Lieutenant General Hester: It is great to be with you today in Orlando and it is great to represent your Air Force’s air commandos at this AFA convention. I noticed that as I looked around as people were listening to the other speakers, I noticed them looking down at their watches. I am very mindful of the unique position that I am in today–that I am standing between you and dinner [laughter]. So I will be appropriately short and brief. I want to talk to you just briefly about the challenges for the future for air and space operations as seen through the eyes of Air Force Special Operations Command.

As our airmen celebrate 100 years since the first powered flight this year—the centennial of flight—I think it is appropriate to look back and take a look at our heritage. Because it is our heritage that we should never be forgetful of, and one that we should always use as we strive to look to the future. I think you’ll see in a moment how we will weave the past into the present, and maybe even into the future in Air Force Special Operations Command.

Back in 1917, the Army Signal Corps stood up the 8^th Aero Squadron. I must tell you that we are very excited that just last year, when General Peterson retired, this is the last Air Force member who flew in this squadron [laughter]. In World War One, this airplane did aerial observation [slide], a little bombing, some airlift missions all over. As you well know, this is the DeHaviland DH-4. It wasn’t much of a performer then and it is not much of a performer now by our Air Force standards: wooden cloth, classic tail-dragger biplane, not too reliable of a piston engine. It was also not the safest airplane in the world. It was known as the "flaming coffin" because the gas tank was between the two crewmen. But, in fact, it was given to our airmen in those days and they did use it to perform their mission in World War One.

That squadron’s line of continuity stretches all the way to today. The 8^th Aero Squadron is now the 8^th Squadron down in the 16^th Special Operations Wing. It is a Talon One, Reserve Associate unit with active airmen who fly this airplane and the Reserves who provide us the airplanes over at the 919^th at Duke Field. They are the second oldest squadron in continuous active service and, if you look at the list of Air Force heritage scores of operational squadrons, this squadron [the 8^th] ranks first.

When we look at the old tail-dragger, cloth-winged biplane, we may think of only the past, but that is the wrong way to view it. In truth, it is the kind of technology that may very well be a part of our future because it is a part of our today. Let me tell you why.

We live in a world of coalitions, coalitions where some are formal and some are long-standing. Some of them are short and some of them the event of the day. They are multi-national on the battlefield. They require us to bring and blend both technologies that we bring to the battlefield, but also the technologies of our coalition partners to the battlefield. Sometimes those technologies match and sometimes they don’t. We have seen that in a variety of locations in certain instances around the world. It is our job of integrating those different technologies, those different national capabilities and limitations, on the battlefield and sometimes it is difficult. This will continue to grow in importance for us as the war on terror moves into new and unseen areas.

It is a mission that one of my other squadrons at Hurlburt specializes in. The 6^th Special Operations Squadron does combat aviation advisory for an internal defense. They train, they assess, they advise and they assist them in training on missions that the local nationals can use their airplanes and their aircraft to perform. That is employment, sustainment of operations, integration of air and space power for combined operations. It is important for us to do this and do it well because there are many times as you well know that the U.S. simply can’t use its combat power in the region.

Secondly, this mission makes it easier for us to integrate foreign forces into a coalition. We are there. We train with them. We have confidence in them. They find confidence in us. This squadron has less than a hundred officers and enlisted, with 32 AFSCs across the squadron. They are talented aircrews, when they come to us and they come to us as IP already. We then teach them eight different foreign languages. We then focus them on several different regions of the world. They are with the overseas geographic CINC and they are in very much demand. We can only fill about one in ten of the requests by the combat commanders and their staffs.

Let me share just a couple examples of what they do. We have had a long, involved process and association with our friends in Uzbekistan. In fact, I had a small team that was in Uzbekistan when the attack on America of 2001 happened. Immediately, the captain and the sergeant who were there went and did business with their Uzbeki compatriots and started finding a way to bed down American forces. And because of the intimate knowledge of the Uzbeki air space, their bases, they were able to offer assistance and advice, not only with the Uzbeks, but also with General Franks as to where to bed down our airplanes. It is instrumental in doing process.

Another country had wanted to also offer assistance to Afghanistan as the process of the war went on, but they had no capability to ship the humanitarian relief that they wanted to sent to Afghanistan. They had no ability to do it themselves because strategic and tactical air lift fall so importantly in our business in the U.S. Air Force.

Consequently, our guys went over and taught them how to pack pallets. How to meet the high standards that General John Handy needed when he sent in his airplanes for them to roll them on. Again, working side-by-side, teaching how we do business, they learned. We learned as well, and the end result was that the folks of Afghanistan had more humanitarian relief in their country. So, the 6^th is able to put the right team with the right skills and deploy it to help nations solve problems.

