General Hornburg: The Chief said that a good plan does not survive first contact with the enemy. Mike Ryan used to say, a plan is merely something from which to deviate. Since the Chief gave about three-quarters of my talk, I am not even going to go to the podium but I am going to stand here and deviate from my own plan.

It is a wonderful thing when the Chief and I would say something that is so complementary. It means that our staffs are staying together. We believe in the same things. I followed John Jumper for many, many years and I'm proud to follow him here today.

When Don Peterson asked me to speak, they called and said, "we are looking for a certain type of speaker. We'd like someone who is suave and debonair. We'd like someone who can kind of think on his feet, who can expand and expound on the theories of airpower and the applications of airpower. And while we continue that search, can you follow John Jumper?" [Laughter]. It is in that spirit that I come here today.

When I was here last year, I had only been in command for two months and I was feeling my way along, but I came to you and told you that we had six things that we found important in Air Combat Command and I'd like to return to that and tell you what those six things are and then give you a status report on where we are with them.

It is easy to talk about because they are so important to our war-fighting capability and so important to our Air Force. It all starts with people. The Chief said it-mission always, but people first. You can't do anything unless you have a workforce trained and ready to go do it and in defense and in Air Force things that we do for our nation, without people, it just simply won't get done.

We have to have people who are trained and ready. We have to have people who volunteer for very difficult conditions and hard things because we ask more and more of them all the time. Now, the Chief talked about it when we went to war on recruiting. And I will tell you that that was the right thing to do. But I also think that we should have recognized at the time that it was also time to go to war on retention. Why did we need to recruit 34,000 airmen a year? Why did we need 34,600 and 36,000 in subsequent years? It is because we were losing 36,000 trained and ready airmen out the back door as we were bringing 34-36,000 new in from BMT and OTS and the Air Force Academy in the front door.

The problem is that you can't take someone with six weeks experience and replace them with 15 years experience. It just doesn't work. So when our chiefs and our commanders come to me and say, "why do we have so many three levels? Where did the five and seven levels go? Why do we promote so may senior airmen to staff sergeant?" It gives me a perfect opportunity to give them a retention pitch. Why do we promote so many to staff sergeant? If you don't like it, go out and retain more staff sergeants. How do you do that?

You don't do it by sitting by your computer screen and doing your email. There is no such thing as digital leadership. John Jumper says give me analog leadership. What is analog leadership? It is full body contact. It is out there mentoring, coaching and leading our airmen to save our workforce from losing them. It lets them know where they fit into the organization. It lets them know that we care about them. It lets them know that without them, we can't do our mission for the nation. And each and every one of them is important to what we do. That is what analog leadership is.

How do you do it? You always do it with love. Sometimes it takes tough love. But you do it because you tell them how important [they are]. You give them the quality of life in the fundamental fashion. Quality of life isn't the latest pay raise. Quality of life isn't, if you have a cell phone, how small and sexy that cell phone is. Quality of life is when you are in front of your mirror shaving in the morning or putting on your make up, if you want to come to work and work for the United States of America in the form of an airman in the United States Air Force, you have quality of life. And if we don't let those people remember that about what they do and feel good about their contribution, then shame on us. When this economy gets better, they will leave. The time to save our retention, with stop-loss and a sour economy, is now, to make them want to stay with us when the going is better and they can go do something else. I want them to feel like they want to work for the Air Force more than they want to go grease cars at Jiffy Lube. And in day's gone by, that simply hasn't been the case.

Our airmen are so precious to us that all the Global Hawks and all the F/A-22s and all the other stuff that we buy will not be worth the scrap iron it is made of if we don't have people to employ those systems. That is first in Air Combat Command.

