General Jumper: It is a pleasure to be here this afternoon with my boss, Dr. Jim Roche, that shy, retiring, soft-spoken guy who has only a little trouble giving direction. But we are working on him, you know? We are trying to bolster his spine a little bit and get him to be a little more assertive. They are so afraid out there, boss -- they are not laughing [laughter].

It is a pleasure to have Dr. Jim Roche as the Secretary of the Air Force, for lots of reasons. But there's one main reason, and that is because he loves our airmen. It doesn't take much to see that when he is out amongst them. I was out at Nellis Air Force Base with him last week. When you see him interact with our airmen, you realize how richly blessed we are in our United States Air Force. We will work on the assertiveness, but he is just the kind of leader our Air Force needs and, boss, we appreciate the way you do care for our airmen.

And he is joined by a superb staff of civilian leadership in our United States Air Force that I get to see working problems for our airmen, day-in and day-out. They work them personally. They are invested in our airmen's problems and Air Force problems. I couldn't be more pleased to be associated with them.

I can tell you that it is a thrill to be here today and to look out on these faces that make so much difference and have made so much difference to our Air Force. I see Mike Ryan out there. Jimmy Adams. Joe Ashy, my old boss and mentor; General Dick Hawley, Fig Newton, Tony Robertson, Jack Gregory. And, as always, I am pleased to see that Johnny Alison is here. What a great hero of our Air Force and the fact that he makes it a point to be here every year is reassuring to us all. All of you gentlemen have helped to make us the greatest air and space power on the planet. And the current generation of leaders that you see in the first few rows up here intend to make sure that it stays that way. Because we are part of the greatest nation on Earth [applause].

Let me add a thanks to our industry partners who are here, also. Along with our industry partners, we are working hard to make sure our acquisition process, our requirements process, our operators and our testers, are integrated in the right way to make sure that we are properly trained and equipped for the future.

And, of course, the Air Force Association... John Politi, what a great introduction and I've already acknowledged Pete-O. These gatherings provide us a great forum to truly understand the work that we do and the work that we will continue to do in the Air Force, from the aircraft and the weapons to the people and to the organizations.

Regardless of your affiliation with the Air Force Association, whether it is military, civilian, contractor or media, I hope you take home a confident and proud feeling that America's airmen always get the job done and they do it well, whether through new technology, new concepts of operations, or good-old American ingenuity. They just do it; they get it done.

We are on the edge of a new frontier in war fighting. The annual Air Warfare Symposium is the perfect place for this critical interchange of ideas to demonstrate the technologies and discuss how the world's greatest Air Force is meeting these challenges today and into the future. And we are meeting them in several ways.

First, the Air Expeditionary Force. When we first started off with the AEF concept back in 1994, it was just a test. Mike Ryan made it a core part of the Air Force in 1997. In 1997, we had 80,000 members of our Air Force that were traditionally on "mobility orders," as we used to call them. Today the number of airmen eligible to deploy in the Air Expeditionary Force packages is more than 250,000 active duty, out of a population of 359,000.

We are working our whole Air Force into the rhythm of the Air Expeditionary Force to include Professional Military Education, start times for PME in the middle of the year instead of summer to summer, assignment cycles in coordination with our professional education, and force packages that we've taken down from the wing-sized force packages of the Cold War into small bite-size force packages that we deploy today. Today we have more than 35,000 airmen deployed and many more enroute to deal with the contingency world that we live in today.

The AEF is allowing us to highlight our stressed career fields. We are able to pinpoint them and able to size the level of our stress. We are now in AEF 7 and 8. Normally, in a steady-state condition, that would be about 17,000 airmen. We had to keep over 500 airmen from AEFs 5 and 6 in-place, some of them staying as long as 135 or 179 days. And we've had to pull 23,000 airmen forward from AEFs 9 and 10 to cover the shortages. Our critical career fields in civil engineering, medical, security forces, communications and many others are highlighted to us in ways that allow us to shift resources more rapidly to cover those shortages.

We are working hard on trying to right-size our force. We all know we've seen our force shrink by about 40 percent over the last 12 years. But outstanding airmen find a way to get the job done and quite frankly that is always part of our problem. We make our shortages by the brilliance and hard work of our airmen. I'll talk more about that in a while.

