Foundation Forum

General Richard E. Hawley
Commander, Air Combat Command
AFA Air Warfare Symposium (Orlando, FL)

February 4, 1999

Today, I’d like to share with you the commander of ACC’s perspective on the status of our Air Force today and, particularly, the status of Air Combat Command. This really has been a tough decade for the United States Air Force and for ACC, and it remains so today.

We read a lot in the press about some of the difficulties we face. We read about adverse retention trends, the mission capability rates of our equipment, the personnel tempo that our people are carrying for the country as they go engage in operations all over the world. Any of us who have spent time in the air can’t help but cringe a little bit. Every morning we pick up the paper and read about the latest missile shoot-out in the Middle East, where we kind of have this Mexican standoff going on, with missiles firing back and forth at each other everyday. You wonder when is this going to stop working out so well.

About a year ago at this same symposium, I tried to describe the pain that some of our people in uniform are feeling, and what I think might be fairly described as the benign neglect of our military. What I was doing for our force was kind of a crude attempt to connect some of the dots among high OPTEMPO, declining spares inventory, and aging airplanes. As the Chief pointed out, we’re now at 20 years for the average age in our airplane fleets. And you’ve all heard a lot in the past year or so about eroding pay and benefits for our people and the emerging pay gap. And of course, all of that led to a pretty rapid decline in the rate at which we were retaining these wonderful young men and women who serve us so well in so many places, in so many odd environments all over the world. It really wasn't a very pretty story. And given the nation’s preoccupation with achieving a balance in the federal budget, there wasn’t much reason for optimism.

But you know, a lot has happened in the past 12 months. Keep in mind where we were a year ago. The federal budget has gone from where the people who account for such things were predicting a tentative balanced budget, I think, in 2002. In fact, we achieved balance in 1998, and people are now predicting multi-billion dollar surpluses for about as far as the eye can see. That benign neglect that was causing me such concern over the past couple of years has been transformed into what I think is an emerging bipartisan support for better custody of these wonderful institutions that have served, and are serving, our nation so well. Hopefully, bipartisan support will make for substantial increases in the resources that we make available for our national security accounts, to include some of those space issues that General Myers just talked about.

A year ago, our deployments to the Gulf—remember, that was February of last year—had risen to where Air Combat Command had 7000 men and women deployed to the Gulf. Well, by late springtime, those deployments had fallen to about 4000 people—actually, below 4000—for the first time in many years. Because at the end of that engagement that began in the fall of 1997 and extended through the spring of 1998, we actually drew the force down to below where it had been over the previous couple of years. And despite two build-ups since then, which culminated in the recent strike called Desert Fox, we still have fewer than 5000 ACC people deployed in the Middle East. Now, many more than that deployed, did their job, and then came back home. We’re beginning to learn some things about how to employ this great national resource called air power.

In the past year, we’ve also made substantial progress in sharpening some of the tools that our great men and women need to do their jobs. The first seven Block-D B-1s are on the ramp at Ellsworth. Now, you probably say, “Well, what’s a Block-D B-1?” All right, well, a Block-D B-1 comes with integrated GPS, a towed decoy, the ability to spot moving targets from that fantastic radar that has always been one of the finest offensive radars ever put in an airplane, and the ability to deliver the Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM).

A month or so ago, I went out to Ellsworth and flew the first operational JDAM drop. I take great credit for delivering that weapon on target. I want to tell you, I know many of you in this room have dropped a lot of bombs. This is a different experience; it’s almost ethereal. You climb up to 26,000 feet, you fly the airplane to the black line, you put it on autopilot, and then somebody in the back does something, and you feel a “clunk,” as a 2000-pound bomb comes out of the bomb bay. Sixty seconds’ time of fall later, it shacks the target on the ground—an amazing experience. So, we need to keep it on track. It is delivering a capability that will give our bomber force ten times the lethality of the bomber force that migrated from SAC to ACC in 1992—ten times.

