Symposia

General Gregory S. Martin
Commander, U.S. Air Forces in Europe
AFA National Symposium--Orlando
February 14, 2002



General Martin: I want to thank all of you for being here today. What I'd like to do is talk to you a little bit about how we in the United States Air Force in Europe are looking at this global war on terrorism. As I do so, let me say again what a pleasure it is for me to be here, to have the opportunity to share a perspective with you from someone who is - although through CNN connected to the states - really in a different location where people are looking at this situation just a little bit differently.

It is truly exciting for me to be here with the Air Force Association and the great work Tom McKee and John Shaud have done in bringing together this terrific group of people who love our Air Force, whether they be the men and women who are in uniform here - and many of them sponsored by the AFA for the opportunity to attend here - or our great, great industry partners, who are making the kinds of things happen that General Jumper and General Hornburg just showed you a few moments ago. Let me also say thanks to those men and women in our Air Force who are here helping escort and are, of course, our great ROTC future. It is a pleasure for me to be among you, back here in the United States, where I have an opportunity to re-blue and re-red-white-and-blue my body.

What I'll do very quickly is just take you through how I am looking at this enemy that we are dealing with today. Be careful when we talk about that, that we haven't changed the imperatives here of warfare or the kinds of things that we need to do as military personnel/military forces supporting our overall national and, in some cases our international, objectives. I'll talk about the humanitarian picture and then lastly we'll just give you a quick snippet of some things I saw and I am not going t talk about necessarily what happened in the AOR, but what I saw from the outside the AOR that might give you some insight on things that we need to work on in the future. Slide.

First of all, when we think of the enemy, we kind of think of it in the traditional Cold War and actual historical perspective of war. It is nations versus nations. We think of the strategic, the operational and the tactical level and the centers of gravity in each of those areas. Strategic are the things that allow a nation to exist; its leadership, its people, its industry, its productivity, its financial structure. Those are strategic things. By the way, when I say people, you'll see some slides downstream that, in the past, how you treated the people made a difference. Sometimes you just tried to eliminate them and that didn't necessarily solve the problem. In other cases, you try and feed them and they actually become a force enabler for you. But nonetheless, those are strategic things. Operational, the things that allow an enemy to maneuver, control, sustain its forces. And the tactical level, of course, the forces themselves. And we sort of thought of that in terms of a country boundary. And that series of pictures there will kind of show you some of the more recent enemies we've faced in the past several years.

While that was our mindset and the Cold War moved on we really went into a period that I think of as a simmering peace. You can see that there are over 67 different events that men and women in the United States Air Forces Europe and in EUCOM in general participated in just in the last decade. Some were humanitarian. Some were hot conflicts. In fact, it is kind of interesting that while we were participating in those events - and that is about a seven-fold increase in terms of the things that we responded to in the previous 40 years - it masked what was really going on with this new enemy. But let's take a look at some of the things that did occur that weren't humanitarian, but were in fact the beginnings of this conflict that we are into today.

We all [remember] 1993 in Somalia and in the United States with the World Trade Center. We understood there was a terrorist connection, but that wasn't foremost on our plate at the time. Slide.

And [then] we transitioned from Desert Storm into providing a no-fly zone in Operation Northern Watch and prior to that, Operation Provide Comfort. Slide.
And then Deliberate Force in the Balkans in 1995 that brought Milosevic to the Dayton Accords. Slide.

The Kenya and Tanzania bombings, over 200 people killed there. Again, a terrorist connection. We were beginning to put the dots together, but we hadn't quite figured this out. Slide.

In Operation Allied Force in 1999, against terrorist connections there, although there were bigger powers at play. Slide.

The USS Cole in Yemen. Again, although not our area of responsibility, Europeans forces responded in humanitarian relief or, in this case, rescue operations and medivac. Slide.

As you know, Israel blew up a little over a year ago during the [current] Intifada. Slide.

Every time we catch our breath, something else catches us as Operation Enduring Freedom has hit us. If you take a look at the history just over the last ten years, just about the time you sort of think the world is safe for democracy, another events occurs and we hadn't quite connected the dots. But they knew what they were doing. Slide.

Who is this new enemy that we are facing? I would say this is a pretty good description. It is an extremist group. They don't really agree with the institutions as we know them. They are pursing their own beliefs and they don't care about the norms of normal social, legal and moral behavior. Slide.
They are organized terrorists. Slide.

