"Opening the Door to the 21^st Century"

Thank you very much, George and thank you John Shaud and Doyle Larson for making it possible for me to be here today. It is always a pleasure to be with the members of our Air Force Association, and I want to thank the community of Dayton and all the vendors here for helping us celebrate the Air Force Fiftieth Anniversary.

Everything I have read and seen leads me to believe this is a great week here for the cradle of aviation. This symposium that is being held in conjunction with the air and trade show and the national aerospace electronics conference, brings things together and allows us to focus our efforts here during the summer of 1997. It is a great event and I think not only is it great for people who are interested in air and space power, but, as I said, for the community of Dayton.

Over the last few years, I've spoken at great lengths, perhaps at too much length some would say, before a lot of audiences about air and space power and its role in national defense. Clearly, over the last six to nine months, much of that has been done as part of the Quadrennial Defense Review. From a personal perspective, not all the audiences have had the same level of understanding and enthusiasm for air and space power, and what it brings to the joint war fighting arena, as this audience.

I do not mean to take this audience for granted. On the other hand, I do look at audiences that I am going to speak to, and normally classify them as friendly, hostile, or neutral. I have you all in the friendly category. If I have misjudged, I need to know that, so I can be work hard to get up the shield here in a hurry.

As I said, the discussions that I've been involved in most recently have to do with the Quadrennial Defense Review. The QDR for all its strengths, weaknesses, and faults really was a pretty thorough look at various aspects of our military; how we fight, how we support our forces and what kind of forces are we going to need in the future. Because of the long-range planning effort we did in the Air Force prior to the QDR, we had prepared ourselves intellectually for what was about to happen and therefore, as an institution, were able to establish some objectives and some priorities. The first thing we said was, when this QDR is over, we want to make sure we are continuing our modernization. Secondly, we want to sustain our readiness. The deeper we got into the QDR and the longer it went, there was almost an element creeping in which said: "It is not a question of sustaining our readiness, but perhaps we are getting to the point where we need to restore our readiness, or certain parts of it." Finally, we want to preserve the force structure that we need to do the job to accomplish our mission. We don't want any more, but I don't think we can afford to ask our people to do with even less.

As we went through that, our overall objective was to ensure that we would have the resources we needed to do these things. I believe we have accomplished those objectives. We may not have gotten everything that we would have liked in the QDR. But I think by and large, we did keep our modernization programs on track.

We got help in some programs that we didn't really need help in. I don't think they were broken. But nonetheless, we got the help anyway. This is one of those, perhaps politically incorrect things to refer to, but one of my favorite books is "Catch-22." Any of you who have read "Catch-22" remember that there is a chapter in it that talks about Nurse Ann Duckett. It goes on at some length describing Nurse Ann Duckett; her physical attributes, some of her mental attributes, talks about how she was a New England lass, long of limb, slim of body, angular of face, and some other descriptions of her. Then it says at the end that she was independent of mind and needed no help from anyone. Then it says, Yosarrian decided to help her. Well, some folks decided to help us. Now we all know what happened to Nurse Ann Duckett, and to a certain extent, a little of that happened to us. We got a little more help in some areas than we really wanted. However, we did survive in the end. We kept our modernization on track. We have made great headway in the role of air power in warfare and particularly the potential of air power in future warfare. We've kept our vision for the 21^st century on track.

This is what I'd like to talk about: the continuing importance of technology to our 21^st century Air Force; some of the systems that we have under development, and some of the ways that we are going to find to pay the tab for this.

Before I do that, everyone always expects some historical tidbit from me. I am always a little ashamed to show up before these audiences of engineers and technology-oriented people feeling that as a history major, my credentials are not quite as good as many in the room when it comes to the technology side of things. I always have to revert to a little history. I know everybody knows this, but on this very day, 59 years ago, an unemployed aircraft mechanic by the name of Douglas Corrigan took off from New York enroute to Los Angeles and 28 hours later he landed not in California, but in Ireland. Of course, he became known as the famous Wrong-Way Corrigan. He explained his monumental mistake by saying that he had simply followed the wrong end of the compass needle. I tell you that story with some degree of assurance that we in the U.S. Air Force have a high degree of confidence we are following the correct end of the compass needle.

