General Kernan: I am a little bit intimidated by the surroundings, I’ve got to tell you. You have already noticed my uniform is different. At Norfolk, with a different hue of blue. What really intimidates me is the Rolex watches, the fat wallets and the low handicaps. I say that with a great deal of envy [laughter].

As John said, I am in the joint world. I am reminded of the story of the three Army officers after a hectic day who were in the bar, having a few drinks. They killed brain cells for four or five hours and asked for the tab and the bartender came up and gave them a tab for three dollars. They said, excuse me, we’ve been here for several hours and we’ve consumed quite a bit of alcohol, I know our bill must be more than $3. He said, "No, I tell you what. I won the lottery a while back. I am a great fan of the military and very appreciative of all the things you do for this nation and I’ll give you a minimal charge. Three dollars is the bill." They said, "That is fantastic." They happened to glance over and there was a crowd of Air Force pilots sitting near the door. And they said, what about those guys? He said, "Oh them? They’re just waiting for happy hour prices."

I want to start off by thanking the Air Force Association. These military associations are extremely important. I very much appreciate what you do to promote air power to take care of our airmen and their families, to strengthen the military. You are our strongest advocates. You are the ones that carry the message and lobby Congress to get the things that we need. We are indebted to you and most appreciative of everything that you’ve done to get our benefits back, improve the quality of life, and move things forward to ensure that we are truly trained, ready and modernized to do whatever our nation asks us to do.

My intent, very briefly, is to give you a quick overview of my command, because there were a number of people who said they really didn’t know what Joint Forces Command had evolved into. I will talk a little bit about transformation. And then to solicit your advice, counsel and support as we transform the military.

As I talk about transformation, I am reminded of one of our greatest advocates for transformation and air power and that was General Billy Mitchell. He lived in a similar time of transition, transformation. A lot of the experts say we are going through a similar thing right now. We don’t have a peer competitor out there. They had just come out of a major war. Things were stable. Rapid downsizing of forces, lean times. He didn’t just believe in air power. He was convinced that it was part of the future and that it was going to drive the way we did future warfare. He went out and very aggressively looked to experiment to prove his concept. He also spoke out in favor of the unified command plan system. He truly was way ahead of his time because he understood what it was going to take to win on tomorrow’s battlefield, that we need to synchronize the efforts on land, sea and air. The system was not receptive to him. And it isn’t today in many respects when you start talking about change. But he had the courage of his convictions and stood by them. I think that what we enjoy today is a great credit to his vision. I think he’d be proud of today’s Air Force and I think he’d be proud of the changes that we are trying to bring to the military.

A quick overview of my command. There have been a lot of changes in the last ten years. It was General Colin Powell’s vision some years ago, just before he finished as the Chairman [of the Joint Chiefs of Staff], to trade in one of his Cold War CINCs to lead the transformation of the armed forces. Consequently, my command has grown into a hybrid command. I have a geographic responsibility. But I also have functional responsibilities and it has to do with experimentation, interoperability, joint training and those kinds of things. I still have those geographic responsibilities, but fortunately, there is really no threat out there so the concerns we have in the Atlantic don’t really consume an awful lot of my time. I have a minimal theater engagement program, as you might imagine. But I do have a great deal of responsibility as far as being a force provider.

The command has responsibility for 80 percent of the general purpose forces in the United States. That is 1.2 million people. We are the primary provider of Army-Navy-Air Force-Marine forces to the other combatant commanders. In that regard, we monitor very carefully the readiness of those forces and are directly engaged in joint training, standing up Joint Task Force training, and doing the leader development piece to ensure that we can effectively employ the capability that today’s military brings to the battlefield. I’ve also been given the responsibility for interoperability. That basically and very simplistically is ensuring that the systems that we have out there can talk to one another, that they can net. I have the responsibility for experimentation. A big challenge there. But it is experimentation in the joint arena. I am dual-hatted. As you heard, I am also the Supreme Allied Commander–Atlantic, a NATO command. In that responsibility, my primary focus is the defense of Europe and the defense of the allies. We do that through ensuring the freedom of the seas. We are the maritime center of excellence for NATO. That ensures the unimpeded flow of forces and equipment from North America to Europe in support of military operations.

