It is a real privilege for me to be here following our Chief, the thoughtfulness of our ACC commander, the comprehensive speed of our European commander, and to be the wrap-up hitter at 1700 in the afternoon.

I must tell you that we all know that the Pacific AOR is large. I came here via Hawaii to Guam to India to Greece for a refueling stop, to Germany for an overnight, Maine for fuel, and Florida. And so even though at this late hour I would ask you, if I can stay awake, so can you.

Last year at this time I was sitting in the second row, listening to my predecessor Pat Gamble talk about PACAF. And he did it by taking a walk around the AOR as he described it. I thought it was a wonderful briefing and I took copious notes because at the time, I knew I may be announced to go to the Pacific to replace him.

I thought that briefing was so good; I am going to kind of do it again because a lot has happened in one year. I will also watch how many three stars out there are taking copious notes. I love you guys, but put your pens down. I am planning on staying in Hawaii for as long as I can. [Laughter]

Let me talk a little bit about the Pacific. I want to talk about Noble Eagle and Enduring Freedom and the part we play and what my command plays as part of this Air Force team that we have. But I want to do it in a little bit different way than the previous speakers. I want to talk about it in a country context and a geography context because it is very important where I live to know the environment in which we have to work and where we have our forward base forces.

I will start in Northeast Asia. Our friends in Japan are still our friends. And they are great friends to have. Our three bases there are well cared for, funded in large part by the Japanese. They are becoming more and more interoperable with us as they buy potentially tankers, AWACS, other kinds of equipment from us. And we are working hard on exercising together, both bilaterally and multilaterally. We have made some breakthroughs in the past year in that regard and the Japanese are great hosts and important strategic partners in that part of the world.

South Korea remains a country that has not yet quite known peace. Our two bases there are very important to maintaining that peace. This is a satellite photo of the Korean peninsula taken recently. And that big dark spot that you see north of the big white spot, which is Seoul, is North Korea. You have heard our president recently describe this as part of the "axis of evil." What we need to understand and remember about Korea is that it is a nation that has impoverished its people by design. It has weapons of mass destruction. It has not sought peace for 50 years. There is no peace on the Korean peninsula.
What we have for our partners and ourselves is a deterrent force and nobody knows how this is going to turn out, whether this will be a soft landing, a hard landing, or what may happen. And so we pay lots of attention, always, to what is going on in Korea and look at the signals from the north to see what might happen next. So, when the Kitty Hawk sailed down to the Indian Ocean and away from the Korean peninsula, the CINC and the South Koreans felt it was important that we send our F-15Es from Alaska down to the Korean peninsula as a deterrent force to let the North Koreans know that we were still paying attention. And that we had the wherewithal to blunt any no-notice assault. Again, nobody knows how this is going to turn out and it is at the top of our job jar to make sure we always pay attention to this.

China in the past year has also had some interesting developments. Before I got into the job, I was invited to go to China, in September, as the PACAF commander. That all went away when the P-3 incident happened. We went through a period of months of high tension, virtual stoppage in mil-to-mil relationships and we are now getting back to a little bit more normal relationship that we traditionally had with China over the past few years.
As you all know, China is a huge country with a billion people, a very large military force, a very large air force, with a lot of combat aircraft rapidly developing from very modern airplanes to the full range of older airplanes, developing very rapidly to the future with surface-to-surface capability. It is potentially a tough adversary, if it comes to that. We are all hoping for a soft landing on this, that the opening of markets and their economic growth will similarly at some point down the road also blossom into a political environment that is similarly open and peaceful. But nobody is too sure how that is going to turn out.

The Taiwan situation complicates that as always and we watch that very carefully in the Pacific to make sure that our nation's policy with respect to Taiwan is credible. And again, we pay lots of attention to that and we are very concerned this year as our relationship with China went south for a while.
I must tell my attaché friends in the audience, most of whom I know, please for those of you who come from Pacific countries, if I don't talk about your country, please don't be upset. Time does not allow. I am just kind of giving highlights here. It is 43 countries strong, a thousand languages. It is a big place. Let me take a short tour around as I describe what is going on.
Largest Muslim country in the world, Indonesia, with a huge population, has been very unstable the past few years, as you all know. It seems to be more stable now. We have paid, in the past few years, great attention to Indonesia and we continue to do so. But as yet, we are not what I would call a normal close relationship, where our forces exercises together and we have a very close working relationship. That is not how I would describe it. On the other hand, they have been very friendly, especially after 9/11, very sympathetic to what we have to deal with and have been very helpful.
Another very large Islamic population is in Malaysia and they have been very aggressive taking care of the Al Qaeda network problem within their country and very successful. That has enhanced our relationship with Malaysia and it remains very good.

