Let me follow on to the remarks of General Ryan and General Eberhart to thank the Air Force Association for what you’ve done here. I have been assigned here in Los Angeles three times in my career – as a second lieutenant right out of grad school; as a young colonel and as a commander of Gene’s organization. I have been to a lot of these forums over the years, many times in the past and I can tell you this is the premiere event in my opinion. The Air Force Association has events around the country that are number one. This to me is the premiere one and the fact that you focus this on a space symposium over the last few years to me is just the right thing to do. I am very proud of the Air Force Association and what you do for each one of us every day and what you do for the men and women of this great United States Air Force.

    It is also happy for me to get back out here because there are so many familiar faces. There are the usual suspects out there, people I have talked to and have worked with and worked for in this audience every time I come out here. I am always very pleased to see my former bosses, my mentors, so Lieutenant General Don Cromer and Major General Don Hard whom I worked for out here at SMC.

    The other boss I had in a direct way was Pete Aldridge. Even though he was secretary of the Air Force, when I was here in 1987-1989 running the space launch recovery activity, which included the development of the Titan IV, the Delta 2, the Atlas 2 and all the launch systems we have today, we were just developing them as part of our challenge and recovery activity, Pete who was sort of the father of that for the Air Force, really watched very closely over what was happening with these launch vehicles. As the director of that activity, I knew I had to be in my office by 5:30 every morning because I got a call from the secretary of the Air Force’s office every morning checking on how his babies were doing. Nothing focuses a program manager more than having the Secretary of the Air Force office call you every day.

    I am now living at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, as you all know, the headquarters of Air Force Materiel Command. I’ve been caught up recently in the excitement around there in Dayton. It is an excitement that is an obvious one when you think about it. We are three years away exactly from the millennium of flight, December 13, 1903, when the Wright Brothers had their first flight. The city and whole community is really pumped up, they are looking forward to major celebrations of flight, looking forward to major events that they can have in the area.

    I’ll just say this not as a paid advertisement, they are hoping the Air Force Association will help sponsor some of those events in 1903. Hint, hint.

    Lots of activities and plans in the city. Lots of activities for major development. It really is shaking out to be a major event, perhaps not quite on the scale of the 50^th Anniversary of the Air Force, but that is the way they are thinking about that. As a matter of fact, I went to a new play, a musical last week at Wright State University. The title was "1903" and was dedicated to the Wright Brothers and also Parlance Dunbar who was also a native of Dayton, Ohio. They knew each other and grew up in the time frame of the late 1800s. This particular play was focused flight, focused on that event in 1903. They actually had a full scale replica of the Wright Brother plane on stage and in the closing act, they actually had it go from the back of the stage all the way forward on some major contraption, simulating the first flight. In all honestly, that distance was about the same distance as the first flight. It was more a real simulation than people thought about.

    Think about it, one hundred years of flight and we’ve come a long way in that time period. From the Wright Flier to today’s F-22 to the soon to be Joint Strike Fighter to Global Hawk systems, you name it, we’ve done a lot. Contrast that to space and our space activities. We have done a lot in space yet space is just a baby when you think about man's involvement in space activities. Sputnik went up in 1957. The United States’ first satellite, Explorer, went up about a year later. That is just 43 years ago, a baby when you think about the comparison to 100 years of flight.

    We’ve come a long way. We’ve had manned space flight. We’ve had man on the moon, actually just 12 years after Sputnik. We’ve had missions to other planets, lots of other activities that are going on. We’ve had the first surveillance satellite, the Corona, from the organization we used to not be able to talk about, the NRO, was launched in August of 1960. We are about to launch very shortly our first SBIRS satellite today. The GPS is something we all take for granted, but it is a major significant technical event that everybody in the world depends upon. We have come a long way in space, but we are just babies when you think about manned flight.

    The question we have to ask ourselves is where will we be or where should we be in the 100th year of space activities for man? More importantly, how are we going to get there. I am reminded, whenever I talk about this subject, a story that is very known commonly in Dayton about where we are in terms of technology. You can look at space technology in the same sort of way.

    There was an Episcopal Bishop in the late 1800s in the mid-West who had lots of discussions with his peers and lots of discussions with his parishioners talking about technology. He made a comment one time to a scholar that there is nothing more that mankind could do in terms of new discoveries. They have discovered it all. He particularly made a very disparaging remark about somebody trying to fly. The name of that bishop was Bishop Wright, the father of Orville and Wilbur. He certainly was wrong and his kids proved that. I am not going to say we have come as far as we are relative to technology for space and space activities, we have a long way to go and there are many things that I know we are going to be doing in the future.

