General Martin: It is a great pleasure to be here today to spend just a couple of moments giving you an airman’s perspective of what we are doing in Europe and potentially the path ahead. But let me say at the beginning that I am delighted to have been asked to come here. I am most grateful to the Air Force Association for asking me to do this, but also to the Air Force Association and our very special contractors here who not only give us our equipment, but support us, take care of – what most of us know is the business of convincing and helping our process to understand the value and importance of air power so that we do have the finest equipment and the resources we need, even though, as you saw from the Chief, we’ve got to up that a little bit. The resources we need to not only operate it properly, but to take care of these magnificent men and women that we have serving in Europe and the civilians that serve with them.

My congratulations also to the AFA for the time you have taken to nurture the future of our Air Force in our young ROTC cadets here from the different universities. It is an awesome pleasure for me to see these young fine men and women learning here, learning more about their Air Force. Those people who have taken the time to express their interest to become conversant with our Air Force, whether they actually serve or not, they are serving today and I am grateful to you for that. I look forward to serving with you on active duty in the years ahead.

I used to be a Redskins fan. But about three and a half years ago I began to think that the Cowboys were a pretty good team and now there is no question after the slides you saw, what a great team it is. And I am not sucking up. Again, it is a pleasure to be here and General Shaud, thank you for allowing me this opportunity.

I believe that there are several recent real-world events as well as several recent important exercises that will help us as aerospace power leaders to look ahead and determine the kinds of things that we should be paying attention to as we think about the next series of modernization efforts. I say efforts rather than programs. The programs will come, but it is that modernization effort – what it is we need and why and what the capability is. I think you’ll see some common themes just in two of them that I will use – the air war over Serbia and a recent NATO exercise called Constant Harmony -- that helps provide a little clarity regarding aerospace power’s future vector, and I’ll talk about them in just a few minutes.

First, let me set the scene in Europe for you with respect to where we may be going in that area. There are some exciting things happening on both sides of the Atlantic. Obviously, with the F-22, the Joint Strike Fighter; on the European side, of course, the Eurofighter, the Rafael. Those are exciting programs, but by and large, what I think you’ll find is that modernization and particularly interoperability in general are lagging behind in the progress that we have come to expect over the years, in their pace and in the speed at which they are bringing on new and more interoperable systems.

The European defense budgets are somewhat flat. And the governments are wrestling right now with the concept of the European security defense identity. Basically, from my perspective, NATO modernization has slowed, not unlike a ship that is going through the equator region. It is in the doldrums. That slow pace may be caused by the low budgets, the high cost of weapons system development that we experience today, the long periods of time that it takes to field world-class systems. Finally, because national priorities, particularly with respect to each nation’s desire to maintain robust industrial and technological bases, appear to be taking precedence over alliance standardization and interoperability in the development of many of our modernization efforts.

As always, with modernization comes a discussion and a debate of maintaining strong trans-Atlantic relationships, but depending on America only for some of the special capabilities. All of these factors combine, I think, result in what most warfighters will tell you is a relatively slow pace of modernization.

The nations in Europe are dealing with a new security environment that they find themselves in and as it unfolds, they are beginning to show some fairly serious concerns about many of their own domestic issues, about becoming embroiled in a growing number of hot spots within their region, and they are concerned about being swept into long-term engagements that could drain their limited resources. In addition to these factors, I think as a result of the air war over Serbia, they became quite concerned about their capabilities. Within the NATO alliance, we find that they aren’t all uniform. Each nation participating in Operation Allied Force did contribute, but the United States possessed the majority of the special capabilities, particularly with regard to precision, air refueling, airlift and certain aspects of surveillance. The NATO ministers in the Washington Summit noted the capability gap in April of 1999 and they initiated a path to try to eliminate that gap. We know it today as the Defense Capabilities Initiative.

