General Hawley: As a retired four-star, there is one question you get more frequently than any other – it is, what are you doing? When I retired, I thought about what I wanted to do. I had this group working for me – they call it the Commander’s Action Group. I thought, this is what I would like to do in retirement. You get a bunch of these guys and they go up in the top floor of the ACC [Air Combat Command] headquarters building and they think great thoughts and they build great Powerpoint briefings. This is the way to live – no pressure. You give General John Jumper a speech every now and then or something. It works pretty good. I sought out that kind of employment and it just happened that Dave Deptula was building a commander’s action group at the time to support the QDR. He had some great young talent – a guy named John Backhsees from Hick and Associates and I got recruited to join this group and that is what led to this.

I appreciate all the credit John, but really I am just a mouthpiece for this thing. Jumper is the guy who owns the concepts.

With that, I’d like to tell you a little bit about this idea that I think is pretty timely. It helps us or has the potential to help our CINCs deal with a looming problem that we as a nation will face and that is, how do we continue to project combat power to the areas of the world where we need to influence events in order to protect our national interest. It is called Global Reconnaissance-Strike [GRS]. We call it a joint leading-edge power projection concept. I think it is certainly a concept that is aerospace-power centric. I would argue that if we face these what are described as asymmetric threats, the way to counter them is with our asymmetric advantage and our asymmetric advantage is aerospace power. You’ll see a lot of aerospace centricity here, but it is not alone. I think Speedy said it yesterday--we are never going to fight unilaterally. We are going to fight combined and we are going to fight joint. This is a joint concept.

Our vision of the future as articulated by NDPs [National Defense Panels] and Joint Vision documents continues to rest on our ability to project combat power abroad to defense our interests. You can read all these quotes. But the point is, we defend our interests by projecting power abroad. We don’t fight in New York harbor. We fight someplace else.

We do it like this: we have a continually deployed forward presence. We rely on that as foundation of our ability to influence events in the world. The Navy calls it Naval Forward Presence, but keep in mind that we’ve got about 100,000 troops forward-deployed all the way across the Pacific. Large numbers of people in Europe. Large numbers of folks camped out in the Middle East. Everywhere where we think our interests are threatened. We rely on warning time to allow us to deploy forces to augment those forward-deployed people and build up to the point where we’ve got the kind of combat power forward that we need to counter a threat. Then we fight our wars, we win them, we come home and we reconstitute. That is kind of the way all of our operations plans work. You heard a couple of them mentioned yesterday – 50-27; 41-02, which is not defunct. They all worked that way.

But there is a problem in that those war plans rely on warning time and access to the ports, the littoral waters, the airfields that we need to use in order to get that combat power projected forward. Plenty of people question whether that warning time and access are going to be there when and where we need it in the future to include our current president, George Bush, who gave a speech down at the Citadel that highlighted some of these issues. The presence of ballistic and cruise missiles that could threaten our ability to project these forces forward. That threat looks something like this and it is what you might call a triad. The triad is commercially available C4ISR [command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance].

The fact is, you can buy very good photo intelligence off the Internet today with very good resolutions. Weapons of mass destruction that are proliferating at an uncomfortably fast pace, very advanced conventional weapons both offensive and defensive and, of course, this is not a problem that only affects air power or land power. There is a significant anti-access threat that affects our ability to project maritime power forward as well, as highlighted in a recent GAO report that pointed out that these advanced sea mines, cruise missiles, sea-skimming anti-ship missiles and so on seriously threaten our ability to move our fleets forward where we need them to operate.

And, unpleasantly, as pointed out by a Defense Science Board study on globalization security a couple of years ago, lots of countries are working on this. In fact, they concluded that a country that was willing to commit as little as $10 billion a year to a total national security budget and commit about 20 percent of that – a couple of billion dollars a year — to acquiring these kinds of anti-access threats, could in less than a decade, develop very robust anti-access capabilities that they could use in this asymmetric fashion to threaten our ability to project combat power abroad and protect our interests.

