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Dr. O'Hanlon: It's a real privilege to be here.

What I wanted to do today and what we were asked to do on this panel was raise some broader strategic questions which are the kind of things we should be thinking about in the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) process this year, and which are always important, even at a time when we're so preoccupied with the current military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. So it's a special honor for me to be able to speak to you at a time of war when you and your colleagues and comrades are doing so much for all of our security, but I also want to now look beyond the current conflicts to try to put on the table a few scenarios that of course I—like I'm sure all of you—hope never come to pass, but that militarily I think we need to prepare for.

None of them, in my judgment, are more outlandish than the idea would have been four or five years ago that we'd be fighting to overthrow a regime in Afghanistan. So one thing we all know in this business, and I've heard many of you say it over the years, is how important is to predict or plan for the unpredictable, and that's a little bit of the spirit of my remarks today.

I'm going to try to be quick. I realize when you talk about future scenarios and conflict possibilities you risk coming across as sort of a Tom Clancy without the talent. I don't want to try to do that. I want to just put a couple of specific ideas on the table.

The overall theme of my remarks really is the need for balance in force planning. It's easy for think tank people—and I know a bunch of us have done it—to say the service budget shares have stayed the same for 30 years and that must be a bad thing because it reflects bureaucratic inertia and secretaries of defense just caving into the services. They don't want to offend one over the other so they just more or less preserve what's been the norm. There may be some validity to that point at times, but overall I would have to say when you go through this list of scenarios I'm going to present to you, I see a pretty strong case for more or less maintenance of the current budget shares. It's not to say we don't need a bit of tweaking. I think the Army does need to be larger right now. I think we're asking too much of the Army in particular. We're asking a lot of all of you, but I think we're asking way too much of the Army.

Having said that, as Army Chief of Staff General Peter J. Schoomaker frequently emphasizes, it's hard to recruit a bigger Army today, even if you want one. Therefore, even that argument is not really going to lead me to a strong advocacy for a reallocation of Pentagon budget shares.

But enough of my bureaucratic apology for the way the Pentagon works. Let me now put a few contingencies on the table. I'll look forward to the discussion with you later.

I've tried to analyze these in a little more detail in my latest Brookings Institution study, but really I've just sketched them out because they're all meant to be illustrative more than concrete, more than the sort of thing that you folks often plan for or engage in, with one or two exceptions. One or two of these will be familiar to you.

What I want to do is a big clockwise sweep of Eurasia. I think most of the plausible future scenarios that we will face of major difficulty would probably be in Eurasia, broadly defined. I don't mean to rule out certain other possibilities, a major counter-insurgency or counter-drug operation in Colombia, for example, perhaps in conjunction with that government; a major stability operation in an African state like Congo or Angola. I believe these are plausible. But I also think if you do the clockwise tour of Eurasia you can sort of capture the realm of plausible contingencies or at least the broad range of types of fighting we might have to face in the future.

I said a minute ago I was going to focus primarily on scenarios that I do think require some attention, but let me begin very quickly, just so you don't think I'm trying to invent stuff, to justify a $600-billion-a-year defense budget. Let me mention three that I do not think we should plan for because they're in the category of either just too hard, just too symmetric in the kind of response one would envision militarily, just not very plausible, or not directly engaging major American interests on a sufficient scale for the difficulty of the mission.

One of them would be a Russia scenario where, even more chauvinistic and confident than we typically imagine Russian President Vladmir Putin on his worst days, he decides to reassert Russia’s authority in the Baltic states or to protect a minority Russian population, for example. I do not think Russia is very likely to do this, but even if they do it, I don't think we should get into the business, despite our Article 5 commitment to the Baltic states, of responding in a directly symmetric way. Many of you may disagree. My co-panelist may disagree in a moment, I don't know, but I would suggest that this is not a scenario for planning because there are better ways to respond to that one if it happens than a symmetric response. And frankly, as much as our Article 5 commitment would require some kind of major American response, it does not have to be a symmetrical one. I think there are other ways—naval blockade, for example, or major economic sanctions—that might be more appropriate to the kind of stakes. But I don't think that scenario is very plausible any way.