We have issues with the age of our air and space systems. At 23 years of age, our aircraft are older than we have ever seen in our United States Air Force and we are dealing with issues that we have never had to deal with before: in corrosion, in skin replacement, in frayed electrical wiring, in unanticipated component failures. Just a few examples: The A-10 is now 21 years old, the F-15C is 18 years old, the F-16 is 13 years old; and so on and so forth until we get down to the KC-135Es that were brought into the inventory during the Eisenhower Administration.

The need for modernization is so urgent that it is difficult to set priorities. The KC-135s, when you visit them on depot line at Tinker Air Force Base, you can peel the skin layers apart and powder comes out the middle. Corrosion is overtaking these airplanes and fatigue cracks them in ways that we have never been able to anticipate.

In the F-15, we've had structural failures where the tail has actually come off the aircraft and we are beginning to see major cracks in the wing structure of the aircraft. We've already had to place restrictions on its maneuvering and speed. And to retrofit, to correct for some of these problems will cost a minimum of about $650,000 per aircraft.

On engines, the F-100 engine in the F-15 and the F-110 engine in the F-16, we've added 18 additional inspections, requiring 197,000 man-hours just to keep up with the fact that we have not properly funded the safety modifications and the life extension modifications and the reliability modifications that we needed to fund over the years. It has also cost us 126 new technicians we've had to put out in the field to comply with these inspections. If we don't do something about the engine problem, this will increase three-fold by 2010.

When you compare that with our more reliable engines of the type we have on the C-17, we have an average on-wing time on the C-17 of 5,500 hours, more than twice as much as we get off the C-5, almost four and a half times as much as we got off the C-141. And just for engines alone, the availability of the C-17 is five times that of the C-5.

In the A-10 we are finding more and more structural defects than we had planned to deal with. The repair time for an A-10 is planned to be 99 days. And yet we are experiencing repair times of 180 to 200 days at the depot. The wing refurbishment alone was planned to be 74 days and we are finding that it is at least double that much, with implications for time, aircraft availability, and not the least, great increase in cost.

To deal with some of these problems, we have energetic programs under way. Especially with the tanker problem, we have proposed a lease for the Boeing 767 tanker that is now being studied by OSD. We have tried to put together a deal that makes economic sense for the nation and to avoid the costs of keeping the KC-135Es, those oldest of our KC-135s going, [where] operating costs are advancing at 10 to 15 percent each year.

All of this comes together to make us question how we judge the airworthiness of our aircraft. Dr. Roche has suggested, and we will soon implement, the idea of an Air Worthiness Board to verify and to certify the airworthiness of these aircraft, which are flying much longer than we have anticipated.


On the space side, we applaud the magnificent efforts of our space community and their successes in launch. I am knocking on wood. We are not going to go any further than that, but to applaud that great success. But they, too, struggle with degrading systems: old ground systems and range-control systems. The growing inability to service on-orbit and bandwidth issues. The DSP system is 32 years old and the Minuteman III system is 30 years old. We think of space as new and modern, we don't think of it as aging the way aircraft age. But, in fact, these systems are aging.

We are on our way to working these problems. It always begins with people. I've had occasion to travel over to Southwest Asia and I love to tell the story of the young engineer on the ramp at one of our bases over there who comes up with his chief master sergeant and salutes and says, "Sir, I am Captain so-and-so and this is Chief so-and-so. We are putting in this ramp here. We've been working on this for several months and I just want you to know they want me to rotate next month, but I am not leaving until it is finished." And the chief said, "Me, either."

Story after story like that of great people. And you know what? You don't know if they're active duty, if they are Guard, or if they are Reserve unless you ask the question. I love to tell the story of going up to the bomb dump in Incirlik and getting saluted by this sharp master sergeant and he is standing there with a sharp tech sergeant, and I say, "How are you? What base are you from?" And I'm expecting to hear, well, Lakenheath or Mildenhall or something like that. He says, "Sir, I am the sheriff of Little Rock." I reply, "You mean you are THE sheriff of Little Rock?" And he says, "Yes, Sir." I said, "You took a pay cut," and he tells me, "You bet I did." And this guy works for me. I said, "Well, who the hell is guarding Little Rock?" [Laughter] They are great airmen and proud to put on the uniform and serve.

