolling
back those weapons of mass destruction and the IADs that would protect
those weapons of mass destruction. We'd be joined in this case and
General Hawley will talk about this later, but the forces that are
available in stand-off, maritime forces using TLAMs and other stand-off
munitions.
After the initial shock is over, the F-22s get the B-2s in to
continue to take down the weapons of mass destruction, the F-22s
penetrating, taking down the IADs, the B-2s coming in, working on the
chemicals, their storage, their transportation, their manufacture.
Information operations target key nodes in ways that disrupt the command
and control and, in the future with the Airborne Laser available, we
have the Airborne Laser available to take out any threats that aren't
apparent in our preparation of the battlespace and then we clear the
way, as I said before, for the follow-on forces that deploy forward and
provide that persistent force over the battle field, that war-winning
force, if you will.
The full persistent force comes forward and brings with it those
elements that sustain themselves over the battlespace. I've read in
articles lately that this concept might suggest that I do not support
the Joint Strike Fighter. On the contrary, the Joint Strike Fighter is
very much a part of the concept that is part of the persistent force
that lingers over the battlefield. Into this, into the future as part of
the concept, we also include other unmanned vehicles, decoys and other
things that enable penetration in ways that we are looking at very hard
and developing for our future force.
We maintain our air dominance as all the forces enter and persist and
the full spectrum of capabilities to include that persistent force I
talked about, close air support,interdiction, time-critical targeting.
The 24 and 7 operations where we require our agile, short legs to deal
with the things that you have to be there on the spot to deal with. The
kick-down-the-door force plus that persistent forces gives us that
war-winning capability.
Where does this come from? Our Global Strike Task Force will be
extracted from the first leading elements of the AEF so they come out
and if called upon they can deploy quickly and merge quickly to bring
down this kick-down-the-door capability.
They then blend with the normal flow of our Air Expeditionary Force
packages to give us this very lethal up-front mass capability, mostly
against fixed targets, but then blend with the persistent force and with
the new generation of joint weapons that persistent forces gives us—a
significant firepower capability as the AEF packages deploy forward and
that persistent force then begins to take on. The Global Strike Task
Force then joins with our AEF forces, kick down the door and then
persist. This joins then with the capabilities being developed by the
other services—the interim brigade combat team by the Army, and the
Naval forces that are afloat and have great stand-off capability of
their own to provide both the kick down and the persistence.
One thing I want to talk about for just a minute is this concept of
Predictive Battlespace Awareness. We have now intel prep of the
battlefield, which the U.S. Army has done a superb job of being able to
template and to work with careful study of the enemy to do some
predictive analysis of what the enemy might do. We do the same thing for
surface-to-air missiles. We do it fairly well. But what I propose is
that, in the area of Predictive Battlespace Awareness, we take a look at
how we go about sizing our ISR problem. Generally the ISR problem is
sized today by a 40,000 square kilometer rule. You take a 40,000 square
kilometer rule and from that re-size how much analysis we have to do and
then how many people we need to analyze that problem. But in that
thinking, each pixel in this 40,000 square kilometers has equal
opportunity to reveal a target. If you take a look at the picture in
front of you now, if you provided several rules such that tanks can't
sit on the sides of cliffs and SA-3s can't be on mountain peaks, you
quickly take away 60 percent of the terrain that is of consequence to
any maneuver on the battlefield.
When you do that you can rapidly, in many cases, narrow your problem
down and isolate it to a particular condition. If the ground force
component commander tells you he expects the enemy to move between phase
line alpha and phase line bravo in the next 48 hours then on the ATO you
put the assets you need to anticipate that movement and when that
movement comes those assets, which could be in the form—as what we did
in Kosovo—of B-1 bombers loaded with 84 mark 82s, are ready to deal with
that in short order. And the bumper sticker to take away from this is
that we will have arrived at this notion when we can use our ISR assets
more to confirm what we predicted to happen than for pure discovery.
That is what we should aim for. And of course we want to get away from
this notion where in the targeting process—find, fix, track, target,
engage and assess—we get rid of the seams between each of those squares
up there, those seams that are now defined by stove pipes, where we have
in our air operations centers and other people—tribal representatives
sitting in front of work stations that represent their tribe—that
translate, that only understand the language of their tribe and only
translate it the way they want to other members of other tribes. We've
got to get away from our tribal contexts of stove pipes as we pursue
this capability.
