Foundation Forum

General James L. Jamerson
Deputy Commander in Chief, U.S. European Command
AFA Air Warfare Symposium
January 30, 1997

"Overseas Presence ... The Joint, Combined Multiplier"

I appreciate the opportunity to come and spend some time with this meeting, even though I am doing it in a slightly different capacity as the DCINC in the Unified European Command, but I think I can bring some thoughts to you and bring some knowledge to you on what is going on in Europe. I'll spin through that fairly fast and finish with a couple comments about technology.

The headquarters building for EUCOM made me think of something. I don't want to argue with Dick [Hawley] about numbers of headquarters that we have and how well we are organized. What goes on in headquarters, though, is different than what went on a few years ago. I noticed it when I got back to Ramstein [AB, Germany]. I noticed when I got down to EUCOM. We are much more operational in these headquarters than we ever were before. There is a lot less time for doing policy and a lot more energy spent on running operations. I suspect that all people who have headquarters would say that. It doesn't say there isn't a better way to do this, but we are "riding them hard and putting them away wet" in a lot of these headquarters these days.

We have an OPTEMPO challenge; we have a PERSTEMPO challenge; and anymore we have a staff tempo challenge. There may not be a lot of concern for what goes on with people in staffs; I accept that. But I want you to know there are some folks out there who are really churning hard as we go from one contingency to the next contingency and then try to work a number of other problems.

As a refresher on U.S. European Command, it covers 83 countries and it is a big command. It is bigger than I realized, even though I spent a fair amount of time over there in the last number of years. I have logged a lot of hours in that part of the world that is in the bottom end, in Africa, because someone needs to go down there. Europe gets a fair amount of attention from others, so I do a lot of work in Africa. A lot of our contingencies have been in Africa; there are a lot of problems in Africa and we spend a lot of time keeping an eye on that area.

There are some seams in the unified command system as Central Command takes a piece of Africa. It is not always easy to work, but we stay in touch with the folks in Tampa. You cannot have things going on in Kenya that don't affect things going on in Rwanda. Things in Zaire affect everybody. This is a continent that has lots of problems, and to divide between unified commands is a little problematical. However, having said that, we've had it this way for awhile. It is not broken and we probably ought to just leave it alone and not try to do anything else with it.

One of our "areas of interest" is the former states of the Russian Republic, which is really somewhat unassigned to a theater CINC. Only pieces of it are assigned. In the Joint Staff, we are working our way through who has responsibility out there. We have run noncombatant evacuations from the European Command out in Tadzhikistan. We are way out there in some of these places doing business.

This is the force structure in Europe. It has been this way for a couple of years. It is not what it used to be in Europe. I've always contended that when you start measuring fighter wings with decimal points, things are getting a little bit tense. Much as Dick Hawley mentioned, there are only two fighter squadrons in a wing, and you've now got a couple brigades in a division. This structure is extremely capable and very competent, but you can't run a lot of things with that alone. We draw a lot of support out of the continental United States now. The Army operation is as listed there.

USAFE has 2.33 wings and very capable operation for airmen. The Navy comes and goes but spends a lot of time with the carrier battle group moving around from the Persian Gulf into the Mediterranean -- more than they ever did before. The Marine Amphibious Ready Group is a busy crowd, being constantly in reserve for operations, but in fact being used for some. Special Operations Command Europe is a high impact organization from all services. We use them a lot and they are our leading edge of the spear in a lot of operations.

We live off of the Guard and Reserve. I would say to all who are employers, we thank you for the time you are giving them. They are taking a lot more time of from their jobs than they did before. We don't operate without them; we never have in the Air Force. You'll find them in the other services, the civil affairs folks from the Army in particular. The same people that I met in Northern Iraq in 1991 I am bumping into in Sarajevo now and they were in Haiti before. We are drawing heavily on the Reserve structure.

This is a simplistic way to show you what this OPTEMPO business is all about, all those little blue columns are about what we were doing in significant operations up to the last five years. That red column is what we've been involved in the last five years -- U.S. forces in Europe have been busy!

If I showed you all of things we have done in the last five years, it would fill a slide. There is a lot going on. Let me step through each of these very quickly.

In Liberia, there is a mirror image of what happened there four years ago. Liberia is a mess. We have to stay on our toes. The problem stays at such a high level in Liberia that when you get a spike, a more significant problem, you might not catch it very fast because day-to-day things are so troublesome there. Most of the group that went to Liberia when we started having trouble on Easter last spring were up on a mountainside in Croatia helping in the recovery of Secretary Brown's aircraft crash. In 24 hours, we pulled them off that mountain, took them down to Liberia using tankers to refuel MC-130s.

