Dr. Grant: I know you all are a little disappointed at not being able to hear General Eberhart and General Handy talk and I share your feeling there. I was looking forward to hearing General Eberhart talk about Northern Command and the unique responsibilities that he faces with that ongoing air campaign of Operation Noble Eagle and many other measures in our homeland defense today. General Handy, no doubt, would have talked about what it takes to put together the ships and the aircraft for Transportation Command to support the global war on terrorism or ongoing operations and the prospect of more.

On the other hand, I was glad to have this opportunity to come and speak to you and that is because I actually did two speeches last week. One was in Kansas City, where General Peterson and I went out and talked to a super group of about 50 business leaders and executives. They took time out of their day to come and hear from the Air Force Association because of their great interest in airpower and in our service and what they are doing today. They were willing to come and listen even for 15 minutes about what airpower is doing in our current world.

But the real reason I was glad to be able to come and talk to you today was that I spoke last week to that group that Secretary Roche so ably characterizes as scholar-operators. That was the whole 600-person class of the Air Command and Staff College. They invited me down to talk to them about something that is very much on their minds.

Before I tell you what that is, I want to tell you a little bit about them. They are a really young group. They are a group that has not had, with one or two exceptions, any experience in Desert Storm. Their experience has come directly from the expeditionary operations, be that in the Balkans, Kosovo or in Afghanistan. When I asked them, "how many of you were over in Operation Enduring Freedom?", probably 40 people in that group raised their hands. Some in khaki uniform; some in green, and of course a lot in light blue. They wanted me to talk to them about something that they had been studying and wrestling with, and that was a very old principle of airpower called centralized control and decentralized execution.

Because, you see, from their experiences, they think that some of the rules of warfare may be changing. They wanted to talk about something that we have begun to call "reach forward," the reverse of using that technology to be able to reach back for information, but also reaching forward for command and control.

And the person on the faculty who invited me to give this talk was one of the first four people to be designated as Predator pilots. He actually volunteered to go down on the faculty and try to spread some of that word about unmanned aerial vehicles and his experiences and to try to also, in his own mind, come to grips with what this new form of warfare is about. So I want to share with you this morning some of the things that we talked about last week as we looked at how the rules of warfare may be changing.

You’ve heard a lot yesterday afternoon and this morning, about this tremendous air component that we have. Air and space power has changed so much since Desert Storm. This is just a representation of the team that has been in place for Operation Enduring Freedom. Look particularly at those words in the middle. While I wanted to put them on the slide, I thought, I can’t just say, "well, persistence is a B-1 that can loiter over the area or it is an AWACS that can control operations." Really, all those four attributes apply to this entire team. What that means, first, is that we see again that airmen, perhaps more than any other branch of the joint force, are the ones who bring forward the new technologies and innovations that start to push the boundaries and rules of joint warfare. We see that there is a great potential for transformation and reshaping of joint operations. And yet we see also some challenges to some principles that we hold dear.

All of this has really been brought together by the fact that we are dealing with some very different new operational realities. Secretary Rumsfeld’s picture is up here for two reasons. One because if you look down at the bottom of the picture, you can see he is talking with his hands, like the naval aviator that he was back in the old days. But it is really because he has constantly reminded us that we must not work at any one operation, be that Enduring Freedom, Noble Eagle or others, and say that that is our template for the future.

We know that the global war on terrorism has brought us many new types of operational realities and that these change some of the things that we are familiar with in terms of dealing with unconventional adversaries in unexpected locations. And in terms of dealing with levels of political goals and strategies that aren’t much like what we saw in Desert Storm or we saw in the past.

What this gives us then is a situation where we are called on to challenge some of the familiar rules of warfare. The concept of reach forward, what does this in a sense really mean? What it tells you is that you can look at the description of these two things that we hold to be very sacred–centralized control and decentralized execution. You can see why they are good. Obviously you want to have unity of effort in any military operation. But on the other hand you want to be able to preserve the tactical fire, the operational sense that can only come from the small unit level or from the pilot in the cockpit. But both of these principles attempt to serve the same purpose and you’ll see it in the last bullet on these two columns. And that is, to maximize the flexibility of air and space power.

We’ve heard, over the course of the last 18 months and 2 years, some frustrations with the way this is being applied. And this was really what the Command and Staff college wanted me to talk about and to help them wrestle with this subject. I put these two quotes up here because they are old and familiar ones. What they get to is an idea, perhaps held by airmen and perhaps held by others, that there is a level of interference, that the idea of centralized control is beginning to turn into something called centralized execution.

