Thank you very much. I would like to start off by acknowledging how very fortunate we are to have the Air Force Association as our Air Force advocates. I cite the example the Chief mentioned of the drive-by shooting last year on the F-22. It was commendable how quickly the Air Force Association mobilized its intellectual forces and got out for us all the materials and the arguments and the facts that we needed to deal with that situation. Great airpower advocates like Dr. Rebecca Grant were able to put together for us the sort of advocacy we needed to turn that decision around. Personally, I was gratified during the Kosovo war, when we had many taking the stage in front of microphones critical of the conduct of the war--who, I might add understand very little about it--again the AFA mobilized forces and helped us, who were over there struggling to deal with a very difficult situation, to get the facts out before our people in uniform, our people in the military, and the American people. It was that confidence and consensus that we felt across the ocean and passed on to Mike Short [Lt. Gen. Michael C. Short, Commander, Allied Forces Southern Europe], who was able to deliver us the success that we saw in Kosovo. From all of us out there who wear the blue uniforms, to the leadership here assembled from the AFA today and the membership out there in the audience--from all of us airmen, I think we owe our AFA a big round of applause and a big thank you.

AFA is all about leadership, and I’d like to mention one other not with us this year, General Bruce K. Holloway, who sat right down there among the front rows. Of the years I’ve been attending this conference and speaking at this conference, after every one I’d get a very nice note from General Holloway. He had a profound impact on the beginnings of this effort at Orlando and we owe him a great debt of gratitude. He will be missed.

In that light, talking about leaders, our great leaders in our Air Force – we’ve had some great ones. Arnold, Mitchell, Doolittle. Each of those people transformed the power of a vision they had for airpower into milestone events that have propelled us into this new century as a force in demand. Daily in the skies over Iraq, contingencies-- as we have witnessed in Kosovo, be they the bomb dropping type or the humanitarian type that we saw in Albania--we were able to demonstrate the power of the force that brings together global vigilance, global reach, and global power available only through the complex integration of mobility forces, fighter forces, bomber forces, space warriors, information warriors, special operators, and all of that agile combat support that goes into delivering what the Chief calls aerospace superiority and decision dominance.

I recently read a book about the battle of Thermopylae called the Gates of Fire. It is about the Spartans, and it gives a detailed account of how Spartan warriors lived and the immense value they put on protecting the person that stood next to them in battle: perhaps the first and most eloquent expression of the wing-man concept. It is that sort of leadership, that sort of mutual support, that we in our Air Force need to develop fully and to demonstrate as we look forward to the challenges of this next century. I am going to talk about a few of those things today.

I am going to start with leadership in command. We are fortunate that we had Mike Short available and ready and in position as a numbered Air Force commander when the conflict in Serbia kicked off. Mike Short trained himself in the operational level of warfare. Like most of the people in uniform in this room today up in these front rows wearing lots of stars, we all trained ourselves. Because our system did not train us. As those in the front row--I watched them sink lower and lower--they will have to admit that all of us spend a career avoiding Blue Flag. If you were sent to Blue Flag, it was because you were near death. I recall being sent to command a Blue Flag from my position as the vice commander at Eglin [Air Force Base]. I got sent there because I was the newest vice commander in Tactical Air Command at the time. There I met Dave Deptula [Brig. Gen. David A. Deptula, director, Expeditionary Aerospace Force Implementation] , who was there holding his guts in from a recent hernia operation. Only because he was DNIF [Duty Not Involving Flying] did he show up at Blue Flag. I am glad he did, because it was there he began to learn the things about command and control and command of aerospace power that make him so valuable to our Air Force today.

We need to take those steps that consciously train our colonels and generals to command aerospace power at the operational level so the next time we deal with [Slobodan] Milosevic, we have the tools at our disposal, practiced and proficient, to bring about that victory with much less anxiety than Mike Short had to deal with. What that means in very short, simple and direct sentences is that wars are not won by managing processes, but by leading warriors who kill targets.

