General John P. Jumper
Air Force Chief of Staff
AFA National Symposium--Los Angeles
November 16, 2001
It is a pleasure to be here today. To share the podium with the great
air and space leaders of our Air Force arrayed here on the front row. To
be in the midst of great leadership. I hope everyone notices that
whenever the AFA meets in groups of more than five, Tom and Trish McKee
seem always to be there. Our Air Force could be no better served by the
leadership than to have Tom and his constant wing-man for life, Trish,
at his side telling our story and making the right things happen for
airmen everywhere. Tom and Trish, thank you very much for what you do.
General Shaud can introduce anybody and make him look good and I have
benefitted from that over the years. Thank you very much and God bless
you for all you do for us.
It is a pleasure for me to be here today. And somebody mentioned
Larry King. I don’t know how many of you have had the chance to do this
sort of thing before, but it is really a combat sortie to go do
something like Larry King.
Everybody I’ve talked to, including my mother, she says, "you look so
young."
I say, "yeah, mom, that wasn’t my face you were looking at."
You had to have a dip stick to get down to where the stick was below
all this stuff they put on your face. It is a helluva’ experience. You
go in there and it is a bunch of little bitty rooms and there are
crowded corridors and people hustling all over the place. You wonder how
they could get anything done, stuff stuck up on the wall with pins and
you go into this make up room and this woman sets you down in a barber
chair and hits this hydraulic activated accelerated and flaps you down
to the horizontal position and she takes out a brush that could only
come from the Sherman Williams store and begins to put stuff on your
face that must be what is left over after they pave the road.
You get up from this and you know that any muscle twitch of the face
will probably initiate a pyro-plastic event of the face that will cause
nothing to be left on top of your shoulders if you do this.
They put you into the room where Larry is. They just used a brush on
me. With Larry, I think they use a putty knife. Don’t tell him I said
that. But in the minute and a half you have between Bob Simon who talked
before us – I mean, they sit you down, they wear you out, they stick
things in your ear, give you a sound test. All of a sudden somebody
counts backwards from five and there you are sitting in front of 50
million people and there is Larry King saying, "listen we have got 20
seconds before the commercial. Can you describe how we are going to
achieve world peace?"
That is a combat sortie, gang, let me tell you. (Laughter)
Later you go in and they have to jack hammer this stuff off your
face. There was a lady going on whatever the next segment. I didn’t
recognize her but she looked like she should be famous. She looked like
I should have recognized her.
The same lady who put the layers of stuff on me, take this
single-hair micro brush and a little bit of talc and whisk it across
this lady’s nose and said, that’s all you need, you are beautiful.
When you see Secretary Roche later this morning, ask him if he has
put in his order for Mabelline yet because he really should keep on the
make-up the next time. (Laughter)
When we were on Larry King, of course, we talked about the war. We
should all be very proud of what our warriors have accomplished in
Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) and Noble Eagle. What you see on the
news is real. What we do with air and space power works. They are in
retreat. We are better today than we were in March of 1999 during
Operation Allied Force.
Why? Because we have great airmen out there putting stuff together
that finds targets, that locates targets and then kills targets. The
Taliban are on the run. In the 40 days since OEF started, on the 7th
of October, our air and space forces have deployed some 14,000 warriors
supported by many, many more at their posts in reach-back positions.
Included among those are our space forces, both forward deployed and in
reach-back positions.
We’ve generated some 3,000 airborne missions plus hundreds of space
tasks necessary for warriors to deploy the force in some of our most
difficult conditions that you can possibly imagine. To generate the
intelligence, to mensurate the coordinates, transmit and receive the
data, to command and control the forces, to put the laser spot right on
the target, and all with enough confidence to avoid collateral damage
and to track the terrorists down and kill them. That is what we are
going to do. It is not over yet.
And it is not just about OEF. It is also about Noble Eagle. In Noble
Eagle we have about 11,000 airmen out there, hundreds of aircraft,
flying 24-hour-a-day orbits. And when I say hundreds of aircraft, that
is both in the air and on the ground--sitting alert from more than 20
locations around the United States, including the AWACS and all that
goes into making this mission happen. About 70 to 80 percent of these
people are from our Air National Guard and our Air Force Reserve. Total
Force, air and space, white world and black world coming together
globally to make things happen. Think about it. We have got a lot to be
proud of. We are doing the job.
