SLIDE 1

SLIDE 2 - I noticed the Chief comes back to listen to me. Secretary Peters, Chief, AFA partners, because that is exactly what you are. It is great to be here today. It has been a year or over a year since a mobility person stood up at the podium to talk to you about the Air Force’s - America’s - air mobility force, the mobility portion of America’s Air Force, and it is great to be here today.

It is also great to be here as the clean-up batter today. If you close the doors, I am going to take my time as the clean-up batter because I don’t have anybody following me today, and if there is anybody excited about the mobility mission and can talk ad nauseum about mobility, it is me. Sit tight, it is going to be a great day.

I talked about being the clean-up hitter here today. It is an appropriate place to put me today, not just because I follow two of my principal customers, that is, General Jumper [Gen. John P. Jumper] who talked a little bit about the things that we did together for Kosovo and General Wald [Lt. Gen. Charles F. Wald] who I support every day through him as the air component to CINCCent [Commander-in-Chief, Central Command]. One of my primary missions is supporting the regional CINCs in the pursuit of their day-to-day mission. I followed the Chief, who set the stage in his comments about our core competency of rapid global mobility. I’m speaking before the Secretary, who has the right and responsibility to correct me to 100 percent for any time I get out of my lane here talking about mobility. I’m also speaking before Mike Short [Lt. Gen. Michael C. Short] gets up here tomorrow. Mike Short was also a great partner and a great leader in our effort in Kosovo, whom I tried to support as best I could from Scott [Air Force Base] and from places around the world.

If you look at the mobility mission from a simplistic standpoint -- and this is the way we describe it to ourselves -- our mission is three-fold: A, to take the troops to the fight; B, to support them while they are at the fight; C, to bring them home when the fight is over. What does a clean-up hitter do more than try to bring them home when they are out there at their bases around the world? So, it is good to be the clean-up batter here today.

I would talk to you about a couple of things. Two quick points: mobility in 1999. It will be a little broader than that, but if you will forgive me, I’ll use 1999 and Kosovo to tell you a little bit about how I think mobility, or the requirement for rapid global air mobility, is changing in the world today. That addresses the theme of this conference, which is, given the rapid pace of movement in international events, the national security environment, the great fog of war that all the other speakers have talked about out there, is there an increasing demand for air, period, in the world today?

What I will tell you up front is, from an air mobility perspective, the resounding answer is yes. There is no doubt, as I deliver forces from a CONUS America to hot spots around the world -- whether they be humanitarian crises, natural disasters or whether they be genuine shooting conflicts -- the pace is picking up, and I’ll talk to you a little bit more about that in the context of 1999.

I would tell you up front that, if you allowed me to talk for the rest of the day and the night, what you would get from me is a good news story about the state of mobility affairs. General Wald talked to General Zinni [Gen. Anthony C. Zinni] about the readiness of his command to support CINCCent. The readiness of mobility forces to support the United States of America, whether they be true movements, whether they be humanitarian responses or whether they be some natural disaster that has occurred in some far off portion of the world or whether it is simply the movement of the Air Force’s AEFs [Aerospace Expeditionary Forces] back and forth to the different theaters, we are far more ready than we’ve ever been. We never would have been able to do a Kosovo the way we did if we were not ready. It is a good news story. I will talk with you about a couple of challenges, and then I’ll take some questions.

SLIDE 3 - Let me start out by talking to you about how we see the air mobility mission. You can look at it from its two bookends. That is our job. As the rapid mobility portion of America’s Air Force, our force is global air mobility for America. The other bookend, our primary and most sacred responsibility, is to be able to meet this nation’s national security strategy of being able to fight two nearly simultaneous major theater wars. On that spectrum of overarching mission to our most gut-wrenching, get-ready-to-go-to-war mission, these are the kinds of things we do. I grade myself on how successful the regional theater CINCs are in the accomplishment of their mission. Because, if they are successful in the accomplishment of their mission on a day-to-day basis, I’ve been successful in mine.