Nor do I believe that a Chinese invasion of Siberia to take it from Russia is very plausible either. I know there have been some folks at the Pentagon who have imagined a future hegemonic China in need of resources, in need of perhaps more farmland. Twenty years from now perhaps global warming has made Siberia the most hospitable, temperate climate on earth. It looks awfully good for growing grain. There are only a few million Russians in the whole expanse, meaning that Russia's historical claim to it is not so overwhelmingly obvious, and maybe China can find a way to justify in its own eyes and the eyes of some of the international community the idea that this land should be its to control. Maybe they use the idea that Chinese populations which have moved into Siberia over the years have been put at risk in some way. That old-fashioned argument about protecting your own, and use that as a justification for invasion.

Again, this is an easy scenario to imagine. It's not totally out of the question if you think that China may behave the way hegemonic powers often have in the past, but I don't think that frankly it would engage American interest directly enough to justify a 30-division response. If we're going to respond to that invasion, which again I don't think likely, I think the more appropriate responses are asymmetric. Either some kind of air and naval response or perhaps a strictly economic response. But again, that's one more I would not plan against.

The third that I want to not plan against before I get to the eight or ten that I will, is a Chinese invasion of a reunified Korea. I think China would have a hard time on historical and ethnic grounds finding an excuse to ever carry out this sort of an attack. I also think China benefits much more from vigorous trade with Korea. And if there were a future dispute, it would more likely be over sea bed resources and fisheries and ocean mineral and petroleum assets, rather than the land of the very small Korean peninsula.

So those are three that I would not spend a lot of time planning for, but I would of course, as we already are, plan for a wide range of Korea contingencies given the current political alignment with the possibility of North Korean attack, North Korean nuclear aggression of one kind or another, or North Korean collapse. Clearly that's nothing provocative. We have a treaty commitment to South Korea. We all know this is one possible scenario.

Moving downward, we've given a lot of thought to Korea already. We have not given nearly as much to Taiwan. We all know that politically speaking we have a quasi-commitment to Taiwan security, but we haven't, until the last few years, been reminded of that in a vivid way. Of course the mid '90s led to some problems between China and Taiwan which could again occur.

My overall impression is we have to do a better job within the military and defense community of planning for this contingency because first of all, it really could happen. Secondly, if it does happen the stakes are enormous—the first major war between nuclear powers in the history of the planet with the possibility of nuclear escalation at least as a remote, worst case scenario.

Third, my impression from unclassified tidbits I see and hear now and again is that our overall Pacific Command plan for taking on China over a Taiwan contingency is a little bit too blindlessly escalatory—too much prone towards quick attacks on the Chinese mainland which I think could raise the risk of nuclear escalation more severely than we would want. So I think this scenario requires more serious scrutiny. I've been trying to give some more thought in a book project I'm now undertaking with my colleague Richard Bush to various kinds of Taiwan contingencies and how to best respond.

Now moving quickly to the next part of the world, Indonesia. Indonesia could present at least two kinds of military challenges for the United States. One of them, of course, would be some kind of a terrorist group closing the Straits of Malacca or other parts of the Indonesian straits vicinities—this whole general part of the world in which we send so much of the world's shipping—and I think there's a distinct possibility that we could run into problems much worse than the piracy that we've seen in this part of the world in the last couple of decades. My guess is that it would be a relatively straightforward matter to open up the straits and/or sail around them, but nonetheless this is a real worry in an era of Al Qaeda.

Maybe an even more serious worry is the possibility of major instability in part of the Indonesian archipelago that Indonesia itself has difficulty controlling in a way that would be stabilizing over the long term. Maybe Indonesia will even ask for international help or international help will seem necessary as part of some peace agreement that would occur between the Indonesian government and whatever rebel group might have been involved in a secessionist activity. There could be a terrorist link to any such rebel group as well. We could have a strong interest in making sure that Indonesia, which right now of course is a relatively stable, relatively moderate Muslim country, stays that way and in fact gets on an even better trajectory towards a more stable and prosperous and moderate future. So I think we would have to take very seriously any kind of major instability in Indonesia that might lead to an international response of some kind.