They fly the aircraft, as well, so that they can be proficient. You’ll get an idea of what number of airplanes they fly on this slide. You’ll notice not many of them are of American origin. They immediately are able to integrate when they go into countries who ask for our assistance and they also gain instant credibility because they are high-timers and they are very proficient in these airplanes.

Earlier, I talked about heritage. I said it was the kind of technology in World War One of the DH-4, the kind of technology that might be pointed to our future. Well, this is it. Roll that slide.

Of course, all aviators in the audience, this is the Russian-designed AN2 Colt. It is a cloth wing. It is tail dragger. It is a biplane, radial engine, same kind of technology that DeHavilland had. It sits on our ramp every day down at Hurlburt Field. It is flown by these same Special Operators in the 6^th SOS. How fast does it fly? I would tell you that this film is being taken from a Huey helicopter [laughter]. But the important point as you watch is to note that is an unimproved strip. He lands in less than 500 feet with a full combat load. He takes off in less than 500 feet with that same full-combat load.

Occasionally we will look inside the airplane and know how to advise and offer our assistance and thoughts on how to update the technology in those airplanes when we go visit with our friends in the foreign countries. It is flown by 28 nations around our world. By mastering this old technology we are meeting part of the challenges of the future of air and space operation.

In a coalition world, we have to be masters not just of the high tech, but often we have to be masters of previous systems, lower technology, and sometimes long-ago legacy systems that our partners will bring to the battlefield so that we can integrate them with Buzz Mosely in the CAOC to the battlefield.

Interestingly enough, the AN2 Colt is not the oldest airplane that we are flying today at Hurlburt. This is Captain Jim Alexander, one of two Air Force military pilots who were selected to fly the replica of the Wright Brothers 1903 flier. It is part of the celebration of the centennial of flight, again pointing back to our heritage.

Back, last October, at the AFA National Convention, we had the opportunity to bring Tech Sgt. Jim Hotalling to you to give his personal accounts of being on the ground at Anaconda and other locations in Afghanistan operations. I couldn’t be there and Brigadier General Lyle Koenig, who is the wing commander now, and was my Special Assistant at that time at AFSOC, came and did the introductions to let Hots tell you his story. What Hots did is that he was able to provide information to you about how to be on the ground as a combat control, what the difficulties were that he had, and how he was able to bring those stories back to us so that we could then start solving the problems for any future engagements.

You will remember one of the things that we were so proud of. He was able to, as a combat controller in association with the TACP folks from ACC who were on the ground—the E-TACs—they were able to solve the ROE problems that so frustrated General Jumper and Mike Short back in Allied Force. And you know they learned this, as you can see from the upper right-hand slide, by riding horses. And General Jumper just tells marvelous stories about guys on horseback on wooden saddles with communications to upstairs overhead assets, with a laptop hanging on the saddle horn and being able to call in close air support.

My favorite picture, though, I must tell you is the one that is in the upper left-hand corner. When it first showed up in the American public’s eyes and when it first showed up as a part of a national periodical publication, it was identified as a SF soldier who was on watch. Those staff sergeant stripes that you see on that young man’s sleeve yell loud and clear that this is an airman. We are all proud of to know that airmen have muddy boots on the ground, enabling America’s awesome air power on the battlefield to make it work for us.

You’ll remember that Hots told you about the ruck-sacks that they jump out of the airplane with, weighing 150-plus pounds. Secretary Roche has been intimately involved in helping us point the way for getting industry to join with us, how to solve some of those problems. Our immediate problem was how to cut in half, by 50 percent, the weight of the gear that the combat controllers and others take to the battlefield and have to do backpacking in places like Afghanistan, where they hike up and down the terrain.

We have now reached a position where we are cutting it down to 50 percent. We are also, in concert and coordination with General Hornburg’s folks in the TAC-P modernization program, developing equipment that is going to transform us from the ability to do business today, where he must line-of-sight, fat finger, get coordinates, altitudes—must then fat finger that into a computer that he is carrying into the battlefield, then be able to transmit it across the radio in the proper sequence and in the proper form to an airplane overhead who then must fat finger the coordinates into the bomb so that they can drop a JDAM. Our objective is to go from one-stop shopping with one piece of equipment to be able to point it at the target. It solves all those problems. He then knows what kind of airplane he has overhead and he sends that electronically, only being observed and QC’ed by pilots’ eyes or navigators’ eyes in the airplane as appropriate overhead.

We are also working with the special tactics air and ground interface simulator, taking advantage of new simulation processes and techniques. This is going to provide a distributed training environment with air and ground forces. It will create cost-effective training and rehearsal capability for our folks.

And our tactics and procedures, I’ve already mentioned what we are doing with ACC, but we are also now reaching out to do the same thing with our Army friends as well as our Marine Corps friends, when they want to get into the terminal TAC control process. I’ve asked General Charlie Holland down at SOCOM to label and finger-point AFSOC as the lead-in terminal TAC control inside of SOCOM because we are reaching and getting into that business much bigger. As you have heard before, it is nice to have folks trained to a high standard who can be more spread out on the battlefield, in smaller teams, and be able to effect terminal TAC control from our airplanes.