In support of those regional CINCs, movement of the AEFs back and forth, movement of the Army’s KFOR and SFOR forces back and forth to Kosovo and Bosnia. Service support and support of the regional CINCs is an integral part of the AMC [Air Mobility Command] mission. This thing I just lumped together called “other US movement priorities.” I serve customers across the spectrum of government, inside and outside of government, the United Nations, Red Cross, Federal Emergency Management Agency, the State Department, the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation], the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] on a day-to-day basis. There are demands and growing demands for global air mobility, the rapid response capability that the Air Force offers to the world as far as mobility is concerned. The bottom line is, my job is to move the forces and not only to move the forces, but from an air perspective, to move them quickly. Global engagement, theater engagement, plans of the CINCs and the two major theater war strategy that we seek to maintain is what America’s Air Force’s global air mobility is all about.

SLIDE 4 - This is my AOR [Area of Responsibility], the world. There are 198 countries in the world. We go to almost every one every year in support. But this is also to show you from a global perspective that we’ve been busy in the years that the Chief and General Wald and General Jumper talked about since the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and the Soviet Union dissolved in 1990. You can look at this in another perspective, because you can look at it from the kind of customers we support. We support coalition partners, the movement of coalition partners from “Desert Shield/Desert Storm” to what we are doing right now in moving the UN forces into and out of East Timor. We support joint forces. We support joint forces from “Restore Hope,” “Just Cause,” “Support Hope,” “Desert Fox,” “Desert Thunder,” “Desert Strike.” The movement of joint forces and the integration with joint forces are key and essential to the efficiency and effectiveness of the way we do business in the global air mobility business nowadays.

Service-specific support. I talked a little bit about our support to the Air Force. As an integral part of the U.S. Air Force, if we don’t support ourselves better than every other customer we support, then we are falling down on our service responsibilities. Response to the Grand Forks floods a couple years ago. Movement of a primarily Air Force force into “Desert Strike,” “Desert Thunder,” “Desert Fox” quickly to make sure the CINCs, like CINCCent, are comfortable that when we come along a couple years later with the AEF concept that it will move just as fast, if not faster, or certainly won’t move slowly as a result of the mobility forces of the Air Force.

Then we support a whole host of governmental and nongovernmental organizations across the world. Nongovernmental organizations providing humanitarian relief. Nongovernmental organizations like the FBI [sic] going down to investigate the bombings in Dhahran or the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania just a year or so ago. Quick response. They want them there that day, and that is the capability that the global air mobility forces provide.

SLIDE 5 - The Chief talked about how tempo has changed in the Air Force in the last 10 years. The story that I hear, the words that I hear, the 40 years of the Cold War, there were 10 major contingencies that the United States participated in. Over the 10 years since, there have been 40 contingencies that our forces have been involved in. And so, if you take the time from when the U.S. Transportation Command was formed or the time the Berlin Wall fell to today, you can see those 40 contingencies. And you need to know that every time you see a headline that says, “U.S. Forces are involved around the world,” or “U.S. providing humanitarian assistance or disaster relief” in some place of the world that you have to get out your atlas to find out where it is, and then still can’t pronounce the name of the place, on that ramp at that runway in that location, is a grey airplane with an American flag on the tail representing your U.S. Air Force. Every single one of these. That is global presence, represented by the U.S. Air Force. - SLIDE 6

I will take that down and just show you that 1999 was no different for Air Mobility Command, whether we were providing same-day relief to earthquakes in Taiwan, same-day relief to earthquakes in Turkey - and you remember the headlines, they just sort of dim into insignificance after awhile - whether what we are doing today in East Timor, providing United Nations and moving United Nations forces into and then taking them back home from East Timor. Providing water purification units after the Venezuelan floods. Air drops at the South Pole, courtesy of your Air National Guard and active duty forces, or the subsequent rescue mission of the doctor down at the South Pole who had the significant medical pslides/roblem. No matter what headline you read, your Air Force is involved and your Air Mobility Command forces are involved.

