Today is Valentine's Day so I would like you all to remember the famous things that happened on Valentine's Day. Probably the most famous is the Valentine's Day Massacre. In that infamous event, Al Capone lined up seven members of the Bugsy Moran gang on North Clark Street in Chicago in 1929 and rubbed them out. So these things can happen on Valentine's Day. As you contemplate which of the brilliant statements I am about to make that you choose to applaud, remember this. [Laughter]

Before I get into my comments, I'd like to pause and echo the remarks made previously and have our 12 outstanding airmen of the year and their guests stand. Let's acknowledge them one more time, please. [Applause]
I'd also like to acknowledge the help that we get from the members of the ROTC units from Embry Riddle and University of Central Florida who come gather the questions, help with herding us properly and give generously of their talent during this very big function. To the members of both those ROTC units, thank you very much.

I'd also like to echo the remarks made about Gabby Gabreski. We talk about that greatest generation and certainly Gabby had to be one of those. When I was growing up in the Air Force, watching all these great heroes come around my house, because these were all buddies of my dad's, and tell stories, and even at the time you knew that somehow the truth is being somewhat embellished. But it didn't really matter. These were all heroes and I was lucky enough to be surrounded by them. And I'll tell you, we are gong to miss these heroes. And our heart goes out to Don Gabreski, who is Gabby's son and to Terri Gabreski who is a brigadier general in the Air Force and works for Les Lyles. Our heart goes out to them. We will recall with great and deep respect the many accomplishments of Gabby, a true American hero and a great airman. [Applause]

And speaking of that greatest generation, we have one in the audience today, Major General Johnny Alison. [Applause]

He came on active duty in 1936, commissioned in the Air Corps in 1938, was an ace in the skies over China and Burma, two Legions of Merit, the Silver Star, Distinguished Flying Cross, Purple Heart - for being shot down in China - Air Medals, the British Distinguished Flying Order. He left active duty following World War II and came into the Reserves where he retired as a major general in 1972. Again, when we talk about heroes, it is appropriate to acknowledge those ones among us, those of that greatest generation that brought this country to the heights that we enjoy today. General Alison please stand up. God bless you, sir.

I am damn proud to be the chief of staff of the greatest air force in the world.
I am also proud to be able to work with a great secretary, Jim Roche. I don't know where he is hiding. I know he doesn't want to sit in the front row because I am going to harass him if he does.

And we are blessed as an Air Force with a secretary who understands us, understands our culture and carries our message so brilliantly. And we have a lot to be proud of and a lot to be thankful for. Thank you, Mr. Secretary.

Now, working with Jim Roche is not always easy. He called me one day and said, "John, let's go on Larry King Live." I said, "now boss, why would I would want to do that?" "Oh it will be fun," he says. So we do that. We go up to New York City and we go up in this very tall building at CNN. And I am sort of out of my element, but I mean, he is cool with all of this. We go in there and go in a place they call the Green Room. That is where you wait. Pretty soon, this very aggressive lady comes out and says, "It is time for your make up."

You go into the make up room and you sit down in this thing that looks like a barber's chair, with a very large hydraulically actuated piston and a big pedal on the side. She steps on this thing and lays your butt flat out [Laughter]. She looks down on your face and says, "we have trouble." And they take out these very big industrial strength-looking brushes that you can only buy from Sherman Williams and begin to slap lathers of stuff on your face. I felt a little bit better because I'd just seen them do it to Larry King and they used a spackling knife on him. The next day my mother called and said, "you look so young." I said, "Mom, that wasn't my face." They had to use a dip stick off of a Peter-built turbo to get down to where the skin really was. It wasn't me. [Laughter]

But it was a lot of fun and hanging around with Secretary Roche does have its lighter moments and it is a pleasure to work with him.

Today, we have up over the skies in America combat air patrols protecting our skies. To service those orbits, we have some hundreds of aircraft tied up. Tens of thousands of people involved. Between what is in the air and what is backing them up, to include the fighters, the tankers, the surveillance aircraft, the C-130s that are sitting strip alert to take response teams wherever they might need to go, day in and day out, 24-hours a day. Our Guard and Reserve forces do 80 percent of this. Overseas, we have tens of thousands more deployed for Operation Enduring Freedom in the skies over Afghanistan. Day-in, day-out, 24-hours a day. This is our Expeditionary Air Force. This is what our airmen bring to this nation. And it is a lot to be proud of.