And I would submit they are not new. Slide.

In fact, if you look at the events that occurred, just in the environment I am concerned about, over the last 20 years, they've been at this in a focused way. They declared war on our way of life. And the toll is rather significant. Over 5,000. They've been at it for more than 20 years and we've sort of thought of it as an irritant, as maybe a criminal activity. But, in fact, the organized terrorists have got us marked. An interesting fact, if you take a look at the first 158 detainees at GITMO, less than ten percent were Afghans. The rest came from other countries. More than 20 other countries have people on the Al Qaeda or on the Taliban payroll. All in [Afghanistan] fighting for those organizations.
A question you have to ask yourself is, how many were being trained and getting ready to spin out? How many have already gone through and are already out there in the world? They've been at it. They are serious and we are awake. And just as General Jumper said, we are going to track them down and we are going to take them out. But it is not going to happen overnight. Slide.

That is who we are facing - it is a supranational entity. They are outside the borders. They are all over. There are nodes. They are getting financial support. They are getting host nation support. They are getting administrative support. Training, recruiting, just as I mentioned. They are sort of all over and right now we don't know how many there are. It is an enemy without borders. It has got global reach and, as I said in an earlier slide, it can take that simmering peace and turn it into a hot war in just minutes and it comes from 360 degrees. And it is not just Osama that you had earlier. It is a whole group of them and right now the question is: where are all of them and who trained them and how can we get at their strategic centers? Their operational centers? And ultimately their tactical execution units? How can we do that? Slide.

As we look at Operation Enduring Freedom, it is pretty clear that we find ourselves in Europe with two arcs that you see there - a situation that we sort of describe as the lens effect. It makes the location or geographic location really important for about anything we want to pursue on that part of the hemisphere. It is about 3,500 miles from the United States. It is about 3,500 miles from Southwest Asia. So, somewhere in that ballpark, we need some lily pads.

If we are going to do the mobility that General Hornburg talked about earlier, that we need support from General Handy on, they either need tankers there to extend the reach of the aircraft or we need bases where we can do a pony express operation with staged crews and send them on. it doesn't matter whether we are talking about Allied Force or whether we are talking about going into new areas of Southwest Asia or Central Asia, that becomes a key and important part to us. Slide.

That is what you saw happen. Both East and West and then the majority of the sustainment action continued to come East. What we find is partnership with other people in the world [is] very important, in fact. Slide.

I would say that as we go about this war, these are kind of the imperatives we ought to pay attention to. We need access. Access at least en route to many of the places as much as possible so that we can bring as much force to bear and help that Global Strike Task Force once it kicks the door down with a sustainment of follow-on forces that will win the war. We need coordination, cooperation, from global partners. And we need to be able to conduct rapid, decisive operations and they are of all kinds. Everyone thinks about kinetics. Jump right in and get them right now. But we need to be able to make some very quick circle turns on political, financial, psychological, diplomatic, judicial, because in the global war on terrorism, when you take a look at those nets, the information I have matched together with the French information and the Italian information and the German information can geo-locate a spot where we can make a difference now in one of those ways, but we have to be able to turn quickly and it requires that cooperation. And all the time we have to be sensitive to humanitarian needs if we want to win the peace. Slide.

When you take a look at the normal spectrum of cooperation, this chart shows that across the bottom are the kinds of things that other nations can do to support our efforts - everything from political statements to sharing intel to over-flight rights to conducting military operations. That is normally what you would see in a conventional war. The level of risk to the participants goes up as you move down the scale. The number of countries is a function of how well you've done your cooperative security or engagement activities. Slide.

In the war on terrorism, I am happy to say, we've seen a great, great amount of support from many nations. Just a couple of interesting statistics here. 142 nations have ordered some sort of asset freeze on terrorist outfits. 136 have offered assistance to the United States. 89 have granted over-flight rights. 76 have offered landing rights. 23 have offered to host U.S. forces. That is the kind of access that we need in order to take on a global threat and be able to have persistence around the world so that when the time is right to make a move, whether it be in the political or in the kinetic, we have the forces or the right people mustered to take that action. Slide.