We folded the blades on helicopters to ship them. If industry is looking for something that has value, find out how to fold up and unfold helicopters in a lot less time than we can do it now. We got them down there within 72 hours, and we also alerted the ready company -- the Southern European Task Force Army unit in Vicenza. We had the MARG in the Mediterranean, the Marines -- start steaming in that direction. In 72 hours, we pulled out 2,400 people and 400 some Americans. That was a lot of people that we evacuated. The Marines then came on board and replaced the original special operations effort there. They stayed for a number of months and then we brought a special purpose MAGTAF over from the east coast of the United States to cover for a little while longer. We are very active in this part of Africa.

In the midst of that operation, the Central African Republic [CAR] heated up and we had to start pulling people out of Central African Republic. We got a lot of help from our allies for this operation. This is French "territory of interest" and we got a lot of help from them. We had to put some forces over in the CAR, so we just peeled off some Marines from Liberia and ran them over to help the ambassador. There are no Marine security forces in many of our embassies any more. When people start firing AK-47s and RPG rounds, an ambassador, if they haven't been under fire some time in their life, is not likely to know what is about to happen. So we have to get some troops in there in a hurry.

We have been running the Beruit airbridge for 14 years. It is easy to get in but hard to get out of these contingencies. It is not going away anytime soon and it is hard to keep paying attention to these things for 14 years and do it right. Every now and then, that bites us when we don't do that.

Macedonia is the one of a kind preventive deployment -- UNPREDEP. It is a preventive deployment by the United Nations that put forces in there, Nordics and ourselves, to prevent a problem. It has been successful if you measure success by saying we haven't had a problem. It is like asking how many accidents did you not have in your accident program. It is hard to measure, but it works, we think. The big debate now is whether we continue this? About 550 U.S. soldiers rotate every six months to Macedonia. That is a big cycle. We've been doing this thing for three years or so.

Northern Watch used to be Provide Comfort and there are negotiations ongoing even as we sit here today about how we will operate this thing with our Turkish friends. The U.K. is still there with us, but the French have elected to not participate any more. I was fortunate enough to get picked to go for 10 days in 1991. I was gone for 8 months. It is five and a half years later and we are still there. These things do not go away fast. About a thousand plus folks are down there flying, and we have used Guard, Reserve and active folks interchangeably, absolutely transparently in these operations.

I am not going to talk a lot about Bosnia. We could spend a lot of time on it, but I won't do that. There are 30 plus nations involved in this operation, but I'll talk about some things a little bit later. It is a big operation.

This gets a lot of coverage in various media and raises questions about what it is you want to do with your forces. Unified CINCs think about how to get the job done. Is the force flexible enough to handle what I have to get done? This is a tough problem to solve. You've got to make sure you don't create something that only services one end of the spectrum. You have to be able to work the whole thing.

Let me talk real quick on NATO. I won't give you an education. NATO is a changing organization. U.S. leadership is important. I don't think I offend anybody when I say that. It is important to NATO. We know that. We need to periodically let people know in the United States of America what NATO will do for us because it is easy to forget about that. It is a unique organization. It is flexible, dynamic, and has changed a lot as an organization. I and General Shaud have served in that organization. We've probably endured the slings and arrows of those who say it takes forever to get something done via all the meetings in Brussels. That is all true. But, they have responded to every single requirement in the Bosnia business in a timely manner. You have 16 nations, any one of which can stop a process. To respond quickly in Bosnia is a minor miracle. In fact, maybe it is even a major miracle.

This is what it used to look like, but it is not that kind of operation anymore. These are the challenges that face NATO. The one in the middle, instability, is probably the biggest one, attempting to maintain stability so that all the right democratic and commercial and business things in the world that we want to happen can happen.

So, now you have a NATO in 1997 that actually can move out and has reaction forces and can do lots of things that were never capable of being done in the past. Those are not arrows of aggression or combat capability that move out towards Russia. That is engagement. That is what it is all about. This is what brings them to us. This is what opens up that part of the world and makes it a better place to live.