If that is fact, and certainly I believe it is, then we might face a situation much like this where we don’t have the warning time. Where people learn the lessons of the Gulf War and use surprise attack. And we don’t have access to those littoral waters, ports and airfields that we need. We could face a situation like this where our ability to build up combat power in the theater is seriously degraded and we might face a situation far more like Normandy in World War II, than that very benign deployment that we experienced during the Gulf War in 1990 and 1991.

The challenge, as pointed out by the NDP in 1997, is to find new ways to do our business, ways that allow us to react more quickly and that rely on smaller forces that don’t require so much theater infrastructure, so much lift and so much time in order to have effect. They suggested that we put greater emphasis on operating at extended ranges. That is what this is all about.

We sat down and we started to come up with an idea for how do you deal with this? What would you, as a CINC, if you were a geographic CINC in the Pacific or Europe or Southwest Asia. What would you do in order to deal with this? We concluded that the way to do it is to mass firepower effects from outside the theater rather than our traditional approach of shipping mountains of men and materiel and equipment to the theater, building up this huge and vulnerable base of combat power before you begin to deal with the threat. You use those firepower effects which you mass from outside the theater and from the sea in order to directly counter that enemy aggression that is threatening our interests, to neutralize the anti-access threats, those theater ballistic missiles, those cruise missiles, submarines, advanced sea mines, so on and then enable the safe deployment of the follow-on joint force which will, as General Jumper said yesterday, allow you to bring that persistent combat power to bear in the theater and win the war.

We think this concept allows our CINCs to directly counter the anti-access threat while simultaneously attacking his centers of gravity and might even, as John said yesterday, prompt him to quit before we have to engage on a massive scale. The idea of this is not that we think this is a war-winning piece. It is the piece that enables everything else in our arsenal of combat power. It is that sharpen the point of the spear concept that we are after.

What this relies on is a set of forces that the CINC has readily available on day one or can get to the theater very quickly that don’t rely on a lot of theater infrastructure. It is the forces that he already has in the theater, those forces that we keep forward deployed all the time and of course many people believe that we are going to have to keep those forces forward deployed. That we are going to have to keep some access to places like Kadena Air Base, Okinawa and airfields in SWA and so on for the foreseeable future. We are going to have to work hard on that. It relies on forces that can get there quickly, those naval forces that are in the region and can quickly move to the theater in question. Long-range bombers which can be present virtually anyplace in the world inside of 24 hours. Those forces, that subset of the total set of forces, that we bring to the table that would enable this concept.

Then, what we do is use those, the bombers, the Special Operation Forces, the very light and lethal land forces that the Army is building through their transformation. We use the emerging ability to defend ourselves against cruise and ballistic missiles, things like the Air Borne Laser, Theater High-Altitude Air Defense, and Navy Upper Tier in order to defend that very small set of forces that have to be forward no matter what you do.

You have to keep in mind that no matter how you are going to project power, you have to be able to target it for effects and you’ve got to be able to assess the effects of your operations. Many people forget that. They talk about how they can deliver cruise missiles from afar and so on and so forth and we don’t need anybody forward deployed. Not true. Not true today at least. Because at least you have to have Rivet Joint forward. You have got to have AWACS forward to manage the air battle. You have got to have Joint STARS forward in order to provide those ground-moving target indications that you need in order to find and fix those mobile targets that are so important to us. All those systems have to operate very close to the threat. They have to operate basically within about a hundred miles of the threat in order to be effective. U-2s, Global Hawks, Predators you name it. What do those things need? They need a benign environment in which to operate. So, you have to deploy forward those things that can provide that benign environment in which those systems can operate. What is that? That is a very capable, dominant fighter that can be deployed in small numbers and accomplish lots of work for you and provide that dominant environment.

You’re probably wondering, why doesn’t he just say F-22? That is right. You need the F-22 forward in order to do this. You need your C4ISR operating forward in order to enable these long-range fires that you important from outside the theater.