Now we’ve seen some stories in the news that attempt to draw lessons
from this war about the relative value of air and space forces versus
ground or sea power. We should not be drawn into these arguments. We
have what is, in my experience, the very best example of joint warfare
going on today. Our Navy is flying off of carriers out at sea, being
refueled by Air Force tankers flown by active Guard and Reserve putting
the sum of the wisdom of our space intelligence, surveillance and
reconnaissance together to locate targets. They coordinate with people
on the ground, teams of young engineers and brilliant people out there
putting the right sort of data into the right sort of screens, airborne
and on the ground, to make sure that we have the targets located exactly
right and avoid collateral damage.
Those people on the ground are special operators, some are airmen,
our special tactics teams with the know-how to control air and space
power. There is a lot to be proud of. We should rejoice in each other’s
specialties among our services and not be drawn into arguments about who
could have won the war all by themselves.
Having people on the ground to precisely locate targets has made us
orders of magnitude better than we are when we don’t have people on the
ground, as we didn’t have in Kosovo. Maybe that is the difference
between 78 days and 40 days. I don’t know.
The most important part of my day on Tuesday night came after the
Larry King Live show. Secretary Roche and I went out to Ground Zero in
New York City. It is a profound experience. You have to be there. There
is no television that can describe the wanton destruction, the mindless
horror of what exists at Ground Zero in New York City.
You stand there and you contemplate the taking of thousands of lives
by a group of people who turned our own technology against us, used our
own symbols of technology, our airliners as missiles, and in a very
clever way hit these big buildings in a way that would make them tumble
and kill thousands of people. You stand there and look at it and you get
angry.
Who are these folks? What made them hate us? And to the average
Western mind, it is difficult to contemplate. They tell us this is a
religious war. But how can this be a religious war against Americans? We
who are so tolerant. We who visit each other’s churches and synagogues.
We who rejoice in the open mindedness of a secular society. How could
this be a religious war? What do we do? So, we jump to other
explanations. It must be destitution. It must be poverty. It must be the
stance we take politically on the Middle East peace process. It must be
something else; it can’t be about religion.
Well, listen to Osama bin Laden himself--this is a jihad, this isn’t
about Islam. It is about his brand of zealotry that defines everything
that he is not as the enemy, to be destroyed. Anything that is a
competing culture, a competing power, a competing ideology, a competing
way of life, must be destroyed. So that he (bin Laden) can re-invent it
all in the cloak of his own zealot’s purity.
There is a two hour video that I wish every American could see. It is
an indoctrination tape for Al Qaeda. At the end, an Al Qaeda spokesman
says, "There are thousands of young Muslims out there waiting to die,
anxious to die, the same way that Americans are anxious to live."
There is no middle ground here, gang. There is no appeasing these
people. There is no negotiation. We’ve got to take them out. That is
what we are going to do. It is not over yet. They’ll go to ground. But
these people essentially believe we should all be dead and they have
demonstrated the capability to gather the tools of annihilation and to
use them. We can’t let it go on. And we won’t.
It was a profound experience to go look at this (Ground Zero) that
night. Our President, I will tell you, has it exactly right. He has
declared war on terrorism and it is not only right that we do so, it is
urgent that we do so, to get this job done. It is just the beginning.
I came here today to talk about my two favorite subjects and that is
air and space. And how our airmen – our air and space warriors – whose
job it is to leverage both air and space, will combine their skills and
their talents to bring the greatest asymmetrical advantage to those
commanders whose job it is to win the war, not only this war that we are
in today, but every war.
Let me start off by talking a little bit about air and space versus
aerospace. I carefully read the Space Commission report. I didn’t see
one time in that report, in its many pages, where the term "aerospace"
was used. The reason is that it fails to give the proper respect to the
culture and to the physical differences that abide between the physical
environment of air and the physical environment of space.
