Foundation Forum

General John P. Jumper
Commander, United States Air Forces Europe
AFA Air Warfare Symposium (Orlando, FL)

February 5, 1999

"USAFE 2005: A Team Effort"

Thank you, General Shaud. It's great to be back, and it's great to hear the words of Congressman Stearns. To many of us those words are music to our ears, and I think you've got your four points, sir, right on target. It's also a pleasure to be here in the presence of great airmen like General Holloway, who was the Commander of the United States Air Forces in Europe when I came into the Air Force.

And it's even a greater pleasure to be able to stand here today and talk to you about my favorite subject: aerospace power. And what you're going to hear from me today is a reinforcement of what you heard from the chief yesterday, from Dick Myers, from Dick Hawley, from Don Cook, and confirmation that the road we're on is the correct road.

Today, I hope to bring to you the experience of a theater commander who is witnessing a wide range of emerging and new issues, where we have old and new partners, old partners joining new partners, old technology joining and, in many cases, conflicting with new technology, old doctrine conflicting with new doctrine, and old threats being added to new threats.

The alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, stands in the crossroads of a new era. With a record as the most successful alliance in history, the nations, together, struggle with their identity as we enter a new century. The alliance was based on Article 5, Defense of Borders, and it is now being challenged with new dynamics, dynamics that talk as much about interests as borders. The alliance is being tugged in different directions dictated by the events of Bosnia and places like Kosovo, which suggest that, as an alliance, it must consider the political and military effects of events that happen around the globe.

In situations like we find in Africa -- the Rwanda situation -- nations and alliances in the next century must be prepared to answer a basic question: if we have the ability to stop the wholesale massacre of hundreds of thousands of people, will we be held accountable to do so?

This is much different than the alliances of old, and NATO’s tugged in a different direction by the new nations that have come on board, nations of the former Warsaw Pact who look upon NATO for a continuation of assurances that borders will be secure. It makes the debate even more difficult.

Within NATO we see conflicts of doctrine, a sort of "Back to the Future" as we reorganize the NATO military structure into joint subregional commands. They pose a particular problem for airmen because the dynamic is that in joint subregional commands, the pressure exists to break up air power into small penny packets and distribute it around to individual command and control. This is made more difficult by the fact that within NATO, within the major headquarters of NATO, with the new command structure, there will be no senior airmen.

You have to come to the third level of command, the Commander of Component Command, North, which will also be the USAFE commander, to find your first four star airman. This is due to struggles that intellectually and historically we're well equipped to deal with, but in the politics of NATO, we will have to continue to struggle with compromises and answers that are most difficult for airmen. That's what I see my job to be over the coming year, in particular, and a job which I take very seriously.

We're also conflicted in the alliance by technology, and I've heard more than one speaker stand before large audiences and say, "We cannot keep up, or compete, with America's technology. It's going too fast. It will so outstrip us that we won't be able to fight as an alliance."

This argument is one we also have to deal with because the reality is, as we get into threats and we look at threats, we're only one decision away -- in many of the countries of our hostile neighbors -- one decision away from leaping two or three generations into the world of SA-10s and SA-12s, which pose a particularly difficult problem, even for the most modern highly technical force. But I think our experience, especially our experience over the last six or eight months, points the way and confirms what we heard from yesterday's speakers.

In Kosovo, since May, we have gone through the most extensive, highly technical planning process for an air campaign that I have ever seen. Anybody in this room would be proud of the contacts we established to reach forward to the numbered air force, to reach rearward to the high technology planning tools that exist in the United States, reach rearward to Langley Air Force Base and to many other places to put together a campaign plan that we are truly and can be truly proud of.

This exercised for us, all the links, the connectivity that we had at our disposal, and pointed the way for distributive and collaborate work spaces for reach-back and for the importance of well-connected, high band width planning tools.

But it's not without its problems. We were introduced to what I call the politics of perception, the politics that for the warrior says, you can't afford to lose even one airplane. We can't afford to lose even one airman. And we have fought these perceptions with technology.

As we put together our plans there were great doubters, there were great doubters about the value of stealth, and what we did is put together a day-long educational course where we brought in, and stood before the audience, the person who would lead the mission in the air, and we laid out for that audience the details, right down to pixels per fortnight and band width and bytes per mega-second how this would happen in a most convincing way.

And it was heartening to watch our airmen go through every specific detail. The airmen that would fly the mission, the airmen that would be in the air, that would face the threats, and with great confidence, come across to a doubting audience in a way that, at the end, that doubting audience stood and said, "Not only do I believe you, colonel, I'd fly with you." That's the airmen we have out there today, ladies and gentlemen.