We've instituted a program called the "E" Pin. We send a letter to the employers out there and we thank them. We thought this would be a nice gesture, Secretary Roche and I did, that would, you know, make people feel good. I cannot tell you the, not hundreds, but thousands, thousands of letters that we get.

And let me read one from an employer who says, "Dear Dr. Roche and General Jumper: Thank you for your kind letter acknowledging the service in the Air Force of our employee Ray Cawley. I value and appreciate my citizenship in the United States and thank you for the dedication that you and millions of others serving in the Armed Forces give to assure our safety. We are pleased to support Ray and others like Ray who serve double duty as an employee and as a member of the Armed Forces. May God bless our country and its leaders to preserve freedom with integrity and interest in the lives of others. Sincerely, Sidney Paulson, President and CEO of IAC Health Plans Corporation in Lake City, Utah."


Just one example of the gratitude. And you can see them [E-Pins], if you walk around today. I saw one on George Muellner. You'll see it on others: that E-Pin on proud employers. We are now going to extend this into a "P" Pin for the parents of young airmen, young airmen who graduate from Lakeland Air Force Base in basic training, families and parents of our ROTC and our Air Force Academy graduates, and other people who come into our Air Force in various ways, so that the parents can feel this special pride as well.

Technology is going to allow us to use our people more efficiently. The way that you help with some of your people shortages is through technology, especially in things like security forces. And security forces are coming up with innovative ways of the type that you see here to patrol the perimeters of our bases. Dr. Roche and I got to see this in action the other night and it works very, very well. Ways to control entry points and to help us with our shortage of about 8,000 security force members. Many of you may know, we've had to go to the United States Army and ask them to activate some 7,500 Army Guardsmen to come help guard our bases during this period of our shortage.

I am excited about the future and we are gaining efficiencies with our other services and our coalition partners. We are looking for ways to keep duplicating efforts and to search out redundancies. We are trying to implement an effects-based planning, programming and budgeting process that starts with a concept of operations and defines requirements that flow from the concept of operations so that we define how we are going to go fight before we decide what we are going to go buy to fight with.


The teams of the concept of operations are cross-cutting so they will guide our thinking and our tactics and our programs. One such example is the global strike concept of operations, which talks of capabilities like predictive battlespace awareness, that allows us to take our horizontally integrated, manned and unmanned and space platforms and use the power of information technology to create tools of prediction.

It emphasizes stealth, an airplane that can deal with any generation of fighter that we know might emerge in the future. And we know that fighters are being built throughout the world that are being delivered today that equal or better the technology of the United States Air Force inventory. You've heard me say it before that we've had our hands on these airplanes from time to time and our guys flying their airplanes beat our guys fighting our airplanes every time. The F/A-22, although a great air-to-air fighter, its great forte will be in the air-to-surface role, as it is able to penetrate and to deal with the next generations of surface-to-air missiles. The F/A-22 will be the only thing that we know that can deal with the emerging cruise missile problem, a problem that we have not fully come to grips with yet. But a problem that we have to deal with along with the growing ballistic missile threat. Cruise missiles in their deployment can be stealthy. They do not have to obey the laws of Newtonian physics and fly ballistic profiles. They can sneak in through the back door and the F/A-22 is the only thing that we will have in the future that will be able to deal with this problem.


In the area of global mobility, we are working on a concept of operations that takes us from the initial phases of a rapid deployment, entry of data into the joint deployment, the loading of aircraft, the enroute visibility of what is on the aircraft, the changing of the missions while en route, the ability to go from a concrete runaway in the United States to a dirt runway somewhere in the middle of a contingency area and all the information that has to pass en-route to make that safe.

When you arrive, it is how to bed down the equipment and the people at the other end, where to put the bomb dump, where to place the tent city, how to set that all up in a rapid way so that you can get operations underway as quickly as possible.

To do this, we will inaugurate a program we call Eagle Flag. It is already underway at McGuire Air Force Base and it will be the equivalent of Red Flag for the combat support world, so that our combat support commanders will be able to go to a place and actually practice in the field the skills that they will have to employ when deployed.

