I just got back from southwest Asia and my first trip through the AOR [Area of Responsibility] as 9^th Air Force commander. I thought I’d go through what is happening there and what is happening in the field, talk a little bit about that, maybe talk about what 9^th Air Force is going to do in the future here with the AOC [Air Operations Center] that General [John P.] Jumper talked about. And also mention a couple of things that are happening with some of our folks.

Back to what General [John] Shaud [executive director, Air Force Association] said a minute ago about allied forces being on TV – if it wouldn’t have been for people like General Short [Lt. Gen. Michael C. Short, commander, Allied Air Forces, Southern Europe], once again--and I know he is embarrassed getting all the accolades today, because I talked to him several times during Allied Force, and he made a point of the fact that he didn’t ever want to be given credit on TV for anything. But the fact of the matter that in this day and age is, if you can’t explain what you are doing on TV and have the right data, we are probably going to lose. I appreciate all that. The people at the CAOC [Combined Air Operations Center] made a point of the fact that every day they would have to give us updated data. We can’t avoid that anymore. It is a fact of life, and in the future we need to get ahead of it early on.

SLIDE 1 The AOR itself is real big, and there is a lot of action going on there, just as there is at other places. The reason I point this out is that with the ops [operations] tempo of the force today, and what is happening with AEF [Aerospace Expeditionary Force], it is probably more important today than ever that we do get into a cycle where our people are spending more time at home than they were before, because this type of thing is not going to end. In the AOR on my trip through and in places like the UAE [United Arab Emirates], they talk about having 20 more years of oil reserves left. Twenty years sounds like a lot to us, but that is not very much. They are living a fairly high standard of living, and after this 20 years of oil is depleted, they are going to have a lot of social unrest in that area, and this is not going to go away.

On the other hand, Saudi Arabia told me while I was there that they have 250 years’ worth of oil reserves. People are looking for that. The fact of the matter is, that is very valuable. People are looking to the east to Iran, rather than Iraq necessarily, although Iraq stays as the biggest threat we have there right now day to day. But Iran is what is bothering people in the Middle East a lot. Our alliance with them will be even more important in the future. If you look at the AOR itself, three more nations just came into our AOR for me: Kurdistan, Uzbekistan and Khazakstan. Also, there are 25 countries there,and 65 percent of the world’s oil reserves are in that area. It will not go away. In the future, we need to start thinking of ourselves as almost a permanent presence in a semi-permanent way.

SLIDE 2 Our coalition continues on. The interesting thing about this slide is that, really, only the Brits continue to fly with us on a day-to-day basis. I went through Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Oman and into Kuwait. And in Kuwait itself, the force is forward at Ali Al Saleem. We are in a situation, our U.S. forces that have the [AN/] TPS-75 radar which gives us the air picture that General Jumper talked a little bit about earlier, the real-time air picture. Those folks are out there in a fire-base type situation that reminded me a lot of Vietnam. I haven’t seen anything like it since. They are 39 miles from the Iraqi border. They are almost within visual range of the border itself – U.S. Air Force men and women out in the combat-type situation. As I said, I was in Vietnam, I spent time at a fire base, and I haven’t seen anything since then that looked like this. In fact, our people are out in conditions that replicate exactly what we had in Vietnam, although they have great command and control capability and they have great electronic capability to see the air picture. From that point on, though, you can go back to Vietnam. Our airmen out on the front lines are doing work that a lot of people don’t associate with the Air Force. Many times people associate us with flying airplanes and going back to pretty hotels like this. Let me tell you, they are living in some pretty austere conditions. But, the good news is, they have great morale. All through the AOR, no matter where I went, the morale was high. I went to Al Dhafra to see the KC-10 deployment – that was four KC-10s that mainly refueled the aircraft carrier out of the Gulf. I talked to General [Charles T.] Robertson [commander, Air Mobility Command] about it a minute ago. I talked to Woody Hogel [Lt. Gen. Walter S. Hogle, Jr.] out at 15^th Air Force after I saw these folks there. This is a group of active duty and reserve officers and enlisted folks, men and women, in Al Dhafra.

When I got there, they were standing in formation for me to say, “Hi,” which I didn’t expect. I was shocked to see, first of all, the morale and the standard that these folks were setting in that area. They looked like a bunch of Marines. I was impressed as hell. I called Woody Hogel up and said, “Woody, I saw a bunch of KC-10 guys that looked like a bunch of Marines out there, and you’ve got them. They are fired up.”