I am also a primary force provider, in particular for what NATO has grown into and that is out-of-area operations, like the Balkans and we do an awful lot of that. I additionally have the responsibility for leading and promoting modernization and interoperabilities within the alliance. You can see there are an awful lot of parallels between my Joint Forces Command and SACLANT missions.

We all know we’ve got the best military in the world. We’ve got the best Air Force the world has ever seen and we are very proud of it. They are fit. They are focused. They are dedicated. They are smart. They are imbued with the values that the rest of society envies and they truly are the envy and the standard bearers for the rest of the world. But we also know we can’t rest on our laurels. Our most pressing issue today is balancing readiness and transformation. I want to talk about the transformation piece.

If we’ve got the greatest military in the world, what is the imperative for change? We all know the strategic environment in which we live today. It is pretty challenging. With the fall of the Soviet Union the old, traditional threat in many respects went away. We are being confronted on all sides by a very determined adversary. There are an awful lot of thugs out there. I am not going to go through the strategic environment with you. You know it better than I do. And you probably talked about it during this symposium. But we’ve had a recent reminder of just how quickly they can come at us unexpectedly, with the Cole. Those people out there are ruthless. They are amoral. But we also have the traditional threat we have to worry about. So we are challenged across the width and breadth of the spectrum out there and we’ve got to be vigilant and we’ve got to be flexible and we’ve got to be agile and we’ve got to operate differently. That is one of the reasons for transformation.

We’ve got to maintain the advantage. Unquestionably, we have to do that. And we’ve got to put our adversary at risk. The national military strategy is going to enforce that we stay engaged worldwide. We all recognize that. As a sole super power we have a moral as well as a professional responsibility to help our friends and allies. But we know we are vulnerable and that a devious minion out there is looking for every opportunity. He will look for the seams and gaps and, as vigilant as we might be, he will look for an opportunity to strike to promote his interests and deny us the opportunity to pursue ours.

The status quo is no longer an option. We’ve got to have a new set of tools, new skills. Some of it is going to be materiel. Some of it is going to be the manner in which we fight. It is going to take innovative thinking. It is going to take new tactics, techniques and procedures. The Chairman is committed to transformation. He has framed the vision for us in what he calls Joint Vision 2020. It talks about full-spectrum dominance. What is that?

It is confusing too many people. You know we have to operate everything from peace operations to general war. We do things from humanitarian assistance, response to natural disasters, getting engaged in conflicts like we did in Panama or as we are engaged right now in the Balkans, all the way up to being able to do a Desert Storm or whatever follows. We know that we can control and dominate some of that spectrum all the time. We do that daily. Periodically and for a very short period of time we can do all of it some of the time. The task for us is to be able to do all of it all of the time and be able to do it seamlessly with tailored forces and be able to project combat power worldwide.

My charter is to figure out how to operationalize Joint Vision 2020. How are we going to do this? When I came into this job, it was the last thing I ever thought I was going to do. I spent all my time as an operator. I never thought I was going to be involved in experimentation and interoperability and transforming the military. I was one of those people like a lot of us out there that used to complain about things not being quite right and wanted to know why this brain-dead system couldn’t fix it. Now I am one of those brain-dead people who everybody else is talking about and I feel those thousands of beady little eyes looking at me trying to figure out, "Ok, what are you going to do to make this right?"

But I see it as an opportunity because I truly believe that the people I work with are committed. They are warriors and they are intelligent and they know their business and they know what needs to be done. We’ve just got to define the process. What is this transformation all about? We had some guys go look it up in Webster’s [Dictionary]. Basically, it says, "to change in nature, function and condition." I am an infantryman and I am from Texas. I didn’t really understand what function, condition and nature was all about. I had to go and look those words up. Then I had to try to put them in military terms. Really what it boiled down to is: "Nature" to me translated to force structure and equipment. "Function" spoke to strategy, policy, doctrine. The "condition" is that which we were talking about a few minutes ago, the strategic environment in which we live.

