The first thing I would like to emphasize today is that I was not on the Air Staff during the McPeak-Rice era, and I have no slides. Secondly, I feel extraordinarily relieved to be able to tell you I did not believe in any of those nine myths. Thank you Rebecca [Dr. Rebecca Grant, IRIS Independent Research] for validating what combat airmen believe.

Mr. Secretary, Chief, ladies and gentlemen, I thank you for the opportunity the AFA gives me to be with you this morning. For combat field commanders like Waldo [Lt. Gen. Charles F. Wald] and I to be allowed to address this forum is an extraordinary honor. Certainly, for Waldo, he will be given that chance again, but with 34 years and nine months of active service, this will be my last opportunity, and I don’t intend to blow it.

Speaking to a friend last night in the exhibit hall, he told me he was looking forward to my remarks on Kosovo and lessons learned. That is not what I wish to speak about today. Kosovo is history. My Air Force moves forward. My Air Force looks forward. There are things we need to internalize about Kosovo, but that is not what I want to talk about today.

Secondly, at this stage, there are no lessons learned from Kosovo. There are lessons. I am convinced that the men and women in this room have learned the lessons of Kosovo, as Dr. Grant made reference to. But whether we are able to act on those lessons will be an issue of resources and political will. I believe the jury is still out on that.

Finally, the Secretary and the Chief have been very patient with me. They have allowed me to speak out in several forums on my deep personal feelings and my deep professional feelings about Kosovo. I believe that time for me is finished. The Air Force gave me the opportunity to speak to Air Force Magazine, which was kind enough to publish my interview. As Waldo was given the opportunity to deal with the press, I was given the opportunity to speak to the Senate Armed Services Committee. Again, that time has passed. I thank the Chief and the Secretary for their patience. I intend to speak about Kosovo in the future – I hope at Air War College and CAPSTONE, at the Army’s BCTP [Battle Command Training Program] and at forums like that. I hope to be able to speak to young people who are just starting the ABC [Aerospace Basic Course] course and SOS [Squadron Officer School], perhaps at Lackland [Air Force Base] where I can speak. But it is time for me to move on in the lessons of Kosovo.

A word of thanks. Yesterday, my past boss, [General] John Jumper, was incredibly kind to me. Kosovo was a success story for airmen - a team of airmen - and I was privileged to be a member of that team. You will never know how much time John Jumper spent flying top cover for me in that 78-day effort and the months that led up to that 78-day effort. I have lost track of the number of extraordinarily difficult teleconferences that ended with John Jumper saying, “SACEUR [Supreme Allied Commander, Europe], I’ll call you on the hotline.” And at Vincenza [Air Base, Italy], we looked at each other, nodded and we said, “The boss will take care of this.” Boss, I thank you.

I want to talk for just a few minutes today about coalition air ops [operations]. We are a forward-looking force, and we look to our future. I believe that is our future. We have in the past 15 years since Goldwater-Nichols [the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986], spent a great deal of time talking and thinking and working at joint operations, and I believe, as Rebecca said, we are there. In the field, we do joint operations extraordinarily well. I am at that stage of my career where I find joint operations to be interesting, but I find coalition operations to be compelling. In the future, there may be scenarios, and you can probably draw them for me, where the U.S. will choose to act unilaterally without our allies because our national interests are threatened and no one else is concerned. But I believe that for every instance where we face an adversary, we will look for a coalition opportunity. We will try to cobble together a coalition because we want to fight that way, because we want to share the burden, and because we want the cloak of legitimacy that operating in a coalition gives us. That is what I want to talk about for just a few minutes this morning — coalition air operations.

To begin with, coalition starting is almost like a chicken and the egg — what comes first? Do you put together the coalition or do you set the terms of the coalition? I believe, if you’ve got the option, you try to set the terms and you go to your friends and you say, the situation in country X is of great concern to us and we intend to act and this is how we intend to act. We intend to conduct an air campaign or amphibious assault, or a combination thereof, and here is how we intend to target, and here is where we believe to be the centers of gravity, and do you wish to be with us? Then we are faced, hopefully, with that decision: whether we act as General Horner [General Charles A. Horner, Commander, U.S. Central Command Air Forces in “Operation Desert Storm” was privileged to do in a coalition of the willing or whether we act in a 19-nation coalition as was issued to [Admiral James] Jim Ellis and John Jumper [Gen. John P. Jumper] and Mike Short [Lt. Gen. Michael C. Short.] where every member of the 19-nation coalition has a vote and has apparent veto power, regardless of its contribution. Given the option, I choose a coalition of the willing. And it may be that every nation in NATO has signed up for that contract, but now we have a contract sealed in blood, and we know what the rules are going in.