We’ve transitioned to an all-Block-30 B-2 fleet at Whiteman. We don’t have any Block-20s left. Every plane on the ramp at Whiteman is a full-up Block-30. And by the way, a year ago we were taking a lot of criticism about the deployability of the B-2. Well, since then it’s been on two deployments. In the springtime we sent it to Guam, mostly because I was sick of hearing about that criticism, so I called up the wing commander at Whiteman and said, “Go deploy that thing and prove to people that you can operate in a deployed status.” Well, they did that, and it did great. They went out there and they dropped a full load of Mk-82s and shacked the targets. And this past summer, we sent some B-52s and some B-2s to Guam, and they spent 30 days there. They delivered JDAMs, they explored the territory all over the theater, they showed these tremendous global reach capabilities to many of our allies all over the region, and they gained some great experience in operating the B-2 from a deployed status.

Then, of course, there’s our munitions modernization programs. As I recall, last year I showed you a film. I know most of you have seen the film of that amazing set of B-2 sorties, where we sent three B-2s over the Nellis ranges and dropped 16 JDAMs, scoring 16 hits on 16 targets dispersed over several kilometers of desert out there. Well, those are progressing nicely.

This year, our inventory of sensor-fuzed munitions—my favorite tank-killer—has passed the 1000 mark. We took delivery of our first production JDAMs, and this year we’ll continue to build that inventory. By the end of the year we’ll have more than 1000 JDAMs in the inventory. So this is no longer pie-in-the-sky stuff; this is no longer programs and plans; this is no longer line items in the budget; this is real capability: all weather, day/night, near-precision attack capability anyplace in the world, anytime, against anybody who deserves to get “schwacked.”

This year we took delivery of our fifteenth Block-30/35 AWACS at Tinker. You say “What is that?” Well, it’s a tremendous enhancement to that great, overworked workhorse of the surveillance world, because it gives it a lot of capability. It gives it the new Link 16 radio that improves the latency eight-fold. Latency of the AWACS picture will be reduced from 40 seconds to 5 seconds. What a quantum leap forward in capability! Integrated GPS will improve the accuracy of the targets that it feeds to the common operational picture, by a factor of 200, and it gains its own electronic systems suite, so that it can be a better informed platform. In EFX 98, which General Myers mentioned, we demonstrated the feed of all of our intelligence into the AWACS so that we could integrate all the “int” capabilities—space based, air based, and land based—into that picture.

Predator has continued its evolution. This month we take delivery of the sixth system. The sixth system is a fully developed weapons system, complete with identification-friend-or-foe capability, much better capability to move data [through data links]. It will have an air traffic control voice link so it can begin to operate in that FAA environment, which has been such a challenge for us. It will have Mode 4, a better engine, and improved—or, for the first time, a reasonable—anti-ice/de-ice capability.

And by the way, it just became operational in its second theater. It’s been deployed almost non-stop for several years now, as you know, in Bosnia. Well, now it’s taking up operations in Southwest Asia in support of General Tony Zinni. So the Predator is getting out and about, and we will rapidly build to our full complement of systems over the next couple of years so that we can sustain three systems forward deployed at all times. And those folks are doing a great job.

There are some things in development that have come along a lot in the past year: Global Hawk, for example. It has now completed 11 flights. It has flown at 61,000-plus feet at 350 knots, and it has demonstrated its move toward full endurance capabilities with a 9½-hour sortie.

Great promise, but promise beyond reconnaissance and surveillance. Our battlelab down at Eglin, the UAV battlelab, is exploring many other missions with this and other unmanned platforms. Early on I think there will be a radio relay capability. It will begin to give us the capability to take a crew out of the back end of systems like the ABCCC and just move digits back and forth and move that communications flow from a radio relay on a high altitude platform. Suppression of enemy defenses—we’ve already demonstrated this capability on other UAVs with the precise geolocation of threats on the ground, and it won’t be long after that before we can locate them and attack them.