We took that and we modeled it and we flew it out for all to see exactly how the air campaign would flow, to look at the conflicts and to make sure that everyone understood what the plan was, and in that we can see where we need to go in the future.

The future is one where, as Dick Hawley was talking about yesterday, we need to be able to find, fix, track, target and engage, and then assess anything that moves. If heavy weapons are of concern, if airplanes and where they're parked and specific aim points are of concern, then the job is to be able to put the linkages together that go from that sensor to that shooter in near real time to have the advantage.

In Northern Watch we see some of this. In the airmen and the support personnel we saw on the film yesterday -- we see that going on day-to-day in Northern Watch -- a testimony to the discipline -- superb discipline -- of outstanding airmen as they try and deal with surface-to-air missiles one at a time, radars one at a time, AAA sites one at a time.

This is not a strategy that we want to sustain, and we're trying to deal with it, but it takes the discipline of understanding your limits and the discipline of superb execution to make this happen in a way that we can all be proud of -- and I think we see that day-in and day-out. Superb leadership by Dave Deptula and Kosovo planning by General Mike Short, General Tom Hobbins and others, with a cast of planners that is truly superb.

In Africa we're experimenting with the low end of the humanitarian spectrum. We’re dealing with command and control along large distances (and few people realize that the distance between London and Capetown is about the same as between Washington and Riyadh) and the art of dealing with NGOs (Non Government Organizations) and PVOs (Private Volunteer Organizations), the art of making your engineers and your surgeons understand the difficulties of dealing with medical and engineering problems on the African continent. We needed to bring all the technology we had to bear.

For example, we found in Africa with the explosions in the embassy, massive injuries to eyes. We needed to have, as part of tele-medicine, highly detailed photographs of eye injuries that could help us consult from the rear to know what to do for those injuries.

We're also on the right path with our Expeditionary Air Force, because we continue to emphasize rapid movement, rapid deployment, being there quickly, setting up quickly, and getting there with enough stuff to get started. It’s a long, slow process.

As much as I've been involved with the Expeditionary Air Force and the Air Expeditionary Force packaging, with this latest movement we did into Kosovo, we still had packages out there that were sized for 30 days. These were large packages that required large amounts of airlift, instead of small packages that get you there and get you started. We still work on understanding deployment lift and sustainment lift and other processes to make it happen and make it happen correctly.

We also have a lot of work to do to understand the airfields that are available and what's there, and a process to keep up with those airfields, to keep ourselves updated, to know the communications, the electrical power, the facilities and resources that are available at those bases. And Don Cook and crowd, and Air Combat Command are doing a great job to pare that down, and we're going to help over in USAFE by trying to define what happens at the humanitarian end of the scale when we deal with humanitarian relief operations, NEOs (Non-Combatant Evacuation Operations) and the like.

We've also defined a need for cultural experts in our Air Force, and not only the foreign area officers who make a life's study of a language and a culture, but also those of us who grew up in squadrons, and had opportunities to get degrees in international skills, international relations, and foreign area studies. We need to give credit on promotion boards for people who take that path, who have language skills and choose foreign area studies that are of benefit to the Air Force. Within each of our commands, we need to give ourselves the capability to immerse people in the cultural skills of the theater with programs that exist for the people who are stationed there.

And I'm also delighted to report, as Dick Myers said yesterday, that the aerospace force is here and now. How do I know? As I sat around and was a part of this extensive planning process throughout the summer, you see, at the targeting table, the blue flight suits of those from Space Command mixed with the Nomex flight suits of the airmen, and the BDUs (Battle Dress Uniform) of the intel officer.

And they had one piece of their uniform that was all the same, and that was the patch of the Air Force Weapons School, because what we have done is created an environment where all warriors are created equal and trained equally, and when you put them out there, they don't care where the platform resides, in the air or above the air. They are proud of one another and what they contribute to the game.

They talk about effects. They talk about how you link up this platform with that platform to create an effect and they don't talk about the relative importance of one platform over another, and we can all take a lesson from that as we talk about our transition to air and space in an aerospace force.

Next is this world of information warfare. It is on it is on its way and it's on its way quickly.

We see the networking of systems in space like Iridium and Teledesic to follow, and other like systems, networks proliferating, band width becoming available, tools and weapons at our disposal to do things in ways that are profoundly different than we did them before. As we do this, my caution is that we think not only of that strategic level, but we include in our thoughts the future of information warfare at the tactical and operational level, as well, which is of most concern to commanders in the field.