We've gone to great effort to maintain and sustain the golden legacy of our Air Force. We truly go beyond a cliché when we talk about a boundless future. The results of the Quadrennial Defense Review really reinforce the journey we started two years ago when we began working on the vision for the 21^st century Air Force. This whole undertaking reminds me somewhat of a quote that Secretary Perry was fond of using, it was by the British author Graham Greene. The quote goes something like this: "There always comes a moment in time when a door opens and lets the future in." I believe the debate associated with the QDR, not the QDR itself, but the debate that we've had in the past, and is now beginning to gain momentum with the defense intellectuals within Congress, and the services, offers us that open door. I believe sincerely that the U.S. Air Force is ready, and prepared to cross that threshold.

On the other side of that threshold we will find a new American way of war. A place where modern technology and new operational concepts offer an alternative to the historic military operations that pitted large numbers of troops against an enemy in brute force-on-force battles. I am not talking about a silver bullet, but a system of systems that we bring together to leverage the technologically superior U.S. capabilities to strike an adversary in an asymmetrical fashion. But at the same time, we must also beware that adversaries are going to try and strike us in an asymmetrical fashion as well. And, to one degree or another, in the world that we live in and are going to, this will become easier. They will not need to make nearly the kinds of investments that we have made in the past because of the readily available commercial, off-the-shelf things that people can go buy, rather than spend years developing. This is a caution.

Our vision of the 21^st century Air Force is one that will be smaller. More of it will be home based. But we are still going to require overseas base and force structure. At the same time, we believe that this smaller, home-based force will sustain superior combat capabilities because of the advances that we have made in technology, computing power, miniaturization, increases in the engine fuel efficiency, etc. But the tools that we need to accomplish this within the confines of the characteristics of future warfare are found in our vision statement, "Global Engagement." They are really threefold. They say, first and foremost, we must have and sustain an effective modernization program. Second, we must be able to search out and take advantage of innovative employment and operational concepts. Finally, we need exceptional people. While I will not talk a great deal about people today, make no mistake, they are the key to this endeavor.

I would also point out that this is not any startling revelation. These are the same ingredients that we have needed throughout our history to dominate in the third dimension. But the level of domination possible has always been based, to one degree or another, on the available technology. To contemplate the role of air power in the future and the importance of technology, it might be useful to just briefly reflect on how we became the world's preeminent air and space power.

The Army Air Corps began to truly develop following World War I. In fact, the most dramatic years of growth happened to overlap considerably with the Great Depression, when the Army Air Corps and the fledgling aircraft industry had to rely on technology and operational concepts to compensate for a lack of resources and forces. The technological developments during this time provided the foundation for the massive buildup of our Army Air Forces during the Second World War and many of them were really driven by commercial aviation as it started to come into its own during the 1930s.

It is also important to remember that the intellectual foundation for this tremendous growth was found primarily in the ideas coming out of our Air Corps Tactical School at Maxwell Field. Then, as the Second World War closed, we saw this pattern begin to repeat itself again. Defense budgets dropped, forces shrank, and once again we had to turn to the intellectual energy of our engineers, our scientists, our aviators, and industry. This was part of the genius of Hap Arnold, when he established the connectivity to industry, and institutionalized it with the RAND Corporation, the Scientific Advisory Board, all others which have made us strong. Clearly, Wright Patterson, the complex here in the Dayton area was at the heart of this effort.

So, when the Korean Conflict began and a buildup followed, our newly established Air Force was ready, sparked by a close relationship that we had developed between our Air Force and our industry. Then, following the Korean War, we found the Cold War. The entire Cold War period, from the 1950s to the last 1980s was underpinned by the power of nuclear weapons and the range, speed, flexibility and utility of air power. So, at the end of the Cold War, we now find ourselves once again in this cycle of shrinking resources. And, again, we are going to be looking to a technological superiority to offset the limitations of a shrinking military force and budgets. If you think back on how quickly this has occurred, since the mid-1980s, the U.S. Air Force has shrunk from over one million people. Our active duty force went from 608,000 in 1987 to 381,000 today. Our Guard and Reserve went from about 225,000 to 190,000. Our civilian workforce when from 266,000 to about 175,000 today. This has been during a time which our Defense Budget has decreased nearly 40 percent and today represents less than three percent of our national wealth. It is the smallest percentage since before the Second World War.

Just as in the early days of the Army Air Corps, technology and innovative operational concepts to use it, will be the keys to overcoming the obstacles that come about by reduced force structure and resources. But, I would tell you that something is different and yet it is the same, depending upon the periods that you look at. The key difference between today, the Second World War and the Cold War is that those massive buildups of the past were in response to a threat. We have no such threat today. So, in many ways, the period that we live in is analogous to what we went through in the 20s and 30s, where no matter what you had in terms of technological thought and ideas, as a nation we need to understand what it is that we need to do, and what the threat is.