We need to make sure we respect those differences. So, I will talk
about air and space. I will respect the fact that space is its
own culture, that space has its own principles that have to be
respected. And when we talk about operating in different ways in air and
space, we have to also pay great attention to combining the effects of
air and space because in the combining of those effects, we will
leverage this technology we have that creates the asymmetrical advantage
for our commanders.
This is what I think is the essence of transformation, to leverage
the nation’s technology to create the maximum asymmetrical advantage. We
who deal in this realm of air and space are blessed with an unlimited
event horizon. Think about it. It has always been true that airmen have
argued for unrestricted boundaries. When we argue with CINCs, we talk
about our area-wide, theater-wide perspective. When we talk to our
national elements of power, it is about our global perspective. And as
we transition, and it will, into a universal perspective. It is in our
DNA. That is the way we think. And we need to make sure we take
advantage of it.
We can view and we can access any battle space. When air and space
combine together in the right ways, we can target, we can be redundant,
we can persist. We can find, fix, track, target, engage and assess
anything of significance on the face of the earth. We can bring this to
the joint fight in ways that no one else can. It is our job, it is our
duty. It is what air and space warriors are all about.
It is our strength that we unlock the intellectual potential that
resides in those who can think across the dimensions of air and space,
of manned and unmanned. If we can do this, it is true transformation.
Right now, I would argue, these are capabilities that exist in bits
and pieces. It is our job to pull it all together, to be able to think
in terms of integration. Where is the one place that this all comes
together today if you are a warrior? In the air and space operations
center. It is where Buzz Mosley is today. That is where it comes all
together. That is where you are sitting there waiting for the combined
effects to arrive to you to use to defeat an enemy.
Do you think that Buzz Mosley cares whether the information is
arriving from a space platform or an air platform? Do you think that the
guy on the ground, the special operator who is trying to put bombs on
targets before they kill him, cares whether the coordinates arrives as a
result of an air platform or a space platform? He does not. He wants the
effect. And he is most grateful for those of us in uniform who can think
across boundaries, who can think across capabilities, in a single word,
who can integrate.
I think there is a formula for this. That formula starts in a very
simple way and it is a way that we have migrated away from. Let me tell
you why I think that is true. The way we start step number one is, what?
Concept of operations. It is the ability to think about how we are going
to fight before we decide what we are going to buy to fight with.
I would argue that right now we have it backwards. There is a reason
we have it backwards. It is not because we are ill-intended. It is
because that is what a tight budget forces you to do. It forces you
directly to an argument about your under-funded PE, program element. It
forces us to think in terms of programs and not integration.
Imagine if we had a system in the Pentagon which allowed us to give
the money to the person who we chartered to create time-critical
targeting? We give the money to that person and he or she is charged
with pulling together the programs that will make this happen -- air,
space, manned, unmanned – to create the effect. It would be a different
way of life. We are going to try to go to that way of life. I think it
is going to work better for all of us.
General Mike Dugan, the former chief of staff of the Air Force, puts
it just right. He says we are all heavy equipment operators. We are all
wedded to our platforms and our programs. And you know, he’s right. To a
hammer, every problem looks like a nail. To an F-15 guy, every problem
looks like a MIG-21, you just gotta figure out how to kill it before it
kills you. To a bomber guy, not many problems can’t be solved with 105
Mark-82s. This is the way we are taught to think about things. When you
are a captain or a lieutenant, that is just right. You are supposed to
be a zealot.
When I go out to Nellis and I talk to the fighter and bomber pilots
out there, I want them to be zealots. I want them to know more about
that platform they fly and the weapons they engage than any person on
earth. You know what? That is why we are as good as we are. We get into
a fracas like Allied Force or Enduring Freedom, we hand this over to a
bunch of operators and they are going to figure out how to do it.
We’ve got people today figuring out how to paste together the
Predator with the AC-130 so you can get the video direct from one to the
other. We have got them figuring out how to put a laser spot on the
ground so you can see it and queue targets one to another to include the
Navy’s airplanes. We’ve got them figuring out today how to do that. Why
didn’t we figure it out yesterday?