We close the seams. We have before us something that looks like a
radar scope for a joint force air component commander, where we detect
targets on the battle field, we lock on to them like we lock on to an
enemy aircraft. We task those assets to data-link ISR assets to go find
and confirm what that target is. Streaming video keeps you aware of what
the status is as we receive messages via data-link to confirm what type
of targets we are dealing with. We search the ATO for the best
opportunity to go deal with that target. The choices are presented to us
and in this case it will be a B-1 that we put there for the purpose of
dealing with this situation. It is tasked by data-link. The weapon flies
out. And the results are transmitted back and presented. This may seem
far-fetched, but we have a CAOC-X at Langley right now, the prototype of
the data wall that is providing this very capability. It is not as
robust as we need it to be. We still need to do a lot of work with
Theater Battle Management Core Systems (TBMCS), but the goal is to make
the equivalent of a radar scope for the joint force air component
commander. Decision quality information.
We should be able to do this because, as we think about the way that
we plan, engage and target today, you think about that outer circle over
there, that outer circle over there represents the 72-hour ATO cycle
that many are fond of talking about. Many forget that the 72-hour ATO
cycle is not an execution cycle, it is a planning and execution cycle.
We can execute instantly and what we need to be able to do is execute in
single-digit minutes.
If you take the example of the Danube River and that outside circle
there, boy are we good at that. We decide we want to hit that bridge and
we measure those coordinates down to the last foot, we get the engineer
to tell us which truss to hit to make it fold like a cardboard suitcase.
We study the traffic pattern so we know if we hit it at 3:04 a.m. in the
morning, there will be the least likelihood of any traffic. We study the
collateral damage so that no shard of glass goes beyond the end of the
bridge to hurt any building that is not part of the target. We ship it
all off to Nob Noster, Missouri, the B-2 guys plan it, fly 17 hours and
that target is dead and there is not anything in the world anybody can
do about it. We decided it is going to go, it gets into this sort of
cycle, and it is dead.
But you know, at the other end of the spectrum, we are pretty good,
too. The F-22 detects targets through a variety of sensors. It displays
up there in a situation, decision-quality display, exactly what type of
aircraft that is, its heading, its air speed, its type, its altitude. It
takes all that information, it passes it off to the missile system and
on your heads-up display is put the envelope of the weapon system and if
all else fails it has a light for the pea-brained fighter pilot that
says shoot when everything else goes wrong. Decision-quality data and
the question we have to ask ourselves: If we can do that at the tactical
level of war, why can't we get the data wall to do that for us at the
operational level of war? Lock on to the ques and the targets inside the
AOCs and immediately have a system where databases are instantly
searched for anything to do with that part of the geography and give us
that information from which we can make decisions. That is our
challenge.
Let's take a look also at the capacity of the kick-down-the-door
piece of Global Strike Task Force and compare it with the first 24 hours
of Desert Storm. In that first 24 hours we flew more than 1,200 sorties
and we designated 203 targets which were destroyed. Forty of those
targets were with stealth assets. If we had to do that same problem
today with Global Strike Task Force, let's look at what it would take.
Here is the B-2. It would take 12 B-2s, each with 16 2,000 pound
JDAMs; two squadrons of F-22, each carrying 2 one-thousand pound JDAMs;
and in that 24-hour period they could destroy 270 targets and that is
another feature of the Global Strike Task Force. The F-22 enables for
the first time, 24-hour-a-day stealth. Let me say it again: The F-22
enables for the first time 24-hour-a-day stealth. It can do it by
itself, because it penetrates and can take out those most difficult
defenses and it can also enable the B-2s and the F-117s to come in
because it can protect them, it can overcome the greatest problem we
have today with the F-117 and the B-2, and that is they can't protect
themselves from air-to-air and visually directed air-to-surface
threats. We wouldn't be able to do it in all cases, but in certain
cases we now enable day-light stealth with the F-22.
Let's put on the future generation of weapons in this same problem.
We take only 4 B-2s. We load them with the 500-pound JDAM. We have two
squadrons of F-22 and we use half of them for air-to-ground using
small-diameter munitions of which you can fit eight internally on the
F-22 and it is the wing version that flies out beyond 50 miles from the
supercruise configuration on the F-22. The other half is used to provide
defensive cover for our ISR assets, which is part of this concept—the
F-22s always provide that cover for our ISR assets and our tankers. Then
look at the number—426 targets destroyed in that same period of time.