I've gone through just three or four scenarios so far. They have a wide range of requirements in force planning terms. Clearly the Taiwan contingency would be very Navy-centric, although the Air Force could clearly play an extremely important role out of Okinawa and Guam and perhaps other facilities in the region as well. The Indonesia scenarios are more naval or ground force. The Korea scenario is obviously an air/ground fight, sort of the old fashioned variety in which the Air Force would certainly play a huge role. So just as a very rough first approximation to these three or four scenarios, I don't see a strong case to lead me to be predisposed towards one major service over another looking at just these three or four, and I'm not even done yet because now I want to sweep a little bit westward and talk about South Asia and the Middle East.

In South Asia I see two major types of scenarios that could be of concern, probably both with a greater focus on ground forces than air, although it's hard to know, obviously, in advance.

One of them is an Indo-Pakistani war. However unlikely that may seem today, let's recall they've already had four in the modern era. This would be a scenario in which Kashmir is again the spark point, and in which perhaps the nuclear option is invoked or threatened by at least one of the two parties.

Under these circumstances, if a nuclear weapon is actually used, or even if the two sides really get scared that the other one might use a nuclear weapon against it, I think different options might be considered, including possible international trusteeship of Kashmir. Now if we have any Indian friends in the audience I'm glad you're far enough out of range that you can't reach me with your over-ripe tomatoes or any other fruit you might have been served at lunch, because I know Indians hate this idea. But I also think that things can look different after a major war, and if there is the possibility of nuclear escalation India might be more open to international control of Kashmir for a certain period of time, and certainly Pakistan could be open to that as well. I'm not saying this is very likely. All of these scenarios are more unlikely than likely, but they're all, in my mind at least, plausible and plausible above a threshold of requiring us to plan just in case.

The Kashmir scenario is bad enough. As many people in this room I'm sure have also shuddered at the thought of, there's an even worse scenario in South Asia, which is a collapsing Pakistan. A nuclear armed, Jihadist infiltrated, collapsing Pakistan. We all read about assassination attempts against moderate Pakistani figures, especially the President, every few months. We know the strength of many of the Jihadist movements in Pakistan. The good news—and again with apologies to my Pakistani friends this time, and also to my Indonesian, Indian, Korean, Taiwanese, Chinese and Russian friends who I've already probably insulted in the first ten minutes—is that I do not consider any of these scenarios likely. But again with apologies, I recognize that as much as Pakistan's military and political and business elites are fairly moderate today, their society is in some trouble—150 million people, very high population growth rate, very high unemployment rate, very serious problems with the quality of public education leading to the proliferation of madrasas, many of which spout Jihadism as their underlying philosophy. A collapsing Pakistan is a big problem.

Of course you could ask the question…what could we possibly do about it anyway? 150 million people, six times the size of Iraq of Afghanistan in population. That's too big, really, for our military to handle even if we could get there fast, and of course it would take us several months to get there in large force numbers.

Well, that's sort of the worst case where Pakistan has totally collapsed. I'm talking more about scenarios in which it's unraveling more gradually and yet the Pakistanis need some help in putting things back together. This could involve all sorts of military tools which we don't really have the time to get into now, but everything from Special Forces helping Pakistan secure its nuclear weapon storage facilities, possibly even some airstrikes if we ever learn that nuclear weapons have been moved from their proper storage sites by renegade elements and we know where they are. Your service could very well be called in. The Air Force could also obviously be called in to move ground forces very quickly to seal off border areas, to try to seal off a given province so that nuclear materials cannot be smuggled out. There are a lot of ways this scenario could play, but I'll say one thing. I cannot imagine a more dire threat to American security than a collapsing Pakistan. I think it's up there with the worst threats our country has ever faced in its history if it happens. Therefore, the fact that Pakistan is not a treaty ally, the fact that it's a long ways away—these are not sufficient reasons to keep us from going to war or at least from using military forces in a robust way.