Let me talk now about a couple things that go with the Joint Contact Team program. You can call it military-to-military contact. I don't think we have any way of measuring the magnitude of how much good has come from military-to-military contact, but it is incredible. I can't give you a number. I can't quantify, but we have worked through these countries in particular since the late 1980s and early 1990s. A lot of very forward leaning people, General Jack Galvin and others, said "Don't get in my way, we have got things to do" and they went out and started mil-to-mil contact.

With these kinds of objectives, this program has been successful, and it is measurably successful as we look at NATO enlargement and some of these things which will happen in the future.

It enables others to operate with NATO and we'll talk about that one more time. This many countries, a hundred events a month, a thousand plus events a year, these are all being done by airmen, soldiers, sailors and Marines, not all in Europe, by the way, both in the CONUS and over there. Contact occurs in every range of thing that you can think about. Anything you can think about that the military does, they want to know about. We put people over there and spend varying amounts of time with them, and them with us in learning how to operate and think and live like we do.

We have strong reserve participation -- a unique bridge to America. There are Guard units and state Guard organizations that are tied to countries. I could spend a long time here on it, but will not, because I don't think I need to tell you about the benefits you derive from this when countries are trying to learn about all the things they see in us. All by just lashing them up with your state organizations. They get to see the local town council and the state government operate. They find out about all sorts of things that can never be done in a large government program any better than this. There are South Carolina folks putting water wells in for a really sad hospital in Albania that had no running water, let alone hot water, and no electricity. The South Carolina Guard, with lots of Marine reservists made that happen.

Partnership for Peace is not military-to-military contact of ours but is the NATO piece of military-to-military contact and is very important. I've heard stories that this was just an idea that people were searching for in Washington when looking for something to do a number of years ago. Whoever thought of it was brilliant. This program has worked superbly for the kinds of things we are talking about right here. Again, it is contact with the NATO nations to our partners.

The program has many signatories. Switzerland has just signed up for Partnership for Peace program. It is a big event politically for the Swiss to do this.

This year is the 50th anniversary of General Marshall's vision about a Europe whole and free from the Atlantic to the Urals. The vision was there, it is only just now beginning to come true. The George C. Marshall Center was established in Garmish, Germany, again because some people a number of years ago had some really great ideas. We now have had about 400 graduates of the five-month course. In that school, you have countries like Kazakhstan with 14 people who have spent five-months talking about how to budget and figure out what defense requirements should be and how they operate in a democratic environment with civilian control of the military. This is going to be at tremendously high-impact program. It already is. We have people who have gone through this program who are now the chiefs of defense.

This is what you get out of all of that. That was a broad brush and pretty fast move through the command. In the middle it says IFOR and SFOR, the Bosnia operation. We have been able to bring 30 plus countries on board and operate multi-nationally on the ground, in the air and at sea. Multi-national is a lot easier to say than it is to do.

To summarize that portion in Europe, we are forward presence, forward based, forward stationed and we think it is important to stay that way. We are working all 100,000 folks pretty hard, but there are things that I just took you through that cannot be done from the continental United States. That is not because anybody is guilty of anything and it is not because anybody is not competent. You just can't do it from here. You must have forces over there to have this engagement.

I didn't mention to you an operation, the latest one in Africa, Operation Guardian Assistance, which involved Zaire and the hundreds of thousands of Hutus who came back to Rwanda. We stayed on alert to go for a number of days. We trained the force in Europe to go, so that General Ed Smith, U.S. Army, knew exactly what he was going to do when he got down there. We had him in a training facility at Kelly Barracks in Stuttgart where he could meet and talk with everybody about what he wanted to do when he got to either Entebbe or Kigali. So, when he deployed, he would have done it all. He had practiced it all. He had been through it all. That is part of what you get with a forward stationed force.

Part of the challenge on something like Guardian Assistance is how to use the technology we have for the war fighting mode and use it in some of these other areas like humanitarian activities where we are spending a lot of time.

We are also leveraging our allies and partners, all of us together so we can get business done. That is very important.

Let me transition from that. I want to also talk a little bit about some personal thoughts on technology. You have seen what is going on in Europe. It is a busy place. The troops feel pretty good about what they are doing, but the cautionary note is exactly what Dick Hawley talked about. We have them working pretty hard. If we don't take care of them and do things right for them in terms of quality of life and a lot of other things, it can get a little risky.

Many of you are in the technology business. We all know how strong our people are and how good our people are. They are really good, and they are good in all services, not just the Air Force. Now, multiply their strength by having the right kind of technology. There are things we can do such as knowing how to use it. This is more and more, by the way, a joint and combined sort of thing.