Now, one quickly says, "well, if you can destroy all those targets
with just a few airplanes, why do you need anything else?" Remember,
these are the fixed targets that are part of kicking down the door. The
persistent force follows and deals with the agile targets, the mobile
targets, the time-critical targets that come up when you are not sure
and our assets are available to take them out when they become a
problem.
So the Global Strike Task Force, ladies and gentlemen,
operationalizes the leading edge, kick-down-the-door power projection
capability, rapidly delivers massive firepower, enables 24-hour-a-day
stealth for the first time, leverages our nation's technological
strength, enables full-spectrum follow-on forces and meets the
challenges that we face for the future. It provides our nation a new
capability. Let me close with an observation. We can talk about
technology and we can talk about platforms. But as the Chief, in the
end, it is all about people. I think often about the emphasis we place
on quality of life for our troops. I talk about quality of life and
value of life and when I saw Boots Plusay stand up back there, I
remember as a teenager going through one of my dad's lockers and finding
an old dog-eared copy of No Guts, No Glory, which I have to this day. I
read through it very carefully as a young teenager, not really knowing
much about what I was reading—the technical aspects of it.
But I also walked those camps during the Kosovo war and I saw those
refugees, 20,000 people in a big tent city. I told those youngsters that
the reason those refugees were alive was because of what they were
doing. We are indeed an Air Force of quality people and of high value.
We should treasure that. All the platforms and the technology I talk
about today are not one iota good without the quality people that we
have in our Air Force. God bless all of you and thank you for the
opportunity to be here with you today.
Q. How does Global Strike Task Force square with the current
Air Force concept of Aerospace Expeditionary Forces?
General Jumper: As we saw, the Strike Force is tailorable just
as everything else in our Expeditionary Air Force concept. They come out
of those lead AEF packages, the F-22s, the B-2s, the ISR assets teaming
with the global mobility and the space assets to give us this
kick-down-the-door force. When I say tailorable, I mean, we used the
basic elements of the B-2 and the F-22. The F-22 enables the 24-hour
stealth. It also participates in taking out the double-digit SAM
threats. But we also tailor it with whatever else we might need for
whatever condition we are in. That could be the Joint Strike Fighter. It
could be B-52s with ALCMs. It could be B-1s with JASM. We tailor it to
what the need is, but the basic elements are the ones that I described.
They come right out of the leading edges of the EAF and they are part of
that Expeditionary Air Force concept.
Q. The next question has to do with air defense systems and
the SAM environment—manned, portable air defense systems dominate the
air space below 15,000 feet. How are we going to buy back that air
space?
General Jumper: That is always an interesting question,
because we came out of Vietnam having lost 4,000 air vehicles to Triple
A and small arms. What we said is, we need to get ourselves up out of
that arena and we developed the laser bomb. The laser bomb doesn't care
from what altitude it is dropped, so we dropped it from 15,000 feet, but
we went lower when we had to. The way to be able to deal with the
problem is to be able to identify the targets in all weather conditions
and to be able to identify them accurately so we can strike through the
weather in all conditions. Things like JDAM and things like
Wind-corrected Munitions Dispenser are going to help us with that
problem. We don't have to buy back the space below 15,000 feet, we have
to learn to operate where the Triple A and the small arms pose the
greatest threat. We've got to operate out of that area.
Q. Recently, there was a policy message issued on EW and
specifically re-entering into the support jammer arena. Can you comment
on the status of this and the ACC Electronic Warfare road map?
General Jumper: Electronic Warfare has traditionally been
defined as generally pods that bash electrons. I think we need an open
aperture and we have to consider all the things that go into allowing
air craft to penetrate hostile air space and get to targets. That
includes capabilities from space. It includes information operations. It
includes deception techniques that all pile into this specific
capability. A particular mode may be more or less valuable in a future
concept than it is today. All I vote for is that we consider all of them
as we look at alternatives to allow the penetration of aircraft.
Stand-off jamming continues to be important, but do we have to do it on
a traditional platform? I don't know.
Q. Organizationally, could you explain the importance of
moving the Air Intelligence Agency into ACC? Also, how will you
integrate information operations and warfare into your combat force?