You and I must be given political objectives. We need to know what our coalition is trying to accomplish on the political scene, and we need to have those translated to us, as professional soldiers, into military objectives. Ladies and gentlemen, we began bombing the first night with our objective being to show NATO resolve. That is tough to tell the kids at Aviano [Air Base, Italy] - to go out and put it on the line to “demonstrate resolve.” We need to know what our military objectives are, and we need to understand what we are trying to accomplish with airpower and ground power and sea power.

I knew, we all knew, what we were trying to do in Kosovo. We wanted Milosevic to cease ethnic cleansing. We wanted the VJ [Yugoslav Army] out of Kosovo. We wanted a force on the ground, an international force under NATO leadership. We wanted the Kosovar Albanians to have the ability to return to their homes and pick up their lives. We wanted the ICTY [International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia] process to work. We accomplished all five of those things to some degree by happenstance rather than by design. You and I need the clearest possible definition of an end state. General Jumper has been very articulate in his observing that we don’t know yet if we won in Kosovo. If you have been in Mitrovice in the last week, you are certainly not sure if we won in Kosovo. What was the end state? We knew what as soldiers we were going to try to accomplish – those five points I spoke to. But what is the end state in Kosovo? Is it a free Kosovo? Is it greater Albania? Is it return of the Kosovo province to Serb rule? We don’t know yet. I have never seen it clearly articulated. We know in a general fashion what the international community wanted to accomplish. But we are not there yet, and we won’t be there for a long time. Political objectives, military objectives and a clear end state.

We need to prepare our politicians as best we can for what is going to happen. If we are going to initiate an air campaign, not an air effort, but an air campaign, airmen need to be given the chance to explain what is going to happen to our political leadership. Airmen, who have practiced their craft and their trade for 30 or 35 years, need to be given the opportunity to make that explanation. I read in General Horner’s superb book how he went to Camp David and briefed the President of the United States on how he intended to conduct an air campaign to prepare the battlefield in Kuwait and Iraq. I am not campaigning for a trip to Camp David, but there was a case to be made for an air campaign, and airmen should have made that case. Our politicians need to understand that this isn’t going to be clean. There is going to be collateral damage. There will be unintended civilian casualties. We will do our level best to prevent both, but they’ve got to grit their teeth and stay with us. We can’t cut and run the first time we hit the wrong end of a bridge. We can’t cut and run the first time we kill innocent people that clearly we did not intend to kill. Just as we did not target the Chinese Embassy as the Chinese Embassy, we never targeted civilians, and you know that. But there are people out there who believe that we did. Unfortunately, the reaction to every incident placed our kids at greater risk and made it more difficult to do our job.

What we are left with now is a generation of politicians throughout the alliance who have an unrealistic picture of airpower and air war. It is a video game on CNN [Cable News Network]. All your nation has to do is send four airplanes and 60 people a thousand miles, turn them over to an American commander, and go about your business. A very senior official from one of our allies visited me at the CAOC [Combined Air Operations Center]. He was sitting in General Tricarico’s office, drinking a cappuccino with this official. He had with him his [General] Hugh Shelton [Chairman, U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff] equivalent. I said to the gentleman, “Sir — the weather was giving us a difficult time early on, but I believe now the air war is making progress.” Before the gentleman could respond, his CHOD [Chief of Defense], Hugh Shelton equivalent, leaped on me and said, “No, no, general, we are not at war in my country. You may be in war at the CAOC, but we are not at war in my country.” I said, “Admiral, that may well be the problem.”

Our politicians need to understand that we will do our best to make airpower clean and painless as they want us to, but it is not going to work out that way. People die in airpower conflicts. There is collateral damage. There is unintended loss of life. When they choose to employ us, to take us to war, when they choose to use military force to solve a problem that politicians could not, then they need to grit their teeth and stay with us.