Our confusion about this has been very honest. Quite frankly, at Blue Flag, we had learned about the command and control of airpower. We learned to deal with very cantankerous pieces of technology like CTAPS [Contingency Theater Automated Planning System]. The CTAPS terminals at the time, we spent more time trying to make them work than those systems work for us. To generate an ATO [Air Tasking Order] with a thousand sorties was hard work, and we never got to the part where colonels and generals were required to mass and concentrate forces to shift centers of gravity or to do the things that Mike Short was required to do in real-time in his real combat experience.

In other ways, we’ve also confused process with product. In the ISR world, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance, that world grew up where we paid most homage to the collection process. That collection process turned out not to be very agile when we tried to shift it into the targeting cycle, especially the rapid targeting cycle. We will have conquered this problem when we understand that no target ever died in the collection process - it only dies in the targeting process. We don’t pop the cork when the image arrives. We pop the cork when the target is dead.

We have our intel warriors out there that understand that. The experience that Mike Short brought to that community is going to make that a permanent change and a permanent fixture in our Air Force. One thing we have to keep straight when we are talking about process and product: our product in war is dead targets and our product in peace is all that goes into generating the warrior proficiency that kills those targets in wartime. The two things that are the hardest that we do in peacetime is to fly airplanes and to fix airplanes. As the chief mentioned, some of our MC [Mission Capable] rates and our U [Unserviceable] rates have suffered in the latter part of this decade and I thank George Babbitt [Gen. George T. Babbitt, commander, Air Force Materiel Command] and those in AFMC and those on the Hill and those in the leadership here in the front rows that have taken this problem to heart and put back into our spare parts and our repair processes over $500 million dedicated to making sure we get back to those levels of sortie generation and proficiency that gave us that force we took to “Desert Storm” because that is, after all, the standard.

We are also trying to do the same with maintenance experience levels and manpower, and the leadership of your Air Force is paying the same attention to those shortages. About doctrine, one of the things that went along with not wanting to go to Blue flag was not paying attention to our doctrine. There were a lot of reasons for that, too. First of all, what we enjoyed the most and what was the most fun was tactical level doctrine, the doctrine of the 4-ship or the 16-ship. We were all very good at that, and that is where we plied our craft with the greatest enthusiasm. We grew up with stovepiped doctrine, and each stove pipe or tribe had its own doctrine. Only in this decade have we really set about to integrate that doctrine in ways that bring air power to bear in a more comprehensive way. We can thank Ron Keys [Maj. Gen. Ronald E. Keys] and Tim Canan and Lance Smith [Maj. Gen. Lance L. Smith] for their efforts to codify and make readable and usable the doctrine that will propel us into this century and bring us together as an aerospace force.

Our expeditionary air force, as the Chief mentioned, is going to be key to getting our hands around and our arms around our optempo problem. That has been described in some detail. It brings to light new capabilities that we need. One of those, I believe, is what I call the first-in capability that comes with a contingency response force of some time. We did this over in Europe just weeks before the Albania crisis, where we went in and dealt with a refugee problem approaching 800,000 refugees. The contingency response group commander and a small force of about 150 went in and established base security, communications, engineering capability, radar approach control, with such proficiency that the president of the country turned all of the airspace of Albania over to this small group of people to execute the humanitarian relief operation.

Whether we are killing targets or killing famine, as the Chief said, we execute those with equal vitality and rigor. It is this sort of a force. When we took the Chief down and showed him this force at Ramstein [Air Base, Germany], we had lined up in full combat gear a group of civil engineers, communicators, lawyers, political advisors, all adept and fully qualified to defend themselves and to man posts that defend airfields. It is this sort of return to the composite air strike force combat warrior “live-under-the-wing” mentality that is going to make us fully capable in our new expeditionary air force.