Congratulations to all of those, all of the leadership here in the front row who make that happen and all of you in the back rows who are actually executing it. Congratulations to all of you for all you do for us and thank you. [Applause]
Today I am going to talk about the themes that I have continued to emphasize that I bring with me from my service in Europe and my service in Air Combat Combat and now to this current position - themes of transformation, readiness, recapitalization and retention.

I think that we can be very proud of the progress we've made, our continuing progress in transformation. We started off with transformation shortly after the Wall came down in 1989. In 1994 we began the transition to an Expeditionary Air Force. The EAF concept matured and in 1997 Mike Ryan institutionalized it and it continues to mature today as we study the dynamics of maintaining a predictable rotation in an unpredictable world.

Phase two of our transformation has been continuing for several years as well. But punctuated by the events of 11 September, we've actually been able to do many of the things that we've only talked about over the last several years. And what we are able to do is to leverage the technology of this nation to create asymmetrical advantage for our military forces and to overcome what Secretary Rumsfeld has called our asymmetrical vulnerabilities.

And what do we bring to that fight? A combination of stealth, stand-off precision, space and information technology blended together in ways that offer us unimaginable change. Key to enabling this force are the concepts of horizontal integration, of manned, unmanned and space platforms that manifests itself in several ways. Several new and different ways.

First, the notion of smart tankers. For years, we have had tankers up close to where the battle is. They have orbited at high altitude and close proximity to front lines. They have re-fueled our aircraft as close as they could get so that those aircraft could get in and get out safely. They are in a perfect position to create for us an internet in the sky. All we have to do is put on them a pallet of equipment that translates one data link message to another in a seamless way so that between Link 11 and Link 16 and Navy CEC and Army EPLRS, we are able to seamlessly send and receive that data from one type system to another.

For years, we've had a fight in the data link community that says, if you weren't Link 16, you are out of the game. And we resented those that went out and found other ways to get that job done in the face of necessity. Why did we do that? It makes no sense. We are going to deal some of our own people out of the fight because they went out and tried to get something that worked in a shorter amount of time? No, we are not going to do that. We are going to buy these translators, we are going to put these tankers to work.

John Handy agrees and in the next generation of tanker, we are going to put into it the sorts of antennas and apertures that will continue to aid this cause.

Imagine if you took the cargo door on a Boeing 767 tanker and turned it into a door full of electronic scanning arrays and you used that door as a remote antenna for your Rivet Joint to pick up signals. And you data linked it back to the Rivet Joint to be processed. The job of the tanker remains passive. But the Rivet Joint guys have signals that are being sent to them from many locations to process and do their work. The idea of a multi-sensor constellation gets to this notion of integrated manned, unmanned and space, where at the machine level, you integrate the Joint Stars, the Rivet Joint, the AWACS, the ABCCC in a seamless way so that the airplanes talk to each other at the digital level without going through tribal representatives to interpret tribal hieroglyphics to the rest of us poor unwashed, the way we do it today.

It is nobody's fault; we brought them up that way. We built the machines at the time where the equipment was so large and bulky and power hungry that you could only put one single capability on a single platform. But times are different. We've got to figure out how far we can go to merge those capabilities. A perfect example is the notion of a space-based radar. And there is no doubt that GMTI will one day migrate entirely to space. But what is the path to get there? In the meantime, should we not make our space-based radar conversant in a seamless way with our Joint STARS?

Should we not make the next generation of Joint STARS as we invent the space-based radar in a way that mechanizes this seamless interface? And when the Joint STARS has a convoy on the ground that is tracking what goes beyond the ridge line because it is obscured, it is already having a digital conversation with the next space-based radar coming over the horizon. Why don't we do that?

You can do that when you insist that the subject is ground-moving target radar information to commanders. And you take away the argument about whether it should be in space or in the air. And you give it a mission orientation and not a jealous argument about air or space. Why don't we do that? We are going to do that.