SLIDE 7 - Let me talk real quickly, though, about “Allied Force.” If you look at it from a mobility perspective, “Allied Force” indicated that the face of the way we do warfare, the face of the way the Air Force responds to crisis in the world nowadays is different. This is an example. In “Desert Storm,” we moved almost 500,000 short tons of equipment and almost 500,000 passengers. But basically, 9.6 percent of the dry cargo that was moved in “Desert Storm,” was moved by air. The demand for responsiveness has gotten so significant that in Kosovo, that number is now 62.4 percent of the cargo that we moved in total cargo and passengers was moved by air. Is the face of the requirement for air power changing? Absolutely. Because the CINCs want it there yesterday and the only way to get it there yesterday is to use your Air Force and your air mobility force to respond.

SLIDE 8 - What else was different about Kosovo? It brought back to life, for the first time since “Desert Shield/Desert Storm,” that we can’t mount an intensive air campaign, we can’t deploy the forces, we can’t sustain the forces required, we can’t move all of our other customers without a tremendous tanker involvement in the operation. While other people tried to talk about Total Force as something we are going to get better at every day, you can see from these slides that we pride ourselves on not being able to operate without our Total Force partners. A hundred sixty tankers at the height of the “Papa Bear” operation in Kosovo and 11 locations around Europe. As fast as John Jumper could find a base for us to put tankers on, we were on final and landing and getting ready to set up operations in support of Mike [Short]. Three hundred ninety air crews in support of Kosovo, a tremendous tanker requirement and one that we can expect to face every time there is a major air operation, which means every major contingency that we are going to face in the years to come.

SLIDE 9 - What else was different? From our perspective, when we approach any major operation, we like to keep it simple: we either deploy, we sustain or we redeploy. Command and control of more than one aspect at a time, even out of an organization that is as sophisticated as a tanker airlift control center, even out of the network organizations of command and control now likely at the AMOC [Air Mobility Operations Center] at Ramstein [Air Base, Germany], combined with the tanker airlift control center, gets very complicated. You start to mix up missions on the same jet, and things start to fall through the cracks. “Allied Force” was more than that. Not only did we deliver the forces to the fight, at the same time we were operating inter-theater airlift, delivering the forces to the fight, we were delivering intra-theater lift the C-17s when we had Task Force Hawk. We had things like “Allied Harbor” going on. “Allied Harbor” being the response to the humanitarian disaster where the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Kosovar refugees that were trying like heck to find a safe haven outside of their country in Albania, a tremendous humanitarian relief operation. At the same time, I mentioned Task Force Hawk. I will talk to you a little bit more about in a minute. The chopping of 12 C-17s to USAFE [U.S. Air Forces Europe], something we had never formally done, went off without a hitch. It required careful coordination between the RAMC [Regional Air Mobility Center] down at Vicenza between the AMOC down at Ramstein and between the tanker lift control center at Scott [Air Force Base, IL]. Task Force Hawk, another tremendously successful operation, but one that complicated this whole effort.

Then, oh, by the way, after 78 days of bombing, as the war started to wind down, we had the movement of the peacekeeping force, the KFOR force, “Joint Guardian” into Kosovo to try to establish the peace. Three missions within a mission: deploying, redeploying, sustaining three different forces with the same small sub-set of airplanes, a different way of fighting the war for air mobility warriors.

SLIDE 10 - Task Force Hawk was a graduation ceremony for the C-17, and it graduated magna cum laude. There is absolutely no other airplane in our inventory that could have done what the C-17 did, delivering Task Force Hawk, an Army armored brigade into Tirana, Albania, 430 sorties with 12 airplanes flying 23 missions a day in a 24-hour day into an airfield whose taxiway looked like this, who had to taxi in like this and do 180 [degree turns] in two shift formations, do engine-running offloads in 40 minutes or less and launch so the next two airplanes could get in. If you don’t think that is a [FOD Foreign Object Damage] environment for a C-17, that is what this airplane was designed for, to operate in an austere airfield, to operate in an environment where there is no parking, where you have to create your own parking by backing in, basically. Operating in an environment where engine-running offload is the quickest way to get rid of your equipment and get out of there and get back to pick up the next load - this is what 12 C-17s did for the period of time it took to deliver Task Force Hawk into Tirana, Albania. The only thing the crews complained about, because they loved taking their airplane into this mission, was that it was a 10,000-foot runway, and they had to land halfway down to be able to exercise the short-field capabilities of the airplane. Tremendous plus with this magnificent new airlift.