The Airborne Laser. A great system, and what potential! This is the future! Now, unfortunately, it suffered a $25 million cut as the Congress finished work on the ’99 budget, but we’ve rephased the program; we’ve incorporated some added risk-reduction elements. It will slide about a year to the right and, of course, like all things that slide to the right, it will add to the cost. But it’s been a tremendous achievement this year because they’ve demonstrated 110 percent of the spec power output from the flight-weighted laser module that will form the firing element in that weapons system. And that’s just the start. So we are going to deliver this capability. We’ll take delivery of the 747 platform that we’re going to integrate six of these laser modules on, later this year, and that’s the real test for the airborne laser program—integration of all this capability on a flying platform. The technologies are all in hand.

Our Aerospace Command and Control Agency made great strides this year, and on the first of January they morphed into an alphabet soup agency called the Command and Control Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Center. We now have an organization that is responsible for closing the loop from sensor to decision-maker to shooter, and it’s doing great work for our Air Force. It is integrating all those disparate command and control programs that we had across the Air Force into a program that makes sense and that we can afford. And now, we are tying in the surveillance and reconnaissance piece so that we close the loop. Great success!

They were responsible for pulling off EFX 98, which was a great experiment in many areas, not just in how to do reach-back, as has already been mentioned. The deployment of what we’re calling collaborative tools to allow many dispersed nodes of the command and control system to integrate one to the other so that the members who are in those places don’t care where anybody else sits. Great advances—great advances in the ability to put sensor-to-shooter capabilities on our B-1 and other platforms so we can launch some of these Global Reach platforms without even giving them a target. We’ll assign them their target en route and send them their mission folder and all their target data so that we can accelerate the decision cycle, which is usually the slowest part of any command and control structure.

In our struggle to better manage the high OPTEMPO that is putting so much strain on our people and their families, we have had some successes. Two years ago, when we sent people to support operations in places like Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia and Al Jabber in Kuwait, frequently they would be tagged to go off all by themselves. They’d put their duffel bag over their shoulder and go catch a hop to the Middle East and generally spend three or four days in Europe on the way, sometimes longer. They’d show up and they didn’t know anybody and nobody knew them and they didn’t know their boss. And it wasn’t much fun. Frequently they did that with as little as seven or eight days’ notice.

We have changed the whole process. We have re-engineered the way that we do that kind of work. Now, 80 percent of the men and women in Air Combat Command who are given these assignments have 120 days’ notice so they can plan both their personal and their professional lives around that deployment. They also go as part of teams. Almost nobody goes as a single anymore. If the security force is called, it’s a 13-person team. Even if they’re a public affairs person, we try to get them married up so there’s at least two of them who go from the same unit, so they’ve got some mutual support. Great progress!

And then, of course, there’s the Aerospace Expeditionary Force concept, which we are in the process of fielding. General Cook talked about it. I think he gave you all that you’d ever want to know about AEF. So let me put a little different spin on it from my perspective at ACC.

One of the real benefit of AEF will be for the warfighter. The warfighter will know that he is getting forces that have been tailored for his mission and specifically trained and prepared to do his work, rather than just stacked up in the middle of the country and stuck over there without any focused, tailored preparation.

And our people, will get predictability in their lives that they haven’t enjoyed in many years. Because they will now know well in advance—a year or a year and a half in advance—that they’re going to be deploying next June, July, or August, and they’ll know where and in what theater it is that they’re vulnerable to deploy.

We’ll get greater participation from the Total Force, because we’ll be able to give our Air National Guardsmen and our Air Force Reservists adequate notice so that they can plan to participate in these operations to an even greater extent than they have been in the past. And we’ve had great Total Force participation in these operations already, but that’s going to get even better. And that will relieve some of the stress on the active force that is causing us such grief.

<>We’ve even had some notable successes in the facilities area, which is, by any measure, the most neglected part of the DoD budget and of the Air Force budget. But even there, we’ve had some successes. When Howard Air Force Base closes in December of this year, ACC will no longer have a single gang latrine-equipped dormitory.