We hear a lot about how morale is down sometimes because of the ops tempo. I didn’t see one person during that trip who wasn’t anything but positive. A lot of that has to do with the fact that they know people in the Air Force – the Chief, the Secretary, the rest of the senior leadership – are doing things that are going to change our way of life; things that are more than just rhetoric. In the past, and I know when the AEF first was thought of or designed – as a matter of fact, it was exactly two years ago this week on the elevator out here at the top of the staircase, when the secretary was here at the time. Where Joe Worley, myself and Larry Northington [Maj. Gen. Larry W. Northington] with a few other folks, we were just told we have to make an AEF. Fact of the matter is, from that point, after two years, the AEF is in existence, people in the Air Force today believe that things are being done to make their life better. They aren’t talking about quality of life, as General Jumper obviously alluded to earlier.

We are talking about quality of life where our equipment works, where they can trust the fact that they are going to have a schedule where they are going to have new equipment that is state of the art with what is happening, and that there are people in the Air Force who are going to actually deliver on their promises. That means a lot. When you go out in the field, you usually get a real sense of what people are actually thinking. These young folks sincerely believe the U.S. Air Force is going to deliver on its promises. That is a really big change. That will do a lot for retention for us.

If you look back at the alliance itself, at PSAB [Prince Sultan Air Base], Chuck Simpson [Maj. Gen. Charles N. Simpson, commander, 363^rd Air Expeditionary Wing], who was just promoted last week to two stars, is doing one great job. For those who have never been there, force protection in the AOR is at a peak. You can never have enough, but the fact of the matter is people at Prince Sultan are actually living in a prison, if you’ve ever been there before. They are in a prison from the outside. The conditions at Prince Sultan are outstanding for living conditions. Morale there was sky high, across the board. There were Guard, Reserve active duty people there. You couldn’t tell who was whom. They all looked exactly the same, acted the same. They had the same attitudes. They were working side by side. It was extremely impressive. My feeling would be, after seeing this, from being away from it for a couple years, that you go out in the field and you see the things that are being institutionalized by our leadership, it is actually catching on, it is taking hold, and I think that will be one of the biggest things that happens concerning our retention and morale.

The British are the only ones that--right now, today, in the Gulf--are actually participating from an air perspective with us. The French are out there at PSAB. They are not flying air missions due to politics. Their pilots are frustrated because they can’t fly combat, but they are there. So it is really a U.S. and British coalition flying most of the air part. From the naval side, the maritime air ops, some of the other nations are helping. We have a New Zealand downshaking on the boats with our folks. It is a coalition. It is important to remember. The big thing is, the Gulf state allies have come to the conclusion because of things like Kosovo, that unless they become inter-operable with us, they will become ineffective. Just as some of the problems with our NATO allies, they have come to realize that without interoperability, they marginalize their capabilities. The good news is they will be looking for capabilities to work with the U.S. That is good for a lot of us in Europe for a lot of reasons, but mainly from an operational perspective. We can start having some of their aircraft join us in the fray if we need to.

Since Desert Storm, a quarter million sorties flown. If you hear General Short’s speech, he’ll talk about 32,000 sorties, which is phenomenal. No losses. Knock on wood. Two hundred fifty thousand sorties here and no losses as well. That is a very big concern with a lot of people. When is the inevitable going to happen? We hope never. But politically that is very sensitive. I can tell you this: There is nobody over there that is reluctant to fly the mission. They know exactly what they are doing on a day-in and day-out basis. I will talk a little bit about what happened about a week ago.

SLIDE 3 I talked to General Zinni [Anthony C. Zinni, USMC, CINC, U.S. Central Command] this morning at Tampa and gave him a briefing on the readiness of 9^th Air Force, and the readiness of 9^th Air Force is in great shape in a lot of ways, although as you all know, we could use some new spare parts and a few things that are coming down the pike. In general, we can do our mission in a great way. Part of the readiness briefing is, how are you doing on training? All of our training is in the green. One of the ironies is that this ops tempo and the fact that we’ve been deployed overseas so much--obviously, continuously for 10 years--has given us the ability to train for the mission that we never had before.