Finally, I want to spend a moment talking about people. Dave Vesely asked me yesterday, "What are you hearing out there when you talk to your folks? What kind of e-mails do you get? What are they telling you?" And this gets right to the problem of retention and quality of life. Let me tell you what they tell me. I have not gone up to one F-15 pilot and said, "When did you stop liking to fly the F-15?" and gotten an answer. That's not the problem.

When you have a conversation with our youngsters in the field about retention, the answers you get are tortured answers. "Sir, I love what I'm doing. I feel fulfilled. I'm contributing, but it's like too much candy at Halloween, I can't keep it up. I'm not seeing my family and I'm coming to the point where I have to make difficult choices."

When we talk about quality of life, that's a very important part of the equation, and we have to balance that with value of life, with high standards of life. We have to tell our people and make our people understand why what they're doing is not only important to the nation and to the Air Force, but most importantly, it's got to be important to them.

And we got confused along the way in some places. We went through this movement called "The Quality Air Force," but we didn't get it right, and we got confused.

And I remember going to an ORI soon after I became the commander of 9th Air Force, and I had remembered from the old days the big screen on the board where they flashed up the pictures of people and they flashed up the "Great," "Outstanding." The air horns would go off and the guys over in the left-hand corner of the auditorium would scream, "Hoo-wha." Those were the ammo guys always. And I stood there prepared for this spectacle, which I'd remembered so well, and instead the Baldridge number of 163 flashed on the board, and one air horn in the back of the room went off, and that was the quality guy, because he's the only guy who knew what it meant.

The Chief has given us clear instruction, and this is the way we've got to go with quality. We have to operationalize quality. We have to make it meaningful to the people. And Dick Hawley makes an excellent point, too: we can't abandon those things that make us examine our processes, because that's important. And Dick Hawley is exactly right.

But we can't confuse the language. Nobody knew what was meant by "empowerment." Nobody knew what was meant by "breaking down barriers," and we alienated our senior NCO corps, and it caused confusion. We are getting that back. We are replacing words like "empowerment" and "breaking down barriers," with the words that people understood when they joined, "commitment," "pride," "loyalty," "integrity," things that are important to the military culture, things that reward performance, and show understanding of the nobility of our profession.

When Fig Newton puts out a young warrior at Lackland, let me guarantee you, there is no human being more dedicated, no human being with expectations any higher, no one more infiltrated with the warrior ethic. What they ask for is leadership, and that's what we have to give them: make them feel important about themselves and the job that they do and understand how that contributes to the larger purpose.

Many of you have heard me say before that every one of these kids is going to join a gang of some kind. Many of them made the right choice because they joined the gang whose colors are blue, and we've got to make sure that our gang has the rewards that make it more attractive than anyone else's gang. And that's our commitment, the commitment of this leadership to our Air Force.

We just lived through a special year in USAFE. It was the year of the Berlin Airlift. And the stories that were told recalled many memories. One of the things we did was put on a show -- many of you in this room got to see our Berlin Airlift show. We got to put it on in Berlin, and we filled a large auditorium with people who remembered what air power did for them.

In one of the parts of the show, our band leader, Lieutenant Colonel Denny Layendecker -- who has six children, all of them immensely talented -- two of his daughters in the show played the part of a German girl from the Berlin Airlift time, named Mercedes, and Mercedes was famous because she gave Gail Halvorson, the candy bomber, her teddy bear in thanks for what he was doing for the children of Berlin.

And two of Denny's daughters played Mercedes, as a young girl, and then as an older girl, and after the show in Berlin, I was tapped on the shoulder and turned around and there was the real Mercedes.

And she said, "Could I meet the young ladies who played my part in this play?"

And I said, "Most certainly."

And it was an example of what we -- in previous generations -- what our Air Force and air power brought to people around the world that literally, in many cases, meant salvation. And we beat ourselves up about spare parts, about retention, about quality of life. As we beat ourselves up about that, we should remember the Air Force of General Curtis LeMay, General Bruce Holloway, the Air Force of our fathers, Mike Ryan's father, Pat Gamble's father, my dad, is now ours, and we pass it on to our children.

And I am reminded of Curt LeMay and the famous phone call that he got from Lucius Clay during the Berlin Airlift, and he said, "General LeMay, I want you to haul coal into Berlin."

And LeMay said, "Sir, I think we've got a bad connection. I thought you said, 'Haul coal into Berlin.'"

And Lucius Clay said, "General, that's exactly what I said. Can you do it?"

And LeMay characteristically said, "Sir, we can do anything."

Dick Hawley said it yesterday, "We're a kick-ass Air Force and we're going to continue to be that way," and it's up to these people in the front row and me to make sure we deliver, and that's our pledge to you.