Then, of course, there is what I consider to be our most important modernization program: the F-22. Now you know you can’t invite me to the platform without hearing something about F-22s, so just gird your loins and be prepared for it!

You know, those who have to win control of the skies may have one of the most daunting tasks of any warfighter. Think about it. No terrain to hide behind—you can’t mask your movements. There aren’t any fields or forests to provide cover and concealment. When they enter battle, they are visible to everybody who has eyes of any kind to see them. So the only thing that assures their success is the technical virtue of their aircraft and their own confidence in their skills.

And today I might use the analogy of two very equally equipped foes facing each other in hand-to-hand combat, and the only thing that will assure our warrior victory today is the training superiority.

<>Because today we are matched equally in this environment. Some would say that we are sending our warriors into combat at a potential disadvantage against some of the systems that have already been fielded in other air forces around the globe. It’s not a very forgiving environment, and it grows more dangerous every year.

We have surface-to-air missile systems, with a 100-mile reach, that are proliferating. We’ve all read about the SA-10 that might show up in Cyprus, of all places, any day. And failure in the endeavor to control the third dimension will come at an enormously high cost for our nation. Our expeditionary forces that we’re working so hard on, both in concept and in reality, could be subjected to the awesome destructive power of modern aerospace forces before they even get to the ports and airfields from which they have to disperse when they get to the theater. They could be decimated as they get themselves organized to leave those air bases and seaports. And for the first time since the Korean War, Americans in battle could have to fight against an attacking enemy air force.

Our ability to dominate the air battle has enabled every military success from Normandy to General Schwarzkopf’s famous left hook in Desert Storm. But it gets tougher to do with every passing year, because technology is proliferating across the globe at a tremendous rate. Every day we see the fielding of systems with important capabilities that exceed our grasp today: missiles with tremendous reach, incredibly accurate radars, electronic countermeasures that are able to blind the eyes of our fighters—the radar eyes upon which they depend for their situational awareness and to employ their weapons.

So what we need is what we decided to procure back in the ’80s, when we invented the F-22 program. We sat down and thought through what we thought we were going to find in the next century in the way of threats. And we decided we needed an airplane that was very stealthy, that was able to sustain high-mach cruise for a sustained period of time. It needed the ability to give its aviators unmatched situational awareness and the kind of maneuverability that you have to have to survive in a close fight.

Now, that’s a tall order, but—fortunately—the F-22 Raptor will soon be in the hands of our air warriors whom we will ask to do battle for dominance of the skies over future battlefields. It will give them the stealth, speed, agility, lethality, and dominant situational awareness that will make them victorious over any foe in any place and at any time through the first three decades of the 21^st century. And the program is delivering.

What a year it has been for this Air Force! Now, this time last year, I was very proud to tell you that we had logged two flights and three hours. And of course there were some people who thought “You ought to do more!” Well, we did more. The airplane now has more than 200 hours on it. It’s been flown to six G’s and 26-degrees angle of attack, at 50,000 feet, airspeeds up to Mach 1.4, and it has refueled literally dozens of times. It is living up to its promise, both in performance and in the key areas of maintainability and reliability.

Because remember, when we hear about all those issues of supportability, that it’s not the affordability of a system when you buy it that counts; it’s the affordability of a system when you have operated it through its lifetime that’s most important. And the F-22 will give us an airplane that we can deploy with half the airlift of a comparable F-15 squadron today, one that we will sustain with one-third fewer people. And when you can save airlift, that means combat power for the CINCs. And when you can save people, that’s money, because 50 percent of the DoD budget goes to pay for our people. And by the way, that’s too little. They need more.

I guess the bottom line of all that is, unlike last year, when I was a purveyor of gloom and doom, that I am really optimistic. Now, that doesn’t mean that all our problems have gone away. I’m optimistic because I see things coming into place that can make our problems go away. So I think we’re going to be on the uptake very soon. That doesn’t mean that mission capable rates for ACC’s fighter fleets, which last year were in a precipitous decline, have turned around—but they did level off. Our mission capable rates to date in 1999 are identical to our average mission capable rates in 1998. So that’s a start, and I hope soon to see them on the uptake.