We need to understand going in the limitations that our coalition partners will place upon themselves and upon us. There are nations that will not attack targets that my nation will attack. There are nations that do not share with us a definition of what is a valid military target, and we need to know that up front. You don’t want to find out when a force of a different nation is on the tanker that their parliament has said they cannot attack that target. You need to know what limitations other nations are going to place on you. You and I need to know that all aircraft based in the United Kingdom are subject to rulings by the United Kingdom government about whether we are about to strike a valid target or not. That is a national card they choose to play, but I don’t want that card played when the kids are on the tanker, because then the strike package comes apart. You need to know going in what those limitations are and push for understanding of those limitations as early in the process as is possible.

Clearly I believe no nation is allowed to veto an entire target set. You need to establish a process to ensure timely communications of those limitations or we press on with the plan. You need to build a team. Coalition is team warfare, and hopefully you build it before the fact. I don’t want to meet my deputy JFACC [Joint Force Air Component Commander] on the first night of the war and be introduced to my J-3 [Joint Operations Officer] as the bombs are dropping. We had the opportunity to put that team together at the CAOC, and it served us well from the early days of the war through its expansion to its conclusion. I had worked with General Tricarico as my deputy JFACC for a number of weeks and [Italian General] Arnoldo Vannucchi before that. They were stalwarts and supportive and knew how we would do our business.

Last Thursday, General [Gregory S.] Martin gave me the loan of a C-20, and I flew to Eskishehir in Turkey. I took with me General Jose Nivo, a commander of a CAOC in Monsanto, Portugal, and commander of all Portuguese tactical forces; General Geronimo Palacin, commander of a CAOC at Torrejon and the commander of all Spanish tactical forces; General Michel Fouquet, who is deputy to Jean George Ravel, commander of all French defense forces and French tactical forces; General Giampiero Gargini, who was my deputy JFACC in Balkan operations and commander of the CAOC at Poggio Renatico and commander of all tactical forces in Italy; General Panagiotis Manousous, commander at the CAOC at Larissa in Greece and commander of all Greek tactical forces. We were hosted at Eskishehir by General Irbahim Vertina, first TAF [Turkish Air Forces] commander and tactical air forces of Turkey and commander of the CAOC at Eskishehir.

Think about that international lineup as we put a team together. We drank an obscene amount of raki. I don’t recommend that to you, certainly at my age. We talked about our team in the southern region and how we would act in any contingency with Comm [Commander] Air South, wherever he might be as a CFACC [Combined Forces Air Component Commander], and the national CAOC commander as his deputy. At one point, Panagiotis Manousous from Larissa, Greece, and Irbahim Vertina, from Eskishehir, Turkey, and Mike Short withdrew to a separate room, and we talked about the Aegean, and we talked about exercise “Dynamic Mix” that will occur on the 20^th of May. Ron Keys [Maj. Gen. Ronald E. Keys] will have been in his seat for 12 days. For the first time in 27 years, Turkish F-16s will deploy to Greek soil and fly sorties out of a Greek air base. Greek and Turkish airplanes will fly together in what we all understand to be disputed air space in the Aegean. I believe we have prepared the team before the fact, and I believe the team will stay together.

Make your command structure a combined coalition command structure. Make it a combined coalition command. I failed miserably on that point. The man that fought the day war for me was Major General Garry R. Trexler, an incredibly gifted American. The man who fought the night war for me was Brigadier General Randy [Randall C.] Gellwix, the CAOC director and an incredible warrior. My J-2 was an American, Heddy Boil. My J-3 was an American [Col.] Stu Johnson, and my J-5 was an American [Col.] Al Peck. The chief of that team was an American, the great Col Doc Zorb. I failed in putting together the kind of senior leadership in my coalition team that I should have put together. Had I to do it over again, there would be Dutchmen and Brits and Italians at that level of command.

If we are to be a team, we can’t just be a team on paper. We need to be a coalition command structure. We should never again, never again, run a U.S. - only command structure inside of a NATO alliance. We should not try to run that rabbit up our allies legs and pull it out of their hat ever again. As I make my rounds of the nations and talk about Kosovo, after a couple of beers, my friends the air chiefs pull me aside and say, “Mike, we will never let you do that to us again.” There was a NATO command structure in place in Naples, and it had been there for 50 years. It was Commander in Chief of Southern Europe, with a NATO staff. We inserted in the middle of that staff a U.S. - only operation whose commander was a Navy admiral, whose deputy was a Navy admiral. The [J-]3 was a Navy captain and the [J-]2 was a Navy captain. We called it a joint task force, and they were given operational level responsibility for running a NATO war. We can never do that again to our allies or we will not have allies.