There is kind of a shorthand that I would offer you as to how to think about this concept. It is called inverting, distilling and protecting. Inverting is the process of relying on long-range fires from outside the theater, primarily bombers and sea-based cruise missiles, in order to accomplish your attack mission during those early days and weeks of conflict as you are enabling the deployment of the follow-on force. Rather than depending on those massive deployments, those 20 or 25-fighter squadrons that we sent forward in 1990 before we were ready to engage the enemy, you begin engaging immediately with long-range fires. We invert our thinking to rely on bombers for those effects early and long-range cruise missiles, rather than sending short-range fighters forward.

Second, you distill. What do you distill? You distill into the smallest possible package, those things that have to be forward. Those things that you can’t win the war without. Your C4ISR and those fighter attack capabilities that simply must be forward in order to allow everything else to work. What do they have to do? Those forward-based forces have to be able to provide that benign air environment in which all of those vulnerable systems can operate, that you need in order to target for effects and assess the results of your operations. They’ve got to be able to complement the long-range fires with rapidly reacting shorter range fires that can respond to the CINC’s time critical needs. And, they must be able to accomplish the other enabling missions – suppression of air defense, destruction of enemy air defenses and SEAD and so on. Finally, you need to be able to protect that enabling force forward.

We’ve inverted, we’ve distilled that forward deployed force in the smallest possible size so that you can protect it reasonably. Then the question is, why is now the right time to do this? Why is now the right time to change our thinking? The reason is three-fold. One, the threat has evolved and we talked about that earlier, where the evolution of the anti-access threats which President Bush talked about down at the Citadel. Second, the maturation of bomber precision strike capabilities per minute. We simply haven’t had the kind of bomber force until now that could allow this kind of strategy to work. Finally, the F-22 and improved C2ISR, which are critical to enabling this capability now is coming on board. We are about to start producing this system and the improved C2ISR that we need in order to make all this work. Now is the time.

And, as we think about that inverting piece and explain why now is the time, of course, bombers have already contributed a lot. We have always used bombers for great effect in all of our wars. If you look at that chart, the bar at the top was how many bombers were involved and the bar at the bottom was how many tons, what percentage of the tonnage they delivered – a disproportionate share of the total effort in terms of tons delivered. The problem is, it took a lot of bombs to kill anything. This is our favorite inside-the-beltway target (laughter) as seen by a conventionally armed B-52 and maybe the safest place to be would be at the snack stand in the middle of that. Although, having lived through an Arc-Light [B-52 attack in Vietnam] when I was a forward air controller, I wouldn’t want to be in the snack stand even with that kind of accuracy.

But we changed all that during the 1990s as we modernized the bomber force. Each element of the bomber force was enhanced. The B-52 was improved with improved cruise missiles. The B-1 with its Conventional Upgrade Program and the B-2 which had priority for incorporation of this new family of GPS-aided munitions, the Joint Direct Attack Munition, which fortunately was available just prior to Operation Allied Force.

And, in Operation Allied Force, the bomber force and in particular the B-2, demonstrated the feasibility of implementing this kind of a strategy. Averaged 15 DMPIs [designated mean point of impact] per sortie. As an old fighter pilot who used to throw my body at the ground a lot and seldom hit anything, these are remarkable numbers. Particularly that fourth one where 90 percent of the targets against which it was fragged were destroyed on the first strike. That is incredible. We demonstrated that we can operate from very long ranges and be effective.

As we continue to modernize, this is a smart rack that is going to allow us to carry 80 500-pound independently targetable weapons. General Jumper referenced this yesterday. Those effects will be multiplied. During Allied Force, this is one of the missions that the B-2 accomplished. All the bombers did great work, but – I like this picture because, if you can’t really see it from the back, what it is, is six runway intersections. The object of the mission was to close that runway so that we could then subsequently kill some MiG-29s that were on an airfield and this what a B-2 did. In fact it did two of these in one sortie. Pretty amazing stuff.

With a smart-rack equipped B-2, you’ll be able to convert that into what I would call an airbase take down per sortie capability, something we’ve never been able to do before is actually shut down an airfield. We’ve been able to put a lot of holes in concrete. The problem is somebody invented quick-dry concrete and made it real tough to keep them down for very long.