When we take a look at what we are doing in Europe, this is a typical year. About 40 percent of our people are engaged in some sort of training, exercise or partnership activities and about ten percent of our flying hour program is working in those nations that you see in the light-colored green. That pays off. When we started Operation Enduring Freedom, not many people realized that every 'Stan, except for Pakistan, and Afghanistan, is a Partnership for Peace member. That means that although they are in General Tommy Franks' AOR, they work with NATO and last May, most of them were at Ramstein at the Warrior Prep Center with General Franks, conducting a peace support operation with the senior leadership of their nations there. Now, isn't that something?

And then when we needed over-flight rights from Turkmenistan or basing rights in Uzbekistan or Kazakhstan, those people allowed that to happen. That kind of contact is very, very important to us and that is something that our forward-deployed forces do, whether they are in the Pacific or in the Southern Hemisphere or in Europe. It is very important that we understand that makes a difference when we are in this global war. Slide.

Then, when we take a look at the sensitivity - humanitarian needs - this is kind of the way we treated the general population in the past. As you can see, it didn't matter what side you were on. Not as much concern for collateral damage as you see today. On the other hand, Slide.

In the last 50 years, I think most of you know that we paid a lot of attention to it, from Berlin to the Balkans to Afghanistan. It becomes a very important mission for us. If we want to win the peace. If we want to enable that part of the force or that part of the strategic center of gravity that can ultimately bring down an enemy that is in their midst. Slide.

It is not surprise that we are proud of what we have done, as an Air Force, as men and women in Europe. Over 250,000 sorties flown in the Berlin Airlift for a period of 16 months. Slide.

And as we went through the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s, go ahead and click those slides. You can see, these are the kinds of humanitarian relief. Slide.
Over the decades, those are the places that we responded to. Earthquake relief, floor relief, humanitarian relief for people who were famine victims. Slide.

Through the 90s and over all, over 160 HUMROEs since we did Berlin. Slide.

Berlin was the daddy rabbit of them all. But Operation Provide Comfort, nearly 4,000 sorties. Slide.

Operation Provide Promise, 43 months of operations, 13,000 sorties. It has been something that we in America and in the United States Air Force have paid attention to for many years. And it turns out to be a part of our war-winning tools. Slide.

Now, when you take a look at Enduring Freedom, it is pretty interesting to see the base structure that we used. The first couple of nights, we were using C-17s. John Handy's C-17s. I must tell you, that I didn't fly fighters, drop bombs, shoot the gun, fire missiles all my life to deliver food. But I've understood how important that mission is. John Handy wouldn't even let me deliver food. It is his guys that delivered the food; I was just packing it. But when you haven't got another mission that is more important, then that one is pretty important and the people over there did a magnificent job in concert with our Army, with the Germans, with TRANSCOM, with our Navy making that happen - and our special ops forces. The first couple of nights, a 22-23 hour mission to make sure that they came in with the package that was supporting the combat operations. Slide.

Then after the first two nights, we deployed F-16s, F-15s, tankers, RJs and AWACS forward to Incirlik and other bases and provided fighter support for the Northern route, which was about a 15 hour mission as you can see. In terms of the United States, about 3,000 miles each way. That is more like going well past the States and back each night and somewhere between 13 and 15 hours, depending on where the locations were. A really interesting operation. Slide.

And during this period, we were sustaining and supporting much of the flow of information that came - of personnel, cargo and equipment that came through the theater, up to as many as 135 wide-bodies a day. So the people in Europe really feel proud about their contribution to this effort that went forward in support of both the Special Operations Command and the Central Command as they conducted the kinetic part of the war. And through that period, the humanitarian relief was something that they made their mission and they were proud of, I think just as we found ourselves proud in other humanitarian relief operations. Slide.

It was a joint and combined operation and it wasn't just out of C-17s. We had C-160s that the Germans used to fly down to Incirlik where our special operations forces delivered Vaseline, oats and saddles to Sergeant Linehart. You can't go on the German market and get Vaseline using that term. They have another name for it. I don't know what it is, but they got it. Point is, this was a magnificent group of people on the continent, from the different services in different countries that helped and made a difference to those troops that were forward.

And by the way, during that period of time, we were up to nearly 500 people who have been evacuated for medical reasons out of the AOR, including some of those who have been killed in action. An unsung group of heroes really are our aero-medical evacuation folks who do their job with great compassion and great sensitivity and care for the people who are serving our nation so well. That is a great crowd. And we are very proud of them wherever they may be, but certainly those at Ramstein. Slide.