And while we're at it, what about the unmanned? What about mechanizing this aircraft, this platform that has command and control on it so it can control Global Hawk or the next generation of UAV from the airplane itself. So you can always triangulate and have those two airplanes in perfect position to triangulate for precise target identification, precise target location.
These are the things that we have to think of that give us the capability to take the sum of the knowledge of these systems and end up with a cursor precisely over the target and we will have arrived when the technology that produced that cursor over the target is entirely and totally transparent to the operator who sits in front of the screen. That is when we will have arrived. Why don't we do that? We're going to do that.

This notion of predictive battle space awareness, where we take all the Army has given us in the ability to do intel preparation, the templating, and we take that to the next level and we find those information technology tools that allow us to exploit predictive analysis and we study it over time. I call it D minus 365, where all the time you are looking at those things that most concern you. What if we had done that with Osama bin Laden? What if we had been able to study in detail over a lengthy period of time?

I don't know if we'd be any better off today than we are, but I have a hunch we would be. We worked this with the SA-6 problem in Kosovo. Mike Short. We sat down a bunch of young intel officers, a bunch of targeteers and we said we've got to get these SA-6s because we are trying to get the airplanes into the air over Kosovo in a persistent way so the SA-6s - we've got to get them. I want you to sit down and study these SA-6s. I want you to know the name of the battery commander. I want you to know how many children he has. I want to know when he goes to bed and when he wakes up and what movie he saw last night.

And these kids went away and they came back about a week later and said, "sir, here is the deal." Here is Slobo down here. He is the battery commander. We think he drinks because he doesn't wake up until nine in the morning. When he wakes up at nine, he doesn't do his test patterns until about 9:30 a.m. We picked those up. And he used to go between these five places. Now he only goes between three and he is doing it in a predictable way. We think he lives in this village and tomorrow morning at 5 a.m., if you wake up, he is going to be right here and that is where he was. That is how we got these guys.

We took a lot of heat after Kosovo because we didn't kill all the tanks. But you know something? We knew where the tanks were. You could watch where they came from. You could do the Army IPB and you could tell that they were in this area and within that area when you did the templating, where was it that you could hide four or five tanks? It turned out to be two or three places. You study the tracks and very soon you figured out they had to be in this tree clump.
We couldn't hit them because the ROE said you had to see them first and we didn't have that total analysis where we could be convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that they were really in those trees. But that is where they were. We've got to take away the doubt. We've got to put these youngsters to work. We've got to shift from collection to prediction and get out of the paradigm of collect, analyze, report and put the intelligence community in the skill stream. Find, fix, track, target, engage and assess. And scrunch these timelines up to near real-time.

Why don't we do that? We are going to do that.

You know we saw a great briefing yesterday at Corona. Staff Sergeant Matt Linehart, a special tactics NCO who has been on the ground in Afghanistan. He came and told us a story. He told us a story of bouncing around on a horse in Afghanistan and on the saddle horn he is sitting there with a laptop computer tied up to a satellite telling him exactly where he is. He told the story of getting the oats and the saddles dropped out of the C-130, even asking for Vaseline because he had saddle sores.

We hadn't trained him to ride a horse in the middle of northern Afghanistan mountains. And sore butt and all, he went out with his laser devices, which were just invented, by the way, largely as a result of the experience of Kosovo, set up his equipment and he tells a fascinating story about the assault on Massir E Sharref, where the Northern Alliance came back and forth and back and forth, and here is this youngster in there calling in F-14s, F-18s and B-52s-essentially, doing close air support.

Close air support with B-52s. Who'd have thought it?

We taught these guys that they were going to take off from somewhere in the northern tier of the United States, they were going to fly into the heart of Russia and they were going to die. We didn't teach them to talk much in route. But there they are today, hooked up to Sergeant Linehart on the ground with data inserts doing close air support at 800 meters away from the guy who is calling them in and they are doing it from seven miles in the sky.