Also, when we think about where we are and where we need to go, we can’t do any of it without modernization. It is not only the doctrine. It is not only the ISR [Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance]. It is not only the command of airpower. It is the tools we give our aerospace force to execute what we ask them to execute. Clausewitz talked about the fog of war, but I worry that we are not more challenged by the fog of peace. As we look at more and more countries developing weapons of mass destruction, acquiring advanced surface-to-air missile systems, and while we bask in the success of air superiority, we also see countries building and acquiring air superiority aircraft that rival our own and in many cases exceed our own capability. As the Chief said, one of the problems we have to deal with is, we make it look too easy. It wasn’t easy, and Mike Short will talk about this. We lost two airplanes in the skies over Serbia, but we had more than 700 surface-to-air missiles fired at us. We had aircraft, Mike Short’s son among them, struggle home with holes, with embedded [air-to-] surface missiles, and got airplanes on the ground through superb discipline and airmanship. Another person we owe a great deal of thanks to was the perseverance and outright stubbornness of a great leader, Mike Short, who brought all those aircrews home alive.

If Mr. Milosevic had had an SA-10 or an SA-12--and he well could have--or the latest generation of fighter--which he could well have--Mike would have faced a profoundly more difficult situation than he did, and we would have been having a debate over why we didn’t have the F-22 five years ago instead of several years from now. The F-22 will bring us not only the air superiority that we traditionally think of in the air-to-air role, but that total air superiority of a first-in capability that takes out the airplanes and those most potent surface-to-air defenses that would otherwise limit our access to targets. That is why we need the F-22. That is why we need your support. That is why we need to send our airmen in, and that is why we need to counter those who would wish to opt for that force that could win the next one by a score of 51-49 when our standard and the standard of the American people is 100-0.

When we talk about integration, we also need to intellectualize a bit and think about how well we do with systems like the F-22 and apply that same thought process to those things where we leverage aerospace power at the operational level, our Air Operations Center. We need to think of our AOC as a weapon system. We all recall sitting in the cockpit of the F-4--and this illustrates the difference between the way we do it now and the way we could be doing it. We sat in the cockpit of the F-4 and we saw strobes in our RAU [radar warning receiver] gear, some from the air and some from the ground. We had a radar over here that had some hits on it, some of those hits were probably causing some of these strobes. We’d integrate the beeps and the squeaks in the pods--that you didn’t know worked, because the pod switch was attached to the switch that went on and off. We integrated that with a lot of prayer. But all that integration went right up here. When I look at some of my colleagues in the front row today, that sort of scares me as I think about it.

The F-22 was really our kind of airplane. We didn’t have it. It was this thing with a picture of your airplane in the middle and a little fan out the nose that tells you how far your radar can look against the thing that is looking at you and a little fan out that enemy airplane’s nose. And rings on the ground that tell you how vulnerable you are to that surface-to-air missile, and they can expand and contract by the pitch, roll, and attitude of the airplane at the second you are looking at the scope and you’ve got a little oblate spheroid sticking out the front of your airplane that describes the envelope of your JDAM [Joint Direct Attack Munition] and you get that target that is shown by a Maltese cross into that little oblate spheroid and hit the pickle button. And in the meantime you are focusing on what? Keeping that airplane out of those rings, knowing what those threats are, because the information that is presented to you is decision-quality information.

Translate that to the Air Operations Center that Mike Short had to deal with during this war. Yeah, you had an operational picture, but you didn’t have everything. You had a lot of inputs, but that correlation was going on right up here. We have the technology. We have the wizardry--It is sitting right here in this room--to fix that, and we need to put some energy into making that happen and making it happen soon.

A final topic today. I want to talk a little bit about the warrior ethic. We as leaders have a responsibility to help those who serve feel damned good about what they do; to understand that quality of life to us in service is not a higher standard of living, but a higher standard for life overall. There are no greater rewards than the rewards associated with being a part of something that is bigger than yourself. This past year alone, our pilots, our maintainers, our communicators, our security forces, all of them - great men and women in uniform - did something very profound. They saved hundreds of thousands of lives in Kosovo. Today whole families are alive, who would otherwise have been brutally murdered, because of our people who wear the blue suit. Although all of them were not out dropping bombs and directly involved with killing targets, even those communicators who were installing the local area networks at the many bases that we opened up, who made sure the communications happened, who did the negotiations with the base commanders, who made sure the fuel was pure, who built the tent cities, who strung up the electrical power, who minister to the forces, all of them were warriors.