I wish I had good news on retention, because retention rates are even worse today than they were a year ago, in all areas. The pilot shortfall, which I think last year we predicted would bottom out at about 1800 short of our requirements, is now predicted to bottom out about 2000 short of our requirements. So we’ve got some work cut out for us.

But the just-released presidential budget is a huge step in the right direction, especially the proposals to restore the value of military retirement as a career incentive and to arrest the erosion of military pay scales that have failed to keep pace with those in the rest of the economy for too many years. And last week, the Senate moved to enhance the President’s proposal in both of these areas, both in the value of retirement benefits and in the increased rate of compensation in general. This attention to the needs of our people is long overdue. It’s the right thing to do, especially when we are asking so much of military people and their families in this very turbulent world that General Ryan described. And it sends the message that our force has been yearning to hear for many years: it tells them that they’re important.

I spend a lot of time with our airmen, and most of that I spend listening. And what they have been telling me is pretty clear. They have been wondering whether the American people still value their service. Their service has not been an element of the national debate for a long time, so they wonder—as they see their compensation and benefits steadily eroding, as they struggle so hard to maintain the mission-capability rates of the equipment for which they are responsible, as they get asked to deploy countless times to far-off places under difficult conditions—they wonder whether the nation still cares about them.

So these recent moves in Washington to enhance the pay compensation and benefits of our people, to restore some fairness to the compensation system, send exactly the right message.

And it’s not the money that’s important to them. It’s the fact that we’re telling them for the first time in a long time that the nation really cares about their service—that the nation values their service—that the nation considers that what they do is important.

The President has also committed to increased funding of spare parts for our aging equipment, and to buy new equipment to replace that which is simply too tired to continue. But more is needed, and some of the sources for the increases already proposed may never be realized. We are counting on continued low inflation to cover many of these needs. But inflation in the supermarket may not match that for military hardware. So we need to examine the assumptions very carefully, and should they prove false, we must be prepared to provide more direct sources of funding for these critical needs. I think we’re on the right track.

Thank you for your continued support of our armed forces and for this great Air Force Association. And again, thanks for this opportunity to spend some time with such a wonderful group of people, talking about the Air Force and Air Combat Command. I hope my perspective has been of some use to you today.

Gen. Shaud: The first question has to do with priorities of Science and Technology (S&T) funding. You spoke of new weapons arriving in the inventory. Do you believe the Air Force has adequately budgeted for the next generation of weapons for the next generation of aircraft? (For example, F-22s and Joint Strike Fighters.)

Gen. Hawley: I think we have a very tenuous balance between the budget authority that we are projected to receive through the FYDP and the missions that we have the resources to do. It’s going to be a real challenge, unless we see a change in the nation’s priorities with respect to support for the national defense accounts. As I mentioned, I think there’s some very optimistic assumptions that underlie the current stream of funding, and so there is going to be a need to readdress this.

In the science and technology accounts, of course, for most of the drawdown period that we’ve been enduring for the past decade, we’ve really done a very good job of protecting S&T. I think the overall budget for the Air Force has declined by nearly 40 percent since the 1988 time frame, while I believe S&T today is only about 10 or 15 percent below where it started. So we’ve done a pretty good job. Obviously, any reduction requires some balance, or rebalancing, of those accounts. And what we’ve determined to do is to shift some of the weight of effort in the S&T accounts towards research that will enable our future capability to dominate in the space environment. That’s what it takes: we have to invest today in those enabling technologies that will allow us to get to space in an affordable way and then to dominate in space, once we get there, in an affordable way. That’s going to take a lot of S&T investment, because it’s not affordable today. At least, it’s not affordable within the kind of budget topline that the Air Force is looking at through the remainder of this FYDP.