We have people out there at PSAB or other places doing what we would consider the combat mission on a day-to-day basis that we have trained up, and we have an experienced cadre now that 10 years ago was waning to the point where we had very few people out there who had any combat experience. They are forces fully combat ready and we have a high percentage of those folks who actually experienced combat. If you look at this, since 1991--April 6, 1991 is when we actually started flying over Iraq, before Southern Watch and Northern Watch, a thing called Provide Comfort. I talked with General Zinni today. One of the issues will be, over the next few years, will be whether or not we maintain the same force level we have in the Gulf as we have today. Some of that will be dependent upon the carrier presence. That is being debated as we speak. General Zinni understands and has high faith in the Air Force to be able to respond rapidly from CONUS without having to move forces into place, for example, with carriers not present, which in the past, we’ve had to always back fill with other forces. He is confident of that, based on the fact that he’s seen and had the Air Force prove to him day in and day out that we can do the mission. Kosovo was not an insignificant part of that. General Zinni is sensitive to the ops tempo. He feels comfortable we can operate from home station and deploy rapidly if we need to. He is confident that our B-2 will work. He has seen that before, and it gives us a great capability to augment world wide from back in CONUS. He has a lot of confidence in that.

I was sitting with him today talking in his office, and General Zinni kind of challenged me as to why people do not understand we need the F-22. This is a CINC [commander-in-chief] asking. He was being rhetorical, obviously. But he said, “I can’t understand it. I get briefings all the time. I got one yesterday on the new capability of aircraft coming on board, and I cannot understand why people have any question why we need the F-22.” That was unsolicited from a CINC. There are warfighters out there that understand. There are other people who don’t always have such a clear picture. But General Zinni is very clear on that.

SLIDE 4 Since Operation Desert Fox last year, we have flown 30,000 sorties and had over 500 times where they either fired at us AAA [anti-aircraft artillery] or had a radar light us up. A little over two years ago when General [Michael] Ryan became the chief [of staff of the Air Force], I was in the Pentagon doing staff work, and I’d sit in his staff meetings in the morning to get the daily intel brief Tuesday and Thursday, and you would see things that were happening in Southern Watch, and they’d report that a pilot had been shot at and we didn’t respond. To me, that was one of the biggest reasons, besides op tempo, we had a retention problem back a couple years ago. There were many pilots who were going to Southwest Asia or other places - and it happened in Bosnia for awhile early on - and they were flying missions without the ability to actually retaliate when somebody shot at them. I can’t think of anything worse for a pilot to have happen to him. It makes you cynical. You quit believing in the mission and you start denying whether your leadership really is supporting you. It had nothing to do with any individual. It was a policy problem. General Ryan started fighting hard for the fact that if we are going to get shot at out there and fly missions, we need to have the ability to retaliate back. Desert Fox occurred, and since that time we have had the ability to retaliate back.

Last week, on the 19^th [of February] when I was at PSAB and then up to Eskan Village at the CAOC , we were able to retaliate back for a violation by the Iraqis. There is about a 20-25 percent reduction in the IADs [Integrated Air Defense System] in Iraq right now, which equates to about the first three to four days of the air campaign if we had to go back and do a Desert Storm. That is a good thing, and the young folks understand that. They equate that to leadership at the senior level and policy that works for them. It is a good thing for all of us. If you look at the number of munitions expended, it is ironic, and we all know this. But we get used to the fact that this goes on day in and day out. One of the real problems is an understanding of what we are really doing in the Gulf. I am not a policy guy, I won’t start to be that way. But from a mission standpoint, it is working. Saddam [Hussein] has basically been cleared out of most of south of the 32 line and north of the 36 [degrees North latitude] line as well, by the Northern Watch guys. That is a good thing. The policy is working. I would say it is airpower at its best. I don’t know what you call it. General Link [Maj. Gen. Charles D. Link] is here. He can put a name to it, but airpower is what is making that policy work in the Gulf today. We should all be darn proud of that.

SLIDE 5 I am going to show you a couple of shots from the 19^th. This is an F-16, last week on the 19^th of February against (unintelligible) early warning. This is over Iraq, and it is above 15,000 feet. For the pundits out there who think that is not safe - the beauty of this is you get instantaneous feedback of the BDA [Battle Damage Assessment]. You know what happened on the mission. This is five, six days ago. These are your folks in action, the U.S. Air Force using equipment that is the best in the world, doing the job, and sometimes we become complacent about that. We forget.