We have this potential for the new American way of war. Technology will not augment, nor will it empower large forces, but it is going to have to supplant them because this idea of the threat is a thing of the past right now. What we are talking about is capability-based forces. In the near-term, I don't think we are very likely to experience something like we did in 1950 when Korea kicked off and we had a quadrupling of the Defense Budget. We are going to have to be able to put together the kinds of forces, resources and capabilities that will ensure our ability to operate in, to control and dominate the air and space medium with smaller, much more effective, much more agile forces.

This will be accomplished through advancements in the areas that we talk about in our vision statement: global attack, rapid global mobility, precision engagement, information dominance, all of which will aid in decreasing the required number of American troops that must be put in harm's way.

Technology has always been a key element of the Air Force legacy, but its purpose and the emphasis on its development, will change in the future. For the greater part of our existence as a service, we were presented with a single adversary. It has only been within the last six or seven years, that we, not only in the Air Force but all of services, have had to come to grips with the fact that we no longer have this single adversary that drove our tactics, our systems, and our capabilities. Cold War technology responded to the threat in a way that was, in my view, a little bit easier to handle than the challenge we have in the future. That is, it developed weapon systems designed to respond to a fairly well-known and understood scenario. But, as I said, today no well-defined enemy or threat exists. So, rather than being able to respond to scenarios, we are going to have to be able to intellectualize and think through what it means to have a capabilities-based force.

As we do that, we have to recognize the fact that cost has become a major factor in the development of all systems, it is being considered in the lexicon of the acquisition world. While it is something I don't pretend to know and understand, I tolerate it. There is probably a reason that they took these people under Goldwater-Nichols and set them off here to the side. It wasn't to clutter the minds of service chiefs, but in this lexicon where we talk about cost as an independent variable and requirements are traded on the basis of value, it becomes important for us all to become a little smarter about the process.

We also need to recognize that commercial technologies are developing very quickly and in some cases more rapidly than military technologies and they will have a significant impact. An enemy does not have to build the same kind of R&D complexes that we have built in the past. That does not lessen the importance of ours, but it means that in an asymmetrical fashion, folks are going to be able to go buy things that it took us years and billions of dollars of investment to produce. What we get out of our labs and out of our research and development complexes, becomes extremely important as we go to the future.

We ourselves need to step up and take advantage of this commercial technology and counter their use when we see it in adversary systems. Future systems will be evaluated on a combination of capabilities and cost factors, not on solutions to specific problems. To meet the future needs of the nation and our Air Force, during the 1990s we have been well-served by what I believe is a balanced, time-phased modernization program. Most, if not all of you, are familiar with this. While risking some redundancy, I will just briefly review it.

Our near-term priority has been to address the nation's most pressing military need, to execute a two major regional contingency strategy, that is strategic lift. You have to get the forces to the fight. Strategic lift comes in two forms: sea lift and air mobility kinds of forces. In the case of the U.S. Air Force, our near-term priority has been on building, replacing, and sustaining a core airlifter. As some 250 C-141s will be going away between now and 2006, they will be replaced with 120 or perhaps, as we saw in the mark this year, 122 C-17s. We many have even more. Nonetheless, we have received 33 of these magnificent airplanes so far and we look forward to receiving more of them in the future.

You remember our mid-term priority has been on bomber upgrades and on autonomous precision and near-precision munitions. We are continuing our conventional upgrades to the B-52, the B-1, the B-2s so that they will be able to employ a full-range of conventional operations and employ advanced and upgraded munitions. From an operational perspective, in the near future, I hope to start to convince my fellow chiefs and CINCs out there, that we have made enough advances in this area. It is time to start demonstrating the pay off from this increased conventional capability. We may in the not-to-distant future see bomber forces going back on alert very similar to what they sat during the Cold War, but now, with conventional munitions. Because, as we go through the discussion on the strategy and begin to see how important the halt phase and see what a tremendous pay off you get from these bombers, we must take advantage of what we've invested.

There is a lesser-known program. We talk a lot about the QDR, but this is one of those things that's been proposed in a couple of circles, it is called the QDP, the Quantity Deception Program. This is a program where we simply tell everyone that we are buying 100 B-2s and then we let future adversaries go crazy trying to find the other 80 of them. It unfortunately has one limitation, and that is, while they are stealthy, they aren't invisible. It is a program where you have to be innovative. In sincerity, we remain convinced of the role of the globally capable bomber and the fact that it is going to become more important to us. More important in the near future.