As an Army author put it, we had a great a prospect with digital information. We had the prospect of expanding our reach and our flexibility more than we ever have in the past. And yet that digital flow of information also threatens to tarnish that sacred tactical level of control. And that is the frustration that these two quotes speak to. They lead you to that question on the bottom of the last slide, which is: is decentralized execution in danger? Are we in danger of risking part of what it is that makes air and space power the powerful force that it is today?

This is the principle that we hold dear. For those of you who have not read a doctrine publication, you ought to take some time to read this through. It tells you why it is that these principles have become so much a part of the unique airmen’s perspective on joint warfare. You don’t find these principles captured in quite the same way in joint doctrine but they tell you here why they are important. One, centralized control helps you to focus for victory, but delegation of execution authority gives you tactical flexibility.

What is important to understand, though, is where these principles came from. It turns out, if you look back over the history of airpower that Billy Mitchell had something to say about, pretty much everything. And usually what he said applied in some way, in an enduring way, to what is going on today. He gave one of the best descriptions of what decentralized execution is really all about when he talked about not wanting the pursuit pilots in World War One to be bound by what some commander (read in his case, some Army commander) thought they ought to do with their aircraft, but that they ought to be free to engage in combat and to engage in strikes on the ground in the way that best suited the tactics that they knew. This is the beginning of what decentralized execution does. And that tiny little picture down in the corner is taken from the World War One Guide to the American Battle Monuments. It shows what it labels in that book as a German gun destroyed by an aviator. So you begin to see why decentralized execution is so much a part of the rising power of the air component even from its earliest days.

But, Mitchell, who had experience as a commander, saw the value of centralizing control as well. And in this famous first example of a great joint and coalition air campaign involving American forces, the Battle of San Miguel, you can see just the extent to which he used this authority to centralize and brilliantly what went on in that air component.

The number of sorties they flew, I like to put that up there just to show that it wasn’t a small effort. He had a great many aircraft under his control. Some of them were British, some of them were French, some of them were American. They were all the result of a level of joint and coalition training going on, on that front. And because of this he was able to have significant impact in the first uniquely American offense of World War One, the Battle of San Miguel.

But, decentralized execution remains a key to other brilliant successes such as the Battle of Midway. The man up in the corner, of course, is Admiral Chester Nimitz. You think about the stories you hear about this battle. The actual execution of this operation was somewhat divided between two carrier task forces, Admiral Fletcher with Yorktown and Admiral Spruance with Hornet and Enterprise. They acted independently. They made their own decisions about when to launch strikes against the Japanese force, once they spotted it. And through the brilliance of their decisions, particularly of Spruance to launch beyond the range that he was looking for, they were able to achieve a great victory and essentially halt the spread of Japanese naval power.

Around about the same time, our British allies were learning what it took to put airpower together to support a very difficult and elaborate ground operation. And the one who was learning how well they were doing it was the adversary, the Desert Fox, Erwin Rommel himself. Rommel always had a smaller force in North Africa than did the British. But he was very successful with it, until the British under Montgomery began to understand that they needed to centralize their control of the air and apply that as a force against Rommel. And at this battle here, they stopped a German counter attack that threatened their lines. Between getting the logistics together, controlling the supply lines and using airpower, the British were able to turn the tide in North Africa.

And so one of the greatest articulaters of this sacred principle of airpower is this man pictured here, this is Montgomery. He didn’t like women. He didn’t like people who smoked cigarettes and he didn’t like Americans. So when General Eisenhower showed up with his female driver, his four-pack-a-day habit and his American-Kansas accent, it wasn’t exactly love at first sight [laughter].

But one thing that Eisenhower and Montgomery had in common was that they both liked airpower and understood it. And it is Montgomery who is the first to write this famous, often re-quoted quote about not breaking up air into small packets and spreading it across the battlefield, not doing what in fact the Union army for a long time did with their cavalry in the Civil War–assigning it simply to chores and jobs for the component. It was Montgomery who really set out this principle and shortly thereafter it became doctrine for the U.S. Army Air Forces in one of their best ever doctrine manuals, put together in 1943.

Within that came that final edition to the old struggle and question about centralized control and decentralized execution. That was the codicil that air needed to be controlled by an airman. It is an idea that Montgomery had seen, that there would be unique perspective and view on the battle from that airman’s point of view and that that is what you would need to be able to prosecute joint and combined operations.