My piece of this is the joint operational architecture as I call it. The overarching joint concepts, the development piece of that. I stay in my lane. I am not getting into the service’s business. They know how to do that better than anybody. But I believe, if we are going to do this right, we’ve got to have something that frames our efforts and identifies the top-end piece of this—how are we going to fight jointly and what are the protocols and standards that are going to guide the development of the various supporting capabilities. We’ve got to have a process to do that. To me, it starts with the front-end analysis, doing the joint concept development, determining what we want to do. Then, through rigorous experimentation, test and validate that concept. Then take it to Washington, D.C. in a Joint Requirements Oversight Council, generate those requirements necessary, prioritize those things, go after the resources to get them so that we can begin making a top-end decision, be proactive, and get the money necessary to pursue this. It has unquestionably got to be linked to the National Security Strategy and the National Military Strategy.

We’ve got to do the strategy-to-task analysis. We’ve got to determine what it is the nation expects us to do. What is it that OSD expects us to do? What kind of capabilities do we possess to do that right now? Where are we deficient? Then, what is going to satisfy those deficiencies? We are going to have to prioritize those also. Because we will never achieve the objective force we would all like to have, we know that. We are realists. But as we identify what we can afford, we also have to identify the risk associated with not resourcing that which we cannot afford. Other people have to help us underwrite this risk. This is not just in our lap. We get accused a lot of times of basically chasing technology and wanting to buy things. We recognize probably more than anybody else the fact that transformation is not just a material solution. We’ve got to look at new doctrine, new organizational structure, new operational concepts and basically just ensure that we’ve got the relevant capabilities to not only prosecute military operations today, but to be able to do it in the future.

General Shelton has summarized that in full-spectrum dominance. I’ve got to tell you, General Ryan has that message loud and clear and he is leading the charge and the Air Force is also. These high profile efforts with the Global Reconnaissance Strike Task Force, the Air Expeditionary Force, the synchronized presence piece we are looking to try to balance OPTEMPO, are all a big piece of this. You couple that with the fact that we need new platforms to be able to do these kinds of things, like the F-22 and the Joint Strike Fighter, the Global Hawk UAV. These things will ensure that we’ve got worldwide, rapid power projection to do what we need to do to support our nation and our allies. It is going to require new tactics. We are working on those right now and we’ve got to be able to do this rapidly with massive, round-the-clock firepower.

This doesn’t just happen by accident, there is an awful lot of thought goes into this. I know you all have been talking about this. The bold, innovative, determined warrior-leaders that you have in the Air Force today are making this happen. They are driving this point home. It is not easy. But we can all be proud of what they are doing because they are doing it for the right reason and we are producing a much more capable, much more efficient, much more lethal Air Force and, ultimately, military today.

In addition to leveraging all this technology we are talking about, there are two other fundamentals to transformation that can’t be understated and overlooked. That is the doctrine piece, doing the intellectual change first before you get into the physical change. The head space and timing has got to be there. We’ve got to know exactly what it is we are going after so we don’t waste time, we don’t waste resources and we get the right equipment. Then we’ve got to have adequate time and resources to do the training and the leader development and the training to refine these new tactics, techniques and procedures to understand how we are going to leverage these capabilities, not only within the Air Force, but within the joint community. You have to have your core competency piece done first and then you have got to meld it together with the joint team. Every service needs time. The joint community needs time. We’ve got a resource that can do that properly.

I’ve been tasked to lead transformation. Look, the direction for transformation really comes from Congress, from the secretary of Defense and the Chairman. I am sort of on-point. I do that in partnership with the services and the combatant commanders. We are trying, together, to figure out what it is that we need to do. Work in partnership. I think we are off to a good start. I try very hard to stay in my lane. I am not about to try to suggest what type of air platform the Air Force needs. I need to look at what kind of joint war-fighting concept we are going to develop. You all will develop what capability best satisfies that. Then I also have to go and with you fight for that to make sure that we get it. We just can’t tinker on the edges. This is going to require a new sense of innovation.

Let me give you an example about that. Between World War I and World War II, the Army and the Navy thought that [military] aircraft were simply another element to use spotting and scouting and doing reconnaissance. Billy Mitchell, once again, saw that air power ought to rank up there with land and sea power. The technology, unfortunately, was just not ready to deliver on that concept. These were lean times. These were tough times. We didn’t have any money and we had a high optempo because we had a small Armed Forces out there, much like we have today. But he very aggressively and diligently carved out money and people and went out there and beat people up basically intellectually to drive this point home. It was through his tenaciousness, that we developed and refined the doctrine, the organization, the technology for daylight precision strategic bombing. In 1941, we were able to go deep and strike at the heart of the enemy and hit him a devastating blow which ultimately helped to turn that war in our favor. We could have never done D-Day without some of the things that we did through air power. We all know that.