It is the Air Force of our fathers and we need to go back to it in many ways. We need to make the right things happen for those magnificent people who are out there doing our work and the nation's work day-in and day-out.

I am grateful for the opportunity to be here. It's always a pleasure to be among many warriors who I've shared my career with, throughout this audience, and are great supporters of the AFA.

Thank you, General Shaud.

Gen. Shaud: Johnny, after that speech, I hardly know how to ask you questions, but I'll try. The questions really are in three areas. One is the idea of expanding NATO; the other, theoretically, in terms of the AEF, how it's really working out; and finally, with regard to your kids over in Europe in USAFE.

First of all, NATO. How will USAFE train with NATO in the new command structure?

Gen. Jumper: Well, sir, we are already involved, deeply and widely, with our new partners in NATO and through the Partnership for Peace Program with the other nations of central and eastern Europe in a variety of exercises, both bilateral and within the NATO alliance. My predecessors, Dick Hawley and Mike Ryan, began program of deep interaction with our present and future allies, and we have continued it.

The thing that we worry about the most is flying safety. As we bring the new partners aboard, we integrate into exercises sharing that operating picture, sharing a common view of flying safety and levels of performance and training and standards. And General Wes Clark in EUCOM has been very, very good about letting us lean very far forward to get started on this at an early date. And I think when we do have a session, in less than a month, these nations, the new nations, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary, will come aboard with a good fundamental basic capability in air defense and be able to join the NATO air defense system.

More capabilities will follow. They are all anxious to modernize and to be included in a more difficult exercise scenario, but that will come with time, and we will pace that according to the nations' wants and skills.

Gen. Shaud: The next question has to do with resource distribution in the real world. How do you in USAFE balance Kosovo and Incirlik and stretch UAVs, EP-3s, and other assets when you have two real contingencies ongoing. Johnny, what's the situation?

Gen. Jumper: Well, that's an excellent question, and it's one that requires careful, careful management. We do that as a command in EUCOM and USAFE and General Mike Ryan pays particularly close attention to that, as does Dick Hawley, and, of course, the Joint Staff. The concern is to make sure that these assets do not fall prey to insatiable appetites of us in the theater, and that the distribution is clearly warranted and justified, and we're adding capabilities.

As Dick Hawley said yesterday, "The Predator is now coming on board." It's the first time, after all these years of employing Predators in our operational system, that we now see it coming to us as a baseline capability where it's got the stuff it's supposed to have to do its job. We've been doing this job all along -- Dick Hawley's people have -- with systems that are largely experimental.

And we have what I think is superb cooperation between the Navy P-3 community and our Rivet Joint community to share the workload, not duplicate it. We include in that also the Army’s Guard Rail System, which also does what it can to share the work load. And in a theater such as ours, we can do a lot of that sharing and relieve some of these assets for the more difficult scenarios you find in Southern Watch where the distances are much greater.

So, is it a problem? Yes. We have to manage it extremely carefully.

Gen. Shaud: Very good. Let me kind of follow on to one of the systems you talked about. As we have unmanned aerial vehicles coming on board, Johnny, you're getting more used to using these sorts of things. What issues does the operator see emerging with the Predator and other systems?

Gen.Jumper: Well, the Predator is an interesting example. It's a marvelous capability, and it works in an environment especially well when the distances tend to be rather short. And we have a superb mechanism for reaching back and maintaining command and control over long endurance missions. But the impediments are pretty self-evident. You know, I like to say, in a 70 knot wind, the Predator can go there or it can come back, but it can't do both.

It requires airfield limitations, much as a regular air frame does. You have to have a precision approach, and you have to have the right airfield equipment to bring it in along with other air traffic.

As Dick Hawley mentioned yesterday, you have the limitations of working in civil air space with UHF radios, and IFFs, which we now finally have on board. And as you think out into the future, to those who would say, we should just invest in the wholesale abandonment of manned aircraft, we have the obvious problem of having to herd a flock of combat UAVs across the ocean with air refueling, reception teams, command and control, et cetera. Right now, that would not present much of a savings.

So this is much like Dick Myers talked about yesterday in the evolution of space. Things come in their time when the technology is available at a reasonable price, and the time will come where we're better equipped to consider these things, but for right now I can tell you that our UAV experience has been extremely positive.

And I think Dick covered it yesterday, we have customers that are extremely satisfied with the product. When I walk into the commander's office, in Sarajevo -- I remember in Desert Storm everybody had CNN up on the wall -- now it's CNN, and right beside it is live Predator video.

Gen. Shaud: Great, Johnny.