As we go forward on the next part of this war, we are going to have to have access and that requires a continuation of our partnership and our exercises and our presence. We have to have a global cooperation, info sharing, intelligence gathering, interoperability. We have to be able to move quickly, whether it be kinetic, political, diplomatic, financial, we have to know where to go and to move quickly. That gets at the predictive battle space awareness we are talking about, but from a different perspective, a different lay-out of the nodes that we are talking about. And then all this time I think we have to maintain a sensitivity to the humanitarian relief operations. That helps us in stabilizing an area, building a sense of trust and hopefully being able to move forward with post-conflict progress.

Now, as I mentioned at the beginning, I talked just a couple seconds about some of the things I've seen over the past several months that we need to do better or that we need to work as a military-industry team so that we will be better the next time a war occurs. And, even better, for the war we are already in. Slide.

First of all, force protection. Some of you were at Eglin last year when I made this pitch about force protection. Let me just say that our view of force protection is throw more people at the problem, hunker down, try to keep anybody from getting in. It is a foxhole-bunker mentality. We have got to knock that off. It is really manpower-intensive and the most sophisticated sensor we have is a dog and the stand-off distance is a leash. We must do better. We must HPM it. Bring effluent out. Laser it. Find out, is that is some sort of explosive at 500 meters or more. Disable the person or the vehicle and then do what we want to with them before they can detonate and kill either the gate or anybody inside the gate they blow through. We have to do better. It can't just be more people thrown at the problem.

IPB. D-minus 365 that the Chief talked about. We need to know lots more about lots more places in the world because, guess what, those nodes I am talking about are everywhere. We have got to know a lot more about them and particularly those areas of focus when we are ready to go do something. So the kinds of things that the Chief and General Hornburg already talked about are those areas that we really have to focus on because if you want to conduct a rapid, decisive operation, you've got to know what you are doing and you've got to have a pretty good idea what it is going to be like when you get there. We found, on the first night, a great strap-on system for our C-17s called ABI - airspace battlefield awareness. It had great feeds in there and it gave the people in the cockpit a pretty good indication of what was happening all around them. Strap-on. It ought to be integrated. The machines out to talk to each other. We ought to know where everyone is and it ought not be something that is kluged together and it ought to be something that we have focused on and made happen as a conscious effort, rather than as a last minute thought.

Execution of air and space activities from reach-back locations, clearly when you look at the Predator, clearly when you look at the Global Hawk, we are doing those kinds of operations a long way away. Now the bandwidth requirements. Now the deconfliction requirements. All of the things that we need to start thinking about when it comes to actually executing from outside the AOR. Or a long way away from the target area. Lots to learn there. Lots of technology effort that is going to have to help us here.

How about Sergeant Linehart, on the ground for six weeks? He didn't carry six weeks of food with him. And he moved a lot. So being able to supply small teams that have high-tech triggers is very important and it became absolutely critical in this effort. We had a good system, we thought, but then when you talk to the customer, you find out that it was a little like mail order instead of LL Bean off the shelf right then.

And then, lastly, humanitarian assistance is something we have been paying a lot of attention to for the last 50 years, but there are a lot more things we can do. We can't afford to have our CDS container through a house and kill two people. We know that we have laser wind detectors. We know that there are things that can be done to give us a much better and much more accurate delivery of the things that are important and necessary from all weather and all altitudes.

Those are some early take-aways that I would give to you to think about and to talk about during this great symposium. And ultimately to come back because you saw a phone number up there for the guy that has got the big bucks. That is my good friend Hal Hornburg and between us and him we are going to help make some of this happen. But it is going to take some help from you. I look forward to sharing the phone calls with General Hornburg. Slide.

Last, let me just say in parting thoughts that clearly the nature of this enemy has changed. The principles of war have not. It is a global war. It is going to require a global perspective and last, as airmen, we must think offensively. We have to get out of the foxhole. We have to go get them because they are out there and they are right now 360 degrees around and they pick the time and place of attack. We have to go get them first. Slide.

In closing, let me just say what a pleasure it is again for me to be here. I thank the AFA. I thank all of you for being here and I look forward to your questions. Thank you.