We need to work to understand the mindset and temperament of every partner nation. Every nation in your coalition is feeling different pressures than you are. You’ve got to spend several hours a day understanding those pressures. You’ve got to have POLAD [political advisor] help, and you’ve got to be talking seriously to your senior national reps. You’ve got to be in touch with the DAOs [Defense Attache Offices] in those countries, and you’ve got to understand that even if they just contributed four airplanes and sixty people, that was an enormous decision and step for them to take, and you have to understand how frail coalition governments are, just as your fighting coalition may be frail, and understand what they are going through. Few of us in this room will ever understand the enormous pressure the Italian government was under. The work that Mr. Massimo D’Alema had to do to hold that coalition together in very difficult times. My deputy, [Lt. Gen.] Leonardo Tricarico, was in daily conversation with [Italian Army General] Mario Arpino, [Gen.] Andreas Fornasiero, and the prime minister himself because of the price Italy was paying to support the alliance in Kosovo and doing that with a coalition government. You and I have to work to understand how difficult that is. You have to work with their leadership and acknowledge that leadership and give them positions of responsibility.

Shortly after I took over as COMAirSouth, I named [Gen.] Arnaldo Vannuchi as my deputy JFACC for what were then operations in Bosnia-Hercegovina. A series of Italian commanders have replaced him and have also been named as my deputy JFACC for what are now Balkan operations. When I am in the United States today, Giampiero Gargini is the JFACC for operations in Kosovo and Bosnia-Hercegovina. That is as it should be. We need to establish that early, make it real, not something token, and make it work. We need to keep every one of our partners informed. It doesn’t matter how large their contribution is, they need to know what is going on.

Go out of your way not to hurt feelings, but don’t be afraid to shoot straight with your partners. There is a myth out there that many of the nations that we work with have a culture that does not prevent them from hearing the truth. Ladies and gentlemen, at the military level, that is simply not the case. Professional airmen I have worked with wanted to know what is going on and wanted me to shoot straight with them. We did that in dialogue, and it works. Professionals come together and solve the problem because we are honest with each other, and we are up front, and there are not cards hidden, and everything is on the table. And it works.

Understand the capability of the contributing nations. Ask for the best they have and understand the request process. Know who’s got LANTIRNs [Low-Altitude Navigation and Targeting InfraRed for Night targeting pods] and who doesn’t. Know who can shoot BVR [Beyond Visual Range] and who can’t. Know whose got tankers and will contribute what. Understand the request process. I went through a dance with one of the nations who had reconnaissance airplanes deployed to Italian soil taking up very important spaces on the ramp. I went to the senior national rep, a two-star from that nation, and I said, “I would like you to deploy HARM [High-velocity Anti-Radiation Missile] shooters instead and send your recce birds home.” He said, “We’d be glad to do that if you will make the request.” That was not something they were going to do on their own, although clearly the recce birds weren’t turning a wheel. So he prepared a letter for me to sign and give back to him that was proof certain to his government that the JFACC wanted HARM shooters instead of recce birds, and we made it happen. Understand that the way you and I may ask for airplanes is not the way you ask for airplanes with your partners.

Understand that you may be issued airplanes you don’t want. Just don’t throw up your hands. Have a plan. Every member of the coalition is going to want to contribute, and you can’t deny them that ability to contribute. Have a plan for using airplanes. The airplanes may not be as near as capable as yours are. But have a plan for them. Make them feel good about their contribution.

Try to control the beddowns. Sitting out in the audience about five rows is an extraordinary officer, Brigadier General Pino Marani, of the Italian Air Force. Pino and Piero Gargini at the CAOC, another great brigadier general, worked the beddown process. Everything we asked for, the Italians gave us. Those two officers worked it for us. If I had it to do over again, I would have worked with Pino and Piero to have controlled that beddown just a bit differently. The way it worked, each nation went individually to the Italian government to bargain for their beddown. I found when I needed spaces on the ramp for more capable airplanes, the spaces had been taken, and there was no way I could ask another nation to move its airplanes. We ended up with a scattered beddown to some degree because I didn’t have the foresight to understand the problem. Pino and Piero would have worked that for me if I had been smart enough to know what I needed to do. Get out in front of the beddown process. Understand the limitations. The biggest limitation we faced was the ability to build up bombs on the ramp. There just weren’t a lot of places at Italian bases that you could build up munitions. So if you are going to put bomb droppers on the ground, you have to understand the capabilities. I was slow to do that. Try, if you can, to arrange coalition logistics. Logistics is a national responsibility, but try if you can to work it as a team.