If Pakistan begins to collapse and there is something that we can do about it and the Pakistani government or whatever's left of it wants help, we will help. You will go. I am almost sure of this. I cannot imagine any American president, whether it's Howard Dean or Dick Cheney, ignoring a collapsing Pakistan under any circumstances in which we could help stabilize it and prevent those nukes from getting into the wrong hands.

I'll just tick off the Middle East scenarios quickly. We all have thought about Iran. There's at least two kinds of Iran scenarios. The worst case, regime change. The more plausible issue having to do with either counter-nuclear strikes by us which then lead to an Iranian response in the Strait of Hormuz or the Persian Gulf; and then an air and naval engagement over protecting shipping in that part of the world.

Then there's also the possibility of a coup in Saudi Arabia leading to a cut-off in international oil, exports from that country. Chances are a coup would not lead to a sustained Saudi embargo, but you never know. There are scenarios in which I could imagine a primarily ground force operation to reestablish control of Eastern Saudi Arabia if you have a Jihadist-inspired coup which leads to fundamental chaos in that country. I'm not suggesting we would want to do this unilaterally, or quickly, and I'm not suggesting we would want to keep the cheap oil for ourselves. Under these circumstances we would presumably pay the full market value of the oil and put it into escrow for the Saudi people for such a time when they were able to reestablish governance of their own territory. But the world obviously cannot do very well for very long if the Saudi oil fields are incapacitated for an extended period of time.

So no news to you, there are a lot of scenarios we have to think about. It's very hard to do so at a time when Iraq and Afghanistan dominate the news and dominate your lives and the lives of your brethren and the ground forces in particular, but I think in the spirit of strategy discussions, in the spirit of the QDR, we need to be looking ahead to this next family of scenarios.

Of course the broad theme is we need balance in our capabilities because I can't tell you which of these scenarios is most likely and therefore which service is most likely to be the predominant one. And there's also a lot of lessons we haven't gotten into today about more specific requirements within each service—changes to force structure or to weaponry or other priorities that might be needed to think about these scenarios. So I just wanted to begin the conversation, and I look forward to continuing it later. Thank you.

Dr. Grant: Thanks to Dr. O'Hanlon I think we have a little bit of a view into that future world and some of the conflicts we might face. And as you raised the point, we don't know which service will be called to respond…but we do sort of know, don't we? Got any AWACS crewmen out there? Anybody else in the Low Density/High Density force? We know that Airmen will be asked to respond to this future world, whatever it may hold.

One of the major tools for that hangs in the balance right now. The Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) has teed up choices for a TacAir Panel about fighters and what to do with them.

I just have to stop for a moment and say I know “TacAir” is, other than for OSD, a bit of an outdated term. Tactical Air Command and Strategic Air Command went away many years ago. Even the Navy, who will still talk about TacAir, actually now calls their fighter and attack aircraft and their TLAM shooters “sea strike.”

But the reason that we hear about TacAir is partly because the question we face in terms of budget and policy has been coming for many, many years. You've all seen charts with the bow wave or the bulge of dollars that need to go into procuring air dominance. If it were up to me I'd really want to call this forum "Getting Air Dominance Right." I want to talk about some of the key criteria for getting air dominance right in the future.

Dr. O'Hanlon talked a little bit about the future. I just want to take you back a couple of years to the major combat ops phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF). Fighters were deployed by the Navy, Marines, Air Force, and Coalition forces. They were central to the joint operational concept for the major combat ops phase of OIF. The ability to have air dominance in all its manifestations gave that campaign great operational flexibility—the flexibility to start a bit early, to change the A-Day, S-Day, G-Day sequence. It gave the forces the flexibility to cope with whatever might have happened as 5th Corps started up on the left and the 1st MEF moved up on the right heading for Baghdad. The ability to have air dominance carved out over a previous decade was what gave that joint force a flexible operational construct.