By inverting, we have now reduced our need to deploy that mountain of men, material and equipment forward. Instead of having to do all this, we do something like this. And that significantly reduces your need for theater infrastructure and puts a lot less load on our airlift forces and so on. However, in order to get the rest of the mission done, all those enabling things that have to be done with forward deployed forces, you still require a lot of structure unless you can distill those capabilities down into a very small force. That is the next part of this strategy--creating a force of very capable multi-mission fighters that can deploy forward to do all these things, provide air dominance, accomplish the SEAD-DEAD mission, provide supplemental strikes so that you’ve got timely reactive combat power available to the CINC. Get that down into a small enough force that you can get under what we call the anti-access bar, a force small enough that you can still get it forward, but protect it in the face of these future threats, not so far-future threats.

The only airplane currently available, either in the force or on the drawing boards that can accomplish all that, is the F-22. Only it can do this array of missions that are currently done by F-15s, F-16s and so on. Why? Because only it has the characteristics that an airplane will require in order to do all this work. That theater enabler is going to have to be autonomously survivable across the breadth of the battle space, 24 hours a day. It has got to do that in order to enable those 24-hour-a-day B-2 operations that General Jumper referred to yesterday. Those C4ISR operations, protect those C4ISR orbits, those Rivet Joints, AWACS and so on, that have to operate forward in proximity to those advanced threats, and stealth is a necessary but not sufficient characteristic of that force. It also, in addition to being stealthy, must be able to operate at very high altitudes and at supersonic speeds in order to provide the kind of survivability that we are going to need in the face of these future threats. The high-altitude capability negates all the second-tier systems. You can overfly all those AAA, man portable air defense systems, and up to and including SA-6s that we worry about.

Somebody asked yesterday, "How are we going to get back that space below 15,000 feet?" We are not, as General Jumper said. We don’t need to. Not with these kind of capabilities. When you combine that high-altitude stealthy airplane with supersonic cruise, now you shrink the lethal envelopes of all those advanced SAMs that are the real concern of everybody. This is a picture of a potential Iranian threat laydown in about 2008. It essentially presents a brick wall to a conventional fighter – an F-15, an F-16, an F-18, you name it. Anybody who has to carry bombs on the wing. This is what that threat array would like to a stealthy airplane: an airplane like an F-117, for example, you begin to open up some maneuver room inside those defenses. If you put that stealthy airplane at very high altitude, you remove all those second tier systems, the low-altitude capabilities, and you open up even more airspace.

Now, when you put an F-22 in there, capable of high-altitude supercruise very low observabilities, you provide that operator 12 times more unthreatened airspace than conventional airplanes have today. Now you can get in there and do you job. Now you can be the enabler that allows everything else to work. And, by doing that, instead of sending those 20 or 25-fighter squadrons forward and spending weeks getting them built up before you can begin to engage the enemy, you can begin to operate on day one or two with a very small force – three or four squadrons forward-based using that long-range strike power from outside the theater and from the sea in order to do your work. Now you are in a position to deal with this anti-access threat.

But, many people have asked me as I’ve carried this pitch around, "You still have to be forward. You still have to get to the theater. How are you going to protect these forces?" I would argue that you can do that if you base your force at the most extreme rear position of the theater that you can manage, whatever theater you are talking about, the rear-most bases in Southwest Asia, the furthest airfields away from your target set in the Pacific, you pick it, and then that allows you to reduce the threat of that future theater ballistic missile because most of that threat is pretty short range. There will be some long-range capabilities, but they are the smallest numbers and they are the least accurate.

You will also be able, because you aren’t sending so many of them forward, you will be able to disperse your aircraft better on those few air mobility operations bases, main operating bases, that you still need to access. It will allow your theater missile defenses to focus on a much smaller target set. Instead of having to defend 10, 12, 14, 15 critical friendly target sets, it will be able to focus on two or three and be much more effective. And because you are standing back from the threat more, you’ll have more time for those defenses to react and for you to implement other defensive measures like the ones we used to do when I was over in the Pacific, launch from under attack. We’ve done this for years where we established a posture in the face of these kind of threats where we could scramble, get our airplanes airborne, let the enemy attack, clean up the damage and then come back and continue to operate.