I would encourage anybody who is in the technology development business to think about how do you do it with your allies. It can't just be done with us anymore. We run into real problems when we find that we can't share something. The promise to get rid of that "no foreign" tag didn't come true quite as fast as we hoped. But it did come true. That is important so we can share information.

Let me talk about some other things here. We have been a big customer of technology in Europe, particularly in the last couple of years. We have been very successful in some areas such as mission planning tools, but maybe not so successful in others and there are things that need to be worked -- like getting useable data into the cockpit for aviators.

The venerable old RC-135, Rivet Joint, and the EP-3 now has the Navy and our allies on board, collecting data and then bringing it all together. We have made great strides in the NATO arena in bringing information together and sharing it. I think what we thought we were doing a number of years ago with the old shed operations, and we weren't anywhere close to being in the warfighting business. But we are a lot closer now.

The U-2 is a big paradigm break here to take an airplane and instead of taking lots of C-5s and working an agreement with the host nation to lay a lot of concrete to put things on the ground next door to the combined air ops center, we just run a pipe back to California and work it from there. In low density systems, I don't see that there is any other way to operate than doing that kind of stuff.

A lot of technology has gone into the CAOC and that is multi-national. That is good. You've heard a lot about JSTARS. Its been over twice, and we are learning a lot about how you take JSTARS, which we knew was very good for one kind of scenario, and we are learning it can be very good for a lot of other kinds of scenarios.

Now we are getting to the part where I think we can use some help from industry and many of you out there who do other things. The Bosnia Command and Control augmentation is, in fact, the Joint Broadcast Service, which leads us to Global Broadcast Service downstream. I don't pretend to be able to understand the technology involved in this, but the amount of combat capability it is going to bring to us is mind boggling. But we don't understand how to use it and we are not making a lot of headway on how to use it because the troops are working so hard and they don't have time to take something that is dynamic and this dramatic a change and figure out how to use it, no matter how smart they are.

So industry should look at providing several solution to this in the future. It has to do with a thing like the concept of ops. You know how we work in the military. If you don't, you need to have your engineers spend more time with us. That can be done. We've done that in the past. Then help us with the concept of operations on some of these systems that are so dramatically different. How are we going to use them? Help us with the trade offs. That is important. We have got to trade something out if we are going to bring something in, and we need some help in figuring that out. That is my view from my unified headquarters.

We are comfortable with some of the systems we have. They work pretty well. So, when we get something that is really different and a little hard to fathom, we tend to "put it over here and get to it when I can as I like the system I've got." We are missing some of the potential with some of the new systems.

We must have good training. We forget this time and time again. We've got to train people on how to use the systems if you want any longevity in using it. We've got to have clear lifecycle information on what is the cost of bringing it on board. This is eating us alive in some of these things. We get handed something that is really good. Everybody turns around and goes home and nobody spends much time thinking about the cost over the next 20 years in terms of how many people it takes. This is, for us, eating the components alive, because the components are trying to run all this.

Then, as I said earlier, take a look at new missions. We have a lot of new missions out there. The mission in Zaire was to count the refugees, interestingly enough, because a lot of people were saying that there were hundreds of thousands of people and they were dying. Two years ago, that is exactly what was going on. This time it was not what was going on. But there was a tremendous push to do something because all of these people were dying. But they weren't. So we used a P-3 to go out and literally count people to try to get some truth to what the numbers were. It kept us from deploying a bunch of troops for no good reason, which then puts them at risk and obviously churns up a lot more money in the budget.

That is it -- a little bit of review on what is going on in EUCOM and some thoughts on technology and where we might get some help. We have a lot of people out there in the audience who know what the military does, and we are having a hard time finding the time to work our problems in some areas.

General Shaud: Jim, this question is on interoperability. We used to have problems with 2 ATAF [Allied Tactical Air Force] and 4 ATAF compared to what you are working today. Rate the progress of East European air forces toward becoming interoperable with NATO and highlight some specific examples of progress.

General Jamerson: Mike Ryan, in some ways, would be the better guy to answer this because he's been involved. I would tell you that the Partnership for Peace process in the air side was a little slow getting off the ground because it had to be, I think. In the original exercises that we did with the new democracies in the East, it was very much a right foot here, left foot there, squad level exercise. That is as it should be. That is what it took to get things done. When you start talking about air activities, as we all know, that is a lot more complex. There was a lot of flinching. My first attempt as the AIRCENT commander to get something off the ground was a complete failure. It just scared people. Dick may have had more success. Mike has finally gotten some things done. It has been a slow process to get in and find out in what kind of condition they are in for interoperability terms.