Now, the next five things, tie for second and I can take them in any way that you'd like to hear about them. The Chief talked about EAF. We've come a long way with EAF. In fact, he didn't tell you-he is much to humble for this-he invented EAF. The Expeditionary Air Force. He and General Ryan then rode this thing out back in 1997, interrupted by Kosovo, and then when we re-cocked and reconstituted it in 1999. We didn't know how long it was going to take to fundamentally change our culture. Industry will tell you that it takes anywhere from six years to a generation to fundamentally change the culture of an organization. I am happy to tell you here today that our culture has been fundamentally changed in only four years. Our airmen know what EAF means. They know the good that it does. And we were talking at Corona, if we didn't have EAF, the story state of affairs that we would be in today.

Now, about a year and a half ago, EAF meant using two AEFs to fill the diamonds and pearls jobs around the world, as well as Northern Watch and Southern Watch. That took about 6,500 airmen, every year. Of course we still had 6,600 airmen in Korea that were not part of an AEF. So we were deployed, but we just didn't know what to do with it and how to identify with it.
Soon after 9/11, that 6,500 ramped all the way up to 20,000. And now, as the Chief said today, it is closer to 35,000 and it may well get bigger. The people at the EAF Center back at Langley are doing a wonderful job of taking these capable airmen in AEF buckets and sending them forward in a meaningful fashion so Buzz Mosely and Tommy Franks will have the tools at their disposal to do what the President asks them to do, should he ask them to do it. So the EAF, I think, is a magnificent success.

I look forward to the day when we can refer to ourselves as the Air Force again, instead of the Expeditionary Air Force, because expeditionary is so inculcated in our being, it is genetic for us, that we don't have to refer to ourselves as the Expeditionary Air Force any more than the Navy calls themselves the floating Navy. It is just going to be what we do. And I think we do it very, very well.

Infrastructure. We've made some progress in infrastructure. It is not anything we've really done in the last year because the things that enabled us to do these things in infrastructure were given to us about three, four or five years ago in the POM. But last year, a good news story, we spent $132 million on our families in family housing. We have 266 new houses, 216 new dorm rooms and we renovated 187 family house units. So we have almost 700 airmen and airmen families living better today than they did a year ago. And that is a good news story. That is what $132 million does. This year we are going to spend $180-something million. Last year I think it was $138. It is growing to $182 million.

If you ever go to Langley-and I hope some of you can-if you drive down Benedict Avenue, you'll see one of the loveliest streets in America. You'll see houses built back in the 1930s with 65-year-old trees lining Benedict Avenue. And if you look at those 65-year-old trees, you can imagine that there are 65-year-old roots uprooting 65-year-old sewers. We can't fail to improve our infrastructure. We can't fail. It does us no good to bring on Global Hawk and F/A-22 if we put it on crumbling infrastructure.

And no longer should an airmen who works out on the flight line come in to pick up tools and have it raining indoors as well. Those are the things we have to do. When I was a wing commander, I could spend $5.50 per square foot at Seymour Johnson. Today, Rick Rossberg can spend $2.20 and it is 10 years older. But we've taken our recapitalization rate down from 250 years. We've bought it down now to about 167 years, which is still unsatisfactory. But with the $8 billion we lay in, by FY '07, we should be down to industrial standards and that is good news. I think our airmen will live better. They will be more productive and life will be better for them because of it. So that is the infrastructure piece.

Now there is also communications infrastructure, which is very important. We are laying in $150 million in communications infrastructure for transformational communications. But we are still about $700 million short of where I think we need to be. So there is still plenty more to do, but I think we are on the right road to making that better as well.

The last thing I'd like to talk to you about is transformation. I'd like to do it in the context of our last three strategic thrust areas, which are transformation, command and control, and information operations.

Other than F/A-22, probably command and control and IO are our most transformational potentials in the next ten years. As we transform, we can do it one of three ways-we can transform in technology, we can transform in CONOPS developments, or we can transform in institution organizations. We are doing all three.

The Chief showed you the CONOPS. We are responsible for managing four of them for him. And the CONOPS are the things that enable us to link our vision and our strategies back to doctrine. If you don't have the right CONOPS, then the new technology is of little value.