If you need to increase your sortie rate, you can put some men, bombs and fuel at some of the forward bases and as you establish the conditions to allow you to survive in that environment, drop in, do a quick gas, go rearm and increase the sortie rate available from those forward-deployed enabling fighters. None of that works if you have to send a traditional large-scale deployment forward where you need these 10 or 12 big airfields all of which are vulnerable to the whole array of the enemy threat. We think you can protect this kind of a force. Your objectives of course of doing this are to one, establish air dominance, suppress those enemy air defenses, enable that predictive battle space awareness that allows you to begin to quickly mitigate the enemy anti-access threat, and enable that safe deployment of the follow-on joint force by taking out those weapons of mass destruction, the launchers, the cruise and ballistic missiles that launch those weapons of mass destruction and counter that maritime anti-access threat so that we can get our fleets in wherever they need to work in order to operate effectively. We do that in a parallel, rather than sequential operation. We don’t have to do this one step at a time and take a long time doing it because we have got the capabilities to do it all at once in a parallel fashion.

Let’s illustrate this with a quick run through of a scenario that might occur out there in 2008 where we’ve got this situation with the Iranians coveting control of the Gulf oil. We’ve had some political situations occur with Iraq and the Gulf states that got everybody stirred up. The Iranians moved their forces forward. They are massed much like Iraq was in 1990 and we have to react. We can react the way we did in 1990. We can send all this stuff forward, build it up over six months time frame and then try to deal with it. The problem is that in 2008 or thereabouts, the Iranians are liable to have this kind of a threat that can cover the entire array of bases that we use. Each one of those green dots, by the way, is an airplane. Those that fall in the most forward and reddest areas are those most vulnerable to this anti-access problem.

Or, we can use the GRS approach. Only use a few bases on the periphery of the theater, places that are relatively immune to these threats and that can be defended by our theater missile defenses – ABLs, THAAD, Navy Upper Tiers and so on. That we can reasonably expect to be able to survive and operate in the face of these threats. Our bombers would be where we expect our bombers to be – Diego Garcia, Pat [Gen. Patrick K. Gamble, commander, Pacific Air Forces] talked about the importance of Diego Garcia. It is a key enabling capability because we established the kind of infrastructure there to operate these bombers effectively, and Fairford up in the UK, which we are doing the same thing with. From those bases, they can range the entire threat in this theater without refueling, so you reduce your dependence on that very critical, scarce refueling effort.

What do you do? You begin by establishing information dominance, which we are going to need in anybody’s picture. You’ve got to establish those forward ISR assets and protect them. That is where you need that theater enabler, that is where you need that multi-mission F-22. Then you need to establish air dominance. You’ve got to be able to reduce the threat to lesser-capable airplanes so you can get them into the fight and allow them to survive and operate. You need to take on the enemy’s ground forces, whether they be armored forces of whatever kind of force you face. And you do that with our light and lean future Army force, that transformed Army force, supported by joint long-range fires.

You need to deal with the maritime threat. The Navy will have great capabilities to do this. I talked to Rear Admiral Joe Sestak the other day, who is leading the Navy’s QDR effort. They are intent on countering this threat and they can benefit from long-range fires from our bomber force in order to help do that so we can get the fleets forward where we need them in order to help make all this work.

All that will help us enable the joint force deployment, but what we really need to do in order to do that is destroy, mitigate the threat from these weapons of mass destruction, the cruise missiles and theater ballistic missiles that threaten our forces and their ability to enter the theater. We do all that in order to allow the deployment of the joint force. That is the whole purpose of this strategy.

Some people have commented that it looks like we are trying to win the war with this and we don’t need the rest of the joint force. That is not the idea. The idea is to create those conditions in the theater so that we can deploy the joint force and then employ it effectively to win the war quicker, with fewer losses and allow us to reconstitute better for the next engagement.

As compared to our deployment during Desert Storm, which looked something like this, where it took us nearly six months to get to the point where we were comfortable in counter-attacking enemy capabilities. GRS would look something like this, with the ability to begin on day one or two to halt the enemy invasion, enable the deployment of the follow-on joint force, then deploy the joint force into the theater and win the war. I think by doing that you would frustrate the enemy sooner. You’d have less land to have to take back. You’d be able to do this more effectively, with less loss of life on both sides.