As our forces closed in on Baghdad we saw a tremendous advance in the ability to put a very tailored close air support system into operation over Baghdad. It was called on, and it could have been called on for even greater capacity. What it had the ability to do, as you all know, is to go nearly block to block to deliver fires wherever Soldiers or Marines on the ground needed them, and that was going to be done by the air dominance platforms, by fighters and strike aircraft from multiple services, stacked and waiting at points around Baghdad to be called on so that those Soldiers and Marines on the ground got not only a choice of platform, but in some cases a choice of targeting pods and available weapons.

A look at the munitions expended just in the major combat ops phase of OIF really reconfirms how important fighters were to that mix. Now there were B-52s and B-1s dropping large quantities of precision ordnance, but there was also the employment of a classic fighter weapon, the GBU-12. Fighters were important to this employment concept.

It all came together in the structure of the five air wars that made up a foundation for the major combat ops phase of OIF. This was what allowed the Joint Force Commander to do anti-Scud campaigns in the west, to work Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses (SEAD) and the Special Operations Forces (SOF) war in the north, and to support the drive forward, not only attacking Republican Guard forces in a deep battlespace, but responding to interdiction and calls for close support along the Lines of Communications (LOS) as the forces moved forward.

But as important as fighters were for that, OIF also pointed out a number of shortfalls. This was a force that didn't have much stealth. Only the F-117 was a true stealth aircraft. It's a force that had some shortfalls in other areas that were clearly shown in the after-action reports and they come down to one thing. That is a need to modernize the tools of air dominance for the future.

We can also see that pretty clearly in one telling statistic: comparing mission capable (MC) rates from Operation Desert Storm in 1991 to the mission capable rates for the same aircraft systems in 2003. On average, there is about a 10 percent drop in MC rates. That is not because of the maintainers or the folks on the flight line, that's because you're dealing with platforms that are that much older. So at the time this data was compiled, it's an average age of about 18 years on the strike platforms.

That's major combat ops, but what about today? That was two years ago.

Stability operations are also demanding a high level of air dominance to take place. You all know that convoys in Iraq don't move without this umbrella of air support available to them. The Joint Terminal Attack Controllers (JTACs) on the ground have a constant ability to contact and bring in strike aircraft, to work with them and develop their situational awareness. Marines in Fallujah began to make greater use of the Rover 3 and the earlier Rover apparatus to bring a real-time image of the battlespace.

We've seen tremendous leaps forward in the tactics of air dominance during the stability ops phase of OIF, and we've seen a high rate of sorties flown. There were a little over 20,000 strike sorties flown by the fighters in the major combat ops phase—from late March to May of 2003. And in this year alone, from January to July 2005, fighters have already logged about 13,000 sorties, both in Afghanistan and in Iraq. At that rate, the fighter force is conducting the equivalent of a major combat op about every 10.5 months. It's doing that with the support of some tremendous Intelligence Surveillance Reconnaissance (ISR) assets and it's doing it for a number of missions, whether for troops in contact, for hunting insurgent targets and weapons caches, or simply for providing presence and for providing Non-Traditional ISR that assures those in the fight on the ground that there is air-delivered firepower available when needed.

We think about this as a land-centric war and in many ways it is, but air power is very much a part of that fight on the ground.

I want to move forward now and talk about where we stand. The issues today are how to pay for three major modernization programs. The first one of those is already well underway. That's the Super Hornet, the F-18E/F being delivered to the Navy. There are already 235 E/Fs in the fleet. The Navy is retiring its F-14s. The last two F-14 squadrons are currently embarked. They return to home port in March of next year and that's the end of the F-14s.

F-18 Super Hornet brings some tremendous new capabilities to the Navy that they're very excited to have. That includes things like MIDS which is a Link-16 datalink. The ability for them to have greater ordnance and greater range is excellent modernization. They're about halfway through the buy that will help fill out both Navy and integrated Marine squadrons and provide us responsive carrier air power in the future.