I was delighted to hear Secretary Roche talk a little bit about the break-out from Normandy because I want to talk about that, too. The picture of the three gentlemen standing there together, one is General Pete Quesada. Behind him there is General Omar Bradley. Now Quesada and Bradley lived right next to each other after they came ashore at Normandy. Their trailers were together. They took meals together. And obviously they worked together. Eisenhower has come to visit them and check up on them and see how they are doing. And you can see from the body language and the stance of that, of what is going on.

These air and ground commanders had a terrific relationship and with this they managed to do many of the tasks that they needed in order to use the air component to be that overwhelming and dominant force to assist the ground forces in coming ashore for the invasion and then in breaking out from that area. It took a lot of tactical innovation and command innovation to do this and Quesada in his employment of what they then called "9^th TAC," the part of 9^th Air Force that was the tactical air command—the P-47s, the P-51s, the P-38s. He did everything in the airmen’s book of tricks to make this work. Sometimes he controlled air centrally to a degree that one perhaps does not realize through his signal stations, first in England and then ashore on the continent. Sometimes he executed air centrally. One day when he heard reports from his pilots that they had spotted a major group of German forces moving in, these six aircraft attacked them, as he had trained them to do, and then he sent on other fighters to go and finish up the job. And he also let them execute in a very decentralized way. One of his greatest innovations was putting tanks and aircraft together by taking a radio and putting it in the tank and taking out the armorer and putting in a pilot so that, as Quesada said, the boys in the area can get it into a language they understand how to support. Having four P-47s at a time over every advancing armored column was part of what made that fierce fighting in Normandy successful and the succeding break-out such a dramatic success.

If you move ahead to Desert Storm, you see again airmen using everything they have in their bag of tricks in order to get the job done. You see again a great deal of centralized control, as Desert Storm becomes the first operation that truly validates the concept of the joint force air component commander. I was reminded recently that there had been a time when they wanted JFACC to stand for the coordinator and not the commander. But that passed by the wayside and with the proof of Desert Storm, the value of centralized control was demonstrated again.

And yet if you talk to some of the F-117 pilots who flew in that conflict, they will tell you that they got a lot of centralized direction about what they were supposed to do. That there were moments when they had only half an hour before stepping to their jets and going to strike targets, when someone up in Riyadh would call them and say, "I want you to hit this target. We have some new pictures. We have some new information."

There was centralized control that was used brilliantly in many ways to even determine a centralized level of execution. And yet as we know, Desert Storm still stands out as, in terms of sorties and the span of control, the largest air operation of recent times. And so decentralized execution was critical to the way this was done.

There is no better example of that than the kill boxes that were based on a Saudi air defense grid. They were used to divide up the Kuwait theater of operations and pieces of Iraq into squares that measured 30 by 30 miles. Within that, flight leads could then attack targets under specific rules of engagement. Whenever possible, they tried to send the same pilots to the same kill boxes so that they could use simply their tactical judgement or input from forward air controllers about what to attack. This worked brilliantly at the Battle of Kafji, which is something I hope you all are very familiar with. In an area that measured really just six kill boxes, there was just a little over 250 sorties applied in the three-day period. That application of airpower stopped an Iraqi advance by three different divisions, attempting to come in, take it, and hold the town of Kafji.

This was something that Quesada would have loved to be able to do, which is to spot moving armor, which he could do, but to spot it at night and stop it this quickly and with the level of efficiency that Quesada and Bradley and Eisenhower could only dream about, and through the principle of centralized control and decentralized execution.

As we move into Operation Allied Force, we get into the territory of what I think we will look back and see as a second level of transformation. We heard often General Jumper and others talk about the need to stress real-time targeting and a lot of it comes from this Allied Force experience. Here is where we begin to put together the persistent ISR platforms, the greater level of precision throughout the entire force that makes it possible to produce a different type of execution of the air war.

On the other hand, I went and talked at Davis-Monthan several months ago and they invited me to the bar afterwards and I talked to several A-10 pilots, all of whom complained about having to call the CAOC to get permission to strike tanks when they were in Allied Force. So that tension about centralization and decentralization is something that really comes to the fore as you see this greatly increasingly level of persistent and high-quality ISR giving a view of the battlespace that is not just in the cockpit of the A-10. And it is not just held by the forward air controllers who may be in the area. It goes back to a combined Arms Operation Center, it goes back to a higher headquarters, so that now there is a greater view of the battle space than we’ve ever had before.