SLIDE 11 - The other lesson that we learn from the tanker intensiveness of Kosovo is how important this airplane is, this 40-plus-year-old tanker that continues to operate, even in Kosovo at exactly the same reliability rate of the C-17, 97 percent mission reliability for the old KC-135. Seven thousand sorties in theater for the KC-135, off-loading 311 million pounds of fuel. Also, using 235 deploying sorties to move the forces into the theater and then supporting the B-2 global power support missions that flew out of Whiteman [Air Force Base, MO] with 320 hours and 306 more tanker sorties. Truly a versatile platform and one that we came to value more than just about anything else from a mobility perspective that we put in theater.

SLIDE 12 - What does all that mean as far as what Air Mobility Command is today to America’s Air Force? The simplest way I can put it is, we are the ultimate enabler. We move the AEFs. We move everything that moves as far as the U.S. government is involved, especially anything that is out-sized or oversized or anything that has to go to a location that can’t be serviced on a regular, routine commercial basis, anything that is under threat of harm to the forces that are operating in and out of there and anything that has to be moved now. That is what your air mobility force is, the ultimate enabler for America’s global reach. This same pyramid can apply to everything that we do - the triumvirate of en route forces, air refueling tankers and air lifters that comprise the total mobility air forces of your Air Force, support whatever you want to put in that red triangle, whether it be CINCs, Red Cross, AEF, KFOR, humanitarian relief, disaster relief, and they support it now.

SLIDE 13 - Let me talk about a couple of challenges as we face the new year. None of this should be a surprise if you are a member of the Air Force Association and get the Air Force magazine. Most of these, because they were amplified in Kosovo, are very applicable today, and I’ll talk to you real briefly about KC-135 crew ratios, about strategic airlift in general and the sufficiency of the force and then our favorite subject, C-5 reliability.

SLIDE 14 - KC-135 since the time we pulled alert in the old SAC [Strategic Air Command] days has had a crew ratio of 1.36, a Cold War crew ratio. It is 1.27 for the Air Force National Guard and Reserve, who comprise almost 60 percent of the tanker forces in your Air Force. Take that 1.36 and compare it to every contingency you saw on the diagonal chart and every contingency that we’ve had. The CINC has required a crew ratio of somewhere in the vicinity of 1.8, 1.7, and sometimes 2.0, averaging out to almost 1.8 for every contingency, which really has stretched the tankers. If you look at the highest optempo forces in the United States Air Force, and even taking out the Kosovo data, where we had to do a presidential selective call-up of the Guard and Reserve, some of the highest optempo forces, and it is hard not to call this a low-density, high-demand force, are your KC-135 pilots, co-pilots, navigators -- until we get pacer CRAG in -- and boom operators. That is in peace time. The real pslides/roblem that Kosovo presented us, though, that it led to the PSRC [Presidential Selective Reserve Call-up] in “Allied Force,” something that we thought long and hard about, talked long and hard about to the Chief and to the Secretary because the uncertainty of how long Kosovo was going to last and the impact that it has -- not on the members of the Guard and Reserve, but on their employers, if you do a frivilous recall of the Guard and Reserve, has or could have a significant impact on the future ability to call on those forces in the event of a crisis that goes on a lot longer. We agonize a long time about where and when we would call on that 54 percent of our forces in the Guard and Reserve. We wouldn’t have gotten there if we had had a reasonable crew ratio or we would have gotten there a heck of a lot later in the war. As it turned out, it was the right thing to do and in 20/20 hindsight, we wish we would have done it a lot sooner, because the employers appreciate the fact that their people are participating in a major U.S. operation against some fiend in some far-off portion of the world. But to have to rely on a PSRC to support routine operations if we ever got into that kind of situation, where the demand for tankers was so significant, has required us again to re-examine whether we have the right crew ratio in KC-135s.