One of my favorite stories is one that goes back to the pre-Civil War days, back to 1849, when the Winchester repeating rifle was patented. Now, move forward a few years to 1860. We are fighting the Civil War with what? Muzzle-loaders. Why? It is because of two reasons. One, the Army had a whole lot of gunpowder that they didn't want to waste. But more importantly, it was the way that they fought. They would line up in three rows, and the first row would fire and then kneel. The second row would then fire a volley and kneel, and the third one would fire. Someone figured out that with repeating rifles, the longevity of people in the first two rows was not very long [laughter].

But that is a true story. The Army didn't get the repeating rifle until 1873. The lack of a CONOPS didn't support a new technology. And the same could be said today in a very true sense.

As we transform though, the most transformational thing that we are bringing on clearly is the F/A-22. I was fortunate to be at Nellis Air Force Base a couple of weeks ago when we rolled out the first F/A-22 that was not assigned to Edwards. Doug Pierson was there. He witnessed it, and I said then that the F/A-22 is the most transformational thing that we will probably see in our lifetimes because it will shape the battlefield in ways unknown to this day.

And I also said two more things about the F/A-22-it is not just the parents of airmen who are going to be glad that we have the F/A-22, it is going to be the parents and the husbands and the wives of soldiers and Marines. Because the F/A-22 will result in direct tangible benefits and the loss of blood on the battlefield because of the things that it can do. The parents of Marines and the parents of soldiers will one day wake up and say, "thank God the United States of America has an F/A-22."

The other thing I said was, that if we get the F/A-22 in the numbers and get it in the configurations that we want, it is because of two men and they are sitting right here. Dr. Jim Roche and General John Jumper have spent more time than they should have had to fighting for this capability. But when we get it, just remember, we wouldn't have had it without them. And to both of you gentlemen, the rest of us in the Air Force thank you for your persistence and your leadership on this issue [applause].

Now the Chief's already talked about UAVs, so I won't go into that except to say, "amen." But I will tell you just a few things that we are doing in some of the other areas. As we go into transformation, we also have to look at what we refer to as vectored evolution. We have to take the things that we have now, that are going to be with us for awhile in our persistence force and we have to make them better. With the limited dollars we have, we are doing some good things and I'd like to just share a few of them with you.

In the bomber force, we are going to put a new radar in the B-2. We've already put beyond-line-of-sight communication in the B-2 and we have a targetable weapon capability in the B-2 which makes it an absolutely formidable piece of air gear.

In the B-1, we are putting Block E avionics in it. We are increasing its survivability capabilities, which will make it more survivable in more than a medium-threat environment. We are putting JASSM in an integration capability. And the B-1 is going to be with us for quite some time to come and it is going to be a very formidable arrow in the JFACC's quiver.

And the B-52. What can you say about the old buff except, thank God it is still around. If we recapitalized our airplanes at the same rate we did the B-52, we would still be flying World War I biplanes today. But what are we doing with the B-52? If you go to Barksdale or up to Minot, you are going to see a pristine fleet of bombers. They look brand new, until you get inside. But we are going to give them a precision strike capability as we integrate a strike pod onto it, the lightning pod. We are giving them enhanced communications and the B-52, as the Chief said, is going to be able to do things no one envisioned the B-52 doing. So our bomber fleet is in pretty good shape.

Our fighter fleet is going to take some work. You saw the numbers on the age of the aircraft. We are taking the F-16, the CCIP, and the Falcon UP and we are extending the air-frame out to 8,000 hours. We are putting common configuration in it. So, one F-16 is going to look a lot more like another. It will be easier to maintain and it will be more capable as we fly it.

The F-15E is getting data link and will soon get the sniper pod. It's going to be, with the data link and the pods and the upgrades we are putting into their avionics, a much more formidable airplane as well.

I'd like to take as much money as I can and put a common radar in the F-15C. The Chief outlined the problem that we have with emerging threats, such as cruise missiles. I predict that we will need the F-15C with the better radar, one more capable and one that the maintainers can more easily work on. We won't have software designs for three different radars and three different models.

In the A-10, we are taking that airplane up to 16,000 hour capability. We will put a lightning pod on it and in FY '07 we'll integrate the sniper.