The Defense Capabilities Initiative is an effort to ensure that the NATO alliance military forces are properly equipped and able to conduct operations in the 21^st Century. It consists of a common operational vision for NATO militaries and it also has 58 individual capability initiatives which are organized into five key areas. These areas are: effective engagement, and that is the ability to apply the right force at the right time across the entire spectrum of conflict; deployability and mobility, the ability to move forces efficiently and effectively to where they are needed and when they are needed; sustainability and logistics, the ability to sustain engagements by delivering supplies and support equipment in a timely, organized manner and being able to support prolonged operations through rotation of forces; survivability, the ability to survive and operate in environments not only with chemical and biological, but also terrorist and electronic attack; finally, the fifth area, command, control and communications, or the ability to establish and maintain not only effective command and control, but have effective communication links that are interoperable with national systems -- not before a requirement -- including deployable capability for crisis response. When you take those 58 initiatives and break them down, they can be categorized into those five categories.

Although the Defense Capability Initiative has pointed the alliance in the right direction, progress has been fairly slow. The sheer number of initiatives to some certain extent has created a bit of a problem, because there is no schedule and priority to those initiatives. So, how can NATO then begin to effective allocate its resources, and I say NATO meaning all of the nations there that are committed to this endeavor How can they effectively allocate their resources on the most important initiatives to improve the defensive capabilities that they have, in a way that also strengthens the alliance? We’ll come back to that.

Let me just first focus on two recent events that I think help perhaps give us some guidance and direction on where we can get the best bang for the buck. First, you all recall last year when General Mike Short was here, he talked at the Air Warfare Symposium, gave a great presentation on the new realities of effectively wielding air power within a coalition. He discussed the importance of maintaining alliance unity and the corresponding need for a cooperative attitude and coalition responsibility. I think his speech was very powerful and it provided an excellent leadership lesson for all military leaders. Since then, we’ve completed a one-year report on the air war over Serbia. As you know, that report was commissioned by the chief, General Ryan and executed by Brigadier General John Corley. General Corley and his group of great professionals did an outstanding job and within the report are literally hundreds of actionable items. But in general, General Corley and his team boiled those items down to about 15 what we call "bone marrow" issues. As you would expect, the Air Force didn’t stand by waiting for the report to come out before they started action. But rather, they started and in many cases accelerated ongoing actions that have already begun to pay off and we heard about some of them today, in listening to General Jumper.

Those actions of course were to fix the issues that were brought about as a result of the study. Even though we’ve taken a lot of action, as I went into Europe, I went through that report as it was being completed. Our teams have looked at that pretty hard and they’ve continued to sift and look for those areas where perhaps I could give some guidance, particularly to contractors on areas that we are interested in and concerned about and clearly need your help on. What I want to do right now is show you what I think are the five main nuggets from the air war over Serbia report requiring our best efforts and talk about those for just a few minutes.

We just saw a great presentation and I think we’ll see General Hawley’s follow-on to that tomorrow dealing with global attack. It is very clear that we have changed the nature of warfare with the kind of attack that the United States Air Force can pursue. But, in order to do that, we need to make sure that it is not only all altitude, all weather, but that it has flexibility and the real-time digital delivery to the warfighters in the cockpit becomes very important and we learn that in this report. We were pretty excited about the B-2, but as you begin to extrapolate where you might use that and the F-22 and our other stealth assets in the years ahead, you can begin to see that we are going to require lots of flexibility with that force structure.

We really must develop technologies that will complement stealth. We have invested a lot of money in stealth and we now know that it is a superb capability. No one else has it. We like it. It opens up avenues of approach to targets and target sets that we’ve never been able to strike before. But now, we know it is also not invisible. The structures that we must put in place to support, to give it the information it needs and at the right time in the right place to have an integrated and appropriate support mechanism to enable stealth even further is important. We need to make sure our technology are aimed that way.