You know how many programs we have dedicated to integration in our
Air Force? How much money is labeled against a program element that says
integration? Do you know how much? Zero.
Integration is left as a byproduct of the program, of the platform.
That is often how it is treated. What are we trying to do is to create
an intellectual construct that will take us away from that. It is the
idea of task forces. Task forces that do, on a broad scale, specific
things. I am not sure how we are going to label all of these task
forces, but we got started off on one that worked real well, called
Global Strike Task Force. This is a task force we put together that
describes how we are going to handle our most difficult problem and that
is access, the anti-access problem.
It is that problem that says you don’t have access to forward bases,
you have to create the condition for access, you have to roll back the
threat so that you can bring and deploy forces forward. When you
describe the mission, the concept of operations for this Global Strike
Task Force – and by the way, when you create a conops and when you think
conops in effects based, there is one rule – you never name a platform
or a program. You always talk about what it is you are trying to do. Get
around a conference table and try doing this some time. It is damned
hard, but it is the right way to think about it. In Global Strike Task
Force, that is what you do. You put together several elements of Global
Strike Task Force that deals with this anti-access problem and there are
several elements. I am going to talk about one of them. It is what I
call the horizontal integration of manned, unmanned and space. Notice I
didn’t mention one platform or program.
This horizontal integration of manned, unmanned and space is designed
to do one thing--I call it the "sum of the wisdom."
The sum of the wisdom of this horizontal integration will result in a
cursor over the target. We won’t have to go through stove pipes. We
won’t have to go through tribal representatives that sit in front of
tribal work stations to interpret their tribal hieroglyphics to the rest
of us poor unwashed. We will do this with machine to machine digital
interfaces.
I have the luxury of being a really dumb fighter pilot. I can talk
about satellites conversing directly to airplanes, but I watch people in
audiences blanch white and faint when I suggest such a thing. Why is
that so hard? There is no better example than the example of GMTI.
When I tried to address the example of GMTI in the Pentagon, I got
labeled as an anti-space-based radar guy. But I want to take you through
my logic and see if you can agree with me or not. The subject of the
sentence is GMTI to commanders whose responsibility it is to win the
war. The subject of the sentence is not air versus space. So what I am
anxious to do is take advantage of those technologies that will combine
the persistence of the airborne platform with the high ground of space
in a logical way as we migrate eventually to a space-based system. How
do we do that is the question I ask.
I don’t know exactly what the answer is, but intuitively I can tell
you, it might go something like this: We go another generation of
airborne platforms with GMTI and integrate all of the black world stuff
that we have in the hopper to do that. We take our space-based radar and
we suggest a risk-reduction program that shows us the capabilities and
advances the capabilities so that the first one that we get that is
operational isn’t in low earth orbit, where we have to buy a
constellation of satellites that might break the bank, but actually goes
up to medium earth orbit, where we can do it with a few satellites.
Talk about this horizontal integration of manned, unmanned and space
is to suggest something else. When we do this, we don’t want to put a
satellite up there that can be defeated by the target stopping. We want
it to be able to track those things that are fairly slow moving, but
when they stop, we want it to also be able to deal with synthetic
aperture radar, imaging infrared, perhaps a hyper-spectral type of
device and maybe it is not on that satellite. Maybe it is in
conversation with other satellites who might do this better. I don’t
know. But it is not single dimensional.
In your airborne platform, that next generation of Joint STARS, you
are sitting there and you are looking at the convoy going behind the
mountain, you can’t see it anymore. You are already having a digital
level conversation with the next satellite coming over the horizon and
it is going to fill in the blank. The person sitting at the console
doesn’t know where the result came from. He or she doesn’t care. Neither
does that commander who is passing on that information to the warhead
wherever it is, manned or unmanned, space-borne or airborne, that is
going to destroy that target.
Think about it. We could be doing this today but we are not. We are
going to. We are going to figure this out. We are going to figure out
how to have conversations between airborne platforms, unmanned, on the
ground, in the air. Build us a constellation that marries up the manned
and the unmanned, perhaps control the unmanned platforms from the manned
platforms to put them in the right position so you can triangulate for
precise target location, precise identification. Create that network in
the sky that will pass the information around.
