Lieutenant General Roger G. DeKok
Air Force Space Command, Vice Commander
AFA National Symposium--Los Angeles

November 16, 2001

First of all, I have to tell you, General Lyles bumped me during General Jumper’s conclusion there and he said, "boy, I sure hope you are next." What he was trying to say was, "how do you follow something like that?" What an incredibly compelling vision, I think, our chief left for us here.

Having spent some time in this community and particularly this community here in Los Angeles, I know there are a lot of you in the audience who are sitting out there saying, "boy, we got to do that." How do we do that? How do we do that machine-to-machine level interface between air and space platforms? How do we think about that?

I know you are saying that our money and our funding and our direction all flows down through program channels and the chief is absolutely right, that is the way the entire system has been created to function today. It doesn’t talk about anybody else’s program. It talks about your program and it charges you to optimize the cost, schedule and performance of your individual space program. It doesn’t talk about the programs you have to interface with. It doesn’t talk about the things that have to exploit the data or the products that your system produces. It doesn’t talk about the effects that you are designed to create in the battle space. It talks about cost, schedule and performance of your program.

The vision the chief laid out for you is mind expanding and it is going to require different processes. It is going to require a different reward system than we have today. Because, it is designed to do something very different. It is designed to transcend the issue of platforms and cost, schedule and performance. It is designed to accomplish affects in the battle space. That is an exciting challenge.

I think everyone here in the audience ought to be excited by that challenge, despite the daunting obstacles that you think might exist today, we can achieve this. We can do it. It is going to require a different way of thinking. It is going to require a different way, perhaps even of organizing ourselves, to get things done. But it is a vision that I think all of us can get excited about.

Well, I wish I could talk a lot longer about that topic. But I am here to talk a little bit about the evolution of space systems, a topic that I’ve had an opportunity to witness for 33 years. It is always wonderful to be back here in Southern California among friends, a great many friends. But particularly the friends in the Air Force Association. As General Shaud said, I’ve had the privilege of being here in Los Angeles, being the host commander, as has General Lyles, and I’ve had an opportunity to see both National AFA and the local Schriever AFA Chapter, what they do for our Air Force and what it takes to put this Air Force Association symposium on.

I think I join many of you in the disappointment, but the very understandable decision that was made back in September, not to hold the national convention in Washington, DC. So we have an opportunity to gather as aerospace warriors here in November in Los Angeles and talk about our U.S. Air Force and to talk about aerospace warriors and to talk about the future and I am greatly honored to be here at this podium.

I am here on behalf of General Ed Eberhart and the 30,000 men and women of Air Force Space Command. He’ll be here in about two hours, I’m told. He certainly will be here in time to join us for lunch. I am honored to be here in his stead today and to share a few thoughts with you.

I freely admit that General Jumper is a very difficult act to follow, but that is why he is our chief. That is why he is the right chief to establish the vision for our Air Force as it proceeds into the 21^st century. I think the theme of this symposium is exactly right as we work our way into that 21^st century. The chief talked about a lot of transformational themes today. I think that what he is talking about can be labeled nothing other than transformation. It is transformation that has to take place in the thinking of our Air Force. It is transformation that has to take place in the thinking of the Department of Defense and frankly it is transformation that will have to take place if we are to be successful in the halls of Congress as well.

Today, I’d like to try to put some of that into perspective and talk about the evolution of space and how it applies to that sort of a vision. Webster defines evolution as "a gradual process." It is something that changes into a different and usually more complex or a better form. No doubt, I think, all of us would agree, that space has evolved for the better. Capabilities and effects and people have evolved in fundamental ways over the past 40 years. In some phases, there have been rapid surges and in other phases it has been far more gradual evolution. 11 September, I predict, will stand as one of those times that is going to be a fundamental date in the evolution of air and space power.