SLIDE 15 - Strategic airlift. If you can read this chart here, what it says is, the red line being C-141s and the yellow/greenish line being C-17s, what it tells you is that in a couple years, about 2005 or 2006, you will have a force in the U.S. Air Force that has taken 270 C-141s and retired them and replaced them with 135 C-17s. One for two, one for two. In wartime, our cargo carrying capacity, is equal or better, as far as the C-17 box is concerned, as far as its reliability, as far as its ability to through-put to austere airfields, than what you had with the C-141, although as you well know, it was the backbone of the force for almost 40 years. The pslides/roblem is, and it is a very simple mathematical concept, one airplane can’t be in two places at the same time. Yet the demand for airlift -- and not from single customers, but from customers spread out in 198 countries around the world -- continues to grow every day. What we have is a significant loss of flexibility and capability in peacetime to serve all of those customers as the total number of strategic airlifters has declined. This is something we worry about every day and something we talk about every day and something we are in search of solutions to every day.

Add to that the growing demand for strategic airlift around the world. Add to that the growing demand for intra-theater airlift around the world - the movements of the Task Force Hawks into austere airfields, the movement of Patriots to Israel, repeatedly, every time we have a “Desert Storm,” “Desert Strike,” “Desert Thunder,” “Desert Fox.” The movement of forces in Korea, to reposition forces in Korea. I am not talking about passenger type forces. I am talking about out-sized, oversized cargo. Only the things a C-17 can do makes you question whether our successors will have sufficient airlift to do the job.

SLIDE 16 - The third pslides/roblem. I start out with this pie chart to try to explain to you the impact of the reliability or the lack of reliability of our other strategic airlifter. A tremendous machine is the C-5, borne on the shoulders of some tremendous aviators and maintainers who support it around the world on a day-to-day basis. The pslides/roblem is, because of its reliability, and this chart was built as a result of the mobility requirement study that came out of the Bottom Up Review about 5 years ago, which said that to support two nearly simultaneous major theater wars, you need 49.7 million ton-miles a day. Because the C-5 operates on a day-to-day basis at a mission capable rate of about 60 percent, and in the models that generated this had it operating at 75 percent, it generates about half of our short fall - 6 of the 12 million miles a day needed to meet our requirement. Unfortunately, while CRAF [Civil Reserve Air Fleet] is a very slides/robust force, CRAF is not capable of carrying out-sized, oversized cargo. It is not capable of carrying some of the bulk that we shove over to the KC-10. The only two airplanes that can carry outsized, oversized cargo are the C-5 and the C-17. We have launched into an effort to try to fix the C-5.

SLIDE 17 - Why? Because the C-5A, 76 C-5As are only 30 years and 50 C-5Bs are only 10 years old, and they have airframe life, structural life like the numbers shown on this slide. It is a tremendous box when it is airborne. Getting to the end of the runway and off is the major pslides/roblem that we have to work with. What are we doing to work on the C-5? We tried to identify the bad actors. SLIDE 18 - That is the first and most important thing everyone does when they go after a pslides/roblem with an airplane. What are the bad actors on the airplane? You go out to the aircrews, you talk to the maintainers and you do all the analysis of all of the writeups for the last 100 years on the C-5, and you come up with an airplane that is 90,000 parts flying in formation, none of which break twice in a row - all of which choose their own random time and wrong time to break. But basically if you do try to distill down what the bad actors are on the C-5, the majority of the pslides/roblems are associated with the powerplant, the engine. The first thing we are doing is going after the high-pressure turbine on the engine. We are buying 790 new high-pressure turbines for the engine. It will pay us back. Even at $220,000 a copy, it will pay us back in three years to replace it just based on engine life itself. We are buying 790, and we have obligated for 535 so far. We have replaced 350, and we have not had one on a wing fail yet. The engineers estimate that just replacing the high-pressure turbine on the TF-39 will increase the time-on-wing for the engine on the C-5 from 1100 hours, which is what it is now, to almost 2500, over double the time on wings, just replacing the high-pressure turbine. That is savings and a fast payback. 1100 through 2500 hours, remember that.