The instance that comes to mind is about 45 or 50 days into the fight, several nations come in to me and finally, after a bit of chat, say, “General, we are about to run out of precision munitions. We certainly weren’t stocked to fight for this long and drop at the rate we have been dropping. Can you help us?” I called in General Jumper, and he called General [Michael E.] Ryan. General Ryan was able to each into what was then a clearly diminishing supply of precision munitions and provide them to our allies. How long we could have done that, I am not certain. [Brig. Gen.] Terry [L.] Gabreski could tell me if she were here. But I certainly did not know. You need visibility of logistics problems that your coalition partners are facing, and you need to be involved in that.

Treat everybody as equals. At that table, treat everybody as equals. Young men and women from their nations are going in harm’s way, just as the young men and women from our nation, and we need to treat them as equals. Make them feel good about being part of the team and listen to what they have to say.

Publish a single ATO [Air Tasking Order]. That was a mistake we made. On the first night of the war, as the F-117 force was forming up in Hungary with its escort, a foreign national was screaming from a NATO AWACS [Airborne Warning and Control System], asking the CAOC “what were those airplanes doing in Hungary.” We had a U.S.-only ATO and a NATO ATO, and that young man on board NATO AWACS did not have a U.S.-only ATO. Clearly we have concerns for technology, and perhaps we have concerns for timing. But you don’t ever want to be in a position where on the first night of the war, sitting at the table of the JFACC, and a flag officer from one of your strongest allies says, “General, it appears to us we are not striking the SA-6s at location A, B, and C.” And the best you can do is say, “Air Commodore, trust me.” We are playing this game. There are 117s on the ramp at Aviano whom we genuinely think are not going to fly on the first night.

We have purchased the B-2 for just this purpose. But we generally think we are not going to use it. There are things we need to keep from our allies: technology, planning process, and so be it. But those nations that have thrown their lot in with us need to understand what we intend to do with the coalition on that first and second and third night, and all the way into the war. Because we fight together.

I believe we have to take that risk, and perhaps in that large a coalition there is someone who is providing information to someone who should not have it. But as sure as I am standing here, there was a Serb outside the runway at Aviano with a cell phone, and he was calling Belgrade when the 117s took off. I imagine there was one at Knob Noster [MO, home of Whiteman AFB] who was calling, saying, “four of them took off three hours ago. Only two of them came back. I think two of them are heading your way.” There was one up there doing the same thing. We have to understand that. But we have to include our allies in how we do our business.

We have to fully involve our allies in targeting and tasking. Targeting was done in a U.S.-only forum -- Quite frankly, on a VTC [Video Teleconference], for 78 days. All I was able to do was issue to our allies their targets. They could veto targets. They could choose not to hit that target with their forces. Or, if we were UK-based, they could choose to deny our forces the ability to hit that target. But they were not involved in a workup and justification of the targeting and the tasking. They need to be full partners in that.

Our targeting philosophy clearly has to be agreed upon before we start. Again, we don’t want to start demonstrating resolve and then fumble and figure out what we are going to do next. We need to have agreed how we intend to employ our forces. I am not so naive as to believe that we will be able to execute an air campaign just because our nation wants to. But we need to have made that case, and if that case is not accepted, we need to have a fallback plan that works and gets it done. Again, we don’t want to do this by happenstance. We want to do it by design. We need to share intelligence. General Jumper has spoken to that. We need to let our allies know what is out there. We don’t have to reveal the source. But we need to tell them what the threats are, what the target set is, and how we expect to do our business.

We’ve got to work to keep them together. This is a daily effort, because of the pressures of every one of your coalition allies is feeling. You have put a good team together, now work to keep it together. Spend time at the JFACC doing that. Don’t ask one of your colonels or one-stars to do that for you. Let them fight that daily war. You shouldn’t be doing execution work there anyway. That is not what the JFACC is all about. JFACC needs to be working every day to keep that team together.

Provide visible, approachable leadership. Our military culture is different than that of many of our allies. Senior officers in many of the countries that I work with are treated a bit differently than they are in the Armed Forces of the United States. It is very difficult for junior officers to approach general officers in other services, and to question a direction given by a general officer is absolutely unheard of in the culture of many of our allies. You and I need to understand that. You need to make yourself approachable and someone the senior national representative [SNR] can deal with. That is your conduit. You can call the air chief. But that SNR has just had his feet cut out from under him if you directly call the air chief to work a problem. You want to work it through the SNRs, and you’ve got to make yourself someone that they trust, someone they know they can approach, and someone they trust as a leader.