    Today, when I think about looking towards the future, my mind naturally gravitates back to 1945 when General Hap Arnold chartered Dr. Theodore von Karman with a vision to undertake a study. His specific quote to von Karman was do not look forward for 20 years, but look forward 50 years. Hap Arnold even predicted back in November 1945 that a space craft is all but practical today and it could be built within the foreseeable future. This was back in 1945.

    We all know what came out of that charter that led to a study that we call "Toward New Horizons," looking at the future technical possibilities for the U.S. Air Force or Army Air Corps at that time. That set the tone for a lot of the things that we have today in our inventory and things that we have the last 20 or 30 years or so.

    Today, when I think about future technologies, right now one of the things that first comes to my mind is a TV show when I think about space technologies. I didn’t think this way a few weeks ago, but I think about the TV Show Star Gate SG1. How many people out there regularly watch that show. Usually when I say that, only one or two hands go up. For those of you not familiar with the show, I am not even sure what channel it is on, but it talks about the U.S. Air Force and about technology associated with the Air Force.

    The setting for the show is today though they use a lot of future technologies in the science fiction category. The center of the activity is what they call Star Gate Center, which is headquartered 20 floors below Cheyenne Mountain. The show features a major general named George Hammon. He is actually played by the actor Don Davis, who General Ryan actually invited to our last Corona out in Colorado Springs for all of us to meet. This General Hammon on the show commands a force of Star Gate teams whose job it is to travel through the Star Gate, a space portal and time portal, and save the earth from an evil super alien who is responsible for the sediments and pyramids in Egypt millennia ago.

    Why do I bring this up? Some of you may know, a few out in the audience, that one of our own, General Ryan, had a cameo on the show. That particular episode will air on the 19^th of January 01. Mark your calendars. Actually, it is the day before the inauguration and it may be the highlight of that week as far as we know [Laughter].

    I have to admit there was a bit of type casting here because the Chief actually played the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, Mike Ryan. So that it made his lines a little bit easier [Laughter], but we got a chance to preview the show at Corona and I can tell you Chief, if they ever give out an Emmy for cameo performances, I know who is going to get it [Laughter].

    The Star Gate show, SG-1, features a lot of advanced technology. Let me just mention a couple of things they have like the MALP, a mobile analytical laboratory probe, sort of scout that goes through this time portal to explore unknown worlds and make sure they are safe for humans. There is the FRED, the field remote expeditionary device. It is like a supply truck that also goes through the portal and carries supplies for members of the Star Gate team. There is a TER, a trans-phased eradication rod that detects objects you can’t see normally that might be dangerous toward mankind. They have suspended animation chambers and cryogenic suspension systems. They even have a death glider that is a maneuverable two-seater attack vessel, the galactic F-22 of its day if you will. They even have a healing device that uses thought control to channel healing energy to repair illnesses and injuries.

    I’d like to say these are the kinds of technologies we are working on for the future of the Air Force. Our Air Force Research Lab by Brigadier General Paul Nielsen is doing a lot of great things. But as far as I know, at least what he’s told me, he is not working on any of these things at all [Laughter]. We can use one of these trans-phased eradication rods. There are a lot of applications we can use.

    There are however a lot of great things that the Air Force technology community is working on. I just want to talk a little bit about that. Why am I focusing on technology? In part, it is because of the great partnership that we have today and need even more in the future with industry, with all of the agencies that are involved in technology and particularly in space programs. This is something we all have to work on together.

    The technological realm is one I am very concerned about. When I was serving in the seat that Ed Eberhart formally sat in, I thought for sure I would be able to go in and influence how much money we put into acquisition programs and influence how much money we put into technology. And particularly, with my space background, influence how much money we put into space technology. I soon learned the realities of all the challenges the Air Force has and all the budget challenges we have relative to readiness, quality of life for our people, infrastructure, modernization in other areas and we just aren’t able to do the things we’d like to do.

    There are some categories of technologies that we know we have to continue working on. Regardless of how much money we have applied to it, we need to focus our energy in these various areas. They fall along the lines of evolutionary technologies, revolutionary technologies, technologies that we shouldn’t work on at all, but hopefully, depend on commercial industry to help us along, if you well.