Here is a thought for you. We have tankers that are where? We put
tankers in precise locations during every battle that are close enough
to the target to get fighters in so that the fighters have to go to the
minimum distance. I sat bolt upright in bed about two months ago and
said: Why do we buy dumb tankers? Why don’t we use them as a network in
the air? Why don’t we put pallets on them that translate one sort of
link message format to another? Link 16 with Link 11 with E-PLARS with a
thing that the Navy uses to talk to satellites, to pass target data to
aircraft, to pass it back up to satellites to send it back home or
wherever it needs to be. Why don’t we do that? While we are at it, why
don’t we put electronic scanning arrays on the side of these tankers so
that they suck up signals and send those signals back to where they are
processed; they don’t process the signals on the tanker, they just send
it back to where it needs to be. And you always have a network in the
sky.
Until we figure out how to do low-earth orbiting satellites in less
than constellations of 40, 50 or 60, why don’t we use Global Hawk at
65,000 or 70,000 feet as a surrogate for low-orbiting satellites in
theaters to get this job done, for communication, to solve our bandwidth
problem?
We are going to solve the problem of low-earth orbiting. We are going
to solve the problem of what it costs to get payloads into space. But in
the meantime, why don’t we combine the two, the high ground of space for
the persistence of the airborne platform? This is what we should be
doing.
Then it all comes together in the command and control node, that air
and space operations center where Buzz Mosley sits today. He wants to be
able to take a cursor over the electronic display up there in the front
of the air and space operations center, he wants to lock onto the target
the way he locks onto the target in the F-15. Think about it. Today, if
you are an F-15 driver, you are up there with the AWACS and the AWACS
says, "Eagle One, you’ve got a bandit, bull’s eye, zero-four-zero for
40." You take your cursor in that F-15, you put it over that target and
you press the button and then you sit back and you watch. You press the
button and the system goes to work. Why? Because we trained that system
that listen, we’ve got to kill this guy before he kills us. So we had
better get to work here.
You don’t have to run your mouths over the target and say, give me
the air speed, give me the altitude, send a query out on the internet,
tell me what kind of airplane this is, watch the hourglass run down. You
don’t do that. The system understands the urgency. It says, altitude,
heading, air speed, target, type. You put the dot in the middle of the
circle, it flies you the perfect intercept. Without any prompting it has
a conversation with Mr. AMRAAM missile down here on the missile rail and
says "Mr. AMRAAM, you come off the rail, look right here, that is where
the target is going to be." AMRAAM says, "got it" and puts an envelope
up on your heads-up display: max range, min range, no escape range.
And for the fighter pilot who can’t figure out any other way, there
is a big flashing light right in the middle of the hut that says,
"shoot! Shoot!" (Laughter). That is for me. That is what I need. Find,
fix, track, target, engage and assess. Even if you fail a piece of
information – it can’t tell you what kind of airplane it is – you’ve got
to get a visual contact. You come take that guy canopy to canopy, you
put your radar in vertical scan, it looks up 70 degrees. You turn, it
locks on. You uncage the A-9 synchro head and get the ground on the head
set and let that heat-seeking missile go and that guy is dead. Find,
fix, track, target, engage and assess – five seconds.
Here is the question gang. If we can do this in the tactical level of
war, why can’t we do it at the operational level of war? Why can’t we
lock onto the target up there on the screen for Buzz Mosley? Lock on to
it and have it go in and inquire in databases at all levels – airborne,
space borne platforms – what can you tell me about this? We just got a
tip-off from the satellite that says, "hey, this could be an SA-11 or a
SCUD." You dip down into the databases, it goes because you’ve done your
predictive battle space awareness--a whole other lecture I’ll give some
day. Your predictive battle space awareness and you know, because you’ve
done terrain delimitation, you have studied the patterns, you know that
this is a likely place that SCUD might be. So, yeah, that is what it
could be.