We need to do a better job of recognizing those things that are a privilege to those of us who wear the uniform. Those of us who are privileged enough to raise our right hand and take an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States claim a special right to a special pride. We have to make that felt. We need to talk about it. We need to make our people understand how very special they are.

General Omar Bradley said once that bravery is the capacity to perform properly even when you are scared half to death. In our quality of life, we have those who have demonstrated the courage and the bravery that goes along with saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of helpless people, and we should be proud of that.

In our short, distinguished history, our Air Force is replete with stories. I tell the story of Staff Sergeant Maynard Smith from Cairo, Michigan, on his first combat mission as a gunner in World War II. His airplane came under heavy fire, and two crew members on board were seriously injured, couldn’t bail out. The aircraft’s oxygen system was shot out. Several control cables were severed and intense fires raged across the aircraft as small caliber ammunition cooked off. Three of the crew members did bail out, but Sergeant Smith stayed. He fought the fire. He manned the guns that were still working and fought off the enemy fighters, administered first aid to the crew on board, among those the pilot and the co-pilot. And his actions ensured that the aircraft got home safely. Staff Sergeant Maynard Smith became the first enlisted airman to receive our nation’s highest award, the Medal of Honor.

Just recently, in “Allied Force,” on the night of March 27, 1999, as I sat in my command post, I listened to that sound that all airmen dread to hear, that sound of a beeper going off, and all of us who have been involved in combat know well that sound and the reaction it brings when you hear it. Due to the marvels of technology that night, we heard it as it happened with that same cringe. Captain Chad Franks and his MH-60 crew were scrambled on a rescue mission that required them to fly into a very sophisticated air-defense system on a mission that was much longer than they anticipated because of confusion over the location of the downed pilot. It required them to conduct low-level refueling and ingress in the most difficult circumstances around AAA [Anti-Aircraft Artillery] and search lights. Within just a few kilometers of three Serbian Army brigades, they ingressed, put PJs [pararescuemen] out and ran the hundred yards from the helicopter to the pilot to get the pilot on board and get that pilot out. Then they had an equally harrowing journey on the way out back through the small arms barrages, the searchlights, etc. Captain Franks was awarded the Silver Star and his crew also decorated for bravery in saving the life of that American pilot.

It is that kind of courage and bravery that makes ours a higher standard of life. In closing, as we consider our role in this new century, I want to go back to my story of the Spartans. The Spartans were 300 in number, the year was 480 BC, and the leader was King Leonidis. His charge was to gather a group of volunteers to do battle against the Persian King Xerxes who, although he had an army of about 3 million, put 10,000 against the 300 Spartans in this small, narrow gap called Thermopylae, which translates into “the gates of fire.” Before that battle, the Persian envoy representing Xerxes warned Leonidis that it was futile to fight the Persians because the archers were so numerous that the arrows would block out the sun. In that true moment, which we see so seldom, that truly captures that warrior spirit, Leonidis responded, “so much the better. We’ll be able to fight in the shade.” Leonidis picked that narrow passage and paid the ultimate price, because the 300 died to the last person. They held off those 10,000 Persian troops long enough for the Greeks to muster an army that finally did defeat Xerxes. What historians fail to acknowledge was that very moment in history when the Greeks were founding this thing we call democracy. As we talk about warriors and the warrior spirit, we thank Leonidis for delivering us where we are and the great warriors of our Air Force for displaying that spirit so proudly. I say to you, God bless the airmen of our Air Force. God bless the AFA. And God bless America. Thank you.

Q&A Session

General Shaud: What kind of regime would you like to see for our future Air Force JFACCs [Joint Force Air Component Commander] or even Joint Force commanders?