    Let me just mention some general areas. Things like vehicle structures using components and alloys like aluminum lithium. We’ve been developing it for some time but we never really fully applied like we thought we would by this time period, this new millennium we are in right now. Advanced composite technologies that we can use in all of our structures. Lighter, stronger active vibration suppression systems using materials and technologies and structures. Innovative entity storage systems and technologies to get rid of the chemical batteries that we all depend on today and have become a hindrance in many of the applications, not just in space, but even aircraft systems. Very high rate, long distance optical communication systems, more improvements in laser communication systems, there are any number of things that we need to continue evolving as far as our technological realms.

    There are also some revolutionary technologies that we must invest in. Again, regardless of how minor the investment might be. High-energy density chemical propellants. We are going to be depending on chemical propellants for a long time and those of you who have space-launch backgrounds like I do know that the specific impulses we are operating at are not near what we need to get the kind of match fraction and propulsion thrusts that we’d like to get to. We need to have specific impulses in the thousands of seconds, rather than the hundreds of seconds that we normally operate in.

    We need lightweight integrated structures that combine things like reusable cryogenic storage, thermal protection and self-diagnostics all in the same sort of structures so we can get more responsive, more flexible capabilities out of our materials and how we apply those materials.

    We need higher temperature materials, for engines and rugged thermal protection systems. We need high performance maneuvering technology using any number of propulsion systems that are on the books or things that we know may be possible. And we need technologies for higher power generation, particularly in space, things in the hundred kilowatts or above. If we are going to operate things like space-based laser, we cannot afford to have to continuously go up to refuel it. We need to be able to have systems that can literally take care of propulsion in space without us having to intervene.

    Recently, the Chief and I heard one of our Nobel Laureates talk about more precise timing devices even than what we currently have in GPS satellites. Talking about orders of magnitude, more precision and timing. So, that you can use the timing capabilities in space to actually measure micro-gravity gradients. To be able to detect things on the ground just by detecting the changes in the gravity as a result of having this kind of precise timing.

    Then there is the category of commercially led technologies. Small launch vehicles, things like the Pegasus system that has been very successful. High efficient energy conversion and storage systems, more high data rates, communication systems. Image processing and coding. Things that are needed in the commercial world. We know that commercial technologies are being applied in this area and we need you to continue doing that so we can partner with you and take advantage of all those great technologies.

    Now, some of you out there in the audience may recognize the three categories in the things I mentioned. They are things that were captured in the major study done about five or six years ago called "New World Vistas." It was a study commissioned by then Secretary, Sheila Widnall, and the Chief then, Ron Fogleman. It looked at the technologies that were needed for the 21^st century U.S. Air Force. These are just a small listing of some of the various technologies that came out of that "New World Vistas."

    This question that was not posed to that particular group when they did their study was, how do we get there? What kind of actions do we need to take to try to make some of these things a reality? Let me propose just a couple of things that I think might help. There are some things we are already working on that will help to set the stage and be on the right vector to try to make some of these things actually come to reality.

    We know we have a lot of bills on the plate for the U.S. Air Force. Readiness will always be number one. Taking care of our people, quality of life will always be at the top of our list. Infrastructure is something we need to put money into because it is crumbling throughout the U.S. Air Force. And modernization is something we can’t back away from. Applying money, a large infusion of dollars to science and technology may not be as feasible or as possible as we would like. But I am one of those who is convinced that we can do a lot more than what we are doing today just based on leveraging things and taking advantage of the partnerships that exist today.

    Some of you out there who have worked with me or worked for me, know that my three word motto for management and leadership is communicate, communicate, communicate. I think you can apply that same sort of analogy to what I am talking about here. Partnership, partnership, partnership is the way for us to work together to make some of these technological realms possible for not just today, but certainly for the future of the U.S. Air Force. We can leverage our development activities between the military sector of space, the civil sector of space, and the commercial sector of space. We can take advantage of the national strategy of trying to apply a national strategy for space which is one of the recommendations that the Chief and Ed have made to the Space Commission. We can actually take advantage of that and develop a national long-range technological roadmap for space, to really all work together to make sure we have covered the gaps between the three sectors to ensure that somebody somewhere is working on one part of these revolutionary, evolutionary and commercial technologies to take us forward to the future.

    We need to review this sort of technology roadmap on a frequent basis and not let it sit on the shelf and we need to make sure that everybody is involved, particularly Congress, and take advantage of all the committees in Congress that look at either the DoD sector of technology, the military sector of technology or the commercial sector of technology.