It is interesting and really fundamentally tragic that we lost more Americans in those attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in this one single attack than we lost in terms of Americans in almost anywhere in our history. In the entire American Revolution, from 1775 to 1781, we lost about 4,400 American citizens and soldiers. In the battle of Antietam, one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War, we lost 3,654 Union and Confederate soldiers. In Pearl Harbor, which has often been compared to the 11^th of September, we had 2,388 combat losses. On D-Day, perhaps one of the bloodiest days in American history, 4,900 total allied, not just U.S., soldiers were killed – U.S., British, French and Canadian. During the Inchon landing, a week-long grueling battle that is celebrated in our history, 670 allied forces were killed. But on the 11^th September 2001, in a period of about three hours, about five thousand Americans, we still don’t know the full total, lost their life as a result of an international terrorist act.

The war on terrorism that has ensued since that time is going to take the full gamut of our military capabilities and our intelligence capabilities and our diplomatic prowess and our economic ability to interdict that enemy. Now the chief mentioned already what air and space capabilities are bringing to that fight. I’ll add a little bit more to that later, but I’d like to step back now about 50 years. I’d like to talk a little bit about some of the origins of military space capabilities, which began in this very area here in Southern California.

In 1949, our adversary at the time tested their first atomic bomb. In 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik. We were shocked at that event as a nation. We took great pride in American scientific prowess and we found out that somebody had achieved a milestone before us. The space race was on and we weren’t in first place. The threat of nuclear attack and the fear of losing the space race was the genesis of the space dominance that we enjoy today. Early efforts, like Operation Paper Clip and Von Noyman’s teapot study, which helped establish the Western Development Center here in Southern California under General Bernie Schriever, were the seed corn for that national commitment to space. As a result, we built the most impressive nuclear deterrent force the world has ever seen. In fact, as we sit here today, Air Force Space Command combat crews are sitting on alert in the heartland of America and they still are the strategic bedrock of our national security.

In that time period, we had a president who embarked on a quest to put the first American on the moon. We achieved that challenge. That seed corn took root. In the midst of all this, not as heralded as our manned space flight, activities, largely orchestrated by NASA, began. Our Corona Satellite Program became our first reconnaissance capability to look deep into adversary territory. Our first warning satellite, Midas, in 1963, demonstrated the capability to detect ballistic missile launches which would occur anywhere in the world. Our defense satellite communications programs were born in the mid and late-1960s. They gave us the first capability to link strategic communication from fixed bases. Those were only our early capabilities, but what they demonstrated for us was the potential that space systems had to make a difference.

There were a couple major challenges that affected our early evolution. Exploiting the technology, which was by no means a certain thing. Finding the money because these were very expensive systems and there is always opportunity cost in investing in new capability. And there was a strategic litmus test. Within time, smart people, accompanied by a national commitment, and a vision for the future, those early achievements gave way to the kinds of capabilities that we enjoy in space today.

We like to talk about them in four categories. We like to talk about force enhancement, the enabling capability that we try to provide our war fighters. Our space support capabilities, getting those space systems into the operational regime and controlling them once they get there. Force application, which is done through space, not in space, and is represented by our intercontinental ballistic missile forces and then, finally and perhaps most importantly now, is our capability to exercise space control, to assure our access to our capabilities and deny that same advantage to our adversaries. In that period of time, our Department of Defense space organizations themselves were growing and evolving. Air Force Space Command was established in 1982. U.S. Space Command was established in 1985 and I submit perhaps the most fundamental change occurred back here on the first of October in 2001 and that has been the realignment of the Space and Missile Systems Center and Air Force Space Command.

This is very important – don’t let my examples con you into thinking that military space and air-and-space integration for that matter is about systems, missions or organizations. It is not. As the chief said, it is about operational effects. It is about conops. It is about the capability that we provide and the capabilities that we integrate. Let me say that again. It is about the capabilities that we provide in the battle space.

Up until Desert Storm, our space and research-and-development activities were jaundiced by a relatively narrow view of our space contributions to the fight. We were very short-term focused. We weren’t thinking about how to find, fix, track, engage and assess. No, we weren’t. When the chief said we were beating our drums within the space tribe, he is absolutely right. Many things have changed since that time and we are only about 10 years after Desert Storm, but we’ve made great strides and it shows us what we can do when we have a common vision and we put our minds together to do it. My point is that evolution has to continue. It has to continue or ultimately like all evolutionary systems, we will perish.