SLIDE 19 - The next thing we’re doing is we’re, not only because of reliability, but also because of the requirements to meet the NAV safety standards of the 21^st Century, the requirements to meet the COM [communications] NAV and surveillance requirements of the new global air traffic management environment that says that if you want to fly above 29,000 feet in international airspace, you’ve got to have modern avionics in your airplanes. We are replacing the cockpit on the C-5 in a program called the Avionics Modernization Program. We just released the contract last January to Lockheed, and it will offer us tremendous reliability improvements for the C-5 as well as make us compliant in the global air traffic environment. We started installing the terminal air collision avoidance systems already, and we hope to be able to start rolling out our first full cockpits in about a year.

SLIDE 20 - The piece de resistance of fixing the C-5 is putting the new motor on. Remember, I said the majority of the pslides/roblems are the power plant. How do you get to the powerplant pslides/roblems and all of the associated troublemakers associated with the powerplant, the hydraulic system, the pneumatic system, the environmental system? You get to that powerplant and all of those auxiliary power boxes that hang off of the powerplant.

A study by Lockheed in 1996, confirmed by the Logistics Management Institute in a separate and independent red team analysis, projects that if you just replace the engines on the C-5, along with some fairly significant changes in the way we maintain those engines and some fairly significant changes in the way we manage the parts flow to the C-5, you can actually get the rate up to about 75 percent on the A-model and about 81 percent on the B-model. Those are some big “ifs,” I’ll be the first to tell you, and something that we are working to hedge our bets against -- the success or lack of success in meeting these standards. But these are the kind of standards we need to be able to meet to be able to do our mission in the 21^st Century. Not only will a new engine give us increased reliability, increased thrust will allow us to carry full loads out of places like Ramstein [Air Base, Germany], something we haven’t been able to do in a long, long time. Even out of Dover and Travis [Air Force Bases], our two primary bases, when the weather is hot, and a whole host of other locations around the world, we have to download cargo to be able to get out of the field. Or else we have to download cargo to be able to make it all the way across the pond without stopping somewhere. Not only will increased thrust allow us to take full loads out of the airfield, it will allow us to climb in time to reach the entry point for the GATM [Global Air Traffic Management] tracks that you have to reach, which are very close to the coastline of the United States, to be able to get into that optimum air structure going across the Atlantic and Pacific. This engine offers a lot of capability beyond just reliability. Remember, I said what the high-pressure turbine was going to give you as far as time-on-wing for the C-5, increasing from about 1100 hours to about 2500 hours. The commercial standard for an engine nowadays is about 10,000 hours, and that is the kind of reliability we need for the engine maintainers and for the aircrews that fly the C-5. A three-phrased approach - high-pressure turbine replacement, avionics modernization and reliability enhancement and re-engining program.

SLIDE 21 - There are a host of other modernization efforts going on in the command, most of the ones you know about or have read about - the twin C-130 program, the C-130X and the C-130J acquisitions, PACER CRAG, a highly successful program on the KC-135, our two new loaders, the 60K Tunner loader and the replacement for the old 25K, the next generation small loader, GATM, we talked about on C-5, the Global Air Traffic Management and its impact, what we are having to do is GATM mods on all of the mobility aircraft, because that is our airspace operating across the Atlantic and across the Pacific, our new Large Aircraft Infra-Red Countermeasures in this year’s budget, KC-10 modifications, the extended range fuel tank in the C-17, a host of programs. These are demonstrating a commitment on the part of the Air Force and the part of the Department of Defense to make sure that very important leg called rapid global air mobility continues to stay healthy into the future. As General Shaud [Gen. John Shaud, Executive Director, AFA] said, and as the Chairman said, you just can’t fight without us. I am open to your questions.

SLIDE 22

Q&A Session

General Shaud: Could you please address the need for defensive systems on your airlift fleet?