    One of the things that we are doing from a process perspective in the Air Force that I think will help us to do this is something we now call the S&T Summit. We just concluded our second S&T Summit two weeks ago. The first one was actually in April of this year and it is a forum that has never been done before in memory in the corporate Air Force. It is bringing together the Chief, the Secretary, Ed, myself and all the four stars, Dr. Delaney and the senior leadership in the Pentagon to review the science and technology programs in the Air Force. We look at our budgets, at how we are performing, at execution and at technological possibilities that we need to invest in. This forum has been an excellent one. We’ve only had two so far. We are going to do them on six month centers and I think we need to continue to let that process mature.

    In the area of space technology, I would like to propose and I would be working with Ed Eberhart to try to make this a reality, a sort of mini-summit to kick it up a notch, and to do a mini-summit focus on space technology. To look at specifically the technology that we are involved in, in space, that the NRO is involved in and NASA is involved in.

    At our S&T summits we have the NRO represented. Keith Hall is sitting at the table but we don’t review his technologies. We just get comments from those who may have a hand in looking at some of his technologies, but from a corporate stance, I think we can benefit by bringing us all together and look at a detailed assessment of space technologies in all those sectors and make sure again that we are working towards trying to fill all the gaps for all the possibilities there might be.

    I’d like to stretch that even further and look at doing a mini-summit for space technology that will bring in the commercial sector, bring in industry. As many of you know today, when we look at some of the technologies in industry, it is on a one-to-one basis. It is a visit that Ed has or Gene has or I might have with various companies and we look at some of your technologies that you want to show us but that is sort of looking through a microscope or a soda straw really to try to see what is out there. We need to figure out a forum where we can all get together and look at the technological possibilities and where we need to be and make sure we are all working in harmony.

    I’d like to propose also that we continue working toward things like the "New World Vistas." I mentioned that study was done in 1994. It actually came out at the end of 1995 and beginning of 1996, so it is about five years old. A lot of things have changed since that time period. We the Air Force are a lot more focused in our space activities nowadays. We have doctrines that are very clear for our space activities. We are changing the culture by educating all of our people about space. We have had another major war where space played a major significant role well beyond, as you heard from Ed, what we did during Desert Storm. The technology itself has changed significantly.

    It is time to re-look at that, either through the ideas I just mentioned, these mini-summits, or commissioning another study to look at where we are today. If we do that sort of thing, we should do them on five-year centers because the technology just moves too quickly for us to just to let something rest and sit on the shelf.

    Finally, we within Air Force Materiel Command are working aggressively to improve our development planning processes. To be the linkage between the users, the operators, requirements and where the technological possibilities might be and to help develop concepts and pay for some of those concepts and concept studies so we are always refreshed relative to the kind of things that might be possible for the U.S. Air Force.

    There are a lot of things going on today, a lot of exciting things. I think there are still even more exciting things for the future for us and certainly for us and our space programs. I couldn’t resist since we are here in Beverly Hills to close with a quote from a movie. It is from "Laurence of Arabia," from Sir Laurence Olivier and it says that those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their mind wake in the day to find that it was vanity. But the dreamers of the day are dangerous men for they act on their dreams with open eyes to make it possible. I can tell you, I know the Chief and the Secretary and I know Ed Eberhart and certainly the rest of us are focused. Our leadership is focused, our eyes are open. We are looking toward everything we can do in space and air integration, space modernization, and hopefully space science and technology.

    We have to hurry up. There are only 57 years left before we have the hundredth year of manned space activity. Thank you very much everybody and God bless you.

    Q: The warfighter wants space capability right now. The Air Force conquered the air domain despite test failures. A space acquisition program faces daunting challenge and failure along the path to success. The Congress and the public have little patience for launch and test failures. How do we maintain a perfect test program?

    General Lyles: You want me to solve world hunger all on the first question [Laughter].

    That is a very tricky question and it was one that, to be honest with you, I think there is a simple word to try to address that and it is education. It is trying to educate the Congress and to some extent the public about the risks involved in the things we are trying to do to make sure they understand that there is no way we are going to make progress unless we are willing to take risks and with some of those risks come the chance of a failure. We want to minimize those failure situations and there are a lot of ways we can do that. One of the things our centers are looking at is how we can make simulation-based acquisition a reality for Air Force Materiel Command and for the rest of the Air Force. To do more simulation--modeling and simulation is a foot stomper out there for industry. We need to do that and do that together. To do more of that so we can buy down the risk early on so when you actually have the flight test, you are down to actually demonstrating either some of the boundaries you haven’t been able to test or you are doing it just to verify the models themselves. We want to get to that posture so we can minimize the chance of failure.