We also looked at CONOPS as a way to instruct and to guide us into the future, throughout a spectrum of contingencies that we are not fully conversant with today. If you look back 12 years ago before the beginning of Desert Storm, and you look at the predictions of the sooth-sayers back in those days, you will quickly realize that we wouldn't have gotten anything right. Who would have ever predicted we would be at war with Iraq? Whoever knew that there was even a place called Kosovo? Who could have named two out of the ten "A-stans?" Who would have thought of any of it?


America was supposed to be a second-rate economic power, according to some. And look at what has happened. Through that time, our United States Air Force has been able to deal with these situations and these contingencies by being able to adapt the force structures that we have to the situation that presented itself. And we project that out, working with our concepts of operations through the spectrum of contingencies. We can see where our ideas fit, the idea of an integrated space and C4ISR architecture. We have intentionally given this CONOPS a grotesque name of Space and C4ISR so that everyone will notice that everybody's stove pipe is named in the title, or they would not feel included. But the synergy of those stove pipes, when you put them together, is going to yield us something. Over time, we will learn what that something is and we will call this something besides Space and C4ISR and not have to take a breath in the middle of its name.


What it means to us is machine-to-machine interfaces, the integration of space, manned, unmanned, surface centers and platforms. The guiding principle is that the sum of the wisdom of that integration ends up with a cursor over the target. Now, when you get the cursor over the target, you have options. You can kill it. You can save it, as in the case of a humanitarian effort. Or you can learn more about it. But the fact of the matter is that you have the ability to locate it precisely, whatever it is and whatever you want to do next. That is the important part. A major feature of this is multi-sensor command and control aircraft. And the important thing to realize about the MC2A is that it is more about the integration and the sensors, but mainly the integration. It is much more about that than the platform. The Secretary and I have taken the opportunity to go to the next generation of Joint STARS and hopefully the 767 platform as a way to introduce the MC2A concept, but in fact the integration of those sensors -- manned, unmanned and space -- without preference to any of them, is the most important feature of this platform.

That integration takes into account many things. One of them is the Space-Based Radar. Space-Based Radar is an important program that we are working to make sure is properly integrated with the current generation and the next generation of ground-moving target indicator platforms, along with others to include other satellites that we don't normally associate with integration -- and I am talking about NRO satellites, that could speak at the machine to machine level with manned and unmanned platforms.

In this day of information technology, it is time for us to do that. But when you say it, there is a lot of china that gets broken, as people contemplate passing on information at the digital level that is really rarely passed on even at the human level. But when you think about it, it makes sense. Why do we have to have a photograph of the target? It is not for the digital accuracy. It is for a human-analog mind to sit and contemplate and then pass on that information to some other human mind so a decision can be made.

In the machine-to-machine world, the same decision is microseconds and the digits don't care what the source of the locating aperture was. It just cares about getting the location and the identification right. It is time to make that step. We are going to push to do just that.


Working with the other services is very important. As the Army starts to contemplate its next generation of concepts of operation, we have to be mindful that the brigade combat team concept calls for troops deep behind enemy lines. Which means that our mobility forces are going to have to be able to penetrate, they are going to have to include things like precision air drop and air land in remote areas, things that now have to go into the global mobility concept of operations. When you look at that global mobility concept of operations and you put those airplanes in that position, now they have to be fully cognizant of the total threat picture and the total common operating picture just as a fighter or a bomber aircraft would. And when you study the concepts of operations and you see the similarities between and among the concept of operations, it quickly leads to the conclusion that the thing you buy for one ought to be installed on all, rather than having a mobility team create their own situational awareness device. It also leads you to understand things that have to be further developed, like the need for precision airdrop.

It also in the concept of operations world, as you look for the future tells you where you have to partner with others. If the concept of operations for gaining access is stealth, stand-off and precision, then we go to the other services and take advantage of their stealth, stand-off and precision and you quickly determine that you have lots of common cause with the United States Navy. And you work together to make sure that your concepts of operations are well integrated so that you avoid duplication and redundancy where it is not necessary.