In that part of the world, Singapore has also had some problems with terrorism and Al Qaeda and they have been equally aggressive in taking care of their problem. They have a great air force and we have a very, very close relationship with Singapore. We have a number of Air Force people stationed there. They have a lot of our equipment. We are very interoperable and I see that continuing. Their oversight rights during Enduring Freedom were very important and in fact they have quietly done a lot of air refueling of our assets during this effort.

Our great friend Australia remains a great friend. They have a wonderful range down there that we use. We do an awful lot with Australia. They have been clamoring from day one to see what they could do to help us during Enduring Freedom and they are providing our air defense at Diego Garcia, which they very badly wanted to do as well as a bunch of other more quiet things that they have done. They have been great friends and remain so. While their air force is small, it is very capable. They are very interoperable with us and we do an awful lot, thankfully, with Australia.

The Philippines are interesting. We are, as many of you know, beginning an effort helping the Philippines with a joint task force, mainly special ops involvement, but some Air Force involvement as well to try to help the Philippines with their terrorist problem in the southern Philippines with Abu Sayif. That is only just beginning and those events will unfold in the months ahead as we see how that develops.

India is a very interesting country for us. After 9/11, they were tremendously open and wanted to help us in anyway they could. As you know, we have not had a close relationship military-to-military with India, even though it has been the world's largest democracy and very friendly with us. We have just not had a close relationship with them in the past decades. We seem to have turned a corner and both sides want to have more engagement activities, a closer relationship, and that is now just developing.

As I mentioned at the beginning of my remarks, I just came back from five days in India, where they were very open. I went to three different bases, including one forward base not far from Pakistan, where they have a lot of fighters deployed. They showed me very openly everything. I got in the cockpit of the SU-30 and had a great chance to talk to the pilots and maintainers and talk to senior officers. When I go back to Hawaii next week, we have a high-level meeting in Hawaii with their vice chief of staff to talk about what is the way ahead for us here in the coming months and years, exercise-wise and otherwise that we can do with the Indian air force. I am very encouraged by this. I think it is a wonderful development.

Many of you may not know that Indian actually has the second largest Muslim population in the world. We don't think of India as a Muslim nation. They are a very pluralistic nation. They have 140 million people who practice the Islamic faith.

They are a billion strong population. Some time in the coming years, they will probably bypass China as the most populace nation on the face of the earth. There is no downside to a closer relationship with India that I can see at the moment and so I hope to do what I can to contribute, to nurture and to encourage a closer military-to-military relationship.

Very important out in this part of the world, south of India, is Diego Garcia, a British-owned small set of islands where we have a very large presence right now with bombers and tankers. And one of the key PACAF contributions during the opening days of Enduring Freedom was the tanker bridge across the Pacific, working with the Air Mobility Command and trying to do our best to set up the tent city and the camp there at Diego Garcia to receive the bombers and the tankers that would go in there and, in fact, have dropped the majority of the tonnage in Afghanistan. It has been a very quiet successful operation with very little in the way of press coverage, by design. And it has been one of the important contributions I think PACAF has made to the war - to assist and be a partner in bedding that force down.

Another very important place in the Pacific is Guam. We don't have any force structure there to speak of in terms of airplanes. But what we have there is a very large complex, both weapon storage as well as runway and parking complex. It is very modern. We have a large contingent of airmen who are there, ready at a moment's notice, to open that ramp and to run a very large mobility force, tanker force, or bomber force or whatever it is that we want to run, out of Guam. And early on in Enduring Freedom, there were as many as 70 airplanes on the ground at one time as we moved through. That is starting from zero. It is a very important strategic location in the Pacific and will be for a long time to come.

Meanwhile, Alaska and Hawaii were contributing, especially to Noble Eagle. The NORAD relationship in Alaska is well known. General Eberhart, we turn over our forces to him for the protection and when the lower 48 sat airplanes down on the 11th of September, Alaska followed under the direction of General Eberhart. Our F-15s, AWACS and tankers ever since have been performing a great service, just like the rest of our force structure in the lower 48.

Similarly, in Hawaii, our Hawaii Air Guard went into action with a hi-rock, which is their radar outfit that has always been there, mainly protecting against a bomber or foreign threat. But they immediately were in action on 9/11, as well as the F-15s of the Hawaii Guard, and all of that bed down of airplanes that were coming in from all over the world to Hawaii went very smoothly and very quietly and ever since then, the HANG has continued to be on alert and do its job, like everybody else in the other 49 states.