Instead of facing a situation like this, which might look uncomfortably like Normandy in World War II, you’d face a situation like this, where you are able to begin to bring combat power to bear on the enemy’s critical target sets very early – on day one and day two of a conflict, enable that joint force deployment and allow us to accomplish our missions with the kind of speed and effectiveness that the American people have grown accustomed to seeing in their U.S. Air Force and the joint force.

What are the advantages? Number one, we think this idea is a direct counter to the anti-access threat and we need one of those. We need a counter to this problem because it is real. It significantly reduces the risk of allied casualties and U.S. casualties and therefore gives the National Command Authorities a little more flexibility. It has a lot of utility across the entire conflict spectrum. Any place where you have to deploy offensive combat power, this concept will apply. It doesn’t have to just be the big war. It greatly enhances our strategic agility because by relying on longer-range fires early, you don’t get overly committed in one direction and then have to try to shift to another should you have to. You can more easily shift your focus.

In summary, we think the current power-projection strategy is under a lot of stress from what we call the dual time and access challenges, time being the vulnerability of surprise attack, access being the limited availability of forward-based infrastructure in the littoral waters through which we have to pass to get to it. This concept gives you an answer to that by importing firepower, rather than forces initially in order to counter these threats. The key to the whole thing is that stealthy team of F-22s and B-2s that give you those high-end capabilities that are required in order to make something like this work.

The beauty of this is that it leverages existing programs. We hear a lot about transforming DoD. Unfortunately, many times when I hear people talk about transforming DoD, the vision that you get is some new set of forces that are going to have to come to bear about 2020 or 2030. They are very exotic. They take a long time to invent and deliver. You can do this with the forces that are here today or on the books ready to be delivered in the very near future. That is GRS. Thank you.

Q. Do we stamp Air Force-only on this? How do these other services fit into this concept? Is the concept becoming generally accepted?

General Hawley: Certainly it is not Air Force only. Obviously, this is an Air Force Association audience so we want to talk about Air Force things here. But it can’t work in a unilateral context, either U.S. only or U.S. Air Force only. I can’t overstate the need for these other capabilities, the sea-based power, those light, lethal land forces. Can you imagine trying to stop an opposing army if they had the luxury of dispersing the way they did in Allied Force? I think General Jumper could talk to this better than I can. But the fact is that we need our forces on the ground in order to force the enemy to concentrate and present us with targets that we can destroy from the air. That is how we work best – as a joint team. With those light and lethal land forces in the theater, they can force that enemy, whether he is an armor-heavy enemy or an infantry-heavy enemy – whatever kind of forces they have -- force them to concentrate in order to oppose those ground forces of ours and that then multiplies the effectiveness of air power when we bring it to bear on the enemy.

Naval forces. Very critical to this operation. We need those capabilities. You’ve seen the effectiveness of theTomahawk Land Attack Missile, the long-range cruise missiles. I think most of you understand the synergy between stealth and jamming and today at least, if we are going to get jamming, we are going to get it off EA-6B, which is usually going to come off the deck of a carrier. We need to get them forward and we need to get them into play in order to make all this work. I could go on. There are lots of other capabilities in the joint world.

SOF, in order to go out and provide eyes and ears on the ground--you know, our biggest shortfall in this whole business that we are about is the front end. It is the find and fix part where our greatest deficiencies are. SOF can go forward and help us with that find and fix part so that we can then bring our asymmetric advantage to bear on the problem. This is not Air Force only.

Is it becoming generally accepted? I think a lot of people are coming to think this has merit. But I wouldn’t go so far as to say it is generally accepted. I think people are interested in it. It has drawn some discussion in the media. I took a briefing from Joe Sestak, the Navy’s QDR guy, the other day. You could see elements of this woven throughout his pitch. The Navy is thinking this way. If you took his briefing, it would be a little more heavily Navy focused, but nevertheless, it is all there. What I haven’t seen yet is it exercised in a CINC wargame. I think we will know it has been generally accepted when we see Joint Forces Command or one of the other CINCs exercise this in a joint theater exercise and see how it plays out in their theater.