You’ve got your Combined Federal Campaign thermometer over here on
the right side--that is your confidence level--you are beginning to fill
your brain bucket here. You told it before you fight that we have to
have a 95 percent confidence level before we can go attack this thing,
so you start filling that brain, they go in that bucket and the
thermometer starts filling up, you say, "ok, yeah, well, we know that
is, what it might be." The signals are telling us that. It is in the
right terrain and the stuff but we still need more so here is your list
General Mosley, here is your list of stuff you can do. Here is your
picture of what you’ve got up right now. Here is your satellite it is
going to be coming over here and it is going to be coming over in about
15 minutes. It can help us out with this. Here is your Joint STARS. It
is a little bit out of range. We can reposition it in 15 minutes. Here
is your Predator. It is great, it can go do this for you, but you know
it only goes 70 knots and there is a 70 knot wind so it will take 100
years to get there. (Laughter). Here is your Global Hawk, here is your
U-2. Here is how we grade each one of these sensors to be able to give
you the information you need on a first look, which one do you want?
You click on it, you get it, you say, "ok, this is the one."
Meanwhile the system is telling you, ok, you did your predictive
awareness, here are the platforms that you have ready to go deal with
this problem. You were smart enough two days ago when you made the ATO
to put a couple of B-1s out here with the right ordnance on it. They are
waiting for this to happen. Why? Because you did your prediction. You
knew this was going to happen. So which one of these bad boys do you
want to use? Well, we’ll use this one. Ok, good. Let’s send the data to
him, this guy knows, "ok, this is in the works right now." We don’t have
the permission yet, but it is in the works. You are tasking it through
the AWACS. The satellite comes over and gets the picture, the picture
comes down through our ISR constellation. It gets the ok from the JFAC.
The data goes right into the cockpit of the B-1 and it is on its way.
Why don’t we do that? We could be doing that today.
There is nothing I’ve described that we couldn’t be doing today.
During the middle of the Kosovo war, talk about stove pipes. I called my
bomber mafia and I say, "ok, gang, we need a way to do B-2s better. We
need a way to change targets en route to the B-2s."
Bomber guys, God love them, they were taught to go to the heart of
Russia. You didn’t talk to anybody. We take off with our thing, you
know, we don’t change targets. It might be a communist. I am unfair to
these guys, it is not really this way, but I got in my airplane and I
went out to Nob Noster, Missouri and to Whiteman Air Force Base and sat
down with a bunch of captains. These are the zealots. We pay these guys
to be zealots. And we sat down and in two hours they figured it out.
Somebody told them exactly what we wanted to do and they figured it out.
And the first night they went in there and killed two SA-3s. We gave
them the targets two hours before arrival because they’d been shifting
around. We are using that system today and better. We’ve improved on all
that over Afghanistan with the other bombers. Open the aperture. Think
in effects. Think in conops. It is how we are going to fight before we
decide what we are going to buy to fight with.
It is also one other thing, gang. It is being more than a technician.
We all suffer this one, too. It is understanding the basics of how we
fight. It is understanding our doctrine, the basic principles we use
when we go to war and how our specialties apply to that. It also gets
into our acquisition process.
Our acquisition process today is risk averse. Program managers are
afraid of a mistake. Operators are not involved. So here is what we are
going to do. We are going to get operators involved in the acquisition
process. Operators are going to share the risk. We are going to accept a
failure or two and we are going to create a system that allows us to
trade requirements on the fly to take advantage of new technologies.
There is nothing that we have found yet – people are still searching,
because the first thing I am told is that is against the law. Show me
the law. Bring me the code number. It ain’t against the law. It is
policy. Whose policy? "Well, it is," OSD says. "No, it is not," OSD
says. "It is usually we said." Now I may be wrong. They are still
searching. They’ve been searching now for 40 days. And we haven’t found
it yet.
The requirement shops of major commands, why don’t they get together?
Should we ever write another requirement that isn’t sensitive to the
contributions of both air and space? No, we should not.
Our requirement shops should be of one mind. We are going to do that.
We are going to exchange prisoners. We are going to actually put
acquisition people into requirements shops. Think of that, cats and dogs
living together (Laughter). This was Les Lyles’ idea and he is exactly
right. We’ll have a conference. It will be like the Army-Navy football
game or the Air Force-Navy football game. We’ll march down the middle of
the field and swap prisoners before the game. I could go on and on and
on, but I am already over my time.