General Jumper: The first thing you have to do is quit worrying about the istinction between training and education. We have for a long time in our Air Force jealously guarded that distinction, but in the case of the command, the planning and execution of aerospace power, even at the senior levels, there is a lot of training that needs to go on. These are habits that are formed not out of malice, but out of the lack of equipment to do the job. What we generated from operations like Blue Flag and other things was a generation of commanders who worked very hard to generate the ATO, and in the execution phase, all that we practiced was administering that ATO. We didn’t have the simulations or the wherewithal to put ourselves into the conditions of battle that required that response. That is what we need to do. We need an RTU [Replacement Training Unit], an IQT [Initial Qualification Training], a mission qualification training and a weapons school that trains the command and control of airpower to the same level that we train those great 4-ship and battle force commanders out there to lead at that tactical level. That is what we have to do. Some of it is in AETC [Air Education and Training Command]. Some of it is at the IQT and RTU level. And some of it is in a center of excellence that we hope to build at Nellis [Air Force Base].

General Shaud: On Kosovo, what is the single most important thing to change or most glaring weakness that you ran into?

General Jumper: From my perspective, the thing we need to work on the hardest is the horizontal integration of our ISR assets and the correlation of those assets to our command and control depot so that we can get down to the business, which I know we can do, of real-time targeting. As the chief said, we need to do it in minutes. I would challenge us to do it in single-digit minutes.

General Shaud: From your experience with information warfare during “Operation Allied Force,” what lessons have you learned there and what do you bring to ACC [Air Combat Command]?

General Jumper: The lesson is we need to operationalize information warfare. We need to treat offensive and defensive counter-information with equal weight, and we need to continue to try to shift the focus from the strategic level of information warfare to the tactical and operational level, because the thing that is most valuable to commanders is the tactical and operational level of information warfare. The other thing we have to do is deal with the security system that so suffocates our information warfare tools. The way to do that is to try to make that distinction between the security programs that are useful and necessary during the development phases of technology and understand that they do not translate readily to the operational world. Operators don’t often have to know how the bit or byte parses itself en route to destruction, they just need to know the effect.

General Shaud: With an analysis of alternatives for CSAR [Combat Search and Rescue] modernization, what are the crucial differences in current CSAR capabilities and where you would like that to go?

General Jumper: The crucial differences are: some of it’s in hardware; most of it’s in tactics and procedures. And its the blending and the melding and the integration of [passage missed in tape transfer] and the assets and the resources to integrate all of those tools that need to be at their disposal when the time comes to go in and pick up that downed aircrew. And we owe it to the great, remarkable leadership of a bunch of captains that were able to pull off the rescues that we saw as proficiently as they did. So we are going to create the situation where we can put the ISR [Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance] platforms and the other location tools at the disposal of those CSAR forces as well as to practice with our special operators to bring that level of daily proficiency up to where it needs to be.

General Shaud: Please explain the importance of EW [Electronic Warfare] to ACC [Air Combat Command] operations. As you think of leading EW into the 21^st Century, what is your plan and what are the lessons learned during “Operation Allied Force”?

General Jumper: My first plan is to meet with the “Old Crows”. I’ve got do that. And I need to talk with them a little bit about the difference between bashing electrons and manipulating electrons. We all have to get on the same page here. Because right now those forces seem to be opposed to one another. But it’s a lot more than taking the latest, greatest circuit card that puts out 75,000 gigawatts to bash those electrons harder and perhaps that little bitty microchip that can get in and manipulate those electrons to produce the same effect. We have to work on the definition of electronic warfare and what we go about to defend and start worrying about the effect of electronic warfare to get airplanes in to kill targets. That’s what we’re after. There’s lots of ways to do that; we have to get together on what that means, and we’re going to go after whatever that thing takes to do it.

General Shaud: Next question, Johnnie, is a personnel question, and we move to the Guard and Reserve: How confident are you that Guard and Reserve can keep up with the increasing pace of deployments in our EAF [Expeditionary Aerospace Force] concepts?