Gen. Shaud: The next question has to do with our Total Force. Since Desert Storm, members of the Reserve and Guard now take mission leadership positions when deployed. What is being done to assure continued Air Reserve Technician participation in leadership at the wing level and above with the AEF concept?

Gen. Hawley: As the question points out, we have had great support from both the Guard and the Reserve, not just providing the forces in support of our contingencies around the world, but also providing leadership. I cannot think of a wing command that we’ve stood up, but I know we’ve had groups. And so we had Reservists and Guardsmen at the colonel level commanding groups of active duty Guard and Reserve people in contingency operations. And we will continue to do that.

Our Guard and Reserve are a national treasure. No other nation has figured out how to establish that kind of citizen soldier—airman—as we have. And it is something that we need to treasure and continue to integrate into our Total Force. Frankly, I think we in the Air Force are doing that better than anybody else. We are a model for the other Services.

And you will continue to see opportunities. Whether or not we see opportunity at the wing level I think will depend on how this expeditionary world unfolds. When we get to the point where we don’t have a deployed command and control structure in place the way we do in Southwest Asia today, for both Southern Watch and Northern Watch, and we wind up deploying units from scratch and have to send their own command and control with them—you may well see a Guard or Reserve wing commander provide the leadership for those forces.

Gen. Shaud: The next question is about training. Some see virtual training and Distributed Mission Training as the best way to train. Your view on this?

Gen. Hawley: That’s another whole speech! We don’t have enough time as I want to spend on that. I think there’s a great future in it. I am perhaps the Air Force’s most outspoken proponent for what we’ve been calling Distributed Mission Training.

Now, there’s some confusion about what Distributed Mission Training really means, so I just proposed a name change. I propose that we change to Distributed Crew Training. And another step in this concept is called Distributed Staff Training. They’re two very different things, even though one can support the other.

And I think Distributed Crew Training can take advantage of some of the modern technologies that are emerging today to give our force the opportunity to train in a synthetic environment with enough realism so that they can replicate the kind of training that we used to think could only be done in the air. Then we will be able to overcome some of the constraints that face us today in so many areas, such as: constraints in our access to airspace and ranges; constraints in our ability to provide robust adversary forces; constraints in our ability to replicate exposed crews to threats on the ground; and constraints in our ability to mix joint and combined forces together. And we’re going to make great strides in this effort this spring.

We are installing, as I speak, an advanced system of four F-15 simulators at Eglin. They will be linked together so that the crews at Eglin can train in a synthetic environment the way they fight—as a four-ship. They will have high-fidelity graphics displays, with wrap-around graphics so they will have a great visual environment to operate in. They will have high-fidelity cockpits, dedicated adversary workstations, so we can have them flying against real people, not just computers. I think that’s a very important part of the synthetic training environment—you’ve got to be able fly against more than a computer-generated threat. All that will be fielded this spring at Eglin, and we’ll follow it up in June with another four-ship at Langley. And I predict that by this time next year, you are going to see people raving about the result from this early deployment of Distributed Crew Training. And then we’re going to spread it on to the F-16 next, and we hope to begin fielding it in the F-16 in 2002.

Think about the AEF. This is a collection of units from across the Air Force that’s a virtual organization made up of perhaps eight or ten different squadrons. It’s made up of earmarked ground FAC people, combat communications, Red Horse, and Prime Beef teams, which are all the elements that it takes to deliver combat power to the CINC. What’s better to prepare them for their task in the theater than to train together in a Distributed Crew Training environment, without having to incur the further OPTEMPO of deploying someplace in order to work together? The concepts have a tremendous future.

Gen. Shaud: The next question relates to training and readiness. It is said by airmen that one of the most challenging environments is the area you’re engaged in. Your feelings, sir, about the readiness of our pilots over North and South Iraq today, to fly and fight and win?