My message here today is simple: We are all warriors, every single
one of us. We need to make sure we have our warrior hat on. Warriors win
wars. Buzz Mosley is a warrior out there today trying to win the war. He
doesn’t care where it is coming from. He wants to deliver success for
the American people. The nation today looks toward us. They look toward
people in uniform. They look to great institutions like the Air Force
Association. They want our strength to be at the forefront. There is no
better place to be today than wearing the uniform of your nation. If you
doubt that, go to an airport anywhere, wear your uniform in an airport
and you think about--that is my son that I am talking to--and watch the
people come up and shake your hand. Watch the people come up and thank
you.
There is nothing you can be doing today that is any more important to
the nation, any more important to the Air Force, should be no more
important to yourself, no more satisfying than what you are doing today.
I had the privilege to go to the final game of the World Series.
Between the top and the bottom of the fourth inning, they put the big
jumbotron on my un-made up face, Read a very patriotic paragraph about
people in uniform and the 50,000 or so people in that stadium started
chanting "USA! USA! USA!" People came from all over the stadium just to
shake my hand, just because I had on a uniform. It didn’t matter who it
was.
One of the ladies who was the guest of the owner was a young woman, I
think not 30 years old, who had lost her husband in one of the towers of
the Trade Center. She came up with tears in her eyes and she said, "you
get that guy."
We have the power in this room to "get that guy" and all the other
guys that are out there, if we have the courage to think across stove
pipes, if we have the tenacity to think about the effect rather than the
media, we can make this happen. And we will.
God bless all of you in uniform, all of us in uniform. God bless the
AFA and God bless America. Thank you all very much.
Q: Having been on the job for about 40 days and 40 nights, do
you find the influence of tools as chief as more or less than you
perceived before you became our chief?
General Jumper: Your influence is directly proportional to
your ability to be convincing and to sell what you think. So you tell
me. This is a message I am taking everywhere. This is a message I am
taking to the Hill. I went over to the Hill with the Global Strike Task
Force and it resonated. The other elements of Global Strike Task Force
talk about 24-hour-a-day stealth. You go into people who are bomber
zealots on the Hill and say, "you know what, the F-22 will enable the
B-2 to work 24-hours a day." Some say, "I didn’t think about that--I’m
for the F-22, too."
It is a matter of how – if your description, if I am compelling to
you today, then our message works. Because if you believe it, you are
going to take it elsewhere. That is how you are effective as a chief, as
you well know, Sir.
Q: Being chief is a bully pulpit if you want to seize the
moment and our chief does that. What do you think are the keys to
military intelligence in the future? We look at integrating systems,
data synthesis analysis and so forth... What are you thoughts on these?
General Jumper: We have to break down the stove pipes in our
intelligence business. We grew up in this Cold War, where we got in this
habit--first we collect, then we analyze, then we report. Does that
sound time-critical to anybody here? No.
We’ve got to get our intelligence guys--and let me tell you, this
sounds critical. I am not being critical. This is the way we teach them.
This is the way we taught them. Our intelligence people are warriors
too. We’ve got to get them inside the kill chain. Get them inside the
kill chain. That is why predictive analysis is so important.
If we – I call it D minus 365. If we are able to use our peacetime to
get inside the brains of our enemy and imagine an SS-25 that is, and
this is a random example, I am not going to name a country--but goes
around hiding in the forest and you have people in our intelligence
community that study this for six, seven, eight, nine, ten years. They
will know more about how that SS-25 moves around and hides than the
commander of that SS-25 unit, because they’ve been at it longer than he
has. That is the way we got the SA-6s in Kosovo. These kids learned the
commander. They come to me the next morning and said "you know, this guy
doesn’t wake up until 9 a.m. He doesn’t turn on his radar to test it
until about 9:30, we think he is pretty hung over from the night before
and he is getting pretty lazy. He is only going between here, here and
here. If you get there at 5 o’clock tomorrow, he’s going to be right
here." That is where he was.