Q. Do you see Europe enabling common or joint military forces? Will they buy comm and weapon systems and work as one unified force?

General Martin: I think General Jumper said it pretty well when he was asked a similar question here. Although it is clear that we believe the European nations in general are not spending enough on defense and that there is concern about this growing capability gap - they talk about a technology gap, but I reject that, I call it a capability gap - but the fact is, if they spend their money on the right things, they can take quantum leaps in capability to then join the fray. Just as we talked about with secure comm and data link and precision weapon systems. You don't necessarily need the most sophisticated platform. That is kind of the way people think about modernization - it has all got to be new, it has all got to be gee-whiz. But the fact is, that is very expensive.

What we really need to do, I think, is ask them to look hard at where our industry can cooperate. We are going to have to share a little, they are going to have to perhaps buy a little of ours while we work some cooperative stuff. And in the meantime, pick the right thing with the right money and then give you that capability enhancement. And right now, it does not look like it is going that way. I think we need to help that process come back to a capability-based presentation as opposed to an industrially-based development process.

Q. Do you see European allied support for a long war against terrorist and possible operations beyond Afghanistan diminishing? How do we keep their full support?

General Martin: I think that their ability to help us and our ability to help them in this global war is going to be a function of a continuing drum beat, if you will, of the need for sharing of information, a continuation of the kinds of things I showed on the board there when it came to access - the partnership, the training exercises, and those sorts of things. The interest can ebb significantly until an event occurs unless we, not only the United States, but leadership in the partner countries, remain vigilant and concerned about this threat and the number of intelligence inputs that come in daily keep people pretty interested. Although you may see some waning of interest in the population, right now, I haven't seen that with respect to the government.

As many of you know, NATO declared or invoked Article V within 24 hours. They sent AWACS within a week of the time we asked, five of them. They sent two more since then. They have not started to ask, "when are we bringing them home?" They know we need them. And at this point, now as the next phase [begins], I think you'll find much of that will be very important - military to military, nation to nation contacts for the purpose of attacking some of those nodes in ways more than just kinetic.

Q. With the European Union's formation, are they diverging from NATO and U.S. influence?

General Martin: Only, I think, if we all let it happen. The EU is really a much more complicated organization than many people understand. As an example, they have now developed common environmental codes and restrictions. They may even go into a non-public smoking mode some day. Clearly, they have the euro. To be a member of the EU, you can't have capital punishment. There are a whole series of legal agreements that have been made, not just those that we hear a lot about - the trade barriers, the unguarded borders, the euro.

There is a whole group of things that are happening. Now, in my view, they could drift apart and begin to split the transatlantic alliance, but I think we need to work hard to not let that happen. I think this global war on terrorism gives us an excellent opportunity to continue strong relationships, continue sharing of information - in some cases technology - and, in the end, an opportunity for some important cooperative developments that will maybe give that capability gap a little less steam in the reporting that we see.

Q. Final question, giving that Enduring Freedom has increased optempo in USAFE, how are your troops holding up in your command?

General Martin: I worry a lot about the optempo. Just to give you a rough example of the concern. Before 9/11, the average person in our command was working between 50 and 54 hours a week. We plan for them to work about 43 hours. So we already have people who were busy.

The good news that we were seeing an increase in our readiness. We were seeing a significant increase in the funding for our facilities. Housing - 100 million a year from 20 or 30 million dollars, just a few years ago. Military construction - $113 million this year as opposed to $30 million three or four years ago. So, they know that we care. They know that. But the load is heavy and then, after 9/11, we have asked a lot of them. We know we've gone through the stop-loss business. And we are now beginning to see that there are some of those specialties we can release. I think, deep down inside, that General Hornburg said it as well as anyone. We, the leadership -helped by the way, by organizations such as the Air Force Association and our other great institutions that provide support to our military - need to continue to convince our people 1) that what they are doing is very important; 2) that they are respected; and I will also mention that people in uniform, our policemen and our fire departments, are [receiving that] kind of respect, which is just a wonderful thing to see happen in our country. People in uniform that serve for others, by putting themselves in harm's way, are elevated in this nation.

It is a great time for us to serve. But in the end, we have to turn those resources into the people, the equipment, the facilities and, lastly, into the right manpower numbers so that we can take that load off of the few and put it across a larger number of many.


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