Our Guard outfit in Alaska and our Guard outfit in Hawaii are great parts of PACAF and they have done yeoman's work. They continue to be deployed. The tanker unit at Eielson is right now at Guam. And they continue to do work on Noble Eagle and Enduring Freedom quietly and professionally and we couldn't do our job without them.

For PACAF, it is a relatively small command. It is 40,000 or so with 400 airplanes. One of the ways I describe PACAF when I talk to audiences is that it is somewhat geriatric. Our tankers' average age is 42 years old. Our C-130s in Alaska are 28. In Japan, our 130s are 36 years old with Dash-7 engines. Our F-15s at Kadena are the oldest in the inventory. We need to modernize just like the rest of the Air Force does. And so, when the Chief gets up and talks about acquisition reform and the things that he wants to do with our Air Force, and Hal Hornburg gets up as the leader of the CAF and talks about the things that he wants to do as leader of the CAF, and I am sure John Handy, when he gets up tomorrow as the leader of the Mobility Air Forces to talk - I am cheering them on. Because just like Speedy Martin in Europe, we need a more modern force structure for those forward-placed forces that are out there because our young airmen are performing miracles to keep our OR rate where it has to be.
And just like the rest of the Air Force, we also forward deploy from our forward-deployed locations. We just got our jets back from Misawa that were in Northern Watch. We will go in the next EAF rotation and be down in SWA. And it is just routine. We are part of the EAF and we do that pretty well and our optempo stays high, just like the rest of the Air Force.

There are some new things that are going on in PACAF that I will talk about just briefly. We have established in the past year a Pacific Operations Support Center that did great work during the initial throes of Enduring Freedom, in bedding down our forces and doing that non-glamorous work that General Jumper talked about, working with JOPES and the TPFD validation process to make sure that the tanker bridge and the bomber flow - that we had everything there that we needed to support them.

And God forbid if something breaks out on the Korean peninsula, they will be key to bedding down the force for the CINC to be able to make that come out right. We also have moved our air operations center that was at Guam and brought it to Hawaii, where it is going through the throes of standing up. We will cut the ribbon here in two weeks. It will reach IOC in a couple of months and it will have the capability to be a no-kidding, full-scale air operations center that can handle everything from the smallest HUMROE to the largest contingency of warfighting that you can think of. It will have the ability to deploy forward, either in part or in whole, depending on what is called for, including aboard-ship if we need to do that. It is a very exciting time, with the new things that are coming in the command and control area of the Pacific and we are anxious to get those standards for our AOCs that General Hornburg is working on and we will fall in line.

At the same time we have this new character in Hawaii, we also have a very mature AOC in Korea called the HTAC in a hardened facility, and they have been doing that business for a very long, long time. It is up and running all the time and it is very mature, although the people turnover in Korea is always underway with a tremendous annual turnover.

We have also stood up a contingency response squadron much like the contingency response group that General Jumper started in Europe and these are the guys that are willing to go and able to go at a moment's notice - to go into an airfield and set up operations, no matter where it is in the world. All it has to do is be semi-secure and they are there. And that capability that exists in our contingency response squadron is maturing. I will be trying to work with General Jumper and the Air Staff to enhance that and maybe make that a little bigger in a more standardized way with the rest of the Air Force here in the coming months.

We have invested a lot in our command and control in the Pacific over the past year. We think we have come a long way to building that infrastructure and spending a lot of non-glamorous bucks on very important things that will enable us to do our job for the future.

When I describe PACAF to PACAF people, what I try to describe is a full-service, forward-based MAJCOM. What I mean by full service is that we bring to our CINC the full range of Air Force capabilities: mobility, fighters, tankers, airlift, bombers, information warfare and space. Everything that the Air Force needs to do its job, we have in some way in the Pacific - to either plan, execute, reach back for, help bed down, and offer that capability to our CINC. I resist being put in some kind of stovepipe that stereotypes us as anything but full-service MAJCOM for our CINC. I think that is the way to think of us, as full partners. These other guys here in the first two rows provide us with the capability and the partnership that we need to do our job in the Pacific. We have been important contributors in Enduring Freedom and Noble Eagle and we will continue to do that.

It has been a learning experience for me for the past year. I have learned a great deal. I have not made my way around anything but a smattering of countries yet, although I have put 200,000 miles on our airplanes in trying to get around. It is a huge place and I am still learning.

The Indian experience that I had last week was most interesting. These are people that want to be open to us. They want a new relationship. They are very friendly, but they have a very different culture. And that is the part that is most interesting as I go around. Airmen are airmen and we understand each other very, very well, no matter what country you talk about.