You also take a look at remotely piloted vehicles. We are going to take this whole notion of UAVs and remotely piloted vehicles and change the name to remotely piloted aircraft, to fully capture the kind of things that you are doing in something like the Predator, where a pilot is required and pilot actions are necessary to take the responsibility for dropping weapons and putting aircraft on targets; the same level of responsibility, we feel, as in piloted aircraft. And then the UAV signature can be designated for things that do not quite require so much of a human interface, such as the Global Hawk.

We have to get it right, on this notion of remotely piloted aircraft and UAVs. One such issue we are dealing with is the issue of the UCAV, the conventional armed unmanned vehicle. What we have to get right is that we have to make sure that we fully understand what those leveraging qualities of unmanned aircraft are. And that we are not going out to buy something merely for the novelty of taking the person out of the aircraft. The thing that makes a Predator so leveraging for us is the fact that it stays airborne for 24 hours. It has persistence. It has endurance. It does things that a person could not do in that airplane. The same thing with Global Hawk. So if we are going to take advantage of those same qualities in an armed vehicle, then we should demand an order of magnitude increase in the capability of the vehicle that we go out and buy. And we have to look very carefully and be very cautious of going out and getting something that does not advance the mission and is only attractive because of the novelty of not having a person in it.


We are working very hard with OSD to try to make those definitions and to go after (along with the United States Navy, because we end up having common cause with the Navy on this program), to make sure we are doing the right thing and we have stated the right objectives.

In the bomber force, the concept of operation that calls for stealth, stand-off precision leads us to some conclusions about the bomber force as we develop the next generation of stand-off weapons and as we arm up the B-2 to go from 16 2,000-pound bombs to 80 500-pound bombs and we bring about this notion of a small diameter bomb that will fit internal to the F/A-22 and the Joint Strike Fighter and other systems as well.

As we develop the notion of laser communications to deal with the bandwidth problems, a long way to go here, but we have very energetic programs to develop this notion of laser communications into the future. And of course the whole notion of Homeland Security conjures up this notion of what role airpower will play in urban warfare and in the homeland environment, in addition to the traditional things that we have.

The airborne laser is an exciting system that will be rolled out and prove itself -- it is already flying, the platform is already flying over the next few years and give us yet another way to deal with the problem of theater ballistic missiles and perhaps other targets into the future.


It invites us to look at alternatives, like the use of Global Hawk and other UAVs for other things. For example, the notion in homeland security or urban warfare of a hovering UAV that could use something like a short-pulse laser system to map in 3D an urban environment, so you have coordinates not only in X, Y and Z, but in X prime, Y prime and Z prime for the 10th floor of a building, the third window in. And it could hover in close proximity to a place like that with the systems of the type that Dr. Roche and I saw just a few nights ago, very accurately delivering small-armed type of weapons through a window or things like tear gas to disable people that were holding a building hostage or holding people hostage. Things like that are in consideration now for how we cope with future scenarios.

Another thing to consider is the idea of the stealth of the next generation, systems that would lead us to conclusions about what the next generation gun-ship could look like, how big should it be, can we miniaturize the armaments that we would put on this gun ship so that it could be smaller than a C-130? Can it be remotely piloted? Can we make it stealthy enough to do that? What are the options? And there are some exciting options in cantilever-wing technology that gives us some alternatives to consider for the future.

Smart tankers. It goes along with the notion that we have put forward that we will never again buy a single mission aircraft or platform. And the idea of a smart tanker is to have these aircraft that always orbit very close to enemy lines, turn them into an IP address in the sky and use them to pass information just as a computer network would around the battle space for target information and other vital command and control information.


These tell us also, these concepts of operations, how to use our forces more efficiently and the more efficient deployment and use of our forces means more efficient use of our airmen and more time at home to enjoy their families and loved ones.

Why do we do all this in our Air Force today? It is for those heroes that have gone before us. It is Johnny Allison's greatest generation. It is for those airmen from past wars who have defended their nation and in many cases given their all. And it is for those selfless who continue to demonstrate the high ideals and the virtues of this nation. To Senior Airman Jason Cunningham to Tech Sergeant John Chapman to Staff Sergeant Kevin Vance to Lieutenant Colonel Jim Fairchild to Major Junior Shore, all heroes in Afghanistan. Senior Airman Cunningham and Tech Sergeant Chapman gave their lives.