Let’s talk a little bit about military space today. In terms of the military impact, Desert Storm was for space what World War I was for air power. I would never stand up here at this podium and claim that Desert Storm was a space war. I think that far overstates the contribution space systems made. But what it did was it taught us a very valuable lesson of the potential of space to make a difference. And no longer just in a strategic sense, which is the origin of space systems, but in a theater sense, at the operational and tactical level of warfare. That is something we have to build upon.

Now, we took many lessons from the contributions of space during Desert Storm. We pushed the throttle forward, as my boss likes to say, on force enhancement. I think we see the future fairly clearly in the area of enabling capability. We are planning and developing and fielding space capabilities that are far better integrated into the operational and tactical level of warfare than they’ve ever been before. The focus on space integration paid off in the air war over Serbia. Some would reasonably argue that space systems evolved from importance to dependence.

One example that I’d like to give – and I’m sure most of you are familiar with this example – but let’s take those B-2 bombers from Nob Noster, Missouri, Whiteman Air Force Base, as the chief mentioned. They received weather and intel and communications from space-based platforms operated or facilitated by Air Force Space Command warriors. They dropped bombs that were guided to their targets by a system, the NAVSTAR global positioning system, that is operated out of Schriever Air Force Base in Colorado Springs. We are flying similar B-2 sorties in Operation Enduring Freedom today except this time, instead of 30-hour missions, they are 44-hour missions. Now we are concentrating less on platforms and more on effects.

Well, what effects are we concentrating on? Effects such as the predictive battle space awareness that the chief talks about. Effects such as tactics, techniques and procedures to optimize the accuracy and lethality of our shooters. We are talking about maintaining situational awareness and vigilant warning on the battle space for active defense against theater ballistic missiles and ultimately the capability to kill the launchers. We are talking about minimizing the theater footprints and achieving reach-back through widely available broadband communication systems. And, as the chief indicated, we have got space warriors deployed forward to provide that capability in the place that it matters most to the Air Force, the air and space operations centers, for people who understand not only the capabilities of space systems – and this is important – but also the limitations of space systems.

Space systems can’t do everything. Sometimes those in the space community promise more than we can deliver. We establish expectations that we cannot fulfill. It is important that we have people in those operational centers who understand not only what our space systems can do, but what they can’t do and to take those lessons learned and make that next generation of space systems more capable and more integrated at the operational and tactical level of warfare.

Let’s talk just a moment about space systems for tomorrow. To realize that full potential of horizontally-integrated air and space force, we must change in many other areas. I asked you earlier not to be fooled by talk about platforms. We need to think about missions and operations and organizations. But platforms are still critical to our success. That is what we produce. But we have to produce them in a different manner than we produce them today.

For far too long we’ve been on a slippery slope talking about acquiring systems and capabilities and what we do is we develop requirements in the requirements communities, we throw those requirements over the fence and then pick a number – five or six years later. Developers throw capabilities back over that fence to operators and then we decide how well people have done. Sometimes operators change the rules of the game in the fourth quarter and there is no opportunity for developers to react to those changes in capabilities. We are taking, with the realignment of space and missile systems center and Air Force Space Command, the opportunity to fix that. That fence is gone. We are a combined team of operators and acquirers who are going to establish a new generation of space professionals who are going to be able to do that job without the artificial divisions that have separated the operational and the acquisition communities.

In a way, this is going back to the future. This is going back to the time that existed in the 60s and 70s before the establishment of Air Force Space Command and we are going to do it better this time. This is the promise that we have to make to each other.

We are talking now about a cradle-to-grave organization, an organization that is focused on effects. It has to acquire new knowledge. It has to understand this horizontal integration, the systems it has to interface with it and, most importantly, the command and control that is going to exercise this capability. In my experience, that has not been the forte of our community and we can and we must do it better. This will not happen overnight. We don’t train our people correctly. We don’t necessarily organize them correctly. And we certainly don’t have the reward systems in place to allow this to happen and that is our challenge.

We are under no illusions in this process. We know the world is watching to make sure that we get this right – to see if we can indeed put the ball in the end zone. And if we get it right, there may be others who copy our play book. We are committed to this course. We see it as a necessary evolutionary step.