Did we buy that airplane to do that? I've looked carefully through the specifications and I don't think we did. But you know what? The great youngsters out there are putting the stuff together to make it work, to fill the need, to answer the necessity. It is an old airplane. It is an old horse. But it is a brand new concept and I call that transformational because it works. To Sergeant Linehart and all like him, we owe a great debt of gratitude because they stayed with us and they stayed with us long enough to bring that expertise to this fight and it made a difference. [Applause]

Another transformational capability is the UAV, the Unmanned Air Vehicle. And many of you have heard me tell the story. About how we get trapped in our own bad habits. When Mike and I were over working the Kosovo problem, we said "listen, we need a laser-designator on the Predator," and we called back over to the United States and we got the system energized and the big safari guys go in there and they make miracles happen and pretty soon we've got a laser ball on the Predator and we've got it all figured out how to use this thing. We sent it over there to the theater and we put together a conops and I come back to be the Air Combat Command commander and I sit in on my first staff meeting and say, "how are we doing with laser Predator?"

"Oh well, sir, we took the laser ball off the Predator. Because it wasn't in the program."

I said, "how about putting it back on?" And while you are on it, put a Hellfire missile on there and see if we can shoot that sucker off and how about taking about three months to do it?

It took a little longer than three months. And it took a little bit of money, but it worked. Now I read in the paper where guys like me are afraid of the UAV. We are afraid it is going to take our job.

We are not afraid of the UAV, ladies and gentlemen, in the United States Air Force. We welcome the thing that can make all of our jobs easier. And we welcome the next generation, which will be a Predator B and the Predator B will be one that is dedicated to the hunter-killer role with either four or six weapon stations on it - we are not sure yet. It will go a little bit higher and a little bit faster and will do what we are able to do today much, much better.
And the generation after that will be called the UCAV and it will be jet powered. And we look forward to bringing that in the inventory. Why? Because it is going to bring access to the targets to us in a much easier way. Am I worried it is going to take over the job of the pilot? Not quite yet. Because right now the best bandwidth instrument you can put in the air and the best set of apertures are the human brain and the human eye balls and as long as we've got those emerging target time critical situations we have to deal with, it is most likely going to have to be done with a person making the final decision that is on the scene.

So we welcome this generation of UAVs to include Global Hawk. We look forward to their introduction to our inventory. And we are proud to have them included. But, in any case, these are the things that are going to help us close the seams between the engagement cycle that exists today, between the find, fix, track, target, engage and assess. These are the things that are going to help close those seams.

The final piece of that is command and control. And we've all seen the typical situation in an air-and-space operation center today. We go over to Southwest Asia and we can see a modern, digitally-based air and space operation. But others aren't quite there yet. You still don't rely on the digital piece. You still have the 1-250 acetate-covered map that leans against the wall. You are not ready for that technology quite yet. Well, we are making a weapon system out of the air and space operations center. And we are going to take all of those work stations that we see there today, again, usually manned by tribal representatives, and we are going to integrate them and those crew positions will be certified. They will take check rides like we do on every other weapon system. And we are going to mechanize them so that we have machine-level interface with the other tribal workstations on the floor of the air and space operations center and get around the inefficiencies that exist today where even in our most modern one, you hear shouting across the floor, "hey buddy, do you see this?"

A typical case is when we exercise a SCUD missile attack and the great stuff comes from Colorado Springs and it tells us that something has just happened. You see the blue light go off in the AOC. Everybody pays attention. The digits flow in from tens of thousands of miles away, put this nice presentation up on the screen and then what happens? People stand up from their workstations with a pad of paper, walk up to the screen and copy down the coordinates of the launch place. And they wait awhile until the coordinates of the impact place comes in and they write those down, too. Then they go back to their workstation or huddle up in the middle of the floor and have a conversation about what they are going to do about it.

The first 10,000 miles of electrons that come in from Colorado Springs is damn near perfect. It is the last 20 feet we haven't gotten straight yet. We are working that problem. It is a matter of automation.

And speaking of automation and UAVs and time-critical targeting, one of the great things that we have done in this Afghanistan war is couple up some of our most lethal systems. We have taken the stuff we have learned from our JEFXs, our joint experimentations and our joint exercises and we have been able to put it to work for us in some small demonstrations of horizontal integration.

One excellent example is the match-up between the Predator and the AC-130, where we actually put streaming video into the back end of the AC-130s so that the Predator was actually doing scout work and when the AC-130 arrived on station, it was able to go right to work. I have a short video clip today to demonstrate the product of this lash-up. Let's go ahead and run that, please.