These heroes persist today. Theresa Cunningham, Valerie Chapman, the wives of our two fallen heroes, who continue to serve bravely in their own way. Theresa will come on active duty in our Air Force this summer.

And, of course, for our most recent heroes, the Columbia Seven, who accepted the risks of exploration in the name of all mankind to keep alive that spirit of adventure that elevates the human spirit in all of us and makes this nation the great nation it is, because it is that spirit upon which this nation was founded.


For those who have gone before us, who have given their lives so that we could have the greatest Air Force on Earth, so that we could enjoy the wonders of freedom and liberty, we pledge our best. And make no doubt that they are with us here today. They line these walls and they fill these aisles. And they look upon us and we ask, "Are we worthy?" And I know the people in the front rows who share the leadership responsibility in today's Air Force with me ask ourselves every day, if we are worthy to lead these great airmen. Because they are the greatest airmen on Earth. Let's take just a minute and take a look at a few of them.

[cut to video tape]

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your United States Air Force. God bless you and God bless the United States of America [applause].



Q: An article appeared in the Washington Times quoting Air Force officers as not agreeing with the war plan for Iraq. Have you seen the plans and been part of the planning? If so, what is your view?


General Jumper: Yes, I did see the article. I must say it is very perturbing. People who have seen the plan have always been in a forum where they have been asked to comment and everyone who has been involved with the planning has had every opportunity to comment fully. I myself have sat in with General Shinseki and with the land and air component commanders on three occasion with General Franks' concurrence, and gone through every detail of the plan. So the people who make that comment are either ones who were in on the planning and didn't have the courage to speak up at the time or those who are content not to know about the plan in detail, but take pot shots from the shadows.

Anyone who has a problem with anything that Secretary Roche and I are doing know we have a saying, we call it "briefing room rules," and it comes from the flying part of our Air Force. Briefing room rules mean that you say, regardless of your rank, if you've been invited to speak, you don't have to be invited to speak, you speak your mind. And you have a chance to comment. And then when you get up and walk out of the briefing room, all things are forgotten. And that rule has been in effect throughout every phase of this planning. So I am deeply perplexed and I have great concern about the professionalism of officers who would comment in this way. That, I can guarantee you, is a small minority of the officers in our Air Force.

Q: How has international cooperation affected Air Force operational deployments to the Gulf area?


General Jumper: We have a great coalition of partners throughout the world. They have come to our aid as they have in the past. We have agreements, we have partners, we have incorporated many of these partners into our planning and I think that we are going to have everything we need to do whatever the President asks us to do, without going into any specific and obvious details. I am pleased with these partnerships and there are always concerns, there are always bumps in the road, but we work these out and I think, over time, we've seen how these things have been worked out and I think that we have what we need to be ready when the President asks us, if the President asks us, to do something.

Q: Considering how quickly air dominance was achieved in the last Gulf War, how do you keep airmen from being over confident and susceptible to tactical surprise?

General Jumper: Well, anyone who has been in the business of wars knows that, first of all, no plans survives the first contact with the enemy, and they also know how quickly things can go wrong. So our forte is to plan it the best we can and to count on the great competence of our airmen to carry us through. But it would be a mistake for anyone to assume that it is going to be easy, especially as we face the perils of the world we live in today, the weapons of mass destruction and the sort of terrorist activities that we have not really had to deal with before.

There are many unknowns out there and I think it is a complement to our airmen and to Buzz Mosely and to General Tommy Franks that the planning that has gone on has done a good job of anticipating those unknowns. I am very proud of that.

Q: Considering the successful joint effort we've had in Afghanistan to date, do you see more integration between our Air Force, Army, Navy, Marines and Coast Guard?


General Jumper: As you all know, with the Navy, it is a fairly natural interface. More than 55 percent of our tanking sorties in Operation Enduring Freedom were for aircraft off of the carrier decks. And you notice that we had no spats in the news media about who was doing the most because it was truly a shared effort from all components of air power of the United States and our coalition partners.

What we did see was some conflict that arose about close air support and we had a disturbing article that described some lack of coordination in Operation Anaconda. The leadership of the Air Force and the Army have gotten together and we've confronted this head-on. In a recent meeting of all the Air Force and Army four-star generals, we went through this piece-by-piece. There is enough fault to go around in this lack of coordination of close air support and we have taken positive steps to make sure that we compensate for those errors.