The next question you would only dare ask a former OPS staff, okay? You talked about doctrine issues surrounding the use of air power. Are there changes in the command and control system that would help keep and make air power more effective in Europe? Are there impediments to the use of air power that you see?

Gen. Jumper: The major impediment I'm dealing with right now is the impediment within the alliance. But also within the Joint Task Force structure, we find ourselves dealing with convoluted numbers and make-ups of joint task forces that seem to me to confuse the situation. It will always be the prerogative of the CINC to construct joint task forces the way the CINC best sees fit.

Now the problem I see is that with multiple joint task forces and the reduction in headquarters strength throughout our Air Force, we have a very, very difficult time manning all the joint task forces. When you have multiple joint task forces, each with an air component, trying to populate those is very quickly becoming beyond our ability.

I told Mike Ryan, during the Kosovo planning, I came very close to having a shut-down of a fighter squadron in order to get some planners to go deal with the multiple joint task forces that existed during that process. I think if there's something we can concentrate on as a joint team partnering with the other Services, it is to deal with that problem.

Gen. Shaud: General Jumper, we have a lot of people in the industry in the training business, with us. Are there plans to develop distributed mission training programs among NATO partners to facilitate coalition training?

Gen. Jumper: There are many training programs that are at work among the NATO allies right now, but I must confess, I know of nothing that pulls them together as an alliance in the distributed sense. We have the Tactical Leadership Program that many in the room are familiar with. It brings airmen together in a flying context, and we have the systems that Dick Hawley talked about yesterday, that will bring us together in an air force to be able to practice complex scenarios that are difficult to do with range restrictions and other things that we deal with.

But within the alliance, I think we've got some missionary work to do, and I think it will best be done as we are able to demonstrate the savings and the quality that comes out of this within our Air Force as time goes on.

Gen. Shaud: So the test bed will probably be here.

Gen. Jumper: Exactly. Exactly.

Gen. Shaud: Johnny, the last question. You knew I'd get to the AEF sooner or later.

Any recent lessons learned about the way AEFs are being deployed and used, through your lenses?

Gen. Jumper: I think that we are digesting many lessons of the AEF, and I'm not sure how many new ones we're learning. I'm not sure that we weren't pretty well aware of the complexities that were on our plate as Air Combat Command led us into the evolution of the Expeditionary Air Force -- and it deals with many problems at once.

The AEF, many in the room will recall, was designed merely as a way to put a small package forward that did not conflict with the CINC's decision to flow his larger pre-planned delivery plan, TPFD (Time Phased Force Deployment) Force. It could go forward quickly and be a part of a deterrent operation that could have deterrent value and effect and join with the rapid reaction capabilities of the other Services to show that we are serious about a problem. The benefits of that rapidly presented themselves when the CINCs used this capability perhaps even too much.

And then with the vision of General Ryan, we transitioned into packaging these forces in a way that would allow us to overcome some of the problems that we had, not only with the dynamics of OPTEMPO, but the dynamics of the Cold War, where we practiced for years and years sitting in fixed bases in the United States and deploying to other fixed bases overseas.

That was replaced by the dynamics now of deploying from fixed bases in the United States to tent cities and other places overseas and staying there for a very long time, and doing it two or three times during a three year tour, for example, at Langley Air Force Base. Then, you come home and find PCS orders remote to Korea, because somehow, in the minds of the system, the three deployments and the contingencies didn't count because you were PCS'd to Langley.

This is the dynamic that that allows us to focus, in the work-up period, on those combat skills that are dedicated to the place that you are going. You'll get your small arms training, your chemical defense training, and you'll have it in time so that when you enter your vulnerability period, you'll be peaked up and ready to take on those responsibilities. And then when you come back, you’ll have a certain down-time to take care of your business and enter the next training period again.

And these are the things that focus on not just Southern Watch and Northern Watch, but whatever dynamics exist in the world while we're still able to keep our commitment to the two MRCs, (Major Regional Contingencies) because when the TPFDs and the major war plans flow, EAF, AEF, are all off. We flow it as it's written.

Now maybe we can even do some tailoring so that the initial flow even comes out of expeditionary forces that are ready and prepared, or those that are most ready and prepared, but we cannot give up our commitment to the major war plans, we cannot give up our edge in training, which is, right now, as Dick Hawley again said yesterday, our greatest commodity. That is our edge. We can't give that up, and we can't give up our commitment to the CINCs who depend on that air power to be there and be there quickly.

Gen. Shaud: Johnny, I can't thank you enough. General Jumper, please convey our best wishes to those super troops in Europe. Thank you, sir.

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