A number of countries have made some bold moves. The Hungarians are putting transponders in their aircraft and are making some moves that make them more compatible. The United States government has a great initiative to bring an air-space control systems to countries over there. In a lot of cases, they are not as interoperable in the air as we would want to have them, particularly in fighter and weapons delivery kinds of things. But they are getting there slowly.

General Shaud: One of the great debates here is the tension between not only the cost of humanitarian operations in dollar amounts, but the cost in terms of readiness. What are you observations on that? I know you have a JTF at least each week, coming out of Stuttgart.

General Jamerson: That is the great readiness debate. The answer is yes to almost every question you might ask. Is there a readiness bill to be paid? To a degree. I would use even the air operation and part of the struggle we've had in what was Provide Comfort and is now Northern Watch. If you take off every day and you fly out to Northern Iraq and you fly into orbit and you come back and you land and nobody ever attacks you and you don't drop a bomb, are you as competent as you were two days or two weeks before? The answer is, "No." So you have to work some training into that.

When we sent the troops to Bosnia, the Army did a superb job of creating training opportunities in Hungary. They brought the troops out and they went through the tank table and they did crew training in Hungary. They gave them a little quality time off, as best as you could give them there, and then they went back into Bosnia. You can maintain, in my view, very high levels of readiness while involved in humanitarian type operations or others, but you are going to have to go back and fine tune some things. It depends upon how long you've been there and what the conditions of any particular humanitarian or other operation are.

There has been some discussion about the 1st Armored Division and bringing it back online. You can do certain things to get back on line. You can cancel all leaves or work every weekend, and you can destroy your people. General Bill Crouch, to his credit, has elected not to do that. They are trained up to a certain level. If the world started to get bad, there is enough time to get them trained to the next level where they need to be.

In my view, the readiness thing is a leadership challenge. You have to keep your eye on it. You have to watch it all the time. But we are not destroying readiness by taking on the missions that the nation has given us to do. That is what leaders are for -- is to figure out how to stay ready while you do it.

General Shaud: Another question that we hear a lot hear in the states, Russian attitudes toward NATO and NATO expansion seems divided at best and confused at times. What attitude do you read currently holds sway and what is current status of the thought of a Russian role in NATO?

General Jamerson: I'm not the guy to answer that. You'd have to have General George Joulwan up here to answer some of that or you'd have to have the secretary general of NATO, because this is really a political question as much as it is a military question. Quite often, the right answer when asked why NATO is this way, is that NATO has political control of the military. The military guys do the military piece; the politicians do the political piece. I am not personally surprised that the Russians are extremely distrustful of this thing called NATO. They spent all those years with this as their enemy. We haven't had near the flow and contact with Russia as we have with other countries. It is going to take time to break down the barriers of distrust that go with NATO.

As we know, the guidance is pretty clear in the political capital side -- enlargement. Those things are going to happen and we'll learn to deal with them. The part about where Russia will be in the hall of NATO; I don't know the answer to that.

General Shaud: With significant reduction in forces by U.S. in Europe, discuss the trends of shifting NATO leadership to non-U.S. NATO nations.

General Jamerson: Who asks these questions? (laughter) It is going to be decided in July. There is a lot going on. I showed a slide that said New NATO. I'd heard people say, well, you shouldn't say New NATO; NATO is not new, it is the same old NATO and has just changed a little bit.

I think they are arguing at the margins when you talk about that kind of stuff. It is a pretty much a new alliance in a lot of ways. The command structure and the internal workings of the alliance are changing. Part of that change is to adjust leadership roles. Do you have three regional commands or two and a lot of other things, many of which have not been decided yet.

If the question concerns what is going to happen in AFSOUTH, I don't know. I will tell you that in other command positions, the wonder of NATO is they sit down at the table, and it works out. They come to an agreement and they figure out how to do it. So, I am not worried about how any of that is going to turn out. There may be more Europeans in command positions; there may not be. If there are, it will be because everybody agreed to it.

General Shaud: Jim is charged with possibly one of the busiest headquarters in the world. The last several times I've been through there, it seemed as though they were standing up a joint task force every week. We appreciate the way you take care of the quality of life for your troops and you are keeping your eyes on the right things. Thank you very much.

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