SLIDE 6 Next is our British friend, the Tornado. Once again, this is against a 57-millimeter radar-controlled gun. It is just your standard day at Southern Watch. We forget this is going on and that we have Air Force people in places like PSAB and places like Kuwait and Oman and Al Dhafra who in this mission just are doing it as a routine.

SLIDE 7 Command and control. General Jumper mentioned the AOC as a weapon system. I couldn’t agree more. It is high time for the Air Force, and I know the chief agreed with that, that we start training people up as weapon system operators in the AOC. That doesn’t mean that is all you are going to do in your life, but that means you are capable of doing that particular mission at that time. What we plan to do with the CAOC at Eskon Village is move them into PSAB, about 45 minutes south of Riyadh. Build a world-class CAOC from the ground up, using all the systems that we’ve learned from people like General Short and when General Ryan was the Air South commander and at other places like that which actually tested this equipment, put it together and band-aided this thing. It has turned out to be pretty sophisticated. But it has been band-aided in the past. We have as much expertise as we can and actually build a world-class CAOC. The next step we have to take is have the right people manning our numbered Air Forces that can actually man the AOC at the right manpower to make sure we can fight as a numbered Air Force, and my vision would be that we actually rotate those people from the numbered Air Force to the AOC as a CAOC and maintain that over time.

One of the things we will be working on is TBMCS [Tactical Battle Management Core Systems]. Next year I am going to Blue Flag for eight days. I’ve learned my lesson. That is a great point General Jumper had. By the way, I have had a hernia. I am in good shape. My guts are still in. I plan to go to Blue Flag and learn how to fight this team I have, and we’ll have a lot of the toys that have been developed by the exercises like JEFX [Joint Expeditionary Forces Exercise] that we plan to execute with that equipment. One of the bad news stories is that TBMCS is not ready yet. We’ll still use CTAPS [Contingency Theater Automated Planning System]. From what I understand, TBMCS is pretty close, and we will probably start using that in the next few months. At least test it.

I feel that once we get TBMCS, what I want to do at 9^th Air Force is have all of the wings use TBMCS on a daily basis to do their scheduling, because it is a proficiency issue. It is like flying airplanes--if you don’t do it, you are not going to be able to it very well without some training in combat. We plan to do that as a combat and control capability in 9^th Air Force and set it up in the new CAOC and then go from there. I feel very good about the move to PSAB and once again, for those that haven’t been there, it is about seven miles from the base itself to the actual gate of the Saudi air base. You are out in the middle of nowhere. From a force protection standpoint, I can’t imagine anything better. It is the best force protection in the world. Knock on wood. You can’t get too much, but they have got it right.

The Air Force knows how to do force protection. They know how to deploy. They know how to do AEF. They know how to fight. They know how to pick up and go. They know how to be light, lean and lethal. At PSAB, the lead unit there is Elmendorf Air Base. I went into the clinic at PSAB. It is great for what it needs to be. Every person in there, except for just a couple who were from Elmendorf, was an AEF team. They were fired up. I was impressed as hell. We went into the living areas with folks, and many of those folks were from Elmendorf. Many of the cops were from the same base. They felt like a team. They felt like they were getting a bond with each other. They were proud to be there. They also knew when they went home that they were going to be home for about a year or more. As a matter of fact, most of them would be home for more than a year. If you really get lucky on one of these cycles, you may go 90 days in three years. I firmly believe over time that what is going to happen is we are going to have people wanting to go TDY, begging to go TDY almost because they are going to miss it. There are people over there right now from the Guard and Reserve that say they are having the best time of their lives and not from a standpoint of frivolous time. They are so proud of what they are doing, it is incredible. You cannot tell a Guardsman from an active duty person one bit. They are outstanding people and have really done a great job. One of the things--General Zinni agreed with this, too.

The Chief does, and if he doesn’t he’ll slap me around later, but--is the capability for our B-2s - and General Short is attuned to what is probably the most important thing that happened in Kosovo - that we actually demonstrated our vision of the future. And that is global capability with the B-2s. General Zinni has high confidence in that. What I want to be able to do back in 9^th Air Force is be able to control the B-2s forward, at least get them going in that direction and then hand them off with real-time command and control and have the ability for General Zinni or the CINC, whomever that may be at the time, to have these B-2s augment our force forward with, in the future, up to 84 500-pounders, we hope, on a B-2. You pick six B-2s with 84 bombs each and we are talking about a giant force of aircraft from the get-go out there. We want to be able to control those from the states. That then will give us the ability not to have a bunch of forces move over every time a carrier leaves the Gulf, for example. We want to be able to do that from 9^th Air Force. With help from General Jumper, we hope, in addition to the Chief, we will be able to do that and be able to command and control those forces forward. SLIDE 8