The fact of the matter is that we haven=t done close air support in earnest and in great quantity since Vietnam and we have institutional problems that we have to overcome. There are many who think that close air support is only close air support if the aircraft is below 500 feet and clearly visible to those are calling for it. In fact, we saw very valid employment of close air support by B-52s from 39,000 feet talking to sergeants on the ground. The effect was there. It was there with greater accuracy than we have ever been able to do it before. These are things we have to overcome. We have to work harder with the Army in peacetime to make sure that all elements of our close air support are well understood, that we do a better job of understanding the Army's scheme of maneuver, how they operate, when they have to break up into much smaller units than they are used to breaking up into or that we are used to practicing with. We have taken some initiatives to get them bedded down with our forces and it seemed to work very well. I am very pleased with where we are. I do think it is better than it ever has been before and we have to continue to work on it, these concepts of operations that I described, to give us the tool to do that as we continue to develop joint concepts of operations, not just service-centric.

Q: In the last few years, we've had a lot of concern about retention in our force and many of our career fields, in particular our pilots, our maintenance personnel. Do you see that abating at all?

General Jumper: Yes. We have done very well. We are meeting our goals in retention. We are meeting our goals with recruiting and pilot retention is vastly improved in the last year or more. Things are indeed turned around and much better. Some of these data are masked by things like stop-loss and of course the state of the economy has a role to play in this, too, so we don't want to get complacent. As Mike Ryan will be happy to describe, when we had our recruiting problems in 1998 and 1999, we had to take a look at our recruiting effort, which was only a fraction of what the other services were putting into recruiting. Mike and Dr. Roche turned up the wick on that and we got ourselves a professional recruiting force out there in some numbers and it is doing the job very well.

Last year we met our recruiting goals by the end of April in the fiscal year, which gives you an idea of how well they are doing out there. It is something we still have to worry about because we still have to deal with quality of life issues; we have to pay attention to the families that we are also trying to retain as well as the members. I think we have a good effort in that regard. And the mission is always the most important thing. I think we have the greatest mission in the world and I continue to tell our people that it is a marvelous thing to be able to join the greatest Air Force on the planet. It is a marvelous thing to be able to defend the greatest country in the world. It is a marvelous thing to be proud of the your role in that. No one else can look in the mirror and say that they do what our young airmen do. They should be very, very proud of that. It is a message that we should all send to them.

Q: What future do you see for distributed mission operations? Do you see that application of modeling and simulation helping us in war-fighting?


General Jumper: This whole notion of distributed mission operations is a take-off from distributed mission training, which began with the notion of taking simulators at bases and plugging them into a network so that you could plug an AWACS simulator at Tinker Air Force Base into a flight of four F-15 simulators at Langley Air Force Base. That part we've done very well. But when you are thinking of effects-based things and integration, it very quickly leads you to what the next step should be. And the next step should be that we integrate all of our space, manned and unmanned platforms into this network. We put it into a distribution center, like the TAC-AF at Kirtland Air Force Base and we are able to put together synthetic wars of the type. And practice with platforms in ways that we are never able to do in peacetime.

The perfect example is combat search and rescue. The one time that you will ever see all the platforms come together for combat search and rescue the way they do in combat is when you actually are in combat. Because, the combat search and rescue mission requires the coordinated use of our ISR platforms, of our command and control platforms, of our space platforms, of people on the ground in our surface to air communications and so on and so forth. Virtually everything that we use in our Air Force when you go to Red Flag, and you try to practice with all these platforms, they are never available. So in a synthetic environment, when you have these things hooked up in simulation, you can not only hook up the simulators, but you can actually synthetically insert the capabilities of a Rivet Joint or a Joint STARS where one would not otherwise be available, either flying or in a simulator.

This also has obvious applications for modeling and simulation, as you test concepts of operations, as you rehearse for operations and you go through the many things that we go through in the development of weapon systems, through their application and their employment. So, lots of opportunities are here that we have to pay attention to. This is going to be huge in our future and we need to keep emphasis on it.
 

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