We really have found out that the value of precision is no longer a special capability, it is a standard and required capability for us to pursue military activity of a lethal nature. We have to take that to the next step, where not only is it very precise, but we also have the right measure of ordnance to give us the effect that we need and I think we all know because of the concern with collateral damage, as both the chief and General Jumper talked about earlier, let’s face it, the days of being able to just conduct a level of violence that was required to dominate in the battle space sometimes is not acceptable, and particularly if the leadership is an alliance of 19 nations who all have different views and each one has a no vote in an organization that one no vote can stop the whole machine. We’ll have to have weapons that can be discriminate with low-collateral damage. We will have to make sure that they are precise and that is a technology effort we must continue.

The last two bullets that I will talk about here are a little different than we would normally address but I think they are very important. As General Shaud said earlier, we are working very hard on the operational level of war. We found that it is not only important to have our senior leaders involved in our exercises, but we have to have our inter-agency senior leaders involved also because all of those organizations are a part of our national security strategy and our national security level of activity. Our exercises must include those kinds of people. We are doing that as hard as we can at the warrior prep center. The exercise I’ll talk about in a minute had our most senior military leaders, but we haven’t yet cracked the nut as strongly as I think we need to in our inter-agency groups, both in the national level as well as in our coalition and alliance level, an area that we need to pay close attention to so that the consequences of our actions will have already been thought through, the alternatives will have already been discussed and discovered, and we will have an opportunity at that point for more rapid decisions.

Last, we really are focusing hard in the Air Force on the command and control above the wing level. We have become tactically world class. I think we all understand that. The problem that we have is, we have not very well defined the organizations above the wing level. It must come together and train together and be a team when the crisis occurs, not pull it together and train it and learn it and understand one another after it has occurred. How you do that is what the Air Operations Center as a weapon system and our AFOR [automated forces] initiatives are all about. Frankly, this is an area that we have not done nearly as well at as we needed to over the years, but we are coming on strong and we will fix this soon.

Ultimately, the study provided a lot of important things for us to focus on. The five that I just gave you are relatively large, top level, but within them, most of you in this room can probably find some areas where you can add and help us. Clearly we need to pay attention to the old adage that the military always prepares to fight the last war. We need to heed that warning. So the second event that I’ll talk about is an exercise we just conducted – the Constant Harmony NATO exercise. It was in November 2000. It was the very first NATO Article 5 exercise conducted since we restructured the alliance formally, March 3, 2000. Many of you recall that we had at that time the Allied Forces South, Allied Forces Central and Allied Forces Northwest. Northwest was inactivated. Central was inactivated. We now have Allied Forces North. The command and control relationships, the connectivity, all of those kinds of things have now been mashed together and are beginning to make progress. This exercise was the first effort at assessing our ability to control the forces as we envisioned when we created that new structure. The way the scenario was set up is we had a northern war for exercise purposes that occurred on the UK island. We had a naval force in between and then we had a southern war. The northern and southern wars each had land component commanders as is written in our NATO documents. Air North is the commander of the air forces in Northern Europe. So, our job was to meter air power between the northern war, the sea war and the central war.

Now, my job with my NATO hat on is being the air component commander, the commander of Allied Air Forces, Northern Europe. I worked for General Joachim Spiering. He is the commander in chief of the Allied Command Europe’s Northern Region. General Spiering is very concerned about the 58 DCI initiatives that I mentioned earlier because if you treat them like the Oklahoma land rush, you are going to put a little money on everybody and you are not going to get very far toward finding the new-found land. He is trying very hard in his military capability shortfall study to determine those initiatives that will have the highest payoff fastest for the capabilities of NATO forces.

One of my objectives in Constant Harmony was to try to glean some information about what things we were deficient in, even though in an exercise perspective we still could apply some of the hardware limitations we had as well as some of our command-and-control software and other limitations that would be a normal part of a CPX [command post exercise]. The Constant Harmony exercise provided a great opportunity for us to flesh out, not only organizational structure, but the details of the planning and execution process. I think it provided us with some very important insights with regard to not only the organizational structure, but desired weapons capabilities. Let me review with you, from this exercise, some of the things from a NATO perspective we are very, very important players in, what some of the short falls were.