I was just out at Holloman, going through the F-117 things that we are doing out there. We have a new type of engineer working on the F-117, because of the ram material, they are now doing this in-house more than they ever have before and they call these people "Martians." I said, well, what does a Martian do? And they showed me exactly what they do and they take pride in it and the airplane flies better than it ever has before, and it flies at operational rates better than it before. We are also putting in that a selectable precision weapon so we can re-target.

The vectored evolution, coupled with the transformation of things on the horizon and things yet to come, I think, put the Air Force from Air Combat Command's perspective in pretty good shape. Although, we could do a lot more with more, but I am proud of what our people are doing with the resources that they have.

What about command and control and IO? Very briefly, I am very gratified by where we've gone in command and control. We are going to lay in $1.1 billion to try to integrate, as the Chief described today, in a systems way, in an organizational way, and in a training way the CAOC of the future. Ron Keys, our XO has gone to the Chief and me and I am right with Ron on this-it is time to freeze the stick and starting building them.

Leslie Kenne and the integration people can then take that baseline CAOC and make it a lot better. The last time I was over visiting Buzz Mosely, I was so pleased by the state of condition of our command and control system. I go back to General Mike Ryan, we were in Vicenzza in probably the world's first CAOC that Bear Chambers built. It was about the size of a small bathroom. And the JFACC could not answer the fundamental question that all JFACCs need to answer and that question is, "what is going on?" Today, the JFACC can. And tomorrow he'll even know more.

With IO, though, as we've talked about, C4ISR not being a noun. C4ISR is a descriptor of its components. We need now to elevate our game and find out more about information operations.

Information operations to me is not the operations of information. There are elements of information operations which in a very fundamental way scare people. IO should not be treated as a nuke anymore. I think we need to take information operations down to three components and we talked about this a little bit at Corona. We were able to get a lot of smart people to think about this down in Lackland Air Force Base, at AIA back in December.
It appears to me that the things that are frightening about information operations are basically the manipulation of public perception. Secondly, getting into the networks and doing mischief with the networks. If you set that aside, the things that I think the war-fighter needs to be interested in more than anything is what you might go back to in history and call "electronic combat."

I would even set that term aside and I would say that what I am interested in is non-kinetic solutions to today's kinetic requirements. I would love to see the United States be able to take advancing phalanxes of armor and somehow shut down the ignition systems on that tank and then let the JFACC go back and kill each one when he wants to, instead of having to run back for him and do it kinetically.

When General Jumper was helping Mike Short with the air war in Serbia, when they talked about taking the Serbs' lighting-their power grids-away, one day it would be nice to be able to do that selectively and then not have to go back in three weeks and rebuild it again. There are many non-kinetic applications and I believe we should discover what they are. If they are in SAP-SAR programs, quit treating SAP-SAR as another command and control system. Put the tools of the trade in the hands of the commanders. Exercise and then when we go to war as a nation, should that day come, the joint force commander, the air commander, the land commander and all commanders have tools of their trade, both non-kinetic and kinetic ways to end warfare with less bloodshed and more effect. So that is where we are starting to leap off in information operations.

There you have it. I'll give you a little time back. We start with people. We give them something, a framework with which to deploy and do their jobs. We give them something to stand on and work on with respect to infrastructure. And then, for all of the Air Force, we do our part as best we can in transformation, in command and control and in information operations.

Q: Discuss transportation requirements.

General Hornburg: Working with John Handy at the AEF Center has taken the wonderful transportation capabilities we have through TRANSCOM and as I said before, the numbers grew quickly from 5,500 to 20,000, now to 35,000. And I think that we'll be able to satisfy our national requirements to get the right airmen to the right place along with the right soldiers in the right place to do the right thing when the right time comes.

Q: Comment on ACC's ability to simultaneously provide combat-ready forces for the desert area and also support the Homeland Defense mission.