It is good. It is something we are proud of. It is something that has helped in the execution of the air war, but it is the very thing that is pressing against these rules. So you see again in Allied Force, decentralized execution in the Kosovo engagement zone. Highly centralized control and in some cases even what you might call centralized execution through the transmission of real-time targeting changes.

The concept of network centric warfare, which has been ably advanced by the Navy and by others begins to even bring this to a higher level as the idea is to push information out so that it can be executed very rapidly. The naval example is a good one because it looks at linking ships in the battle group, aircraft in the battle group and other sensors so that one ship has such a good information picture that it can fire weapons based on information produced from that whole complex of network-centric warfare. And network-centric warfare taken to one extreme demands a greater level of decentralized execution than we have perhaps ever seen before.

We see this constant tension that is coming through. The Navy has always talked about this a little differently than airmen do. The phrase they use is "centralized planning and decentralized execution." And accompanying that is a term that is unique to them called "command by negation." That is where the commander of the battle group, like a job that Admiral Ellis once had, basically picks what his components and subordinates will do, expects them to do it unless he says otherwise. Command by negation. So again you see how the rules of warfare are changing and with the technology on-hand, will change even more.

As Admiral Ellis said when he talked about, but he didn’t like the term, C⁴ISR—that you needed to know what letter you were speaking about—that applies here, too. Because really it is about the first two C’s of that, command and control. Do you want to centralize these? Do you want to decentralize these? Well, you know you pretty much always want to centralize command. You never want to decentralize command, that contravenes unity of effort and the primary principles of war. But as you see on this chart, most of the rest of this falls into a grey area. There will be times when you must have centralized execution for efficiency. There will be times when you must have decentralized execution for the span of control. And what we see in modern warfare is that we cannot necessarily take one template of rules and apply it. This is why this was a hot topic at Air Command and Staff College, these scholar-operators begin to look at that aggregated level of war and to anticipate going to jobs on staffs where they will be faced with these very issues.

You can do this well and do it every way. The only example here that I really haven’t talked about is that of decentralized control and a great example there is the Battle of Trafalgar, where as the legend goes, Lord Nelson’s captains knew so well what they were supposed to do that even though he was wounded and he was out of communication, they were able to prosecute and have a brilliant success at Trafalgar.

These three tasks—command, control, execution—really require judgement. But there is another message in this as well. In the cases that we’ve examined—they are all historical cases—but they give you some little insights into how these rules of warfare are changing. It has a lot to do, in terms of centralization and decentralization, with the level of complexity of your operation. If you have an operation like Quesada’s, where he is supporting Lightning Joe Collins and the Army and there are a great many troops ashore and in contact and hostiles and friendlies everywhere, you need a level of control that is very different from what happens when you have, perhaps, just special operators working with a small group of forces.

What these bullets really show you is that it depends a lot on the complexity of the operation. It is about what each particular operation requires. As far as joint doctrine, it actually gives the commander a great deal of authority to pick and choose in that grey area and how this will be organized. Those of you who are air warriors and air and space warriors know that that airman’s sacred rule is that there is a unique perspective by airmen. And it is true. And yet on the other hand, what these rules tell you is that a commander can hold OPCON or TACON as high as that commander wants it or delegate it as low as that commander wants it. It says that a commander is perfectly entitled to use his staff in anyway that he sees fit. If that is to issue orders, then that is the way it is. And it says most of all that while you can delegate, nothing you as a commander do will ever absolve you of the responsibilities for the success of that operation. So this wide span of authority is something that must also be taken into account as we look at decentralized execution and centralized control and these changing rules of warfare.

That brings us to the end of the briefing and to looking at Operation Enduring Freedom and this tremendous team—technologically capable, innovative, motivated, successful—that makes it possible to do things in air warfare that we really could not have contemplated even ten years ago.

What we see, captured best in this now very famous picture of this combat controller, Master Sergeant Decker, and that ornery looking horse that the Northern Alliance has given him. What this picture really shows you is the value of decentralized execution. This combat controller is able to call in airpower on demand, airpower that is centrally organized and there loitering there for him. Perhaps it is a B-1. Perhaps it is a pair of F-14s. Perhaps it is F-18s. Maybe it is a B-52. And we see the demand for that in that the increase between the number of flexible targets, targets whose coordinates weren’t known to air crews when they watched during Allied Force, is less than half. During Operation Enduring Freedom, it is darn near all the targets. We see that tremendous change.