In the mid- to late-term in our modernization prioritization, our investment is clearly in the space arena. We have three new programs: the new launch vehicle, the EELV; a new missile warning system, SBRS; and a new satellite communication system, called the global broadcast system. The EELV is designed to deliver assured, affordable access to space by reducing the cost by at least 50 percent. SBRS will provide an enhanced, more timely ballistic missile warning system that will greatly increase its utility through theater-based ballistic missile forces. Global Broadcast System is going to provide that high-capability communications to our force. It is really an example of how we can take advantage of many of the systems that we now have in the field, and how we can move information and data to change the way we deploy and employ.

Finally, our long-term modernization priority is in the air superiority area. Our current air superiority fighter, the F-15, is going to be nearly 32 years old when the first F-22 squadron is formed in 2004. There are two ways that one can discover it is perhaps time to start looking for something else to do. When you look in the mirror and what hair you have is turned mostly gray, is one clue that you should perhaps move along. The second clue is when you go visit the Air Force Museum and you see an F-15 that you flew when you were a lieutenant colonel being inducted into the museum. You begin to question how smart you are. The fact of the matter is, the F-15s will be 32 years old operationally when the first F-22 squadron is formed.

We all know that many of the new fighters that have been developed abroad, the Raphael, the MIG-35, and Swedish Grippen, have reached parity or exceeded F-15 capabilities in such performance areas as maneuverability, avionics, range, etc. The F-22's stealth, super cruise, integrated avionics truly make it a revolutionary system. It is clearly going to be the air superiority air craft of the 21^st century.

Finally, as we look out into the future, I'd like to briefly mention one more revolutionary program and that is the airborne laser. The airborne laser is today a developmental program, where we are going to install a chemical laser in a 747. This is a laser that will be designed to intercept enemy ballistic missiles in the boost phase at a range of hundreds of kilometers. It is doable. The technology has come that far. We've spent a lot of money to make it possible. It will become part of our layered defense system to deal with theater ballistic missiles, be combined with the terminal defense systems, and with the attack ops. But I am convinced it will become more than just an anti-ballistic missile system. Before it is done, we will begin to see this as the leading-edge system that teaches us more about directed energy weapons in the air and space medium. We plan to have a demonstration of this system just after the turn of the century.

The task we face to ensure we have the resources available to maintain this technological development is not an easy one. One way we can do this is we can try to put into balance what has happened to us. During the initial phases of our draw down in the early 1990s, we clearly took force structure, we closed some bases, but when you look at the size of the draw down and the force structure compared to what we did in the support side of the house, it is clear we need to go to the support side of the house and do more work there. We will do that, through out-sourcing and privatization. We will have to change some paradigms. I think we will be able to do that, and step up to it eventually. It won't be easy; it will be difficult, but it must be done.

Another one that we have been working hard on is to improve the acquisition process so that we are ensuring the maximum purchasing power for each dollar. Throughout DOD it is my view that we have taken significant steps to improve this process. The fact of the matter is, the results are real. Two years ago the U.S. Air Force initiated the lightning bolt initiatives to try to revolutionize the way that we acquire our weapons. These initiatives focus on such common sense things as streamlining organizations, procurement regulations, developing relevant strategies and the use of the integrated product team. As a result, many of our programs are already experiencing cost-avoidance and savings in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

We like to hold up the joint direct attack munition as a real success story. A few years ago, we set out to convert thousands of dumb bombs into smart bombs that could be accurately guided. We were going to build kits for each bomb that would use signals from the GPS satellite constellation...the results were a warranty increase from five to 20 years, a decreased production delivery time of six years and a cost-reduction of 52 percent and overall program reduction of nearly $3 billion. We also reduced military specifications and standards for our C-17. We took and reduced it from 346 down to 9. This led to a total program reduction of $5.4 million. This gives us increased purchase power within a declining budget and that purchase power has been turned directly into additional capability.

But we need your help. We need everyone's help to continue to accomplish this. We talk about this boundless future that we celebrate this year. It is the future of our total force team. When I talk about total force, I remind you all that I talk about our uniformed members, our civilian employees and our industry partners. These acquisition savings that we have realized are based to a great degree on your ideas. We have been able to implement them and implemented them successfully together. Finding a way to secure future technologies is going to depend upon our continued innovations together.