In this situation, we are looking through the AC-130 and he is talking to the Predator guy. This is the sort of firepower that combination and integration can bring to us that we are putting to work every day. This was not done six months ago. It is done every day today and it is getting better by the day.

Let me move on to how we implement what I have been talking about. Many of you have heard me talk before about basing what we do on concepts of operation, about us being able to describe how we go to war and how we interface with the other services before we start talking about what we are going to buy to do it. This conops-based way of doing business is one we are also trying to bring to our planning and programming system. And we do that by describing our capabilities in terms of task forces and we've created the task forces that do global response to deal with the anti-terrorism business: the Global Strike Task Force, which many of you have heard me talk about before, to deal with the anti-access threat; the space-ISR task force; the expeditionary task force to deal with what we do day-in and day-out in our business; the strategic task force to deal with our nuclear obligations, and so forth.

If we describe ourselves in this way and it captures most of what we do, then why don't we plan and program that way, too? And give the money on the Air Staff to the people who are tasked to come up with the capabilities that make those task forces able to do their job. And those champions of the capabilities then go to the programs and they pick from those programs those things that yield the capabilities that we need and one of the ways that you prioritize the programs then is by how many of the task forces a certain program would support. We are going to transform ourselves in this way in the planning and programming business and see if we can make this work, a capabilities orientation to the way we do our business.

Many of you have heard me talk about the Global Strike Task Force. This is the anti-access task force, the one that kicks down the door in those anti-access scenarios, where we combine the capability of the F-22 and the B-2, where the F-22 goes in and kicks down the door and takes out both what is in the air and those most lethal threats that are on the ground. This gets us away from the notion that the F-22 is merely a replacement for the F-15. And it brings to the forefront the superb capabilities of the F-22 in the air-to-ground role, to take out the worst of the threats.

In its current configuration, the F-22 will carry two 1,000-pound GPS-guided bombs, but we are developing for the F-22 a small diameter munition that has wings integrated into the bomb itself that will be able to glide out 50 or so miles from a super-cruise configuration and deal with those most difficult threats. What else will it be able to do?

In the future concepts of the United States Army, when they talk about putting capabilities deep behind enemy lines, this is the thing that will be able to come in at Mach 1.5 to 1.7 to deal with any trouble that they might run into. And this will be the airplane that nothing can touch. This is transformational from my point of view.

The other elements of the Global Strike Task Force are ones we well know. Get to the horizontal integration of ISR that we've discussed earlier and robust the capability of the B-2 so that we can carry eighty 500-pound GPS-guided munitions on each B-2. With each bomber now, with each B-2, we can carry enough bombs to deal with a fairly significant target set.

As I talk about these capabilities, what enables it all? It is the environment of space. And we are glad and happy to have among us now, confirmed and getting immersed in his new job, Mr. Pete Teets, the new Under Secretary of the Air Force, also heading up our executive agency responsibility for space and also heading up the NRO. This is a synergy that will allow the United States Air Force to take advantage of all the capabilities that reside in space. It will allow us to fulfill our responsibilities as executive agents for the other services and the other agencies of the government.

And it has been recognized, as we see in this budget cycle, that it takes more than the budget shares that we have had to do this job. Mr. Teets and his team will help us lead this integration that will bring us to new heights. And we will have Ed Eberhart and those great people out in the space business bring this digital interface that is long overdue as we bring our full combat capability to bear.

Let me touch on readiness. In February of '01 we bottomed out in readiness when 65 percent of our forces were C1 or C2. Everything else was below that. One year later we see ourselves at about 71 percent and climbing and we are working very hard to make that better. But you know there is a psychology to readiness that belies the numbers.

I could stop buying aircraft parts today and it would take us a year to figure it out. And what would happen in that year is those great troops out on the flight lines would do what it takes to cannibalize, to make the airplanes fly until when? Until they figure it out that the leadership had betrayed them. And that they weren't getting the resources they need to do their job. And we go through this cycle from time to time, as we did in the mid-1990s when somebody ran through the auditorium with a pennant that said let's buy down readiness. And we decided that the 90 percent mission capable rates we took into Desert Storm may not be necessary.