I talked a little bit about capitalizing the force-enhancement capability of space in the aftermath of Desert Storm. There is another capability that has to be pushed forward. As my boss likes to say, we are not going to cut back on the throttle for force enhancement. But we need to push it up, on the throttle, for space control.

Our space warfighting capabilities, ensuring our success and denying the same success to adversaries, is dependent upon the capability that we have vested in space today. Every potential adversary out there who contemplates challenging the power and might of the United States of America recognizes that fact.

Dependence equals vulnerability and it creates a military imperative to ensure that those wonderful capabilities that we produced are adequately protected and defended. Some people, like the space commission report, warn us of a Pearl Harbor in space. They assert that it would be every bit as devastating to our national capability as the 7^th of December 1941, if it occurs. So, unlike Pearl Harbor, shame on us if it occurs because we have been warned that the potential exists. We have time to remedy the problems that we have and indeed we will do this as well.

Space warriors who understand both acquisition and operations are rare indeed. But we must develop more of them who have the capability to understand the importance of horizontal integration in the battle space. Someone once said, "don’t be afraid to take a big step when a big one is needed." You can’t cross a chasm in two jumps. We face a couple of chasms in this process. There is the tribal chasm that the chief has talked about. We speak sometimes different languages. We have different perspectives and we need to evolve and grow as a tribe in order to overcome those limitations. Tribes aren’t all bad. Tribes are good. They facilitate communication. They provide bonding. They provide shared experience. But we have to be big enough to get outside that tribe and it is something we can and must do.

Then we’ve got a chasm between our operators and our acquirers that has existed in the space business at least for the last 20 years of my career. So we’ve got some big evolutionary steps in front of us. They involve major cultural shifts and they involve changes in the way we train and educate our people at all levels.

One final thought. Air Force Space Command also now has a bigger role now in defining our scientific and technological priorities. It makes perfect sense, I’d submit, in light of the changes that I’ve talked to here earlier. With the cadre of true space professionals and a cradle-to-grave organization, we will understand and be better focused on what we need to provide the kinds of effects that we are charged with creating. Then we also have to understand the technological challenges associated with integrating.

I saw many of you here in the audience, when the chief talked about the capability to communicate directly between satellites and platforms and systems and you were all thinking, "how do we do that?" Then I expect, as you reflected more, you say, "well, I think I know how to do it. No one has ever told me to do that before. No one has ever given me any direction. No one has ever given me any funding to do that. But you know, if they did, I think I could do that. I think I could integrate with them. I might have to talk to someone at ASC or ESC, heaven forbid that someone here at SMC would talk to someone at ESC or ASC, but I think that if I could talk to them, I could do machine-to-machine level interface." That is the challenge. That is the real vision that the chief is laying out for us. If our organizations need to evolve to make that a reality, so be it.

Just because Air Force Space Command and SMC are now separate from Air Force Materiel Command, that doesn’t mean that these organizations don’t have to work together. In fact, it has probably made it more important that these organizations work closely together. I know General Les Lyles will talk about that a little bit in his talk. We won’t evolve without a solid foundation in research and development and modernization and recapitalization. The Air Force focus for those activities will remain in Air Force Materiel Command. That partnership between these commands – Air Force Space Command and Air Force Materiel Command are going to be more important, not less important in the future as a result of the organizational changes that we’ve made.

It is said that the definition of a good speech is the one that has a good beginning and a reasonable ending and that they are pretty close together. I am going to finish this here in a minute.

Let me close by saying these are incredibly exciting times for our air and space team. The Air Force Space Command team is ready to provide the next evolutionary steps in this journey. We are building a cradle-to-grave organization with emphasis on war fighting, with emphasis on developing a cadre of space professionals that understand the full domain of their responsibilities. With the help of our chief and our secretary, we will break down those top tribal barriers, those cultural barriers, that get in the way of achieving this vision.

Again, thank you for inviting me out to Los Angeles and General Shaud, if you have any questions, I’d be pleased to take them now.

Q: How will Air Force Space Command bridge the gulf between systems operated by the NRO and those operated by the Air Force?