The U.S. Air Force has a fairly clear vision of the future. We have a plan that will get us there. I believe that we have the determination to see it through. It is right for our Air Force. It is right for America. I clearly believe that this door to the future is open. But we've got to have the wisdom and the courage to cross that threshold. So, the senior leadership of the U.S. Air Force is counting on the members of our own research, development and acquisition community to work with the same communities within industry to lead us across that threshold.

Thank you and I'll entertain some questions.

General Shaud: That was great. Asked if I have enough questions, will you stay until next Tuesday? But I don't think that we really want to do that, so what I've done is pick some representative topics that cover the very topics of interest.

You are known to have done a lot for the planning process. Are there any initiatives to increase industrial participation in the strategic long-range planning process?

General Fogleman: I think that we have several initiatives along this line. First of all, this was an idea that came from industry. The suggestion was a good one. They said, you are going to go build this intricately crafted strategic plan, and you are going to classify and we are not going to have access to it, so how can we share in this? Early on, one of our charges to the long-range planners was to go produce an unclassified version of the long-range plan. We have done that. The second thing that we have done is that we have had at least one, and I know that we have more planned, sessions, where the long-range planners meet with industry meet with industry to try to amplify and share in a way what it is we are trying to do, where we are trying to go. I know I've spoken at least at one of those because I've got quoted in the press during that. That is not unusual. We recognize that an exquisite long-range plan that is only available to the Air Force has limited utility when we are talking about a true total force. So, we are open to any other ideas that people have and how we might knock those doors down.

General Shaud: Chief, a centerpiece of strategic planning was the Battlelab initiative and the S&T Committee this morning with Jack Welch we were talking about that, how it is going, how it is working? It has been implemented a few months now, do you have any update?

General Fogleman: Our battle labs initially stood up the first of April. We officially declared initial operational capability on the first of July and we hope to have, when we talk about full operational capability by 1 October. My review of this, and I review it fairly frequently with the folks in the XO community, is that we've got all of our commanders in place, that the normal summer rotation of the personnel system will get the staff's fleshed out. We have already had several sessions where we are looking at the ideas, the concepts that folks are going to be exploring out there. I sense enthusiasm. We were worried that there would be a little unionism involved. We have our Air Force and you put lab title on something and right away everybody kind of gets defensive and says, hey, wait a minute, you are getting into my turf and why do you have to go do this? But we've been fairly successful in explaining that, no, this is a different concept. So, what we are seeing as we are get more information out there, we are getting more ideas from people who say, hey, we really need to go look at this. And it is now kind of neat to have a place where you say, you know, that's a great idea, why don't we send that out to the AEF Lab or why don't we send down. So it is a nice place to know that you are going to have operators, you are going to have engineers, a combination of people working these problems. I think it is going well.

General Shaud: The discussion this morning found exactly as you say, complementary to the lab processes. The next question has to do with the war game. Strategic Force 96, down in Maxwell in November, was your push for a new level of war gaming and simulation. Our understanding is your are planning to do that again in 97 and how will the global engagement war game in 97 be different and what results might you look for?

General Fogleman: What a great question. Since I spent a couple of hours this week reviewing the scenario and the status not only of the war game, global engagement, but to tell you one of the way's we've improved the process this year, is we recognize that in the complex world that we live in, it is one thing to bring in very qualified retired folks and people from the CINC staffs today and put them in an environment where they start to operate force on force, struggle with the issues of logistics support, with mobility, transportation, all of those things. We've certainly done a lot to capture that, but an additional thing that we've done this year, is we are actually going to run a precursor game to global engagement. It will be a game that will be played in the last part of September, early October with global engagement going in November and this will be a game that will address policy issues.

We are looking at, for instance, what constitutes an attack on U.S. sovereignty. If you take out my MILSTAR constellation, what am I going to do about that? How do the National Command Authorities deal with that? The whole range. If I discover somebody has attacked my Federal Reserve System through a virus, how do I deal with it? This year, in all candor, it got away from me a little bit. The troops have separated these things. They are going to run the policy part and then they are going to brief the people who play the actual game on sort of what some of these policy parameters were and then we will go from there. I told them that next year, in 1998, I know this takes a lot of time and effort of the players, but I would really like to see us pull these two games together. So, the players show up a couple of days earlier at Maxwell and we go through the policy game with one set of the players, it is the same players, but in different roles. So, somebody plays the president, somebody plays SECDEF, SECSTATE, all these folks, and you go through the policy thing. Then, once you've had the benefit of all that debate and analysis and understanding of the issues, then we'll reform and pick somebody else to be the president and all, and then we'll go in and play the game. And we'll play the game like we did last year, having three different CINCs running against the same scenario. And, as we've done it, we have an airman, a land component type and a maritime type, so we are not stacking the deck. I think it will be a valuable game as we do this.