Today we call that "DOT-MIL PF" solution. Doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leader development, facilities and personnel. It is not a single solution. It is a solution set. It gives us flexibility and ability. That is what we are looking for today. Is there another one of those DOT-MIL PF solutions out there? I think there is. If you think back to [Operation] Just Cause, 19 December 1989. The Panamanian people went to bed under the heels of a thug, a criminal, somebody who had basically wrestled power away and retained it. On 20 December 1989, they woke up, their freedom had been re-established. Their dictator was on the run and hiding and subsequently was picked up. The Panamanian Defense Force was in a rout. The elected government was in place. That happened without going to any forward-staging bases. We hit 27 targets in 45 minutes across the width and breadth of that battlefield. We overwhelmed them.

You could say, well, it wasn’t really a first-rate military. Ok, but take the concept. Think about it for a minute. Think about how we do operations today. In many respects, today we don’t operate any different than we did in World War II. We do it better. We do it more lethal. We do it faster. We can do it deeper. But our concept is pretty much the same. If you think about it, what do we do? Our Air Force and our Navy go forward and establish air space and sea superiority or, ideally, supremacy. We then look for an intermediate staging base somewhere in a country, an island, somebody who will give us sanctuary and we very deliberately flow forces in. It takes an awful lot of time. Once we’ve got the necessary combat power forward, we then very deliberately go forward and set conditions. We seize ports and airfields if we have to. That means we have to go against the enemy’s mass. We have to go against his air defense systems, his artillery, his shore batteries. He is going to do everything to deny that to us because he knows that is what we have to have to introduce forces into the theater of operation. Then we flow forces forward. Once again, we go through a very deliberate build-up. We expand the battle space. We get in there. We then very deliberately move forward in a phased-operation, linear battlefield and advance to destroy the enemy. Six or seven days later we do an operational pause. We recock, we replenish ourselves and then we press forward. It is very timed. It is very deliberate. It is very sequential. It is very predictable. It affords the enemy opportunities that we would like to deny him.

I would like to take you back and think a little bit about what we can do differently. I think we can do it differently. Think about that same scenario we were talking about a few minutes ago with Just Cause and relate it to what I was talking about on how we fight today. Now, today, on D-Day whenever that may be, we simultaneously strike across the width, depth and breadth of that battlefield. We bypass intermediate staging bases. We use our asymmetrical capabilities, our strategic lift, our inter-theater air. To position forces into contested and uncontested areas. We bypass those ports and airfields. We use new capabilities to unhinge the enemy. We use a combination of kinetic and non-kinetic systems out there to attack his centers of gravity, to situationally take down his integrated air defenses. To disrupt his power bases. To interrupt his command and control. To hit his power grids. Heavy use of psychological operations to break the national will. Create an operational and tactical dilemma for him. He is now fighting 360 degrees. We are coming at him direct from CONUS with airborne forces or assault-landing in the Army’s new medium weight force. Air assault operations from maritime platforms or other staging bases, amphibious operations, the simultaneity of operations both close and deep, the air interdiction being aggressively worked. It all has to be synchronized. It all has to be integrated. But I think we can do this. It is going to take some technological improvements. It is going to take some organizational changes. It is going to take some doctrinal changes. But I think we can do it and I think we have an opportunity to do it now.

We call this rapid-decisive operations. The nice thing about it is we do it rapidly, we do it repeatedly. It is a non-linear battlefield. We replenish as we reposition so this focused logistics piece that is a part of Joint Vision 2020 is a large part of the success. We’ve proven this capability in simulation. Global Strike Task Force has been proven in simulation. In 1941, General Marshall had to go out there in the thing called Louisiana Maneuvers. Basically what he did was he took these new concepts that they were developing and put it in the dirt down there in Louisiana and down at Fort Polk—Camp Polk then—to find out what worked and what wouldn’t work. Not everything worked. But they came out of there with an awful lot of lessons learned and they came out of there with a high-degree of confidence and competency that they could in fact go and prosecute land operations. We’ve got to do that.