First of all, you recall the way I described the arrangement of the surface forces – North, Sea, and Center. We found it very challenging throughout this exercise to get reliable, useful order-of-battle information from our naval forces and from our surface forces in the UK. That is not an indictment of those forces, but the fact is that the communication systems we have, the way we transmit information, was slow, cumbersome, data-stream oriented, plotted on a map, not digital and very difficult for us to get a handle on. Our recognized air picture isn’t bad, but we have no similar circumstance for either the sea forces or for the ground forces.

On the other hand, we had a pretty easy time understanding what was going on in the central region. The reason for that was, Headquarters Air North was co-located with the joint land component commander, General Dr. Klaus Reinhardt. As hard as we tried to draw a line in the bunker and not cheat, you just couldn’t help but see their maps as you walked by their ops planning area and one peek is worth a thousand cross-checks when it comes to knowing where their forces are arrayed and where they think the enemy forces are, what their scheme of maneuver is, and although we never had any formal face-to-face conferences or discussions, that one analog look at a map can give you a million ideas on how better to apply air power. No such similarity in dealing with either our maritime forces or our surface forces in the north. The recognized air, land and maritime picture is absolutely essential for us to be able to operate and it is not just U.S. forces, it is something we will have to think very carefully about in terms of security classifications and release authority.

You already heard in the question and answer period the discussion on the integration of electronic warfare and information warfare again. Our overall information warfare and EW as a single integrated effort. I cannot over-emphasize how important it is for all of the people that are dealing with trons to understand what one another is doing. Then for us to have an effect-based approach in the way that we use the systems that deal with trons, whether it is in the mode of electron bashing, deception, disruption, or destruction. Having those efforts integrated to include your IO psy-war is absolutely essential. Very clear in the 10 day exercise that we participated in. By the way, the senior leadership at all levels participated. General Spiering was at the helm the entire time, as was I. And General Reinhardt as well as our other component commanders.

I cannot over-emphasize how important it was for us to be able to determine the force movements on the ground with some precision, particularly if one of your highest priority targets given to you by your joint force commander is the reserve, whether they be the operational reserve or strategic reserves, when they begin to move. We had a lack of surveillance assets that had the ground moving target indication systems. They were absolutely essential in tasks that I just described as well as you saw earlier with General Jumper tracking Scuds or other targets of interest. Once the war has started and you’ve got troops in contact, the ability to sort out friend and foe and begin to track the forces that are or could be of significance now or within the next couple days is essential. We are the only ones that have that capability. It is an area that we need to work much harder as an alliance.

Never have we had one of these exercises where air-to-air refueling is not short and Allied Force was the same way. This is an area that NATO is grappling with, is struggling with. We will be in our Air Force struggling with this very shortly as our 1955 to 1960-vintage mod-ed KC-135s begin to flow out of the fleet. This is an area that not only the United States needs to worry about, all of our allies are worrying about. We need to work this one hard.

Very clearly, in the future, the disruption caused by theater missile attacks into either forces, equipment or cities was of such a disruptive nature, it is something that we must work to a successful conclusion as quickly as possible so that we give our forces and our leadership the flexibility they need to feel secure while they prosecute the actions they’ve decided to.

In summary, I think you can see that we have war data with some very important nuggets. We have exercise data with some very important nuggets on where to focus some of our defense initiatives, to guide as aerospace leaders and as industrial experts as to what we should be paying attention in the years ahead. But there is still one question that lacks clarity here. How do we as an alliance develop these difficult and expensive modernization programs particularly with the modernization environment that I described at the beginning of the presentation – low alliance budgets, high weapon system and development costs, long fielding times and a tension between protecting one’s industry and technology base and purchasing standardized, interoperable equipment. My personal view is that cooperative development is really an area that we must focus as nations and as industrialists on very heavily.