Something else that they really wanted in modernization is mission tanking, both for operations around the ship, recovery tanking, and as was done during OIF, for some mission tanking when E/Fs dragged F-18 Charlies up into the strike area. And sometimes they did that as well as participating in strike missions.

The bad news is the Air Force is not in as good a position with its modernization. One reason is what we called the “procurement holiday.” But what it boils down to is that fighters were not acquired in numbers after the early 1990s. We are only now beginning the acquisition of line F/A-22s. The F-35 is yet to come. So you can see exactly why right now our nation's air dominance is somewhat at risk depending on the decisions that are made about how to move forward from this gap. However, there is a plan in place, and that builds on the lessons of recent conflicts as well as on plans that have been in the works for quite a while.

This modernization is essential for several reasons, but I want to just focus on two primarily. One, the warfighting requirement. Also, the need to introduce advanced technologies into this force structure. These are the things that we're going to need to assure air dominance as a primary tool for future military operations.

The F/A-22 is I think without a doubt the premier fighter aircraft ever developed. I was talking to someone here who said he had a friend who flew F/A-22s and he said, “this is the most super aircraft I've ever seen. There's just nothing that it can't do.”

To be a little more specific, what does it do? It guarantees you Day One air dominance, whether that is against a number of rogue adversary fighters, or more importantly whether that is against a sophisticated air defense system.

We didn't see a highly sophisticated air defense system in Afghanistan. We saw one that was more robust than we might have thought in Iraq during OIF. We saw one in Kosovo that continued to take shots, unguided, all the way to the end of that conflict in 1999.

The F/A-22 does more than this. A four-ship picture—it reminds you of what the datalinks on that aircraft will enable this four-ship to do in a stealthy configuration managing that battlespace from Day One and moving forward.

The problem with the F/A-22, of course, is its funding is very much under threat. It's not currently funded to the full stated Air Force requirement of 381 aircraft. That's one of the biggest challenges faced by the TacAir study in trying to get air dominance right; how to bring the F/A-22 into the place it needs to occupy to guarantee our future air dominance.

The F-35 is the other fifth generation aircraft along with the F/A-22 that's coming along. In the case of the F/A-22 there will be better than a two-for-one replacement of the F-15Cs and the F-117s over time. The F-35 is designed first as an allied program with many international partners signed on and participating and planning to acquire the aircraft. It's also a tri-service program to be purchased by the United States Air Force, the Navy and the Marine Corps.

The F-35 had power on for the first time a couple of weeks ago and expects first flight sometime in the late summer of 2006. It is designed to be an air-to-ground specialist. It's stealthy, it has a great weapons payload. It's able to go in and do the job early on and conduct the bulk of a campaign. And it's going to give the joint services and Coalition partners a level of interoperability that Airmen have never experienced before.

One of the key reasons for staying on track with these aircraft is to meet warfighter requirements, but also to take this great opportunity to capitalize on incorporating advanced technologies. There are many that I could talk about. Consider an F-15 in an OIF mission and you can see pods and tanks and weapons all this equipment on its underbelly. Equivalent for the F/A-22, this is all internal. That just gives you a clear, visual image of the advanced technology going not only into the airframe, the design, the stealth, the stealth materials, the Low Observable (LO) maintainability, the engines, the avionics, special systems, and I could go on…

But the key point is this is our chance to bring true advanced technology into the force in the form of a fifth generation fighter.

There is also a very important synergy between the F/A-22 and the F-35 programs, and not just because Lockheed Martin is the prime contractor for both, or just because they'll both have Pratt & Whitney engines. We in fact plan for these aircraft to draw on each other's lessons. Engine maturity for F-35 is partly dependent on what happens in the F/A-22 program. F/A-22 radars are being upgraded, partly in reflection of what's going on in the F-35 programs and in other areas.

There is also a key industrial base consideration. We have a bulge in TacAir acquisition because we're going to try to buy F/A-22s and F-35s at the same time. Now from a Pentagon accountant's view that's a difficult thing, but from the point of view of the industrial base, that's capitalizing on a sound investment in the workers whose specialized skills are used on both programs.