General Jumper: The first point is that this is not a hostile
takeover. What we are trying to do is what I've been talking about for
several years. So has the Chief and so is all of our leadership. That
is--operationalizing those elements of information warfare that we the
Air Force have developed. That is what this does. It puts those
elements, those information warfare tools into the hands of the numbered
Air Force commander, that is a war-fighting commander. It allows us to
integrate the effects and combine the effects to the greater good and it
has all sorts of side effects, like the people in the back of Rivet
Joint and the people in the front of Rivet Joint wearing the same
patch.
Q. You talked of intelligence support of deployers. How about
intelligence support to the deployed? Can we do that better?
General Jumper: Absolutely. I talked about this new concept
of Predictive Battlespace Awareness." What I think it does is it
provides us a focused intensity on activities in a certain AOR so that
we can use that analysis to be more predictive and focus it on the
CINC's priorities. We are putting together a new discipline with General
Glenn Schaefer, a new discipline we call Predictive Battlespace
Awareness, to bring the elements of this together to define exactly what
needs to go into this science, sort of a forensic study of the battle
field so that we baseline the battlespace. We know when a new road
appears that goes off into the trees. So that if later we find there are
hard things in those trees, we have the ability to go back and
investigate over time where the thing came from that went into those
trees that made those tracks and then we can define from point of origin
whether they are bad or not, get a degree of confidence about what they
are, and we get away from the notion that we have to visually identify
the thing under the tree before we can hit it, which is sort of the
rules we live with today—a 90 percent probability that because it came
from here, out of bad-guy territory, down to here where that unit now
resides, that the things under the trees are bad, go ahead and hit them.
It is that sort of thing that PBA will do for us. The same thing with
Scud missiles. You have a terrain-delimited analysis that tells you that
Scuds—because of their proximity to command and control, to hide-sights,
etc. and you take the terrain out—can only reasonably operate from these
particular sights. When you have activity in those areas then, that is
a tip-off to a Scud. You combine it with SIGINT and other INTs to say,
"yeah, we correlated that, now you've got enough confidence to go hit
it."
Q. How will you measure success in CAOC-X and what are its
main goals?
General Jumper: We will measure success in our revolution in
information technology pretty much the same way we measure it in
industrial measures of information technology. We need to be able to
move information quickly and I've set out a general goal that we want to
do time-critical targeting in single-digit minutes. This sets out a
wide-variety of goals for us and we start with the notion that you take
in your combat planning and you get rid of the post-it notes, the yellow
stickies that you put on the acetate. That is how we do our planning
today. We replace that with a digitized version so that when the targets
are entered, the ATO is automatically built in the background because
the machines know, the databases know, where the right airplanes, the
right bombs, the right fuses, the qualified crew chiefs, etc. all reside
in a theater of operation. When you get that last target entered, the
ATO is all but built and what you don't have, the machine tells you.
This is what you've got to go do to make this ATO executable. It also
puts the ISR assets in the right places and the tanker orbits in the
right place. When the JFAC walks in the next morning at 7 a.m. he hits
enter and watches the whole thing fly out in 50-time speed so that he
can see where the weak points are: If that tanker orbit is too close to
that SA-5 ring, what is the consequence of moving it? Will this EA-6
stand-off jamming coverage be able to cover this target up here? You
pause and you ask those questions and you do that analysis, you turn the
art of administering an ATO into the art of commanding air power. That
is what we are going to do. In the execution phase, the problem with
the common operating picture today is that you see the picture up there
with the dancing sticks that show some level of activity, but you know
that level of activity up there the way it is today only shows about 60
to 70 percent of what is really going on and you know that some of it up
there is probably minutes, if not hours, old. So you take that synthetic
display that you did when you built the ATO in the first place, you put
it up beside the current dancing stick display and you compare the two.
This is what should be happening, this is what is happening, and now
you've operationalized your common operating picture, in addition to
those features which I talked about in the data wall where you lock onto
targets and get database help to decide what those targets are. That is
where we are going with this. We will do the beta work at CAOC-X with
the help of ESD, Generals Leslie Kenny, and Les Lyles, we will take
ideas from out of the field. We've got the captains giving us ideas that
we are putting into the field today. We will do the compliance piece and
check for stability and all those things and put those out sort of like
AOL puts out changes to its software. Stand by for an update. That is
where we hope to get and we take those practices right out of what we
see in everyday life in the information technology world.
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