AEF, on call forces as well. With GCCS [Global Command and Control Systems], units back home can actually see the air picture, and, in the future, we hope the [Air Tasking Order] from their squadron. They can see what the spins are every day, what the ATO is every day, what the target list every day is. They can actually participate in the mission from home station and keep their head in the ballgame so when they actually arrive in theater, the only thing they have to do is get 24 hours of sleep and they are ready to go, just as if they had been there the whole time. We need to be able to do that in the future. I think we can and people will be ready for that.

Space and IO [Information Operations]. The Chief talked a lot about that. Without that, none of this would be possible. Space and IO are working right now at PSAB. I was sitting at the CAOC and they had had a U-2 fly out earlier in the day to try to find one of the weapon systems. Sure enough, it did. In that afternoon, about an hour and a half before they actually determined this, the aircraft launched and went to bomb that target. That is pretty close to what the Chief is looking for. We need to get down to minutes. Today we are within an hour and a half of finding something and actually having bombs on target. That is pretty darn impressive.

Ten years ago, during Desert Storm, which most of us still use as a paradigm, 9 percent of the bombs were precision that were dropped. Two percent of the aircraft hit about 90 percent of the strategic targets, the F-117. We still live with that. We think we are there. We are so far beyond that today because of things like what has happened with the Chief and other folks from a leadership perspective where they have actually equipped us with the capability to do things that 10 years ago seemed like “gee whiz.” Today is it commonplace. We will not drop any bombs in Southern Watch, as we speak, that aren’t precision today. None. Zero.

If you look at the aircraft, with B-1B, with JDAM [Joint Direct Attack Munition] and JSOW [Joint Standoff Weapon], you give yourself the capability with that and the B-2 to do what in the past would have been one full-day’s worth of mission with a handful of aircraft from the get-go -- if you have the right kind of targeting out there, which people are working on, which is becoming a little more accepted. But we have a long way to go with some of our sister-service folks. They can understand this, but you start using that type of targeting with the aircraft we have today and from home base you can make the same effect as you would if you had several squadrons forward deployed for a long period of time. We need to continue to work in that area in space, and IO will do that.

For the Blue Flag exercise next week, we will have 825 people there, we will have 85 allies from different countries. Saudi Arabia is sending 22 alone. We have a space and IO capability there. We will have space folks there, five of those. We’ve got one of the deputy commanders to actually participate to make sure that part is working. We also have an IO campaign, and they have already developed the IO ATO for this Blue Flag exercise, which is pretty sophisticated. This part is not classified, but they have a two-week plan for information operations that will be folded right into the air tasking order that will start working our information operations capability during the campaign. There are actually people out there doing that as a living today. At Shaw Air Force Base, the AIA [Air Force Intelligence Agency] folks in San Antonio have given me a 30-person unit of information operators who actually know how to deploy this kind of capability.

The Air Force is way ahead in that front. It is a vision of people who understand how that works, which actually came to maturity in the middle of Kosovo. General Short can talk about this with authority, but in Kosovo, our information campaign didn’t start until about half way through. Part of the problem was, we had people like Orville Wright [Brig. Gen. Bruce A. Wright], doing a great a job up there as a team of one in the Joint Staff. He should be given great credit for bringing IO out of the closet. But there was a lot of sensitivity because of the uncertainty of information operations, because of legality, because of our American ethos of freedom of speech and not being intrusive on people, that people just didn’t understand where the safeguards were. They understand that now. The future of this will make a difference. I contend that in the future, with all our capability, if we do it right and we are able to unleash our capability, then one of the biggest problems we are going to have is making sure the enemy knows how bad off he has it. We are going to actually have to tell him, because he won’t be able to figure it out himself.

SLIDE 9 General Jumper showed this a little bit and the Chief, too. This is not a pipe dream; we can do this today. We will. This will give us the capability to meet the vision the Chief has on global vision with reach and vigilance.