And yet, on the other hand, we see Operation Anaconda. This picture actually was not taken during Operation Anaconda. It was taken later. It is a picture of coalition forces who are about to be extracted. But if you look at a couple things here, you can see why I wanted to put this on the slide. One, you can see the dust and the grit as these guys are hunkered down and then behind them you can also see the mountains rising up, looking no doubt as challenging as the heights of Fredericksburg looked to the Union Army in that great battle.

What we see in Operation Anaconda is a whole new challenge, but it goes directly to the challenges that would have been very familiar to Quesada and Bradley and Eisenhower and that is the challenge about how to command and control in a tight operating space with many different components operating together—air, special forces, ground forces—in a battlespace where there is more resistence than is expected. It is coming differently than what you thought might have happened as the situation developed. And where in this case the air component has a major challenge, which is to do close air support with which they do a very good job, it is do to interdiction, some of it preplanned, some of it done on the basis of airborne alert. And to go ahead and also handle what was so unique about this conflict, time-sensitive targets. Very broad term, but often meaning in Afghanistan targets that were, for one reason or another, so sensitive that they did require approval from the higher headquarters in Tampa or perhaps even beyond.

What we see then in Anaconda is a reality of the type of things that we face in the global war on terrorism. And what we see here in some ways is that that tension of decentralized execution and centralized control remains a huge part of the success of applying airpower in battle. One of the major problems in Anaconda, what the Army has talked about in one of its lessons-learned reports is the sheer number of controllers who were there on the ground in this small space. And the overlapping and immediate requests for airpower that came in. I think that, as we go on and study this operation and others like it, what we’ll see is that again you cannot apply one single rule but you must look to the level of organization and coordination, the level of complexity, of that theater component force.

Sometimes you are going to need rules that look like they looked for Normandy, where you use everything in the bag of tricks. Sometimes it is going to be simpler as it was, in some ways, for the master sergeant on the horse, able to call in aircraft and really knowing where friendlies were and where the enemies were and having a very small group of friendlies in place. You’ll see different levels of complexity in any future operations as we’ve seen in the near-recent past.

The ideal—oh Billy Mitchell always puts it so well, he talks about the ideal being for the airman to look down from this battle, in the clouds, and to understand every distinct element of the operation. And by that he means understanding the ground plan of action. If it was joint warfare today, it would mean understanding the plan of action of all the components and yet he says at the end so nicely the battle can be changed by the course of what that lieutenant pilot does. So you must have your centralized control. You must have your ability to execute centrally. You must have your ability to execute decentrally.

In this era, perhaps more than in others, the different types of operations we do will continue to create churn and change in the rules of warfare. These three columns just very roughly show you the typical number of strike sorties flown during an average day on each of these three operations. It shows you the great need for understanding that the span of control will change. And that your command arrangements will change. And that what you must do will change.

In this box it talks a little about targeting, again shows you how broad the guidance is. You have to target in accordance with the rules of war. You have to target based on operational necessity. So that commander’s job is very difficult. Unity of effort. But tempo and initiative. Synchronization where it is appropriate. Simultaneous lines of action, where it is appropriate. This will be the stock and trade of air and space power in ongoing operations.

Finally, I want to end with another thought, that a lot of times—and this was very true of the group at ACSC—what we see as the conflict between rules can be something of a misunderstanding. Because, the most important C in C⁴ISR is, was and remains command. And no one talks better about command relationships than Dwight Eisenhower, who was a master of them. He talked about this actually to a War College audience after World War II, in 1950. He talked about how it is important to build these relationships and he says here, you can’t command this level of cooperation. You have to build it up. And if you think back on the experiences he had with Montgomery in dealing with allies, he was soon to deal with Montgomery again when they made him his deputy at NATO. But what Eisenhower says is really true, that it is about building these relationships and these component and command relationships.

And so when you have an issue that confuses, creates tension and questions about centralized execution or decentralized execution or centralized control, it is really an issue of the hard and necessary work of building command relationships and trust.

This will never be an easy issue. It will never be easy to know whether you should give execution authority out to that pilot in the cockpit or out to that air battle management platform or when, due to the goals of your operation and the political constraints that are there, you have to hold it closely. It wasn’t easy for Grant, who said in his orders, "I am not going to tell you what you need to do. But as soon as you figure it out, please let me know right away." That tension that you see is always part of what makes command a challenge. And so while there are unique rules of air warfare, this tension will be with us.

