It is good to be back at Air Combat Command and I think that you will find that, although the Chief laid out his four priorities, we also share those priorities because he left an envelope in my desk and said, "open this after your change of command." And he said: Transformation, Readiness, Recapitalization and Retention. I am just going to place the emphasis on a different syllable as I go through this for you.

Because with me, I think that we need to start with retention. If we don't exercise retention properly, we stress the recruiting, as the Chief said. We lose those eight- or fifteen-year people and we make out like the young airman who comes to us from Lackland is an adequate replacement. Well, he is more than an adequate replacement with respect to what he can become. But he is inadequate with respect to what he is because he hasn't gotten there one day at a time and learned the skills to replace the person who just left. We have to scrape, fight, and make it very hard for those folks to leave us. I think that when I go around the Air Force and look and see what is wrong with our retention, I have to look and see where we've come in the last 10 years or so.

We closed 93 major military installations. We've come down 40 percent in our force structure, base structure, our personnel. And yet our optempo and perstempo are up 300 to 400 percent. What is not happening? Well, the job is happening. The mission is getting hacked and we are hacking it very well with our great young airman out there doing the jobs that they are doing. But what we are not doing is at the four-star level down to the one-star level down to the lieutenant colonel, down to the chief master sergeant level down to the staff sergeant. We are not coaching, leading and mentoring our airmen as we were coached, mentored and led. That has to stop.

I go into some offices and I find people ready to pounce on that next email. I am trying to encourage our people to get away from that email and go have a conversation with a human being. [Applause]

In my life, one of the great leaders I worked for was General Billy McCoy. He used to define this as "spitting and whittling." Get out with the airmen, find out what is on their mind, find out if they have got an itch. If it is in your power to scratch it, scratch it. If you can't, find out another way to fix it. But when you turn on that computer in the morning, it shouldn't tell you what you have to do that day. The first thing it should tell you is that Staff Sergeant Smith has a re-enlistment decision to make in six months. We then have six months to work that problem. But if Sergeant Smith walks in and says, "Sir, this is a sign or die. Do I leave or stay?" You've lost the fight.

So I look forward to working with General Jumper, with the Secretary, with my friends here in the first and second row, to make sure that we don't stress our recruiters. That we give them less than 36,000 to bring in because we are doing a better job of retaining. And let me show you what we get in return.
I was at Minot last week and I came across some engineers and brought back some photos. Let me share a few of them with you.

This is day one, 0730. Next picture. Three and a half hours later. Not bad. Next picture. Day two at 1700. Next, please. These are the folks who built the mess tent. The problem is, the Afghanis didn't build the slab in time. So, how do you get the slab under the mess tent? Let me tell you, these are big tents. It took someone with more than Aggie engineering to figure this thing out. But they picked this thing up and didn't break it and they took it to the slab. They found out when they were trying to build this thing that there wasn't a bulldozer so they made one.

They took a forklift, went under a conex and began scraping and leveling the dirt. It was no surprise to me. Then I met one airman at Minot. His name was Sergeant Lom. And when the 10th Mountain Division went in, the 10th Mountain Division discovered they had no structural engineering expertise. Sergeant Lom was a political prisoner of the Army for about a week, but he helped. Are we expeditionary? You bet your bottom dollar we are expeditionary. And it is our airmen who make us so.

Now, turning to transformation. As some people call it, the dreaded "T" word. Some people are afraid of transformation because we don't know really what it means. I looked it up in the dictionary and it means "change at the molecular level." It means, coming out at the other end different than you went in. Some people say, well, it must be like Bruce Wayne going into the Bat Cave and becoming the caped crusader. That is not it-really it's not. That is not transformation. The Incredible Hulk is transformation. [Laughter]

When I started looking to see what I wanted to look like, what I wanted our part of the Air Force to look like, it dawned on me that I kind of like what we look like today. But I went and talked to my friend Ben Lambeth at Rand and he explained to me that there is nothing to fear - we've been transforming since 1946. Probably the first transformation was when we went nuclear. I can assure you that the transformation between Vietnam and Desert Storm was true transformation.