General Shaud: The next question you probably anticipated had to do with the QDR. The QDR strategy for the U.S. Air Force seemed to be based on a premise that allowed you to shed excess infrastructure. With the recent announcements from the Hill with regard to the BRAC. What will be the Air Force strategy to recover if that legislation just is unable to be passed?

General Fogleman: Well, one of the interesting things that the chiefs were able to get a commitment out of SECDEF on is that as we were going through this QDR drill, as an old programmer, I asked the question. I said hey wait a minute, we are going through a cut drill here. Everybody says it was strategy based and all that. The fact of the matter is we are going through some kind of a cut drill. I know what one smells like, looks like and tastes like, I think this is the cut drill. But I can't say it is a cut drill because there is no decrease in our TOA. So we are going in there and we are identifying programs that we are going to shed and initiatives that we are going to do to generate cash so that we can take this cash and put it into the modernization accounts and keep modernization money from migrating into paying for O&M bills and things like that. One of the good things about the QDR from my perspective is, the services were able to keep the bulk of the money that we identified. So, if we identified money as a savings that we associated with base closure and somebody says you can't close that base, at least you have the operating capitol to continue to operate that base. Now, we'll go back to the old migration and all that.

But there are some other things in the QDR that don't require BRAC legislation. So, I've got the Air Staff right now working on a comprehensive proposal that we are going to go forward to SECDEF and see how serious he is about this because there are things about our QDR, like we said, we need to go back and combine some squadrons, go from 18 PAA to 24 PAA. We need to combine our bomber forces. We need to do some of these kinds of things. They generate tremendous savings and you don't have to close a base to do it. But, I tell you, the folks out there in those communities, where those airplanes are going to start disappearing, it is going to get their attention. So we are going to see how serious the folks are in OSD and how serious the people are on the Hill about this. I hope that they are serious because we will not only be better off in terms of being able to operate for less dollars, but I think it will also be more effective in terms of OPTEMPO, PERSTEMPO, some of those kinds of things.

But I'll tell you, you can not even begin planning these things without somebody being up on the net. So, we've got congressional delegations sending hate mail and directing this guy or that guy to go over and talk about things that we shouldn't talk about. But my philosophy is, we ought to, by God, go talk about it. Let them know. This is what we plan to do. Got a better idea? Let us know. Don't have a better idea? Give us more money. Can't do that. Then sit there and watch us go down the tubes because you can't lock us to where we can't get on with managing the force.

General Shaud: Last question, another difficult one. Are you concerned about the consolidations of mergers in defense industry that leaves you with only two manufacturers for fighters?

General Fogleman: This is where being ignorant of how this system works is bliss. This is a great question for Art Money. Even though I am a novice in this area, what I would tell you is, quite frankly, I don't have a great concern. I don't understand perhaps all the inner workings of this. I myself am kind of proud of the way the American defense industry has pulled itself together over the last three to five years. I don't think anybody could have predicted that they would have been able to do that in the fashion that they have. Now that they have done it, I think it will put a tremendous premium on the people in the acquisition business, working with the industry, to make sure that we do continue to have some semblance of the benefits of competition, etc., and that we have the first team working on the things that need to be worked on. So I am not one of those folks who really see this as a doomsday kind of thing. But then as I said, I am not a card-carrying acquisition guy. From an overall policy and philosophy standpoint, I think we are stronger. It is a little bit like, let's go back and do the QDR analogy. These folks in industry I don't think like to see their names hyphenated or disappear or whatever, but it is one of those things I'm looking at as post-Air Force employment, I want to become one of the guys who builds these displays because the names change so fast, that there has got to be lifetime work there. I am going to get me a paintbrush with a big hyphen in it for sure and then we will go do a lot of these things. These are industries run by smart people who understand what it takes to survive in the world. If we begin to deny them the ability to survive, the consequences on that side are not very good either. I have taken a look time to say, ask Art Money that question.

General Shaud: On behalf of this audience, our Air Force and our nation, God bless you. You are a blessing to us and a combat-ready leader. Thank you.

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