Maybe we can do it with a lower number and so we funded to the lower number and we stopped buying parts and it took a long time for us to figure out what the impact of that was going to be because guess who we forgot to tell? We forgot to tell the troops on the flight line that a lower number was ok. And when they figured it out, readiness fell off a cliff and so did retention.
In the meantime, many sat back and said, "see, I told you." These people can make it happen. They can make it happen, but they are not going to make it happen for long if we take them for granted and that is psychology of readiness. That is the thing that the people in this room, of all generations, cannot let happen again. We have seen it twice, let's not do that again and betray our people.

In the Expeditionary Air Force, we have got a new skill, too. We look at that skill that has to do with picking us up from a base, doing all the load planning, putting the thing into the joint deployment system, which is not very user-friendly. As a matter of fact, if you get mobilized and you get ordered to get ready to go, what you will do is you'll go down to the command post and see someone, probably a junior enlisted person, sitting behind the JOPES terminal and a long unruly line of people behind that one person who knows how to use it to enter the data. It costs us time as we deploy. But who is that person who understands how you pick yourself up, how you plan the loads, how you get yourself on the airplanes, how you deploy and maintain en route visibility, how you get yourself to the other end, how you set up combat phases and combat ISOs, where you put the bomb dump, how you put the tent city, how you plug yourself into the supply system of the gaining theater? Who is that person?

What I just described is about 15 or 20 people. But we need to build this competency in our Expeditionary Air Force and make it a prime player in our hierarchy of heroes. And that is what we are going to do.

Recapitalization. The average age of our fleet is 22.7 years old. If we buy everything that is on the books today in the quantities that we have ordered, by the year 2020, the average age will be 30 years old. We are improving that some with the '03 budget, but not by much. We've got to keep working on this problem. Many of you have heard the discussions about the 767 tankers. Secretary Roche articulates this on our behalf extremely well. Even since September 11th, we have flown over 10,000 tanker sorties, refueling all sorts of airplanes all over the world, including the skies over the United States. As a matter of fact, over 5,000 of them have been over the skies of the United States. We are doing it with a fleet that is very old.

We have 160 airplanes at Tinker Air Force Base right now in some severe state of corrosion problems. It used to take us four or five months to put one of these airplanes through the depot. It takes us now more than year. We have to pay attention to this problem. We are trying to find the best way to do that between a lease and a buy and we will figure out the best way to do it and that is what we will press on with. Thank you Secretary Roche for your courage to stand behind this very real requirement. [Applause]

We recapitalized the Joint Strike Fighter. For the first time the Joint Strike Fighter is going to give us persistent stealth over the battle field. We've never had that before, as we pursue those traditional missions that require us to respond quickly from short ranges and be there in a sustained and persistent way.

Let me touch briefly on retention. How long does it take to replace a young staff sergeant who gets out after eight years? It takes eight years. And this young staff sergeant is usually very highly trained, very highly skilled. He is very much in demand on the outside. It is our job to retain. We can talk a lot about recruiting and we are doing a marvelous job in recruiting, but what we really need is to retain the people that we recruit. And today, I look out on this audience that is filled with blue uniforms and I think that today there is no greater time in our history to wear the uniform. The people of the United States of America look to us, the people in uniform as symbols of our pride, the strength, the power, and the might of this nation.

There is nobody doing any more meaningful work today than our people in uniform. All you've got to do is put on that uniform and walk to anywhere in downtown America. People come out of nowhere and they will tell you, "you know, I didn't even know much about the military, I am embarrassed to say, but I just want to shake your hand and tell you how proud I am of what you are doing for us." It happens all the time.