We will be expected to lead any coalition that we join. Our allies understand what we bring to the table, understand our capabilities, our professionalism, the marvelous performance of our young people, and they now fully understand our technology. Any coalition we join, they will expect us to lead. We need to have thought about coalition ops. We don’t want to do this as a pickup game. We need to understand coalition operations just as we understand joint operations, and we need to be ready to do that.

I got back to Naples Friday afternoon from our trip to Eskishehir, and Saturday morning my aide and I left for Sophia, Bulgaria. The chief of the Bulgarian Air Force, Stephan Popov, had asked Pete [Lt. Col Peter Schwarz] and me to go skiing. It is a hard job, but someone has to do it. We flew to Sophia, jumped in a little staff car that I believe was coal-burning, and we drove to the mountains to a place called Borovets. Everyone else in the party skiied, and I survived. We spent a lot of time talking with young pilots that Stephan had brought in to meet me: MiG-21 and MiG-29 pilots. Young men who are getting 30 hours a year. Young men who worship the U.S. Air Force. We have received requests from the Bulgarian Air Force to help them with how you do pilot training, how you train professional noncommissioned officers, and how you build a core of doctrine. General Martin has a team in Bulgaria this week scoping the size of the problem, and the Chief has said he will support us in that effort.

The best Bulgarian MiG-29 pilot, an incredibly gifted young major, asked me for two things. First of all, he would like a floor plan for what a good modern fighter squadron should look like, because their facilities are incredibly decrepit. I said I thought I could provide that. He also asked for anything we could give him that would get him and his young people out of the mindset of flying welded wing and Soviet-type tactics, because he has read in open source on the net a number of publications on how the U.S. Air Force tactically does its business. I will be asking General Martin and General Jumper and General [Lloyd W.] Newton, if indeed there are unclassified phase manuals, some kind of documentation we can provide to the Bulgarian Air Force to help their young people get better.

The Bulgarian Air Force is not alone. Every air force in that part of the world looks to us. We are the goal that they wish to achieve for their air force. The old Nike ad used to say, “they want to be like Mike.” Not this Mike. They want to be like us. We are the ideal, and we have a responsibility there. We can make incredible friendships and have incredible impact and be ready when those nations are needed in coalition operations.

It has been my honor to talk with you this morning. I will be glad to answer questions on Kosovo if you have those sorts of questions, but again, I felt in my one opportunity to address this audience, that our future is more important than our past. Thank you very much.

Q&A Session

General Shaud: What would you recommend to the Air Force in the way it prepares a future air component commander or joint force commander? What can we change?

General Short: I would echo everything that General Jumper had to say. I went to one Blue Flag in my life. I was Jim Record’s [Lt. Gen. James F. Record] chief of staff as we worked a Central European scenario, and the emphasis was on getting the ATO out. I had the chance, as many of you know, to serve as the first J-7 in USACOM [U.S. Atlantic Command]. I came away from that experience with a healthy respect for a program the U.S. Army runs called the Battle Command Training Program, BCTP. It is a series of yearly exercises based on modeling and simulation - this is not a live ex [exercise]. It is modeling and simulation, the Army’s core battle simulation and models that come after it. For every year, Army warriors train. You start out with platoon leaders, and you train as platoon leaders, and company commanders, and battalion X0s [executive officers], and commanders, and division and corps commanders. There are core-level BCTP exercises, where modeling and simulation is used to teach the next generation of leaders how to do their business. It is somewhat narrow. It is force-on-force, and airpower is not given its due in a corps battle simulation. But all those limitations aside, generations of great soldiers in green uniforms have learned how to practice their trade in a BCTP matrix. I believe there is something out there that offers the Air Force that same opportunity. I believe it is Blue Flag-based, and as General Jumper said, it is not about the ATO, it is about a thought process. It is about a Strat AF [Strategic-level Air Force] process. It is about how you bring together a coalition, and it is a repetitive experience for young men and women who will lead us into the future - how to employ and execute airpower. Initially, certainly at the tactical level, but moving to the operational and strategic level. I believe that is something we need to do or, again, as General Jumper has said in a number of forums, we run the risk of continuing to be incredible operators at the tactical level, but not the leaders at the operational or strategic level, where our nation needs us.