Interoperability with our partners. I talked about that a lot but I have to pay a lot of attention to it myself. We have to do it with our allies. They have to understand that they have to at least have the ability to get the data from us. They have to have the same kind of radios that we use. They have to be able to - probably Link 16 will be the key for most of them - they have to understand that. If we go out to talk to our partners about the equipment they are going to buy with their F-16 Block 60 or whatever aircraft it is, they need to realize that whatever they buy, they have to have the capability to get the same data we do. Otherwise, they are out of the fight. All of us need to make a point of that with all of our allies as well as our sister service folks.

Early warning. That is not insignificant as well. When you talk about theater missile defense, the same thing applies. They need to start realizing that the only way for this to work is as a team effort. If you look at some of the countries which we just reviewed today with General Zinni, in one country that will remain nameless, they have 425 fighters and 7 types of fighters in that one country. That is a logistics nightmare. What they need to do is spend more money on interoperability and less money on a whole bunch of toys like that. We need to help them along in trying to help them understand that.

Desert Shift is where we moved the CAOC from Eskan Village down to PSAB. It is an ops tempo issue. It will decrease the number of people because of economy of scale. It will start the fighting right there at PSAB itself. That will happen. The Saudis have already agreed with that. It should happen over the next few months. We are real excited about that.

SLIDE 10 The good thing about the CAOC and PSAB is we are going to have the Royal Saudi Air Force in the CAOC right there with us as partners. We need to do that as well. I saw General Short shaking his head. We as an Air Force need to make sure we get all of our partners into the CAOC with us. At Blue Flag this time, we will have a full BCD [Battlefield Coordination Detachment], we will have a full DOCC [Deep Operations Coordination Cell]. We will have the AADC [Area Air Defense Commander] as they did in Kosovo as well. We need to bring them in early and make them understand they are partners with us. There is work to be done on release of information. We can do that. But in the long run, it will serve us well. We will do that with the Saudi air force.

SLIDE 11 That is a run around the AOR, but I want to say, once again, the vision of the AEF is working. There was some skittishness about this next one coming up because it is going to be a big changeover. At the CAOC itself, there will be a full turnover. The people at the CAOC are a lot more worried than people who are not at the CAOC. Ironically, because you get used to fighting weapon systems. But the CINC is confident it will work. If you go out to the field and see the folks as I did the other day, you would be shocked at the high level of morale we have. We hear that it must be tough living in Saudi Arabia. We have a lot of ops tempo. It is outstanding. I talked to General Eberhart [Gen. Ralph E. Eberhart] about this the other day. What has happened is the Air Force has turned the corner here on a lot of problems. It is time for all of us to start emphasizing the positive. The folks in the field are saying that and they appreciate that as well. Thank you very much.

Q&A Session

General Shaud: Chuck, plenty of questions for you. First one. Given your experience in Bosnia and then observing Kosovo, how do you rate the evolution of the air operations center from what you experienced and what you saw happen during Kosovo?

Lt. Gen. Wald: To tell you the truth, my first experience was in Vicenza in 1994 and General Ryan actually came down in the fall of 1994, as the Air South commander. We were in a room that was probably 15 by 30 feet. That was the full CAOC. We had about 10 ground radios and 8 TV screens. We had an air picture and an air command and control radio and a ground radio. We had General Bear Chambers’ [Maj.Gen. James E. Chambers, Commander, 17th Air Force] desk in the corner, and that was the CAOC. That was five year ago. Since then, when General Ryan showed up as Air South and subsequently with General Short and other folks there, the CAOC at Vicenza really is a prototype if you look at it. We have a lot of people trained to do that type of work but we don’t have them trained necessarily as a team. They come and go. They do real well while they are there, but we’ve lost the expertise. The actual technical part of the CAOC is there. We’ve got the basic design for that. Now, as General Jumper says, we need to start training our people as an AOC-type group of folks. We’ve got TBMCS and some of these other systems. It will be important for us to make sure people understand exactly the capability of those systems. We are not really scratching the surface on some of the capability that we have. One of the areas that will be very critical will be at Blue Flag - flexible time-critical targeting that they used at Kosovo. The model they used in Kosovo is the model they use doctrinally now but we have a ways to go with that. That will be one of the areas we need to work on.

General Shaud: Next question has to do with you heading for Blue Flag. Prior to Kosovo - where I am going with this has to do with the use of models when you work at the operational level. Prior to Kosovo, the effectiveness values for aerospace power and joint planning models did not seem to reflect actual capabilities. Has the effectiveness that came from Kosovo affected these models, and do you think this will be influential in your training?