Billy Mitchell really said it best: airmen have unique responsibilities. And so I told the class at Air Command and Staff College that the best thing that they could do in looking at the changing rules of air warfare was to remember to think about them. That there was no one set of rules. That these were guidelines and principles. But that there was no one template that would always apply to every situation. That tension of centralization and decentralization will be with us for a long time. And yet, what it shows you is that with the promise of technology today, and the challenges that we have to face, there really is a unique responsibility of airmen to apply air and space power as they best can in support of joint and combined operations. For, it is in joint and combined operations that the success of airpower is ultimately judged.

Q: How do you see today’s increased technological capabilities in the area of comm, battle space awareness, etc., contributing to the optimum balance between centralized control and decentralized execution?

Dr. Grant: The increased technologies give airmen a lot of the (inaudible) that they’ve wanted for a long time. And the ability to bring fire power to bear more quickly, which is what this is really all about, is greatly enhanced by these technologies. But it places an ever higher premium on judgement as to when there are times that certain targets require handling in ways that other targets do not and what you see really then is that centralization and decentralization are always going to be part of that struggle as we look for ways to best use and apply the technology that you bring us.

Q: When you have centralized control will that equal centralized responsibility, and we have a fratricide, talk about the accountability issue.

Dr. Grant: Accountability. That quote from joint doctrine really put it well. It is always the commander’s responsibility at some final level and I think we’ve seen, particularly instances like the USS Cole where the commander of the Atlantic Fleet came right out and said, "I am the one who is to be held responsible"—Admiral Natter. He said "I am the one who is to be held responsible if anyone must be held responsible." That is one of those things with command that you simply can’t give away. On the other hand, there is a level of accountability that can be brilliantly exercised by much lower ranking officers as well. And one of the stories that one hears from Afghanistan sometimes, kind of told in different forms, almost becoming an urban legend, is the question of, well, we were about ready to attack a target and then we realized that it was a friendly. These guys had blended in so well that this really wasn’t a bad guy, a part of the Al Qaeda, this is one of our Northern Alliance members or this was one of our American forces in there helping support them. And some young officer in the story always says, "no, no, don’t attack, that is one of ours." So that level of accountability is always there, but in the end it is the commander’s responsibility.

Q: Is reach forward essentially a technology challenge or a leadership challenge?

Dr. Grant: It is both, but obviously, in the final analysis, it is always a leadership challenge. The way that the technologies of warfare have changed from the times of Alexander the Great right up through today, if we held only technology responsible, that would be a sorry situation. It always is a leadership challenge. And there will always be cases where it is not clear what to do—always a leadership challenge.

Q: Considering the high stakes of modern warfare and the potential for mass destruction, is the concept of centralized control and decentralized execution compatible today?

Dr. Grant: Is it compatible today? Yes. That almost goes back to the question about accountability because we have not really had to think about weapons of mass destruction and the way that we are thinking about it now, or beginning to think about it. What it does is it places greater responsibility at all of those levels. There is greater responsibility for the centralized level of control, for centralized execution when that is a necessary part of an operation. But there is also a great responsibility at that final pointy end of the spear with the pilot or the soldier or sailor who is doing that decentralized execution. That is something that they have to keep in mind as to how best to handle those situations, too.

Q: You recently gave an excellent presentation on airpower and the new American way of war, which talked about speed and technology and the capabilities we have today. Considering the efficiency of our forces, considering the massive build-up of ground forces in the Gulf, in your view, is America returning to its old way of war?

Dr. Grant: We will never go back. Our war has been about airpower for so long. It is something that Eisenhower understood very well. And it is something that all that we do in the future depends on. We depend today more on air and space power than we have at any point in time and just the fact that I can stand up here and talk about the fine points in the challenges of centralizing and decentralizing and who calls the target and who gives the rules of engagement, really is an example, if you pull back from it, of the great power that we have been able to muster through air and space power and why it is that we can contemplate doing operations overseas in different types of theaters and why we can do operations at home at the same time. The Secretary and General Jumper both talked a little bit about Operation Noble Eagle. And that alone would give you enough examples about the value of airpower as the first line of defense of our country, about the need for centralized control, obviously to get that picture of the air space, but about decentralized execution, too. There was a great story about 9/11 of a fighter unit called up from the mid-west and the pilot said to the control sector he was talking to, the Western Air Defense Sector, he said, "I am here. I have two jets. We have heaters, we have AMRAAMs, what do you want us to do?" That really shows both from the decentralized side and the centralized side why it is that we can expect airpower to perform under these demanding new circumstances.

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