Gen. Hawley: I think it’s absolutely amazing what a great job they’re doing for us. Think about the environment they’re in every day. We have asked them to operate in a lethal environment every day and to figure out how to make it no-risk. Because their first priority is not getting shot down. And yet, they must enforce a No Fly Zone when the initiative is in the hands of the enemy. It’s exactly what you don’t want in combat. The first thing a commander wants when he goes into combat is to seize the initiative; take it away from the enemy. In this case, the enemy has all the initiative. And these young men and women are flying into that combat zone every day. They’re analyzing the situation perfectly, responding perfectly in order to drive that threat out of the zone—avoiding the SAM traps that have been set up on the ground—and they’ve been doing a great job. And they’re doing it because they’ve been very well trained. And if there’s one resource we need to continue to protect, it’s that well-trained airman on the ground, in the air, everywhere in the Air Force.

Gen. Shaud: Sir, the next question has to do with force structure. Specifically, when we speak to two Major Theater Wars (MTW), what do you see as the full operational requirement for such systems as JSTARS?

Gen. Hawley: There are two issues with systems like JSTARS. I presume the questioner is referring to surveillance/reconnaissance platforms and the Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) part of that center that we just stood up at Langley.

For two MTWs, basically you’ve got to be able to give the CINC persistent coverage of the battlefield with all these systems, whether it be U-2s, Rivet Joints, AWACS, JSTARS, because that’s what the CINC wants. He wants perfect situational awareness of what’s going on in the air and on the ground in his theater of operations. So you’ve got to provide a capability that gives him enough of that to provide, if not 24-hour-a-day coverage, very close to 24-hour-a-day coverage. And of course, that’s why we have to provide a whole diverse set of mission capabilities to that CINC. These capabilities span the whole gamut from U-2s, which have a whole variety of sensors on them, to include synthetic aperture radar, to Global Hawk, which we hope will have a similarly broad set of sensor arrays. JSTARS, which gives you command and control capabilities, isn’t a surveillance platform, it’s a command and control platform, and you’ve got to be able to provide that command and control because that’s what links the sensors to the shooters. And of course, that’s what the CINC is after—not only knowing what’s going on in his AOR, but then being able to link that information through a decision-maker to a shooter so that he can react to it. And I guess the real question is “Do we have enough?” The ACC requirement is for 19 JSTARS.

Gen. Shaud: The last question is perfect for the ACC commander. What’s your vision for advanced weapons 20 years from now?

Gen. Hawley: Most of them are either in the field or in R&D today. Twenty years from now is 2019. In 2019 we’ll have a fully deployed fleet of F-22s—I hope more than 339. I’d like a couple hundred more of them. By that time we’ll be about two-thirds of the way through the buy of Joint Strike Fighters, so we’ll have—I’m guessing—probably 1200 Joint Strike Fighters by that time. AWACS will still be flying. J STARS will still be flying. B-52s will still be flying. The B-1 will still be flying. The B-2 will still be flying. And hopefully by that time we will have some systems in space to give us the kind of capabilities that General Myers talked about—systems that will begin to not only complement but begin to displace some of our airborne systems like AWACS and JSTARS.

And that’s the time frame when you can expect to see some of those capabilities emerge from that increased S&T investment that we’ve committed to today. And I think you’ll see continued evolution in our weapons inventories for precision, all-weather lethality in small packages. You’ve all heard about the small smart bombs. In order to take advantage of the stealthy features of B-2s and 117s and F-22s and Joint Strike Fighters and so on, you need to carry all the weapons internally, there is great operational benefit in making those weapons just as lethal as they are today, but in a much smaller package. So you will see continued effort to shrink the size of everything in order to make it more deployable, more lethal. And of course you’ll see command and control involved in ways that we can’t even imagine today. We’re almost to the point when we can find, fix, target, track and engage in near-real-time anything on the face of the earth.

Gen. Shaud: Let me make two comments, if I could. First of all, our appreciation to you for carrying on the great tradition of this Air Warfare Symposium. It is just super during your tenure at Langley. The second thing I would say to General Hawley: Thank you so much for all you’ve done for the people of the United States Air Force.

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