Q. Would you comment on the Air Force’s currently capability to support this concept?

General Hawley: I think that we could support this concept today or at least we could support it by 2006 when we have IOC with the F-22. If I were trying to guide the Air Force acquisition process again, I think where I would place the focus is on the find, fix and then communicate parts of our problem. We need to be able to do a better job of finding and fixing the key targets, the key enemy centers of gravity. We don’t do that as well as we should. Then we need to be able to provide the kind of connectivity within our command-and-control structure and between our command-and-control structure and the shooters in order to be able to deal with those key targets in a timely manner. We don’t do that nearly as well as we need to, either, in order to make this work. If I were targeting money, the money would go towards that front end part of the problem and then the connectivity. Taking better advantage of our space assets. Making sure we have – I think Speedy talked about it yesterday – that digital connectivity with our shooters so we can get real-time information. We used to call it RTIC, real-time information in the cockpit. We don’t have that. We need it in order to really enhance the effectiveness of this kind of operation. But I do think that in the very near future we can do it. We can do it today. It just would be harder, take more forces than we really ought to try to it with.

Q. How would information operations fit into your concept of Global Reconnaissance Strike?

General Hawley: Information ops, I didn’t actually speak to it, but it was on one of the charts. Every part of the force has to be brought to bear. If you are a CINC, you’ve got tough problems and the great things about CINCs is they become very ecumenical very quickly. They lose that service parochialism that they come to the chair with because what they’ve got to do is use every tool that is in their tool kit, every arrow that is in their quiver and information ops is one of those. It is advancing quickly -- not as quickly as I think it needs to, but it is going to be very important.

The difficulty with using some of the information ops tools is devolving responsibility for using them down to the appropriate level. We tend to think of information ops as a strategic weapons, those of us who think about it as a weapon. It is not. There are elements of it that can be strategic; that require approval at very high levels. But there are elements of information operations that can and should be conducted at the tactical level and certainly at the operational level. I think that is where we need to work hard in the information ops world, is figuring out those ROE, the rules of engagement, so that our commander can make better use of it without having to go through an arcane approval process before they can apply some of those.

Q. You had a bullet on your chart that said stealth was necessary but not sufficient. Expand on that.

General Hawley: There are many people who think that all you need to do is have a stealthy airplane. Part of the problem is that we have classified this thing to the point where nobody can talk about and explain how all this works. The fact is, when we laid down the requirements for the F-22, years ago, we did it in a very constrained environment, believe it or not. We were actually trying to produce a $50 million airplane at the time. Our appetite was constrained. But we knew that you’d have to have three things in order to be able to operate in a future threat environment populated with systems like the SA-10, the SA-12, the S-300 and so on that people talk about today and that are beginning to proliferate around the world. We knew that we would have to be very stealthy and so we established a high requirement for stealth. We also knew that it would be best if you operated at very high altitudes and so we optimized the airplane to operate at very high altitudes. We also knew that in order to – you know, this is no different than shooting quail--if you are going to hit that target, the faster the target moves, the tougher it is to engage, the less time you have, the less decision time, everything gets compressed. So, if you have the capability to fly at very high altitudes with a very stealthy airplane and supercruise, for long periods of time – 1.5 Mach plus – you really shrink the decision time of the defenses. That shrinks their lethal envelopes. That is why stealth is not sufficient. I guarantee you the Serbs wouldn’t have shot down an F-117 if he had been flying at 1.5 Mach at 40,000 feet.

Q. Is the present bomber fleet of the U.S. Air Force, specifically 21 B-2 bombers, sufficient for your Global Reconnaissance-Strike concept?

General Hawley: That is like asking can we fight two major regional contingencies today? People used to ask me that while I was on active duty. My standard answer was, well, that depends on what the two contingencies are. If they are small enough, we can handle them great. It is scenario dependent. Certainly, I don’t think 21 B-2s is optimum. That is why originally we were going to buy more. The bomber force would benefit from being a higher-end mix than we have today.

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