General slides/robertson: We have defensive systems on our airplanes, but the pslides/roblem is they are old. We’ve got a system that was originally built for helicopters. It has been modified for large aircraft. The pslides/roblem is, it is even marginal against the old air defense threats and absolutely incapable against the current and next-generation of air defenses. For the most part, we trust the defense of mobility aircraft to things like the F-22. We need to be defended when we go into austere locations. There is a requirement, and I mentioned it when I passed through the Large Aircraft Infra-Red Countermeasures, that as we go into some strange parts of the world, the places that quiet heroes of AMC go alone, unarmed and unafraid, where the threat dictates that you need a little more, and that is what LAIRCM is going to do. It is going to put an advanced infrared counter measures system on just a select number of C-17s and C-130s to be able to get into airfields where the threat indications suggest that we don’t know but it might be bad. The thing that we are concerned about is the proliferation of shoulder-fired SAMs [surface-to-air missiles] around the world. No matter what intelligence reports you read, that is the one common denominator, that shoulder-fired infrared and shoulder-fired SAMs are proliferating among the terrorist groups around the world. We are concerned, and we are working it.

General Shaud: We heard General [Eric] Shinseki [Army Chief of Staff] talk a lot about making Army vehicles all C-130 transportable. Are you working jointly with the Army on this?

General slides/robertson: See this hook at my hip? We are engaged at the hip with General Shinseki, both from a TRANSCOM [U.S. Transportation Command] perspective and from an Air Mobility Command perspective, mostly to make sure, because the goals that he has set for the Army of the future are very aggressive, and mostly to ensure that, as they work their way through this process of defining the new requirement, sizing the vehicles that they are going to design and build, that in fact we can put them on a C-130 and on a C-17. I am pleased to say that they brief me about once every couple of months, and my staff is engaged.

General Shaud: How is air mobility capability divided under the AEF plan?

General slides/robertson: Air Mobility Command supports the AEF three different ways, as opposed to the rest of the Air Force that basically supports it two ways, either as a force provider - C-130s and KC-135s are an integral part of all 10 AEFs. We divided them up just like everyone else has. Just the like the rest of the Air Force, we provide the expeditionary combat support force. I sent the Chief and the Secretary a copy of what our security forces do for their troops the other day. They have built a book - the AMC security forces have built a book that talks about AEF for every cop in Air Mobility Command and then has their name in it. This morning I re-enlisted two cops. We have had cop retention pslides/roblems, and in our command they have turned around significantly in the last six months. But one of the questions I asked when I asked them to raise their right hand was, what AEF are you in? This has been one of my tests. People don’t know what AEF they are in, they don’t understand the concept. Re-enlistee number one said seven. Re-enlistee number two said nine. I know they were planted but it made me feel good. Obviously, we are the enabler for the AEF. From a tanker perspective, the KC-135 is a dual role. They are members of the AEF and they are also the deployers of the AEF and then the strat [strategic] air lifters do what they do so well every day - they move the forces to the theater, sustain them while they are there and bring them home when they are done.

General Shaud: Given the current sortie rate of the tankers, KC-135s, what do you see as a projected useful life, and is a follow-on tanker being considered?

General slides/robertson: I think the thing will last forever. It is the only airplane that the Air Force has ever created that defies the laws of physics. It is a phenomenal air machine. Yes, there is consideration of a follow-on tanker, but when you operate on a day-to-day basis at a 95 to 97 percent reliability rate, when you have a force that is re-engined, with an engine that is equally phenomenal, and a PACER CRAG modification that is going to take the cockpit well into the 21^st Century, along with all of the command-and-control enhancements that the command is about to do -- what the rest of the Air Force is doing about instantaneous command and control of its aircrews wherever they may be operating around the world -- I don’t know what the life of the KC-135 is. It is an airframe that you have to be careful of because it was created before modern metallurgical methods were created, so corrosion is a significant pslides/roblem. George Babbitt’s [Gen. George T. Babbitt, Commander, Air Force Materiel Command] guys have done phenomenally well with their CORAL REACH program in getting ahead of the corrosion pslides/roblems on the KC-135. We watch it every day. My only goal for the KC-135 is total interoperability across the force. We need to bring the Guard and Reserve older KC-135Es along with the rest of the KC-135s, and that is something that the Air Force is also working as hard as it can.

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