Lt. Gen. Wald: I don’t think we’ve gotten there yet. It is a very frustrating thing for airmen or other people who know their weapon systems can do better than the model is giving them credit for. I’ll give you an example that this week actually happened: we had a list of capabilities I was giving that an AEF force could do and number of bombs it could drop. What happened was, they were using data from 10 years ago. This is today. They didn’t give any credit for the fact that JDAM and JSOW were in the inventory. We have well-meaning people today in operational positions that still don’t have the correct data. We have to at least get the data right. Things are happening so fast, moving so fast, that sometimes even the most rudimentary data is wrong. Then you can imagine that on a system like TacWar or something like that, which takes a long time to build the software for, the data bases are very hard to keep up to speed. If we could get the data base itself correct, we may still have some document battles to fight, but at least we start getting credit for tactical weapons we have or the capabilities they have.

General Shaud: Having faced the media for extensive periods, personally what was your greatest challenge and how would you grade the media in their coverage of Kosovo?

Lt. Gen. Wald: Here is the way I think about the whole thing. It was a volunteer effort. It was a great experience. I have a high respect for the media after that. I spent a lot of time with them away from the camera afterwards. There were geniune people who care about the military. They ask some crazy questions some times. It is not because they are malicious. It is because they are really trying, and maybe they don’t understand the way they should. We as an Air Force probably have learned some lessons from that. I think we as a government and we as a military need to know that early on. As a matter of fact, I heard from the Israelis afterwards. They called me and said they had decided to do TV in Israel because of that. Because people understand the data is available and they expect to have, first of all, some knowledge of what their people are doing. Number two is, they expect it to be real time. There are expectations there. In Kosovo, we started late. In fact, it seems like we started at the beginning, but we actually started a week after it started, on the TV. Milosevic [Slobodan Milosevic, president of Yugoslavia] was always ahead of us on collateral damage. We never caught up. We need to do better on that. It was frustrating for General Short to be listening to the TV and hear Milosevic out there telling in his own words what happened - most of it lies - where he would actually be fast enough, ahead of it, believe it or not, sophisticated enough, where he would film an event and have another event similar to it spliced together to make it look like one event. This guy was smart, and he was way ahead of us. And, frankly, I think we failed on it. We didn’t do as well as we should have. We showed we didn’t really serve General Short as well as we should have. The lesson is, we’ve got to start with that early. We’ve got to have people understand that it is not some crazy thing that is just a bunch of blah-blah-fluffy by a bunch of politicians out there who want to be on TV and make themselves look good politically. This is important from the warfighter’s standpoint. We need to be ahead of it.

General Shaud: Looking back to Desert Fox, how successful has Iraq been at rebuilding its air defenses?

Lt. Gen. Wald: Not very, over the last year. Twenty percent of his air defenses in the south have been pretty much destroyed. Up north, he’s got a darn robust system. From an integrated standpoint, he is pretty much hurting. I don’t think he has done as well as maybe some people think he has over the last few months.

General Shaud: Last question has to do with your mission at 9^th Air Force with regard to CENTCOM [Central Command]. How has this changed with the implementation of an Expeditionary Aerospace Force? Have you noticed the impact of AEFs as you have worked your mission with the CINC?

Lt. Gen. Wald: I have. I mentioned earlier that I didn’t think it would catch on as soon. There is a lot of concern over AEF, and the Chief talked about this earlier, because it is really the first one where you’ve got a lot of folks all coming over at one time, and there is an anxiety. There is no doubt in my mind that it is going to work great. It is ironic to me that the number of people that we have sent out there, they get there and then two days after they are there, they are up to speed. It is going to work. I will give you a vivid example. Eglin Air Force Base, the F-15 fleet. F-15s are in high demand for defensive counter air, for all the missions we are flying, whether it be Northern or Southern Watch, Kosovo, Bosnia - it doesn’t matter, you have got to have air superiority and the F-15s are out there doing havoc for high value assets. Eglin is one of the two main F-15 units in 9th Air Force. Eglin Air Force Base is not going to go TDY [Temporary Duty] to a contingency all year. They are going to go to Red Flag, which is good, and do some weapons support. They do not have a TDY to Southern Watch, Northern Watch, Kosovo or Bosnia for a year. That is what the AEF has freed up. They are almost getting kind of antsy out there because they are not going some place. It is working, so I am impressed.

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