It will allow us to leverage limited national resources and limited number of defense dollars It will allow us to focus the research and development on real problems that currently have no solution, but need to be solved. Ultimately, the cooperative development efforts offers us the possibility for creating larger markets for the more expensive systems, a chance to increase the interoperability between those systems while standardizing the equipment and an opportunity to preserve each nation’s industrial and technology base while helping to smooth the alliance turbulence by creating the momentum to work together. The future weapon systems will demand, if you are going to use the cooperative process, they are going to demand alliance-wide competitions. It won’t be an easy game. It will demand industrial partnering. I think the partnering is going to have to provide incentives for each nation to product best-value solutions to alliance requirements. You’ll have to work work-share schemes. I know we’ve got a lot of that going on but from a national and senior leadership level, we have to really begin to push this forward. Sixty-forty sharing relationships, build the product under consortium or licensing agreements, reward the winning design company, but protect the industrial base of each nation that participates.

In the long run, the decisions about cooperative development are about balancing not only military, but also political and economic risk. The NATO alliance has been at the cornerstone of our collective security strategy and it has served us better than anyone could have imagined. But we still have difficulty fighting effectively and interoperably. It will get worse in the future. At the rate the technology is changing and particularly the most valuable technology in the information technology and execution of missions against targets of value, I think it will get worse without a partnering and a cooperative effort.

It has got to be an agreement that we reach between both the political and the military leadership as well as our industrial partners. In the past, we’ve been able to harness that kind of capability. During the Cold War, the formidable Soviet threat demanded a standardized, interoperable and properly fielded aircraft, cross servicing, ammunition, standardized munition configurations, standardized command-and-control systems.

We also cooperated in the development of major weapon systems, such as the F-16, the E-3, the Tornado, the Leopard tank, the Rapier. We also invested cooperatively in our infrastructure development and development of ability to operate and survive systems such as the hardened shelters all around the European bases. In short, the precedent for this cooperation is there. Now all we have to do is persevere and follow it.

Fortunately, certain programs today are under the cooperative development spirit, just as a couple examples show: Currently in the United States, the U.S. Air Force and the Navy are procuring as their primary trainer a modified version of the Swiss Pilatus PC-9. It is licensed through the Swiss for production in the United States. It is a $3.9 billion program that will produce over 700 aircraft. Another example of the cooperative element is in the U.S. Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle, the EELV. Lockheed Martin Corporation, for their version, is using the Russian-designed RD-180 engine to boost the rocket into space. That is technology bought from Russia. Initially the systems will be bought from Russia and then licensed for production in the United States. In both of these situations, American companies have teamed with ones in other nations to create an industrial-technological partnership that produces a better product. Within industry, there are other positive signs. The trans-Atlantic joint ventures are beginning to take shape and have the potential for creating this opportunity for cooperative development. Recently Ratheon has partnered with Thales, the old Thompson CSF, French company and they are not working on an air defense command and control and radar system. Although it is a limited program now, their intent is to increase the collaboration.

As I think about the two activities that occurred and some of the nuggets that came out of that for where we should be putting some effort in the future, and then I think about the cooperative development that perhaps would enable our alliance to pursue some of those nuggets, here are seven areas that I would suggest are ripe for our cooperative development.

I’ll go through them very quickly because we’ve already talked about them. We must focus on the recognized air-land and maritime picture. It can’t be U.S. only. It has got to be cooperative. We won’t fight except maybe in Antarctica, without a coalition or an alliance ever again.

We really must work on that not only for our own forces, but for all of the forces that desire to fly with us and some of the nations have understood that and they are changing their command and control and communication systems in their weapon platforms to try to make that happen.

Once again, the integration of electronic and information warfare, the disruption, destruction and deception aspect, is important.

We already talked about this, in terms of being able to give the commander that has the quickest execution capability, the knowledge of where the enemy is, now, immediately for immediate strike.

As we mentioned, the importance of us being able to be surgical in this precision. Already mentioned, air-to-air refueling systems. What we’ll find is that in the end that may be one of the greatest enablers that we have.