In Afghanistan, we also learned the value of UAVs. Last year you heard and saw a great video about streaming video into the back of some of my AC-130 gunships. We are continuing to refine that process and it is a great process to work with those in the Predator community. But as you can see on the slide we are now working on other UAVs. Many of them are carried on the back of our combat controllers into the combat zone so that they can fly them up to about a thousand feet, 90 minutes in duration, to be able to see over one ridge-line from another. We are working hard with ACC and General Mosely on air-space control. And again, I’ve asked General Holland to finger-point AFSOC as the leader in all of UAVs inside of SOCOM to include our brethren up in the Army. We have been sharing this data, back and forth, with each other and I will tell you, our Army brethren are in full agreement with us because they are using the same kind of platforms that we are using in AFSOC.

Let me turn my attention from the ground, for a moment, to the airborne platforms. We are a specialized air power, specialized in the sense that we take common Air Force equipment, like the C-130 and the six variants that you see on the slide here. And then we use particular equipment that we fund through Major Force Program 11, General Holland’s budget, and turn it into a SOF platform that enables us to take it into a much denser threat arena and much lower altitudes and is normally flown by our AMC counterparts.

The Ranger assaults on Objective Rhino and the insertion of joint teams of Army Special Forces and our own special tactics teams into Afghanistan, are good examples of how we use the C-130. They go from the 130 from the broadcast capabilities up at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and the commando solo to the stream-of-fire from a gun ship. What we need in terms of future modernization is survivability on the battlefield. A much more dense array than we are going to see in other places, other than Afghanistan, leads us to be able to take the threat seriously, and means that we need to update our survivability packages on the airplane, as well as the ability to fly low and undetected into the target area.

As you may know, we are going to increase the number, with the President’s budget this year, we are going to increase the number of platforms that I have. Last year, just before I took command of AFSOC, OSD gave us four new gun ships. We will be going on contract for those gun ships soon and expect to have them within the next couple of years. We also, through the recent OSD action, have been given ten more H models from General Handy’s fleet to convert to Talons, which will also have pods on them that will be air refuellers for us. Air refueling of C-130s, which do the route refueling for helicopters, is a shortness in our game plan. This is done principally to [allow] SOCOM to be finger-pointed as being a supported as well as a supporting combat commander.

We are also looking at additional CV-22s to give to Aggie Pearson out at Edwards, not so that we can accelerate the testing program, but so that we can reduce the risk that this program—that he is doing such a marvelous job in helping manage out there—will be successful and have the risk reduced for completion.

Now, there has been some discussion of acceleration of the entire program, with buying out the CVs early. I do believe this is premature. It is not until we finish the program that Aggie is running, plus finish the more important piece, which is operational test and evaluation, then and only then do we know if the CV is ready for us to bring it out for use.

Should the CV-22 fail, in either one of the two testing programs, it is time then for us to look back to our industry partners. Our industry partners, we will have to come to you and ask you to give us ideas on how to sustain the fleet, not only to do a SLEP on my old payload helicopters, which were built in 1966, but also to give me ideas and options of what to do should the CV-22 not come into service.

Yogi Berra used to say that prediction is very hard, especially when it is about the future [laughter]. But we do know a couple things. The first is that we have to start now on what the future may bring. To that end, we have commissioned several analyses and they are in progress to help us identify requirements and capabilities that we think we will need in the future to make AFSOC a viable entity in SOCOM in the SOF operations. We need to look at future platforms and then we need to press forward toward development. We need long range. We need speed. I need a high FMC rate, thus I need high reliability in not just a garrison concept, but also in harsh conditions. Clandestine insertion is high on my list of how to operate our airplanes.

Let me take a moment to step back and talk about an organizational structure which I know that both General Mosely is proud of, but also his predecessor, General Chuck Wald, over in the CAOC. And that is the stand-up of a Special Operations Liaison Element, affectionately known as SOLE. It is joint because it has not only Air Force in it, but it has the Army and the Navy special operators there as well. The SOLE is deployed as a part of the AOC. When I went with General Holland early to Afghanistan and then to see General Wald back in December 2001, merely two months into the operation in Afghanistan, we were met at the front door of the CAOC and Waldo grabbed General Holland and said, "let me tell you about SOLE, man." And I knew at that moment that we had passed a large barrier. It was an acknowledgment that the work between the CAF operations and the SOF operators was seamless, working together with full visibility and knowledge of what was going to happen on the battlefield every day with every sortie.