I learned a lot last week about reincarnation, something I hadn't thought much about. And I finally decided, listening to them talk about reincarnation, that when I was reincarnated, I wanted to come back as my wife's wife. And when I did, I would buy all the jewels and rugs I could possibly find and when I said that openly to an Indian audience, my wife quickly answered: And I would let you. [Laughter]

So while this has been an expensive experience being the PACAF commander, it has been a rewarding experience and I am proud to be on this Air Force team that we have doing the nation's will.
Thank you all very much.

Q. With regard to the Philippines, how have the activities of terrorist operatives changed host country perception of U.S. forces and what is the likelihood of a return by the U.S. Air Force to the Philippines?

General Begert: The Philippines are a very delicate situation in terms of military-to-military relationship, the political aspects of going back to the Philippines with uniformed presence is something that we are working very carefully and treading very lightly on. I don't think you will see us going back to the Philippines in any large numbers. The operation that has been currently defined for us in the Philippines is very narrowly defined, very carefully managed by the political leaders on both sides and our foot print is very small and designed to be so. I think we will be very careful and very diligent before we expand it to anything more than what it is intended to be right now. We are there to help the Philippine armed forces cope with terrorist activity in the southern part of the Philippines. Period.

Q. Have you made any progress on more bases anywhere in the Pacific-Asian rim?

General Begert: The distances in the Pacific are daunting and we don't have a lot of strategic lily pads, at least not in enough places. What we need is over flight clearances that come quickly, blanket over-flights are better than a case-by-case over-flights. What we need is access to bases in order to get to where we are going. We have critical bases in places like Guam and Kadena, Singapore. There are other places that we are exploring and looking at. Very frankly, India is attractive, depending on where you want to go and what it is that you want to do.

I didn't talk about Thailand, but the Thailand infrastructure in Southeast Asia that many of us remember is still there and still very good and in fact they are very good, quiet allies and have been throughout Enduring Freedom. Those bases are very useful to us in Thailand. But in terms of opening new Air Force bases and putting additional force structure in, I don't see a lot of extra force structure laying around the Air Force not doing anything right now.
Would I like to have a bigger Air Force and more force structure in the Pacific to do the job that we have been asked to do? You bet. Would I like to have something better than Block 30 F-16s in Korea? You bet. But that is not my job right now. I am dealing with what I have got. And what I am trying to do is get access to as many places that will allow us in for when we need to get the job done and then work those over-flight clearances, country by country, as much as we can.


Q. Would you speak to the quality of Air Force facilities in South Korea and what is on the top of your list for improvement?
General Begert: Our young airmen that live and work in South Korea are serving our nation in a unique way. The Wolfpack at Kunsan are completely unaccompanied and they turn over every year with the new Wolfpack. The facilities at Kunsan are not great, but everybody there is in the same boat. The facilities aren't bad and they are tolerable, is how I would describe them. I wish they were better.

Morale, conversely, in Kunsan is about as high as you will find anywhere in the Air Force. These are dedicated people who are very focused. You only have to look at that satellite photo to know that they know exactly what their job is, and that is to be ready to fight tonight. And so you find the Wolfpack is normally sky high and morale takes care of itself. They know what they are doing is important and they know they are appreciated for it. And they take care of each other.

Osan is our other big base. We have a number of families there, although most people are on a remote tour, so they get the same kind of turn over. It is a very crowded base. We have got a lot of facility construction going on and we are trying to make some enhancements to housing and some of the other things. The dorms are improving, but we have a long way to go.
Our families that serve over there [South Korea] are uniquely dedicated to our Air Force. Every spouse, every child, gets fitted with a chemical ensemble. They know what the evacuation procedures are. They know what they do if the balloon goes up. They know what to do if there is a chemical attack. And they deserve every kind of facility enhancement we can give them to improve their quality of life. Once again, their service is somewhat unheralded, but I will tell you that each and every person here needs to appreciate what they are doing.

Q. General Hornburg talked about not learning the right lessons from Afghanistan. For example, in the Pacific, how difficult a threat does the North Korean IAD system pose to achieving air dominance?

General Begert: That is a great question. The North Korean threat is substantial. They have had many, many years - decades - to prepare their defenses, which are hardened, which are modern, which are robust, redundant. They have put what meager resources they have in their nation towards their military. It is their only area that is rich, other than the lifestyle of the rich and famous, which is a very small group at the top. But their military gets the priority.

And so the IADs in North Korea are a real challenge. However, it is also known. We have been studying it for a long time. We have been planning for a long time. We have deterred them for a long time and we are still very well prepared to be able to deal with what needs to be done. But it is a very, very difficult challenge.

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