Predictive battle space awareness. It is using the science and art of
prediction. Let’s figure that out. When you are engaged, you are using
your ISR platforms more to confirm that which you predicted than from
pure discovery. We waste a lot of time on pure discovery. Archiving.
Knowing what that Joint STARS is looking at two hours ago. Where was
this? This thing that just showed up, where was it two hours ago? Ah,
let’s go back and look at what the Joint STARS was looking at. Let’s
mine that out of a data base. Let’s figure it out. That is what we need
to do with our intelligence. If you do that, just think what it does for
the TPED issue.
We talk about, well, Global Hawk has got 1848 terabytes of bandwidth
per microsecond per fortnight and so we need a thousand more intel
people to analyze this. Yeah, for pure discovery you do. A lot has to
happen in the intel business and we are starting to figure out the tools
of predictive analysis and we are starting to implement those and guess
what? The intel people are all for this.
Q: What is now, given the recent direction of the SecDef
relative to the Space Commission finding, the responsibility of the Air
Force to facilitate integration, not only of air assets, but land and
maritime operations?
General Jumper: We have the responsibility to understand and
to consolidate the requirements for space customers and to figure out
how to put those together in the most effective way. In order to do
that, we can’t have branches of our space power that are excluded from
the club; they’ve all got to play. But essentially, as executive agent,
we’ve got to make it work for the nation. How this is going to do with
funding and with competition, I don’t know yet. But we have got to
figure out how to consolidate the requirements and how to make sure that
we understand what is really needed out there. Not to be victimized by
insatiable requirements. It is easy to make a requirement, if you are
not paying for it. And, to do the right thing for the nation and that is
what we are pledged to do and I think Secretary Roche is going to talk
about that at noon today.
Q: Getting to UAVs over Afghanistan. Do you consider UAVs over
Afghanistan an acceleration of the development of unmanned
reconnaissance and TAC? At one point, might UAVs capabilities compete
against manned systems?
General Jumper: Again, right-thinking people don’t even think
about it that way. What you’ve got in the Predator is the ability to
stare. If you have a situation that requires staring, then the UAV is
the obvious answer. You put the razor blade up there. Razor blades are
not disposable because they cost quite a lot of money, but you send your
medal of honor winning intel chip in there, rather than a person and let
it stare at the target. It is the obvious answer. No manned platform is
going to do that. And we don’t have the space platforms yet that are
able to do that. So there is no competition. I get it all the time. UCAV
is coming. Oh, you fighter guys are going to be out of business. That is
not right. UCAVs are coming and we welcome them coming. But there is a
few things in the conops we have got to work out yet.
The picture you see is this unmanned vehicle that is swarming over
the landscape of enemy territory undetected brave and indestructible.
How did it get there, you as the people who build it? Well, we put it in
a large box and we load up C-5s with it. Oh. You mean the C-5s are going
to transport the Army and the Navy and everybody else during the early
days of the war? Well, yeah. I don’t think so. When you get them there,
what has to happen? Oh well, we take them out of the coffin. We assemble
them and we test fly them. We check them all out. I said, "where did the
rapid go?" Where did the rapid and air power go with this? Maybe we’ll
fly them over there. Oh ok, you’ve got the automatic air refueling
system perfected yet. That is somebody else’s problem. We have got a few
steps left to go.
The thing we need to do with UCAVs is make sure they have got a niche
that is attractive perhaps in suppression of enemy air defenses, perhaps
in other things, but there will be a place for UCAVs and we are not
afraid of them coming. We are going to put the Global Hawk out at Beale.
We are going to let the U-2 guys figure out how this transformation
between manned and unmanned will go. Let them benefit from an airframe
that can stay airborne for 30 plus hours, that can go tens of thousands
of miles, that can do the mission in South America from Beale Air Force
Base. Think that might be attractive to them? I do. There are some
cultural issues, but we’ve dealt with cultural issues before, General
Shaud, as you well know, and the great air and space force will do that
again.
I would sum up the message this way: We are one Air Force. We are one
military. We are one nation. Thanks very much, Sir.
Return to the AFA National Symposium Page