In summary, let me just jump back and talk about heritage again. We are mindful of our heritage. We are engaged throughout the world every day. We are there building relationships that hopefully will lead to coalition partners that will share the burden of a coalition operation and sometimes leave Americans off of the battlefield, as appropriate. We hope that we are opening doors and we are laying groundwork for the future for those coalitions. In combat, on the ground with our TAC-P friends as well as our combat controllers, we are guiding American’s asymmetric advantage, our awesome air and space power.

We are modernizing our equipment. We are making plans for the future. And we are experimenting with new technologies. We are coordinating and working, hand-in-glove, with our brother airmen. Our air commandos stand as a proud part of America’s Air Force. I look forward to your questions.

Q: Are you satisfied that our special operators and our CONOPS culture are staying ahead of the adaptive methods of terrorists out there today?

Lieutenant General Hester: Our Special Operators, with the help of our intel community, find themselves always thinking about how small teams can be attacked, because we operate in small teams or we take larger teams and put them in with our airplanes or our helicopters. What you are seeing is that our folks spend a lot of time rehearsing and planning. It is a central part, since we put so few on the battlefield, to go do their jobs. I am confident that as long as we stay tied with the larger parts of our military, with our intel community, that we will have the knowledge that we can then make the proper plans for them to be safe and effective on the battlefield.

Q: How is the current relationship between Air Force Special Operations and the intelligence community?

Lieutenant General Hester: There has always been a lot of focus in any part of our Air Force on intelligence being a part of the game plan, of how you take airplanes off or you take airmen of any kind and send them into a combat zone. I would tell you that our relationship with the intel community couldn’t be stronger.

Q: Modeling and simulation is viewed as an enabler for the warfighter. We talked about that earlier in some cases. How has modeling and simulation been used by AFSOC?

Lieutenant General Hester: As I mentioned, we have future modeling and simulation that we are building and we are also building new technology to do things on the ground with AFSOC airplanes and with AFSOC ground officers and NCOs in the same way that we certainly have done it across the Air Force. That is a key to the future. It is the same thing that we have talked about, being able to get all the participants together in one place at Red Flag. As the Chief mentioned, and General Hornburg mentioned earlier, it is difficult to do that. So, consequently, integrated and distributed simulation is the key to the future.

In the past, AFSOC has been blessed to also have a very robust simulation that has enabled them to plan and to rehearse some of their many strikes, some of their many operations in the past. They’ve been in this business awhile and I am pleased that we are still on the cutting edge of it.

Q: CNN is reporting that there are Special Operations units operating in Iraq, prepping the battlefield. How do you view that from the concern of OPSEC versus the media’s need for information?

Lieutenant General Hester: I am like you, General Peterson, I get to read the morning paper, sometimes with some surprise as to where those people that I am looking at across the room in the morning stand-up, [where they] are for that particular day. Also, I enjoy the opportunity to see the thought that America has the ability to reach out into places, whether true or untrue, acknowledged or unacknowledged, that we have the ability to reach out and put people into places to form coalition partners around the world. Our operators are trained well for that mission and if they are called upon by our President to do that in the near future, I have great confidence they’ll be able to do it very well.

Q: In the current context of our ongoing war with terrorism, how do you see integrating those missions along with the full spectrum of military operations?

Lieutenant General Hester: Through a lot of hard work by predecessors and by this liaison element that I just mentioned [the SOLE], I think that we are tied together very carefully. I would tell you that there is a concern simply because AFSOC only has 88 combat-coded airplanes. We only have about 12,000 people. And we do things in small teams. There is a time that, after we have performed the missions that our nation has asked us to do through our Air Force, there is a time for that to be handed off and transitioned to others who can do that just as well, once those unique trained skills that we put those young people through are no longer needed on the battlefield. And so I watch every day and I watch the ATO and I watch the missions and our taskings, and have been doing so since we started OEF. There is a time for a transition backwards to allow our kids to come off the battlefield. Whether they come home or not is a different point, but that they come off the battlefield so that they can start preparing for the next mission that requires what we train them for.

Q: We see a significant plus-up in the Air Force special operations budget across the board. How do your priorities line up on that?

Lieutenant General Hester: SOCOM is an entity with a budget of their own. It was fortunate to get a significant plus-up over the FYDP. There is no free money. That comes at an expense across all of the services. Our Air Force has contributed heavily into that. As I mentioned, with the ten airplanes that come out of AMC, they’ll be coming out of the Guard and Reserve and also coming in people, because people crosswalk as well into AFSOC to be able to operate those airplanes. Some of those airplanes will wind up being forward-deployed and some of them will remain behind as a rotational base for us. I think that it provides us, again, simply because of the growth in the Central Command area of responsibility, it provides us a baseline to operate from. I do not consider it a significant growth based on the additive missions that we’ve been given. Missions, not more missions, but mission area to cover with more airplanes out into the AOR.

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