Whatever you think you'd like to be doing in your life or with your life, you ought to look in the mirror and be proud of what you are doing with it today if you are wearing the uniform because there is no more noble cause or calling that could guide your life and your actions than what you are doing today and the nation needs us more than ever. I am proud to be wearing the uniform and I hope you are, too. [Applause]

It is fun to go to Lackland Air Force Base and watch one of these graduations from basic military training. And when you go, you see the same scene almost every time - you see a young, newly minted airman in a freshly pressed suit standing there in front of his mom or dad, shaking them, saying, "yes mom, it is me." They don't even recognize their own kid. And you know we are led to believe that somehow in this Beavis and Butthead generation that this generation of youngsters don't know how to be committed or loyal or patriotic or dedicated. These television programs like Beavis and Butthead tell them to be disrespectful of authority. And sure they may give into that for awhile, but I would invite anyone to go walk the flight lines anywhere in America, go to the tent city that we have in those places surrounding Afghanistan and you look at the pride in their eyes because the one thing that is consistent is that human nature. And it answers the call of responsibility. It answers the call of pride. And that is what we give these youngsters and you see it every where you go. They are proud. They are dedicated. They are patriotic. And they are doing their duty. And I know I speak for all of you here in the first couple rows. We have to earn the right every day to lead them because they are so damn good and it makes me proud to be one of them. [Applause]

I am already over my time and I apologize for that. One of the great things you get to do, you get some perks when you are the chief of staff of the Air Force. I got to go to the seventh game of the World Series. And of course it opened up with a B-2 flying over the stadium and what a great sight that was to see the B-2 and the crowd just went crazy and about the fourth inning between the top and the bottom of the fourth inning, the announcer said some very nice things about people in uniform and I was there representing all the U.S. military and had my uniform on and you look up on the Jumbotron and there is your face, without any make-up. [Laughter]

I was sitting beside the archbishop of the Phoenix diocese and he'd sit there with his collar on and all and he bought a Budweiser. And it wasn't one of the little Budweisers, it was one of these plastic glasses about that tall and about that big around with BUDWEISER all over the front of it. So every time he looked up, there he was with my face on the Jumbotron and him sitting right beside me going like that [gestures]. I said, "you've got some explaining to do on Sunday."

But they read this very nice paragraph about people in uniform and both teams came out of the dugout and tipped their hats up toward me and people came out of the stands from everywhere just to shake my hand and say "thank you for what you are doing." And most of them wouldn't have known what the chief of staff of the Air Force was but there was a person in uniform and they were just proud of what these people in uniform are doing for the nation. And the owner of the Arizona team came over and introduced me to one very special lady whose husband had been killed in one of the Towers. I reached out to shake her hand and instead of shaking my hand, she reached up and grabbed me around the neck and she said, "you get those guys." I said, "you bet."

We are going to get those guys. Because these are guys with whom we cannot negotiate. There is no common ground. They just hate us because of who we are, because we vote, because we tolerate, because we go to each other's churches, because we have an opinion and we are allowed to have an opinion. And there is only one solution to the problem and that is to track them down and take them out and that is what we are going to do.

I know that before he passed away, Colonel Gabby Gabreski was proud of what he saw in his airmen. And just like any generation, today's generation is worthy of that name-airmen. And I am proud to wear this uniform and be one of them. God bless you and God bless the United States of America. [Applause]

Q. How has international support been thus far in our operations in the war on terrorism?

General Jumper: I think that we can successfully say, we can say that we've been very successful in gathering widespread support for what we are doing. There are some 80 countries that are contributing in one way or another to what we are doing. And remember, this isn't just a military effort. There are countries that are participating in economic sanctions and other means against all forms of terrorism. We have those countries who are able to participate directly in a long-range operation of the type we are conducting. There is a lot of maritime support. As a matter of fact, Vern Clark worries about the density of ships out there off the coast of Afghanistan. So, in a lot of ways we are getting a lot of help - over-flight, etc. I am very happy with it.

Q. Given less resources, how do the allies of the United States play a part in your vision? Where should we as allies prioritize, especially in the equipment area? Would you recommend role specialties rather than spreading our capabilities thin?

General Jumper: You know, I read a lot about this, about this technological gap that grows between the United States and its allies and its coalition partners. And some of that is probably true. But you know what I think about is, what does it take to get into the fight? What it takes to qualify to get into the fight is not that much.