I went back and I did some research and I found that to drop a bridge in World War II, and this is from the Air Force historical archives, it took 9,070 weapons to drop a bridge. In Korea, we got better. It was down to 1,100. In Vietnam it took on average only 176 weapons to drop a bridge. But what happened between this and Desert Storm?

Now we drop two bridges per airplane, if we are using F-117s. But what if the weather is bad? Did we transform any? Did we learn anything between Desert Storm and Kosovo or Afghanistan? You bet we did and we continue to. I am not sure we have to, at the end of this, look different than we look today. I think we need to go into a process of what I would refer to as "vectored-evolution." But at the end of all this, transformation will occur.

Do we have a road map? Yes we do. It is called the Global Strike Task Force and the task forces that the Chief and others in the Air Staff are getting us started on. We'll pick it up in ACC and in the other commands and I think that at the end of the day, we are going to have something that the country will be especially proud of and that we inside the military will be proud of because we are part of the solution and we are making it work.

Putting transformation aside just a little bit, but continuing on in this same theme. I need to tell you that in Air Combat Command, in USAFE, in PACAF and the Guard and Reserve, we have realized that we have a co-dependency. Our co-dependency is called mobility in space. Let me show you a picture and see what comes to mind when I show you this picture of John Hand and Ed Eberhart.

Now some of you would look at this and say there are two CINCs. I would look at it and say there are two friends. They would look at it and say two great-looking guys [Laughter]. But these are the two gentlemen who run the commands who enable us to do our job. And never before have we depended so much on mobility and never so much on space.

Let me turn to my friend John Handy and single out his mobility heroes for just a minute. When we think of mobility, this is what comes to mind. But go back to where we were in Afghanistan and what enabled us to get there. When I went to Mountain Home a couple of weeks ago, I talked to B-1 crews and F-15E crews. One of the F-15E crews flew the longest combat fighter mission in history - 15 and a half hours.

Slide. If we took an F-15E and sent it to the Middle East, unrefueled, this is about the combat radius of that F-15E. But once John gets them there and then once his people set up the tankers, this is the range of that F-15. This flight of F-15s took off from Achman Al Jaber and it went into Afghanistan and 15 and a half hours later it landed. The highlights of the mission: the confirmed destruction of significant Al Qaeda leadership. But that was on their third pass of the night. They had done their thing. They had gone out. They had refueled and come back in. They had done more. They were in the Indian Ocean and were asked to come back yet again. After doing what they were trained to do and after doing it superbly, they were on their way home and were told maybe they should divert for crew rest. They knew the airplanes were needed the next day, so they pressed on back. The flight leader was a major. The wingman was a first lieutenant. Do we need to retain our people? You bet we do.

Take the B-2. From Whiteman, the B-2's range is very impressive. But we all know that when John and his people enable it, it is virtually worldwide. So we know that to get there, we depend on AMC and TRANSCOM to employ. We depend on them. We need to understand their business better. They need to understand our business better and John and I have been friends for a long time. I went to visit him shortly after my arrival at ACC and learned some things that I think will help us get out of town faster and make us more efficient.
Now, turning to space. Space is incredibly important. General Shaud told you, I am an Aggie, so I am very basic on the way I think about things. This is air. This is a gas. These are the things that fly in the gas. This is space. It is a vacuum. These are the things that work in this vacuum. We talk about air and space very glibly, like we just kind of go back and forth. We need to worry about the integration of air and space. Here's why.

The things on the bottom of this chart depend on the things on the top of that chart for their success. Not only do we depend on those things, but we depend on those airmen who become space people, who have the space core competency to allow us who live in this terrestrial world and this gas we fly in to do our job. Ed Eberhart, we depend on you and your people. We need to work closer together. We need to understand your talents and capabilities and your people need to understand more the effects of what we do. Working together to form a partnership of air and space integration more successful than any time in our past.