And we must work together on the theater missile defense capability.

Sixty years from now, airmen will reflect on how well we as leaders of aerospace recast and reshaped our force as we modernized our air forces and adapted to the new security environment in the early 21^st Century. These great people that are here serving us today, these great people that are serving in our Air Force today that you heard General Jumper and General Ryan talk about, need our best efforts. We don’t want to lose anyone of them where we could have prevented it by the right application, the right system at the right time.

It might be useful, if we are going to pursue this, to not bite off the most challenging one – something like air-to-air refueling. Because, when you bite off the most challenging and you get a cooperative arrangement going and then the program slips and it begins to grow in cost, the next thing you know, you begin shed your partners and pretty soon you either have a program of one or the program dies. So, taking something that is manageable and possible makes a lot of sense and has huge payoff for follow-on activities.

I think that cooperative development on the programs such as these that I’ve listed can provide NATO with some modernization opportunities that will overcome the low defense budgets, the high technology costs, long fielding periods and ultimately I think, the principle of cooperative development, political, military and economic will enable us to increase alliance cohesion and satisfy both industry and military needs. Thank you and I look forward to your questions.

Q. With the recent information about the new NATO members from the Warsaw Pact countries not having necessary interoperability to contribute to being an effective NATO partner, what is your comment with regard to Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary working in exercises? How are they doing?

General Martin: Excellent question. Let me just say first that it is important for all of us to understand that the new member nations and additionally the Partnership for Peace nations by and large have come from an entirely different structure and culture than we have or even understand. One small example of that. In NATO you heard me allude to the fact that one no vote can kill it. The way the NATO alliance makes decisions is an elaborate and iterative process. It can be a little frustrating for people, but in the end, you are trying to deal with 19 big families here. They will deal with an issue and they will work it to a point where they think it is close and if it isn’t quite acceptable, they will fix the last bit they can and they will put the procedure out under silence. But all during that process, there has been discussion and conversation and give and take and pull and tug and when they put it out under silence, what it means is you don’t have to say yes, but you can’t say no. If no one says no, it is the new policy or directive or guideline.

The Warsaw Pact was Soviet-centric. The Soviet’s were in charge, and they conducted their relationship with each of the Warsaw Pact nations in a bilateral manner. In fact, most will say that they did the best they could to keep each of the different countries from talking to one another so that those countries became dependent upon the Soviet Union for guidance and direction and execution decisions. What that means is that they have never developed a process of cooperation and coordination amongst themselves and that is still as it stands today. We are working that very hard to bring them in not only to all of our alliance functions, but to stimulate and exercise cross-flow communication between those different countries. The one thing that they are consistent in is their military doctrine and application of force. It is very centralized, very rigid, not very flexible and their command and control systems are set up that way. Their aircraft are set up that way, in such a way that they aren’t nearly as flexible as we would like them to be. They are a bit behind where we want them to be. But I will tell you, there is no doubt that they are into these exercises. The Poles, the Czechs, the Hungarians are very interested in coming up to speed as quickly as possible. They have limited resources, so where they put their money is very critical, because there is very little of it and what we need to do is make sure we are working with them to put the money in the best spot. Their radar systems, their communication systems, the Czech Republic has done an interesting thing: they gave up the MiG-29s. They got rid of them. They couldn’t maintain them and keep the pilots flying, so they’ve got rid of them and they are building an upgraded version of their L-39 where they’ve put in a radar, NATO-compliant communications and GPS guidance system and the ability to carry precision weapons. It is not a supersonic aircraft. It is not one of the big ones on the block that you’d really like to get, but it keeps their pilots flying and it allows them to start to participate at the tactical level in all NATO exercises. We are encouraging those kinds of activities.