General Shaud: Do you see coalition partners specializing — one air-to-air and another transportation, etc.? Would this make it easier to integrate that partnership, or is that impossible for them nationally?

General Short: The question at the very end hits upon the problem. Ideally, NATO would establish transportation and EW [Electronic Warfare] and a tanker equivalent of the NATO AEW [Airborne Early Warning] force. But what that does, it locks each nation into only being able to operate as part of a NATO coalition. Nation X in NATO cannot call upon NATO AEW to support it in a unilateral operation. They have to have their own capability. You and I won’t know for some period of time what direction the European independent defense identity is going. But I will tell you, the men I talked to believe it is dead on arrival because of the resource strain it will place on their nations. There are few nations in NATO right now who are interested in putting any more money into defense. Unfortunately, one of the lessons of Kosovo for a number of our allies was that the U.S. will step up and lead. They will make a minimal contribution, and the U.S. will provide command and control and again leadership, the tools that are needed, and the alliance will get it done. If you are three nations deep away from the threat, it is tough to convince your population that money should be spent on defense. I am absolutely convinced that leaders of every nation in NATO understand their shortcomings. But whether they will be able, as an alliance or as individuals, to address them, remains to be seen.

General Shaud: Comment on how video teleconferencing is affecting command relationships in military campaigns.

General Short: First of all, used properly, video teleconferences [VTCs] are an incredible tool. I am pushing every nation in the southern region to get a VTC capability so that those air commanders I listed for you, and the future Ron Keys, and the men and women that follow him, will be able to talk real time. It offers incredible capability. In this particular instance, I believe it improperly allowed senior leadership to reach down to levels they did not need to be involved in. We had probably one level too many with regard to a coalition or a joint chain, as it was, and frequently levels that should have been involved in decisionmaking, should have been involved at the operational execution level, were bypassed because the video teleconference allowed you to do that. Additionally, as I made reference to General Jumper saying, “Boss, I’ll call you on the hotline,” video teleconference gives you the very real possibility to provide guidance and direction in stream of consciousness, and then not take that direction and guidance back until someone calls you on the hotline. That is not the way we want to send young men and women into harm’s way. We want to do this in a measured fashion and understand how we are doing business. It is a two-edged sword. I use it two or three times a week to talk to [Brig. Gen.] Randy [Gelwix] at the CAOC, to talk to the folks in Pristina and Sarjevo and Scopje. But we try to create an environment where nothing is laid in concrete on a VTC and I am not interfering at a level where I shouldn’t.

General Shaud: We speak to effects-based targeting, which I think is a good concept, a great idea. Did you see that in evidence during your campaign?

General Short: For the most part, we did not. I will tell you General Jumper’s staff -- in the main, because we were restricted from doing detailed NATO planning -- General Jumper’s staff led by [Maj. Gen. William T.] Tom Hobbins and [Col.] Al Peck [director, 32^nd Air Operations Group] and the boss himself, did an absolutely magnificent job of putting together an air campaign that was based on effects-based targeting and explaining to the senior leadership in great detail what we intended to do with air power, the effects we were going to target, the nodal analysis that had gone into our planning for targeting. And, I believe that we put forward on a number of occasions an air plan based on effects-based targeting. We were defeated, quite frankly, by the thought process that all Milosevic needed was a couple of nights of bombing. The idea that NATO was going to demonstrate resolve. I have personally resolved to never use that word in a complete sentence again. The idea that having demonstrated resolve, and Milosevic wasn’t impressed by our resolve, we then transitioned to bombing. An attempt was made by airmen, and I say this with every bit of sincerity that I can, an attempt made by airmen to bring us to effects-based targeting, but unsuccessfully. Driven to a great degree by an appropriate focus on fielded forces. In my JFACC [Joint Forces Air Component Commander] statement of intent, I said that I intended to conduct sustained and parallel operations, as Rebecca [Grant] made reference to. We all understood the moral imperative to attack fielded forces that the Chief has said. But I had forces made available to me that would also strike at Belgrade. We were denied that. The incredible reaction to collateral damage and loss of civilian life, I believe, prevented us from conducting effects-based targeting. But you all need to understand that Admiral Jim Ellis and General John Jumper and myself knew that was the way to do business. We just weren’t able to convey it successfully as we would want.

General Shaud: What is the plan for electronic warfare and its resources?