    I can’t overlook the idea of educating the public and educating the Congress about what the possibilities are. As you mentioned, running the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, I faced that in space relative to the politics of missile defense and some of the major failures we had a couple years. By the way, they all changed after I left and they started having successes [Laughter].

    It was really an education process talking to Congress so they really understood the high risk they asked us to take on, the high risks we were trying to do and that we had to be willing to tolerate failure. Eventually, they came along and you no longer hear the Congress talking about that. In addition to changing some of the processes and techniques using modeling and simulation and other things to buy down risk, I think we have an education job to make sure people really understand what is going on.

    Q: Where do you see flight going in the next 100 years and what must we do now to make it happen?

    General Lyles: That is a good question and I certainly won’t emulate the words of Bishop Wright. I think there are still a lot of things that can be done in all the mission areas, not just space. I think there are a lot more things we can do in flight and we are trying to make sure we don’t over look that as we work on space technologies, information technologies, etc. Improvements in structures, materials are certainly going to help us to reduce the size and mass fractions of our flight systems in the future. Sensors are going to get smarter and smarter. There will be opportunities in the future and near future where wings and structures themselves are just as much sensors as they are aerodynamic devices.

    There are a lot of things going on in the unmanned category. The Global Hawk program is turning out to be a major paradigm shift for us. The unmanned combat air vehicle, UCAV, is going to set the change for revolutionizing what we do. There are lots of possibilities out there and we are trying to make sure we don’t overlook those things as we focus on the obvious things of space technologies.

    Q: As we become more dependent on computer technology are we investigating more robust self-defending computer technology in our R&D?

    General Lyles: The answer is yes. There are a lot of things that obviously I can’t talk about in that area but our Rome laboratory in Rome and activities up at Hanscom and other laboratories we have are looking at those kind of technologies that will enhance information technology/information assurance across the board. As a matter of fact, when you look at it right now, there is almost a direct conduit of the things and technologies coming out of Rome Labs directly to the warfighter, not just a transition like we do for our technologies coming out of our lab programs and lab directorates, but going directly to the warfighter and directly to full application.

    We are trying to make sure that we can demonstrate some of those things. About three or four weeks ago General John Jumper and I did a ribbon cutting of a major test laboratory at Langley. It is called the combined air operation center experiment. It is a combination – the user, the warfighter, the developers and the people from Rome laboratories – industry and testers all working together to test new information technologies very quickly and then quickly transition them out to the field as sort of a spiral development process.

    I think you are going to see this operational mode a lot more in the future, particularly as Ed Eberhart and our organization work some of our space programs. But it is one way we are trying to make sure we are not only working on those technologies, but we can quickly get them into the hands of the warfighter.

    Q: Partnerships are key to the future success of our relationships. What can be done to ensure that we in DoD keep our budgeting agreements in a way that is useful to industry?

    General Lyles: There are some policy and other process things that need to be addressed in that area and I know some of them are being worked. Larry Delaney was talking about some of the things we are working with Congress to change, some of the rules for progress payments, amount of progress payments and things of that nature. I know those are being worked and we have to work those through the legislature sometimes or even the third floor at the Pentagon.

    What I am more concerned about and I think this is a secondary part of the question is those commitments we make with industry, if we are going to partner where we are depending on you to fund certain things but more important you are depending on us to fund them also. We have to make sure that we have a good way that we review and ensure that we to some extent fence the monies for some of those special programs so we don’t have an up and down flow in our dollars and impact your flow of dollars and more importantly, impact the ability to get a capability out and fielded as quickly as we can. We have a long ways to go to try to work some of those things and make them a reality. It is something that I think is a serious issue for DoD, not just for the Air Force to address.

    Q: How can we sustain the team of space-smart blue suit technical experts who will help move vital military space into the future?