Q. Does the EU, European Union, still desire access to NATO assets and how do you see this issue being settled?

General Martin: That is a very challenging issue. Let me just say this: all of the details and coordination and communications between the EU and NATO are still evolving. They are evolving in some real arm wrestling matches, which is good. The communication coordination is working. When you see things such as the headline goal of 60,000 people in the corps and you begin to see 400 aircraft go, what you will find is, many of the nations that are going to contribute to EU will have to contribute systems that would otherwise also be committed to NATO. Now the question is going to be, how will we reconcile a conflict between what NATO decides to do and what EU decides to do and who will do all that? That is not resolved. They don’t have enough equipment to go both ways. I think what you are going to find it that we are going to need to reach an accommodation between the two organizations in order for us to work properly together.

Q. What has been the survival rate so far of Predator UAVs in recent combat situations? What do you expect future survival rates to be against advanced Integrated Air Defense Systems?

General Martin: We’ve had more UAVs die for their country than American airmen, which is good [laughter]. It is cheaper. You don’t have to go in and find anybody. And they did great things while they were airborne. They did exactly what they are supposed to do. One thing, we just need to make sure that we do everything we can to make them reliable. But they are going to take hits, if they are seen. We will now have to think about the protection mechanisms and those sorts of things because we don’t look at these vehicles as expendable. These are not expendables. These are, we want them coming back, and particularly when you talk about something like Global Hawk. We have to look very carefully at the tactical situation, the risk, the cost and what kind of protection we’ll need to provide for them to make sure that they don’t become too costly to our forces.

Q. Has the transition from Rhein Main to Ramstein gone as well as expected? Are you satisfied with our surge airlift capability?

General Martin: First of all, with respect to the Rhein Main to Ramstein and Spangdahlen, because Spangdahlen is a major part of that, for those that did not know, Rein Main is not closed. The majority of our people and cargo still come through there, but by 2005, those operations will have been moved to Ramstein and to Spangdahlen. Let me make a plug here for burden sharing. Of the $500 to $600 million that will cost, either NATO or the German consortium that is funding this are paying about $400 million. We are getting a lot of money in support of this. Yes, I think it has gone, it is going pretty well, but we have to remember this: it is like an acquisition program. When you set the original agreement up and you define the standards, as you get more and more into it, you find some difficulties and complexities. Perhaps an environment problem that pops up. Perhaps someone doesn’t want to give you the land that they thought initially would be available. We do have to go through a negotiation and a redefinition period. But, overall, those have gone very well. We have a very strong team between the Germany government, NATO and the Flughoffen, the Frankfurt airport authority to make this work and make it work in a way that everyone wins as opposed to win-lose. That is going pretty well.

With respect to surge, let me not comment on General Robertson and Air Mobility Command airlift. Let me just say, that is a matter of record. We know what airlift requirements are. We know we are short in airlift. But in terms of the European theater, we either have today or have in the reasonable future we think the appropriate military construction programs to give us the base structure we need to be able to accommodate the airlift we’ll require for a major theater war or transit to someone else’s major theater war in a way that we think will be effective. That program is recognized, understood and beginning to move forward pretty well. As far as the airlift itself goes, I think the record is clear that we are short.

Q. The Joint Warfighting Center at U.S. Joint Forces Command is leading the way in joint exercises and joint experimentation. Do you see any similar benefits for your forces in USAFE or with our NATO allies through Partnership for Peace or NATO exercises?

General Martin: The warrior prep center is owned by the U.S. Air Forces Europe and the U.S. Army Europe together, but it serves a much wider audience than just either USAFE or USAEUR. It is often used by our Partnership for Peace partners. It was used extensively in Constant Harmony, which was a NATO-run exercise and whenever those exercises are conducted, the Joint Warfighting Center people deploy over and provide a significant and important enhancement to our capability. I think you’ll find it will need to grow as we get more and more into EUCOM level exercises which right now have not been nearly as robust as they were in the Cold War-era, but we are getting back into that. I think we’ll find the need for it to continue to participate very heavily either there in Seydahoff or at other locations as augmentees for all of the NATO exercises we run.

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