Do we really want a fighter production line for advanced aircraft to go cold for a number of years? Or even just dip down for a period if we stretch these programs and cut them too much? I think there are some key questions we have to ask here from an industrial base standpoint as well.

I'd like to go on and on about the advantages that we see in these aircraft ... A key one I haven't talked much about is the prospect of lowering operating and support costs. That's what will keep air dominance affordable in our forces over a longer period of time as there are other pressures on the budget.

But we have to keep in mind, as Dr. O'Hanlon pointed out, many of the places that we might find ourselves engaged. You might be defending the Straits of Malacca or the Straits of Taiwan. You might be part of a big international operation trying to do something about Kashmir or Pakistan. We do know this will be based on expeditionary operations, and the fifth generation fighters seek to give you a much smaller expeditionary footprint in theater. That's key to responsive policy and that's key to delivering what the Soldiers and Marines and Special Operators there need on a rapid basis.

Let's not forget, every day fighters protect our homeland. There was a massive effort made by tankers and AWACS and alert C-17s and by fighters to sustain Operation Noble Eagle in its early phases. That operation has now been stratified into graduated response levels, but should the Air Force be called on to defend the nation against threats such as cruise missiles in the future, that will place a significant requirement on the fighter force structure, and beyond just the force structure ... We'll require the advanced and specialized capabilities like those in the F/A-22 in order to sustain this mission and protect our homeland.

Just before I came in here today somebody reminded me about one of the greatest fighter pilots of all time and that's a man named Johnny Allison. You may all have met him at some point. He was among many, many other things, a Flying Tiger. He talked at one point about some of the lessons that he learned from that experience in China so many years ago. One of the key lessons was that the P-40 was not a real great platform. Just before World War II, the United States had been on a little bit of a procurement holiday and there had been a lot of chances taken with air dominance. It took a lot of good fighter pilots like Johnny Allison and a lot of better aircraft like the P-51 in order to regain that air dominance in the future.

What we can't afford is to not get air dominance right, and getting air dominance right depends first and foremost on remembering the warfighting requirements, on injecting advanced technologies, and getting these fighters in sufficient quantities for a sustainable force because, and no one says it better than Billy Mitchell, "The future of the nation is indissolubly bound up with air power and with air dominance."

Thank you.

Q: Could either one of you comment in more detail on the current study that's ongoing right now in OSD on tactical air power?

Dr. Grant: Sure. I'll speak on that for a minute and then I want to hear Dr. O'Hanlon's views as well.

The study that has been commissioned by the Deputy Secretary of Defense is one that actually I believe looks to feed into the QDR, but also to influence POM '08. I think it's a crucial study. It derives from the experience with the conduct of a Navy and Marine TacAir Integration Study which was done a few years ago. The Department of the Navy took that study very seriously and has made decisions not only on procurement but on sizing and command of squadrons and air wings and many other things based on that TacAir Integration Study.

I think we should all take this one that's ongoing equally seriously…

Dr. O'Hanlon: I'll just make one broad comment which is simply to say that while a lot of the Air Force and broader TacAir and aircraft modernization program looks pretty smart to me and pretty sound and has been tested over the years, I do have one fundamental question which is frankly over the size of the Joint Strike Fighter F-35 program…

I have doubts about that program given the affordability questions, given the greater role of unmanned combat aerial vehicles in a number of areas already which I expect to continue, given the arguments that a number of people had made including my co-panelist about the importance of the bomber force and whether we want to have a bit more discussion about whether or not resources are going there.

For all these reasons, I am skeptical that we need well over 2,000 F-35s between the three services combined. That's my big question and I'll just leave it as a question for now since we have only a short amount of time. But I think that's going to be the interesting one to think through over the longer term.

There are a lot of other specific questions … Do we have enough funding for the F/A-22 program now? How much more attack capability do you want to put on it and try to argue for more? Then there’s the question of the 381, etc. But in broad terms, it's the F-35 program that strikes me as one worthy of a lot more analysis.