    General Lyles: Just like the Chief said in talking about developing aerospace leaders. What we are trying to do is actually enhance that capability. If anything, you could say that making sure we have people who are space smart is very critical both in terms of acquisition, science and technology, but also the operational world. One of the areas we are looking in as part of our developing aerospace leaders is to ensure starting at a very early age, even an accession when we bring a young lieutenant or even a young enlisted personnel on board, that we carefully manage their careers so they understand both the technological and acquisition side but they also understand the operational side. We have had some discussions within my commander’s conference activity. I’ll give you one example we are thinking of. We are thinking that when we bring a young officer on board today, because of the difficulty in getting young officers out here to SMC, we immediately make young lieutenants right out of school program managers. That is great in terms of a title and it sounds good, but they really don’t have the kind of experience we need to be a program manager. We are going to look at ways we can ensure that before we give a person the responsibility for being a program manager, they’ve had the opportunity to serve in acquisition, to serve in technology but also to serve with Ed’s organization and understand the operational side before we allow to put them in that kind of senior responsible position of a program manager. In all honesty, I think those kind of things are very important to ensure people really understand all aspects of what we need to do to continue making this the world’s best aerospace force.

    Q: This has to do with the balance of the S&T being changed. For example, demonstrations versus applied research. Do you see more money going to applied research or is that what your summit is all about?

    General Lyles: The summits are looking across the board, the whole spectrum of our technology program, 61, 62, 63 and even 64 for that matter. There is always going to have to be a balance. If you look at some of the things I mentioned, even the hypothetical things like from the Star Gate show or the things I mentioned from the "New World Vistas" study, they all depend on applied research and basic research to be very robust. But that is an area that I think we need to continue relative to partnerships, not just with industry, but with universities, other agencies. We need to continue that area, particularly strongly in a partnership realm.

    As we look at every other aspect of technology, one of the things that we are looking at in our S&T summits are a new process we call ATC, Applied Technology Council, to review with the users, with Air Combat Command, with Air Mobility Command, with Space Command, review these technology programs we are working on to ensure they are the ones the user wants us to work on, but more importantly that he is ready to have those programs transition to a stage where we can eventually get them into the field. We are going to be applying dollars across the board on all of those. I think we actually have a process that will allow us to better leverage the minimal dollars we have out there, but also gives us an opportunity to apply dollars in the right place if we get additional dollars in the S&T realm.

    Q: Are we looking for opportunities to partner with Army and Navy in the next S&T venue?

    General Lyles: In all honesty, when I talked earlier about the expansion of S&T summits and those sort of processes we’ve established, I had not really thought about how we expand them to the other services, but I can tell you, we have to. There is obviously duplication amongst the services in various areas and it behooves to make sure we understand where they are working and what they are doing and what we are working. I’ll give you an example. Ed will recall this. The Chief held with then CNO Jay Johnson Navy-Air Force wafighter talks to bring together the four stars of the two services down at Pensacola back in April. One of the key things we talked about was time critical strike. We talked about the Navy efforts and the programs they have in time critical strike and our efforts in time critical targeting. We were talking about the same basic mission and we talked about their S&T dollars. We talked a little bit about our S&T dollars. But we are not working together. We weren’t working as closely together as I thought we should be. The Navy is putting $40 million of their technology dollars into this particular realm and it just made sense and it became an accident coming out of that forum, we need to get together. It is the same mission, the only thing is, they take their aircraft off of a ship; we take our aircraft off of dry land. But we are trying to accomplish the same things. Why not leverage and bring together their $40 million, our technology dollars to focus on how we make that technology a reality. That is just one example. The bottom line is yes we need to partner with them and get rid of the duplication and leverage all the services’ monies.

    Q: As one of the primary sources of Air Force engineers, comment on the Air Force Institute of Technology.

    General Lyles: Some of you are very familiar with the recent concerns expressed by Congress among others about our lack use today of Air Force Institute of Technology. We had roughly about 50 percent of the available seats for advanced education vacant going into the current class or even last year at the AFIT. We are trying to do everything we can to address that.

    It is obvious when you look at it, commanders and supervisors who are reluctant to free up there precious resources to go to a graduate program which will take them out of the job for a year to 18 months or sometimes two years. They [commanders] were doing what they are supposed to do which is take care of today’s mission. We are trying to make sure we are addressing the situation and ensuring that we aren’t losing the future by taking care of today’s activities. What we’ve done in the near term is actually bring in, either on a part time basis, civilians who want to attend graduate programs, kids coming out of either ROTC or the Air Force Academy who are waiting to get into pilot training. Why not send them to a graduate program at the Air Force Institute of Technology? We are using these sort of things in the short-term to try to fill those vacant seats and we’ve actually done a very good job even just with this semester. But we are also looking at ways we can ensure we still protect today’s mission, but we have a continuous flow into these graduate programs to protect the technological future of the U.S. Air Force. We are taking this very seriously.

Return to the National Symposium and Annual Air Force Ball Page