Now, if we don't do that, here is what we lose. I don't know if you can read this in the back, but these are things that we basically take for granted today: weather, navigation, all the way down to near precision strike. Take space away and we take our capabilities away. We need to find room and trade space to harden space to make it totally 100 percent dependable. I think you count on the CAF, the people who have airplanes and provide forces that do the things that we read about in the paper to find ways to protect it, because we can't have the analogy of going to Walmart with a full basket of goods and have someone tell us, "the system is down." Our job is so important, the system must always be up.

To do this, we have to command and control it and the Chief has alluded to command and control. The same experience that I have has led me to look at this and say, "hmmm…C4ISR." That is a very amorphous term. It needs focus. I think the leadership of the Air Force in the next several years must bring focus to this or we will continue to drift. But we have such a chance to succeed. A better chance than ever before. If we look at this and take it down, there are a couple of Cs there that may be more important than some of the other Cs. So the way I would arrange this is like this: command and control - with the enablers of computers, communications, ISR to enable that. But there is even one more C that I think is more important than the other and it will surprise you. You'll think it is command, but it is control. We have to be able to control things to do the CINCs' will.

We have to bring the effects of fires to a point of confluence, where the CINCs' and the JFACs' wills are accomplished with respect to what we bring-steel and fire on targets. That is control. The science of control enables the art of command. If you can't control it, you can't command it. And the rest of it enables the whole process to work.

And we didn't have to fight hard for air supremacy. But in the Global Strike Task Force construct, and if you go back to what the president described the other night as the axis of evil… If we go to any of those places we need to learn how to deal with this before we get totally stealthy with the JSF and the F-22. We need different solutions. As 9th Air Force and CENTAF commander, I talked to the Air Force XO and then commander of the U.S. Air Forces in Europe, John Jumper, and found that he had had the same problem when he was the CENTAF commander. I talked to Chuck Wald and Buzz Mosely and find that they have the same problems. And a lot of you in industry are trying to help us. But we don't just need jammers and we don't just need Block 50s. We don't just need one thing at the exclusion of all else. We need an array of capabilities to deal with this threat.

I am looking for ground solutions and space solutions. I am looking for kinetic and non-kinetic solutions. I am looking, for example, from space to be able to get down into an SA-10 and convince it to launch all missiles right now or to deny it from launching their missiles right now. If you have an answer to this, if you want to work on this problem with us, have pencil and paper ready, call me at the number on this screen. Operators are standing by [Applause].

Ok, enough.

It is a pleasure to represent ACC. It is a pleasure to be the spokesman for my friends who command the CAF. We pledged to work together with industry. We pledged to be a good partner of the Chief and the Secretary to conform to the guidelines that they've laid out, to work as leaders in the Air Force to retain our airmen, to fight for their survivability and to do the will of the United States of America. I am very proud to be an airman in the Air Force today.
I thank you for your attention.

Q. Considering the accelerated evolution expansion role of UAVs, what implications might this have for ACC training and doctrine?

General Hornburg: We have to find out - I think the Chief has pretty much answered that question. With respect to concept of operations, we need to know, once we get something, what to do with it or it is going to be like the dog that caught the bus. What next? But we know what to do with UAVs and I think the sky is the limit.

As John Jumper and Mike Ryan have so eloquently stated, it is great to have a little computer chip that is willing to die for its country. But once we take these UAVs and find out all of the things that we can do, there is no airman that needs to be concerned that a machine is about to take his job. But if you think about it, if you look at that array of SAMs, what a great place for a UAV to go in and do its thing. They are great in the high-threat areas and we are glad we have them. We are going to build more. And we know what to do with them. And pilots need not fear the future because of UAVs or UCAVs.

Q. To what extent does the Global Strike Task Force concept employ assets from the Army and Navy?

General Hornburg: We are all going to have to pitch in on the command and control. We are all going to have a part to play. There are people who clamor for things with service parochialisms that I think we need to avoid. We accept all comers to this. This is not an Air Force thing. We are in charge of it right now and we are in the lead of it. But if there is someone from another service or even another planet, for that matter, who has a way to help us on this, remember the number on that screen. Give me a buzz. I'll forward your name to the Chief.