General DeKok: That is a very good question. Of course, the premise for that comes out of our space commission report, which offered some possibilities in that regard. It talked about perhaps the NRO needs to refocus its energies on the cutting edge kind of capabilities that made the NRO organization that it is today. Perhaps it needs to relinquish some of the more routine operational functions associated with sustaining and operating systems to Air Force Space Command. I believe that is a reasonable premise. It is not as straightforward as some people might imagine. I know there are others here in the audience that know exactly what the challenges associated with that might be. But I think that is something, as our new under secretary gets confirmed, a single individual will help bridge the cultural differences that again exist – as our space community doesn’t enjoy a single culture.

There is a culture separate in the NRO and there is a culture separate in Air Force Space and indeed there are cultural differences in the other services as we do the kind of out-reach that the chief talked about. This will be a challenge but I think there are opportunities out there to provide additional focus for the NRO that we’ll have to explore, but exactly what that pathway will take, I am not prepared to speculate right now.

Q: Discuss the long-time viability of the triad of air, land and sea-based nuclear weapons, particularly in light of the conversations between our president and Putin.

General DeKok: You are asking me to speculate what is happening at Crawford, Texas as we are sitting there. I am not prepared to do that. We do know that the administration is prepared to advance lower numbers of strategic nuclear weapons as part of a new relationship between ourselves and the Russian nation as a result of very different and changed world circumstances. But we continue to believe that the land-based ICBM, particularly as it is downloaded to single re-entry vehicle configurations, provides incredible advantages to our country. We don’t know the final numbers that are going to come out of that. So we don’t know the force structure that might exist. All of the numbers that I have personally seen would continue to preserve the ICBM force structure, if not identically to how it exists today, with the provision that it may be downloaded to single-reentry vehicle systems. We are reasonably confident that the land-based ICBM deterrent that has served us so well for the past 40 some years is going to continue on to the future. But it does need to be modernized. In fact, we are working the analysis of alternatives that would allow us to put the next generation of land-based ICBMs into the requirements and production capability of this nation. Because while we are embarked on extending Minuteman right now for the next 20 years, it is time right now to think about the follow-on to that system.

Q: If we had a SBIRS capability today, to what extent would it enhance the effectiveness of U.S. forces participating in Operation Enduring Freedom? How critical is it to the future force?

General DeKok: SBIRS brings exciting new capabilities to the battle space. What it primarily brings – and in this particular conflict, I don’t think the threat of theater ballistic missiles or strategic missiles, which is probably one of the core missions of SBIRS, comes into play. But people forget that SBIRS has far more capability than just as a missile warning sensor. The intelligence capabilities, the battle space characterization kinds of capabilities that this fire-improved sensor is going to bring to our national security equation, I think, would have important advantages. It would have advantages in terms of, we call it "battle damage assessment." Maybe we ought to figure out another term for this. But the capabilities of the IR focal plan in a staring mode to provide intelligence information that has anything to do with a heat source, is going to be, I predict, used in fundamental ways that we’ve only begun to think of. When we get that kind of capability in orbit, we are going to discover all kinds of applications in a horizontal sense across the battle space that we never envisioned because we’ve never had experience with that kind of phenomenology and that kind of timeliness and that kind of sensitivity. It is very difficult to speculate exactly how powerful that will turn out to be.

Q: Considering the events of September 11, what preventative measures must the nation take to protect critical military and commercial space assets having to do with critical information protection?

General DeKok: It is incredibly important that we find a full dimensional capability to protect these national assets. For too long I think most of us in the continental United States have been lulled into a false sense of security that if you were based in the continental United States, there wasn’t any threat to your systems. I think September 11^th changed that. They showed that a determined adversary, particularly one who does not mind committing suicide in the course of achieving their objectives, has incredible capability to destroy the icons of what we consider to be our national treasures. Our space systems are among those and I think that we must and can learn lessons in the entire architecture of how we build systems that will not put single point vulnerabilities into our capability. We need to look at both our ground locations, our link locations and, ultimately even our satellites themselves will not be immune from those who elect to try to interfere with those capabilities. We are going to have to really push that throttle up and I submit to you that protecting our space systems probably has to be one of our foremost objectives as we move into the next decade.

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