General Hornburg: Well, we're doing it. We are doing it on the backs of our people, sometimes. But that is what we have to do because that it was the state of play is right now. With the Homeland Defense mission, I am General Ed Eberhart's air component commander. Major General Craig McKinley is my agent in this, down at 1st Air Force. I think we are finding that there are better ways that we can assist General Eberhart, in addition to flying CAPs. I can't go into a lot of detail on that. I think that we will be able to deal with the Pacific, but we can't do it simultaneously. I think we have to phase that operation and that is left to others better than I to explain. We are doing it as well as we can and I think that we'll be able to hack the mission without a doubt.

Q: How has the deployment cycle affected training exercises such as Red Flag?

General Hornburg: It has been a fundamental and a direct impact. We have just had to cancel a joint Red Flag. We simply didn't have the people in place and the airplanes to conduct it. So General Larry Ellis, who is my counterpart in the Army, was also going to bring folks. The Navy was going to be participating and we all agreed that it was the wrong thing to do at that time because of the optempo. S o I called the Chief and said, "Chief, here is my recommendation." He said, "absolutely." So, we are not getting as much training. What bothers me, though, if we put as many airmen overseas as we might have to, how do we then train those coming up through Don Cook's pipeline? What about the MQT pilots? What about the kids coming out of tech training and our enlisted force? How do we train them? So we are starting to think about those things as contingency plans as well.

Q: In our airborne electronic combat concept, we include the B-52s in that. It was a pretty good deal to get them ready to help us open the door there. Do you see us being able to get the B-52 ECM program built where we can use it as an asset to open up?

General Hornburg: There is not much I can really talk about there. It is an idea right now. The Chief and I have talked about this and he thinks it would be a great mission if something can carry the equipment. If we decide that we need to put pods and capabilities on airplanes, then putting them on F-16s and in A-10s to use them with the depth and breadth that we need and with the persistence that we need, it calls for something like a B-52. I see that as yet another mission that we may well ask the B-52 to accomplish.

Q: As the Chief said and we've all seen, we're really come a long way here in combat ariel vehicles. How do you see the integration of manned vehicles and unmanned vehicles to get the most synergy out of them?

General Hornburg: I can't add too much to what the Chief said. I think that a couple things I might add-how do you like that? I can't add much, but I can add two main points! Number one, we can't treat these things like disposable diapers and just throw them out. These things cost money and it comes out of your treasury, just like it comes out of ours. The accident rate right now, I looked at the Predator accident rates recently and last year the accident rate was 32.8 percent, which means 32.8 Predators for every hundred thousand flying hours. This year, the Predator accident rate is 49.6. If you want to talk about Global Hawk, which we are measuring, the accident rate for the Global Hawk right now is 167.7. That is unsatisfactory. So, we are going to have to do better to make these airplanes, whether they are manned, remotely piloted or unmanned. An airplane is an airplane and it needs care and nurturing and we have to treat one just as valuably as we do another.

Now, when you put them together, let's not just say because it doesn't have a pilot in it, as the Chief said, that it is a transformational concept. It is only transformational if they can do something better tomorrow than what we can today. But once we figure out ways, a concept of operations, where we can take clusters of these airplanes, they can refuel, they can fly in formation and then they can do things that airplanes can't do today coupled with the airplanes that we have today that can do the things that they can do today, that is transformation with a capital 'T.'

Q: Are we in an area where technology is driving doctrine as opposed to doctrine providing requirements and then moving to technology? Having worked and led the Joint War-fighting Center, how do you see that relationship between doctrine and technology?

General Hornburg: I think it is better because we have discipline in our system that we didn't have when I was commanding the Joint War-fighting Center. Anybody that came up with a new idea, we'd sit there and try to develop a way to use it. Rather than say, "here is what we want to do." You can either be deficiency-based or you can be requirements-based. I like the latter. I have a requirement to do the following thing and we turn to industry and industry is doing a wonderful job of coming up and saying, "I heard what you said, here is how we can help." So, this is getting better. And it is doing so because we are all-in uniform and out of uniform-more disciplined. We have concept of operations with which to tie our vision to our doctrine and we have great industry partners to work with. In that case, life is good.

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