We’ve got to now take it and put it in the air, in the dirt and in the sea and we’ve got to do it through live and simulation. We are going to put 20 thousand troops out in the western training area—Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines—we are going to stand up a joint task force from 18^th Airborne Corps. We’ve got an Air Expeditionary Force in there. We’ve got the JFAC in there. We’ve got a special purpose Marine task force going in. We’ve got a carrier battle group. We’ve got an ARG. We’ve got special operations forces and collectively, we’re going to try to validate this concept out there using all the ranges that we have for the various services and use the instrumentation to help validate this capability. This is called Millennium Challenge 02. It is an experiment in July and August of 02. It has been mandated by Congress. We are excited about this because we think we can go and prove a capability—a concept if you like—that we need help in maturing. It is going to take resources to do it.

The advantage that we have is we will up front be able to start influencing the POMs and future QDRs so that we’ve got a better look at this military capability and what we are trying to grow it into. This transformation business is difficult. It requires a tremendous amount of intellectual energy. I’ve got to tell you there are more opponents out there than there are advocates. Not all the experiments are going to succeed. And that is ok because they are experiments. If the expectation is that everything is going to work, then why experiment? Why waste our time? Let’s just go buy it. Let’s just go do it. We’ve got to brace some people that some of these things, this innovation that we are after, is not necessarily going to work. There are an awful lot of expert pundits out there. A lot of Monday morning quarterbacks. We get them all the time. It is interesting. They will attack your concept. They will attack your recommended solution. But in the process of doing that, they won’t offer what is a better way. Hey, we recognize that.

General Hawley has heard those [pundits] in his day. General Jumper hears them today. General Ryan [hears them]. I hear them all the time. But you’ve just got to ignore them. You’ve got to fight through them. I believe we are right. I believe there are some things that we can do better. This is a complex business. We’ve got to be proactive. If we are going to achieve the battlefield dominance that we need, it is going to require innovation, it is going to require commitment and it is going to require taking some risks.

Dissent is not disloyalty. Not everybody is going to agree with it. So, as I said earlier, I don’t mean to suggest that we are critical of dissent. All of us have a stake in this. If you’ve got a better idea, if you don’t like something, address it, but offer a recommended solution to it. We want to hear what you think is going to work and what is not going to work. We are all in this together. We want those dissenting views. We need to take a professional and moral approach to this and we are doing that, I believe. It is not an easy task and there is a lot of risk-taking involved. As an Army guy, as a grunt, we have a simple solution—ruck up and move out. We are doing that. I believe that Billy Mitchell would be proud of us. I can tell you right now we are extremely proud of what our U.S. Air Force is doing. It is an absolutely joy to work with Air Combat Command [with the] things that they are doing in this CAOC world. This Global Strike Task Force. This ability to project combat power forward with the precision and lethality and the speed with which they can do it is exciting. It helps the overall joint community prosecute operations and ensure battlefield dominance.

I appreciate the opportunity to come talk to you. Let me close by thanking the Association for everything they do for our airmen, the families, and the nation in promoting a dominant Air Force. We are all indebted to you. And we appreciate the volunteer effort that you put in to keep our Air Force the very best in the world. Thank you.

Q. Could you give us some insight on the recent visit of President Bush? Our feedback so far is he supports and has a genuine affection for our troops.

General Kernan: Absolutely. General Jumper and I were really privileged to be there and greet him. We spent about 20 minutes talking to him about transformation. He is committed to it. He wants to ensure that our military is properly resourced, that it has the right equipment, that it has the right people, it has the right training opportunities, and it is properly employed. He wants to ensure that he understands what his responsibilities are and what his commitment to the military is before we employ. I gotta tell you, he is absolutely charismatic. He gets out there and he is engaged. He looks people in the eye. He asks very thoughtful questions. He wants to understand what our needs are. He goes out there and relates to those troops and to their families. He took extra time to ensure that he reached out and thanked them for what they did. He was very engaging. It was really uplifting being around him. I feel good. I think we’ve got an Administration that is committed to ensuring that our armed military stays the most powerful military in the world. He is very proud of the military. He is proud of what they do to represent our nation. He is proud of the fact that he served. He recognizes the fact that what we do is very difficult. From my perspective, it was a joy to have him there. He was easy to host and he is firmly committed to our military.