Command and control will have a part. There will be a maritime part. Eventually, once we have the access, there will be a boots-on-the-ground profile to have a part as we seek depth. But right now we are in the conceptual development stage and I think we welcome all comers.

Q. How will squadrons flying Noble Eagle reconstitute themselves for Southern/Northern Watch or Enduring Freedom deployments?

General Hornburg: There is a political dimension to that and that is one that the Chief and the Secretary and the others in Washington will have to work. Until we get relief from the tasking, we continue to comply with the tasking. I've talked to a lot of squadron commanders who have air-to-air squadrons and they are beginning to whimper a little bit. Not whine. Whimper. Because their tongue's hanging out and they see their skills eroding. And we need to work this problem.

Now, one thing. If we had put our money where our mouth is (and we didn't have the money), but just think where we'd be right now if we could put all of those young men and women who are flying in Noble Eagle in a computer system called Distributed Mission Training. Those skills would not have eroded. By the way, is there a question on DMT? If not, I'd like to give an answer on one.

DMT is crucial. There are those in this audience who wonder if we are serious about Distributed Mission Training or Distributed Mission Operations. I'd like to offer up an emphatic "yes." We are going to try to look for the money. We don't have a choice. The way things are going right now, we must go into better, more high fidelity simulation - not to replace flying training, but to make flying training more valuable at the higher levels. Do the basics in the simulator and make your precious flying hours more valuable to you. That is one thing we are going to do. That is not going to solve the short-term problem, but that will help us long-term.

Q. What are the plans to fix manning, specifically security forces, after September 11th?

General Hornburg: Just before I left Training Command, we got word that the Air Staff wanted us to increase security forces throughput at basic military training. That doesn't come without cost. You can't give more people more training and increase the duration of the training without having to take something from somewhere else because we only have a finite bucket of training potential. But we have found ways and General Cook and his folks at AETC are working to beef up. Don, you have a rough 947 cops this year, which is a significant increase from years gone by. So the great folks at AETC are figuring out ways to make this happen and they are doing it for us.

Q. How is ACC working to make CSAR assets available to the AEFs and the war-fighting CINCs?

General Hornburg: What a question. Let me answer it in a way that the questioner did not frame. We talked about this, this morning. The Air Force is vitally serious about how to make CSAR the most vibrant, well-funded force that we can possibly put on earth to go out and pick up our people. Paul Hester and I will be working, starting on the 25th of February, on a concept to find out where CSAR should properly reside. There is no pre-condition. No one is assuming that ACC is the wrong spot or that AFSOC is the right spot. But Paul and I have known each other for 20 years and I think we can figure this out and report back to the Chief. With the help of a lot of the people in the first two rows.

The folks in the CSAR career field need not fear. Your interests are at heart and as General Jumper, the Chief, said today, I don't care where it lives. But we are going to quit funding it in the year of execution. We are going to put it in a spot where we can POM for it. We are going to develop it. We are going to put it in areas that meld with our other forces that have more of a special operations nature. Security. ASOGs and ASOCes possibly. Close air support. Young Sergeant Linehart and his group. And I think that we'll have a capability by the time John Jumper leaves as Chief of Staff that we don't have today and we'll be very proud of the effort that we are about to roll into.


Q. How are you fostering greater speed in the conops to requirements input to make sure you're intersecting properly in the acquisition cycle?
General Hornburg: I think our requirements people work very, very well with the requirements folks in Washington. General Jumper is very much involved, as well as the Secretary and the key leadership of the Air Force, to realize what are the most important things we are doing with respect to how they conform to conops. Whether they are doable, whether they are affordable and whether we want to take them on. Because the days of taking things that don't conform to our concept of operations and then spending valuable money on them to try them just to see if they work and satisfy someone's curiosity have to be over.
I think once we get an idea of what we need to do - what the effects need to be, what the concept of operations should be to get to that effect, and then not worry but ask for everyone to bring us throughout the spectrum things that will get to those effects - we will get to use industry better. We will get away for milspec if at all possible and we'll field things that will be in the hands of our airmen, provide us capabilities yet unseen.

Return to the Air Warfare Symposium Page