We need reliable, secure communications and some sort of precision weaponry. That is what you need to get into the fight. If you've got that, there is a role to play. Now there are certainly other things that along with that, that not everybody has and one of them is the sort of global reach and global power that we are having to stress in this particular conflict, but the CNO, Admiral Vern Clark puts it best: this war is like this war. It ain't like the last one and it ain't like the next one. It is like this one. And so, one of the tenets of the Global Strike Task Force that kicked down the door for us is that we have learned the lesson we are going to fight as coalition partners among alliances. If you acknowledge that, then it requires us to get ourselves access to create the conditions for access so our allied partners and our coalition partners can fight alongside us. That is part of what I think our obligation is. I would work on the entry-level things first and go for the more sophisticated things as a second order.

Q. What does the Air Force acquisition community and industry need to do differently to support your vision to get technology quickly on the battlefield and to leverage this against asymmetric threats?

General Jumper: I tell you, one of the great civilian leaders we have in our Air Force is Marv Sambur who has just taken over as our AQ. This morning at Corona he laid out a vision to do just that and we are all very encouraged. Working with Les Lyles in the acquisition community. What we basically have to do is make sure that our operational community, first of all, steps up to their obligation to create concepts of operations, concepts of operations that then guide our requirements, guide our requirements so they can be turned into specifications. And then to stay involved with the acquisition community during spiral development so the trade-offs between requirements and technology can be made on the fly and the operators share the risk with acquirers.
To sum it up in a very succinct way, I'd say, what we have to do in the acquisition world is get away from the zero-risk mentality that we've developed into and have our operators share the risk and that is what we are going to do.

Q. We've been reading about a new DCS Air Force XI. Could you please talk about your concept for Air Force XI and its implication for not only the Air Staff but the Air Force?

General Jumper: We are still making sure that we've got all the i's dotted and the t's crossed on this so that we are not losing any capability, but in a word, the job of Air Force XI will be doing what I talked about doing here today and that is integration.

It is going to be a little bit like the old BASF advertisement-"we don't make the surf board, we make the thing that makes the surf board better."
And they are going to be the ones that are responsible for understanding the links and the nodes and the hook-ups between manned, unmanned and space that create these seamless, digital, machine-to-machine level interfaces that we've been talking about and they are going to have all the competencies they need in this organization to make that happen. That is the objective. The details I don't want to go into yet because we are still making sure that all the equities remain covered.

Q. With the F-35 soon to be in the Air Force inventory, how do you see its role in the Global Strike Task Force?

General Jumper: The Global Strike Task Force is the kick-down-the-door portion of it. The kick-down-the-door portion of this deal does not win the war. It allows the things in that are going to win the war. So, in Global Strike Task Force, you are taking out those anti-access targets and creating the conditions for access. So the F-22s and the B-2s are going to come in there and take out the SA-10s, 12s and 20s, sweep anything from the skies. They are going to take out the shore batteries that can shoot at the ships over the horizon and they are going to do any sort of support of forces we might put in on the ground that are special forces. They are going to take care of the weapons of mass destruction, their storage, their transportation, and their launch points and then enable the persistence force to deploy forward.

It is the persistence force that is where the Joint Strike Fighter comes in. It is that persistence force with persistent stealth over the battle field that deals then with those agile and dynamic targets that crop up on short notice that you can't service with a bomber force that is coming from 3,000 miles away. It has got to be able to be there, all the time, and on-time every time. That is where the Joint Strike Fighter comes in.

Q. How will the increasing speed, fidelity, volume of information in an AOR and the public visibility of what we do, change the relationship between the highest levels of political leadership and operational leadership in the future? And will our philosophy of campaign planning change as a result?

General Jumper: The person who is responsible for creating effects has got to decide at what level the decisions are made and that is the CINC. That is why we put the guy in charge. And that is why we pay him his money. So if the CINC thinks that the sensitivities are so important that he's got to make some of the decisions - or at least the most sensitive decisions - then our command and control apparatus has to make sure that we put all the things in front of that CINC required to make that decision. Those things that can be delegated lower down, get delegated. But this is always the prerogative of the CINC. We may or may not agree, but in the end, it is that person who is responsible and that person that we have to create the effects for.

What we have to do as our part is to make sure that in the find, fix, track, target, engage and assess loop, that we have done all we can do to give the information that ends up in a decision and we do it in a way that none of the stuff that we do is a limiting factor to that decision process. That is our job and that is what we are trying to create.

Return to the Air Warfare Symposium Page