General Short: All of us in this room know we made a decision - we as a nation, we as a Department of Defense -- to retire the F-111 and place our reliance on the EA-6B. The EA-6B is an incredibly capable system, owned by Marine and Navy, Air Force aviators with extraordinary courage and competence. But you can only turn those airplanes X number of times a day. Those are old jets. They are tough to maintain. Kids that maintain them work their hearts out. But that was the limiting factor. It was how many EA-6B sorties we could generate. We were about to get to the point where I was going to risk forces coming out to Turkey in eastern Serbia without EA-6B escort because we thought the threat would allow us to do that. But the combination of EA-6Bs, COMPASS CALL and the HARM shooters was a key to our ability to operate on top of an IAD [Integrated Air Defense] that we had not killed. We had suppressed it and we had deterred it. But every day the young men and women of the U.S. Air Force, Marine Corps and Navy flew into known threat rings because we knew the SA-6s were there -- not sure exactly where, but we knew they were there because we hadn’t killed them. I also came out of this war as an incredible fan of reactive HARM and not a very big fan of pre-emptive HARM. As Stephan Popov pointed out to me as we were drinking some sort of Bulgarian mixture Saturday night: “You know, Mike, you shot six HARM missiles into my country.” I said, “Stephan, I sure as hell know that I did it. It was a challenge to me to explain to my politicians that you were not targeting us.” The pre-emptive HARM shot, when it opens its eyes, and there is nothing for it to see, takes off like a mad dog. We talked about that on a number of occasions. I found in this conflict, where we were doing our best on a daily basis but there was no need to risk our people without the cover of electronic warfare forces, that we were to some degree limited. I got a call from a good friend in the U.S. Navy about a third of the way into the conflict and he said, “Mike, if you ask for one more EA-6B, we will have to shut down the RTU [Replacement Training Unit] Whidbey Island [Naval Air Station] because we are out of airplanes.” We are all concerned about our future in that area, and I personally have trouble with the statements being made that we could easily have handled a second major theater war. The EA-6s were maxed out in this one. I am not sure what Joe Hurd [Lt. Gen. Joseph E. Hurd, commander, Air Component Command, Korea] would have had to do his job.

General Shaud: What new capabilities would you have liked to have had in Operation Allied Force, and what new systems are most important to our future through your lenses?

General Short: General Jumper hit the nail on the head about the movement of information. The Chief talked about Link 16. The movement of imagery. Real-time targeting. I will share a story. About 45 days into the war, Predator was providing great coverage for us. About 5 o’clock in the afternoon, we had live Predator video of three tanks moving down the road in Serbia and Kosovo. As most of you know, my son is an A-10 pilot, or he was at the time. We had a FAC [Forward Air Controller] overhead and General Clark [Gen. Wesley K. Clark, SACEUR] had the same live Predator video that I had. “Mike, I want you to kill those tanks.” I quickly responded, I had something else in mind, “Boss, I’ll go after that for you.” When shift time came, [Maj. Gen.] Garry Trexler was on the floor, finishing up in the daytime, and Gelwix arrived to take the night shift. I was there because the SACEUR wanted those three tanks killed. We had a weapon school graduate on the phone talking direction to the FAC on the radio. Call went something like this: “A lot of interest in killing those tanks, 421. I’d like you to work on it.” “Roger.” Two or three minutes went by, and 421 clearly had not found those tanks. The young major’s voice went up a bit and said, “ComAirSouth, and SACEUR are real interested in killing those tanks. Have you got them yet?” “Negative.” About two more minutes went by and the weapons school graduate played his last card. “General Short really wants those tanks killed.” And a voice came back that I’ve heard in my house for the better part of 30 years and he said, “God damn it, Dad, I can’t see the f---ing tanks!”

I apologize if I’ve offended. I’d like to move information. I’d like to move pictures. I would like to have had longer dwell time with ISR [Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance] assets. I would like to have had another jamming option. Maybe there is a way to put a jammer on a UAV [Unmanned Aerial Vehicle]. I’d like to have had another way to kill the SA-6 and to do it with targeting GBUs [Glide Bomb Units] or targeting HARM. There are systems out there that -- UAVs -- that take up an orbit and are programmed to attack a system when it comes up. I’d like to have that capability. There is a limit to what we can put resources against, but again, I believe the Chief and General Jumper have focused on that thing which I believe now is the most important to us - moving information, moving imagery and getting to the kids in harm’s way the best possible information to, number one, allow them to survive and, as my former boss said, to kill the target.

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