General Jumper: I have no worry about the Guard and Reserves (applause). It’s like I say about space: We’ll finally get it, and we don’t have to talk about the integration of air and space anymore. And I think with the Guard and Reserve, we’re almost there. I looked at a slide every day when I was over in Speedy’s [General Gregory S. Martin] job, and I looked at upwards of 1,500 Guard and Reserve members deployed to USAFE [U.S. Air Forces Europe] every day, and that was in normal operations. Twice that number during the war. I went out to a guard post in Incerlik and was met by three enlisted men who rendered a smart salute. I was asking them where they were from, expecting to hear “Langley Air Force Base” or “Lakenheath Air Base”. “Where are we from? Sir, I am a sheriff in Little Rock, Arkansas. And my buddies here: this one’s here from” someplace else, and I can’t remember the places. Three Guardsmen. And I said, “Well, what do you think of this?” “Sir, we couldn’t be prouder of what we’re doing. We all volunteered to get here, and by the way, our communities are proud to have us over here. We can hardly wait to go back and tell our story.” [applause] Enough said.

General Shaud: The next question, written by a Congressional staffer who thinks he will see you shortly. [laughter] Sir, as the new commander of ACC, how do you discuss the need for both the F-22 and the Joint Strike Fighter in these tight fiscal times?

General Jumper: We have a need to leverage that stealth capability in a way that assures us access to the target. We need to do it in sufficient numbers that we can go deep and handle the other target sets that present themselves. The way we’ve gone about this, traditionally, is with a high-low mix of aircraft like we had with the F-15 and the F-16, and it is time to modernize that force. And what the Joint Strike Fighter brings us is that long-range, agile capability to get to those targets, combined with the F-22's virtual guarantee of air superiority that continues to give us that level of assurance of combat capability that we have always been able to deliver this nation. It’s that same high-low mix. It’s nothing different than we’ve demonstrated before. It’s what we owe those airmen that we send into combat.

General Shaud: Great answer. Hang in there, we’re with you. The final question: As you move from theater CINC [Commander-in-Chief] to the role of force provider, what’s your greatest concern with respect to future military campaigns that you will be providing forces for?

General Jumper: Well, it’s the uncertainty of it all. It’s the “fog of peace.” It’s the great new world disorder. Because as you try and look out there and anticipate what you’re going to do next, and you look back just five years, and ask yourself “How well would we have done to anticipate what we went through in Kosovo?” We would have done pretty well, but we wouldn’t have gotten it all right. Because the part we would have missed was this unbelievable humanitarian challenge that we had to face. To go to the base at Tirana and face and deal with aircraft from many nations showing up on final approach. Cargo just thrown out the back of aircraft. And trying to bring sense to that while dealing with hundreds of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of refugees pouring across borders in bad weather and in ill health. We were not prepared for that, and what I like to say when I look at the spectrum of and the phases of war that we study in the Quadrennial Defense Review -- we start with deterrent options, then a deployment phase and a halt phase -- I want to stick in there a denial phase. Because what we had to deal with there was several very, very difficult of denial, where we didn’t even acknowledge that problem existed, and it put us behind when we did have to act. And then we were forced into an execution simultaneous with deployment. And so it completely turns upside down our traditional notions of how we employ aerospace forces. We didn’t have a halt phase in Kosovo in the conventional side of it. We watched the invasion happen. We watched the forces mass north of the Kosovo border. We watched the invasion happen. We watched the conventional forces link up with the paramilitary forces, about 40,000 of them. We watched the systematic killing begin and what we did, what Mike was asked to do with airpower, was not to halt, but to counterattack from the air. He was doing it while we were deploying. It is these combinations of the very difficult phases of war coming in difficult timing of it, while Tony Robertson [Gen. Charles T. Robertson, Commander in Chief, USTRANSCOM] was trying to give us a bunch of C-17s to deploy Task Force Hawk, also in the course of battle, that pile up on themselves and complicate what we train ourselves to do. And that is why I talk about commanding airpower. We have never had to face that sort of difficult situation before.

So it is, where is it going to be? It is the complexity of the scenarios as we introduce more and more political considerations like collateral damage -- valid considerations -- the role of politics in the targeting process, all compounds to make it more difficult on the commander.

General Shaud: I have a statement on this card: General Jumper, I am proud to serve in the same Air Force as you. Sir, I salute you. Thanks.

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