Q. What is your take on Homeland Defense?

General Kernan: That is an interesting one. Homeland Defense, Homeland Security. It is a big issue. We know there is a threat out there with missiles. We already know about the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction worldwide. It is not just missiles, it is everything from suitcase terrorism to people introducing anthrax and other kind of biochemical munitions that may be introduced into the public arena. You’ve got the land-sea-aerospace piece of this. It has got to be linked with Canada. It has got to be linked with Mexico. There is the NORAD piece of it. There is the Homeland Defense piece of it that is primarily focused on our National Guard. Getting this synergistic effect that we want to ensure that our public is protected, we can deny the adversaries any advantage here and Homeland [Defense] is going to be a big part of this business. The unified command plan is addressing that as to who has responsibility and potency for it. We all have a piece of it. We are all right now going through an awful lot of risk assessments and looking at where we are vulnerable. The United States is vulnerable. We have seen it already in the World Trade Center. We’ve seen it in things like Oklahoma City. It is just a matter of time before something else happens. We’ve got to be vigilant. The Joint Staff is addressing this right now. The interagency arena is addressing it. It is probably something that is going to be a hot topic for the next year. We hope to be able to resolve it sooner than that, but it is being aggressively reviewed right now.

Q. What are your thoughts on the differences between the services as they go about their experimentation efforts and what the joint world is doing?

General Kernan: All the services have a very dynamic program for experimentation. On my end, in the joint world, we are getting in on this late. We just got this mission in 1999. We did the first bit of experimentation last summer in Millennium Challenge 00, which was really an opportunity for us to put a joint umbrella over existing service experimentation and learn from that. All the services right now are working their piece of it very hard. They have a very effective system and process to do that. The thing that has probably been missing is the top end joint identification of what is required in the way of service capability. That is the thing we are trying to play catch up with right now. We are moving out aggressively. It is going to take us a little bit of time. But nobody has sat and waited because by our very nature, military professionals seize a deficiency, attack that deficiency and find a solution. All the services have been doing that. Unfortunately, as we pursue some of the material, we have not identified up top the architecture that ensures they are interoperable. That is the piece we are reaching back now to fix, and we are working the future piece to identify those protocols and standards ahead of time so the services can continue to do the magnificent things they’ve been doing in bringing these capabilities into our inventory.

Q. What is the role of modeling and simulation as you go into Millennium Challenge 02? Is there any role for the allies, for the coalition in this?

General Kernan: When I just gave a very psychic ready-to-fire example of what we are trying to do with future warfare techniques, we take that rapid-decisive operation and put it into simulation. Through simulation, we validate the concept. We all know that you can take something conceptually and have challenges with it from a practical execution. That is what we will find out when we go and do the experiment in the field. But the modeling and simulation gives us the clarity to go out there with a high degree of confidence that we are going to succeed when we invest in people, time and equipment out there on the ranges. That is what we do through modeling and simulation. It gives us the opportunity to stand it up, to dynamically re-task and change the conditions so that we can adjust and see if in fact this thing is as flexible and agile and still gives us the lethality and battlefield dominance we want. That is what modeling and simulation do for us. We are bringing some observers in from our allies for Millennium Challenge 02. The next iteration is Olympic Challenge 04, which is in the summer of 2004 and that will be our first opportunity to start the introduction of our allies into experimentation so that we can promote interoperability with the alliance and other coalitions.

Q. Where is the intersection between your work and what the services are doing with acquisition? How does that then influence service POMs?

General Kernan: If you think of it simplistically, if you think about what we are trying to do with say, command, control, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance; the ability to do the dynamic planning, the command and control of those forces being able to describe precisely what we need in intelligence, surveillance, sensor-to-shooter piece; if we can define that joint architecture and not talk about specific type systems, but define the architecture, the services then will go out and pursue what they believe best satisfies that capability. They know their business better than anyone else. I don’t want to get into their business. I don’t understand it as well as they do. What I believe I need to do is, working in partnership with them—and it is going to take some compromise because we’ve already started moving forward—if we can define this overarching architecture and work their piece of it and then identify hopefully to us what their priorities are, so collectively we can go forward to Congress and say, "We all agree, this is what we need and this is how we rack them and stack them and this is where we need to resource them," so that we all speak with one voice and pursue what is in the best interest of the nation.

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