Foundation Forum

Speech by General Richard E. Hawley
Commander, Air Combat Command
Air Force Association Symposium
January 30, 1997

"ACC: Charting the Course for Global Engagement"

Thank you John [John A. Shaud, AFA Executive Director]. It has been an interesting year since we last gathered in Orlando. At that time, I was commanding our air forces in Europe, and I spoke here on the importance of forward stationing to our nation's strategy of global engagement. We've got lots of power on that subject here today with Jim Jamerson and John Lorber to talk about the importance of being engaged on the ground overseas.

I've changed hats since then. I persuaded my wife, Mary Ellen, to stay with me through her seventeenth household move, and I've renewed my acquaintance with Air Combat Command. I've visited each of its 36 numbered air force, center and wing-level organizations as well as most of our deployed locations in Southwest Asia. I found a command of more than a hundred thousand dedicated Air Force men and women doing a wonderful job of providing combat air power to this nation: wherever and whenever it is needed. Today, I'd like to tell you a little bit about what those men and women of Air Combat Command have accomplished in the past year and then take a look into the future to see what the new year holds in the way of prospects and challenges.

Nineteen ninety six was a year in which ACC people continued to be heavily engaged in support of contingency operations around the globe, including those in Southwest Asia, Turkey, the former Yugoslav Republic, and in South and Central America. We averaged more than 150 aircraft and 5,000 people deployed for contingencies, in addition to the 4,000 permanently stationed abroad in Panama, the Azores and Iceland.

As I traveled around Air Combat Command, I found only one pervasive issue on our people's minds: operational tempo. Our people are working hard and they know it. They want to know if there is any light at the end of the tunnel. These are dedicated men and women who understand the meaning of "service before self." But, in some cases, we are testing their commitment to the limit.

Therefore, we have made it a top priority at ACC to do a better job of managing the operational tempo of our units and their people. Our approach is a simple one. First, develop metrics to tell us which parts of the force are being most heavily stressed; surprisingly, that is not an easy task because ops tempo is much more complex than simply the number of days that people spend away from home in a year. It is also a function of how hard they are working when they are back home, how well they are able to plan for the deployments they support, and whether they have adequate time to prepare for and recover from major contingency and exercise deployments--as well as other big events, like operational readiness inspections. With metrics in hand to identify those parts of the force that are too heavily stressed, we can then focus our efforts on actions to bring that stress back within limits.

We now host a worldwide contingency and exercise scheduling conference at Air Combat Command to help spread the work more evenly across the force than we have done in the past. We have established scheduling criteria to help us avoid scheduling any one part of the force for too many events in too short a period of time, or violating the sanctuary periods that units need to prepare for and recover from major tasks. In some cases, we have found that heavily tasked units are not fully manned, which drives personnel tempo out of limits. In those cases, the metrics allow our personnel managers to focus attention on getting manning up to 100 percent or even higher if the training base can support it. That is one of the approaches we've used to bring AWACS ops tempo back under control over the past three years.

The next step is to work with ACOM [U.S. Atlantic Command] and the Air Force components of the tasking CINCs to reduce the demand for capabilities that are being too heavily stressed, either by doing without for a period of time, or by substituting a similar, but less stressed part of the force, either from the Air Force or another service. If all else fails, and it becomes clear that we simply do not have enough of some capabilities needed to support the requirements imposed on us by our strategy of global engagement, then we will advocate for investment in additional force structure. We are doing that in the case of Rivet Joint [RC-135V] and our combat rescue forces. One measure of our progress in working the ops tempo problem is that the percentage of ACC people deployed for more than 120 days was cut in half in 1996 from the rate that we experienced in 1995 with nearly identical taskings and a continually shrinking force.

Despite the heavy load being carried by our people, ACC enjoyed our safest year ever in 1996--both on the ground and in the air, reducing our need for attrition replacement aircraft and helping ensure that more of our people are with us each week for Sunday morning services. Our fighter accident rate was the lowest on record. And, we sustained our commitment to protect the quality of life of those wonderful men and women who have made ours the world's best and most respected air force. We made good progress toward our goal of providing quality housing for every member of the force, married and single. We awarded contracts for new construction or renovation of 745 dorm rooms for our single airmen and 1,093 new or renovated housing units for our families. We also saw continued support for adequate pay and benefits for our people with congressional approval of a three percent increase in basic pay and a 4.6 percent increase in BAQ and BAS. We also saw an increase in the dislocation allowance from two to two and one-half months of basic allowance for quarters.

Nineteen ninety six also some significant enhancements to the capabilities that we in ACC bring to the warfighters. We demonstrated and refined the concept of the Air Expeditionary Force with deployments to Bahrain, Jordan, and Qatar, each a huge success in demonstrating the ability of land-based air power to respond rapidly and with lethal force when and where required. Each contributed to strengthened relationships with the host nations and their air forces. Working with our partners in Air Mobility Command, we have refined our AEF planning so that we can respond more quickly and with a smaller deployed footprint than ever before.

Nineteen ninety six also saw an impressive demonstration of our ability to reach out and touch--with precision--any target, any where, at any time. On 8 October, three B-2s flying unseen and unheard at more than 40,000 feet delivered 16 GPS-guided 2,000 bombs against 16 individual targets, destroying or damaging every one. The calculus of air power is being turned on its head. We are entering an age when we will calculate the number of targets we plan to destroy with each sortie, rather than the number of sorties that will be needed to destroy each target.

On September 16, we opened a new era when three B-1s from Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota dropped cluster bomb munitions on an airfield in the Nellis range complex. This was the B-1's first operational delivery of cluster munitions. We now hold a much wider range of targets at risk with this long-range workhorse. But perhaps the true global reach of our bomber force was best demonstrated to the world a couple of weeks earlier.

On August 31, Operation Desert Strike opened as a quick response to Iraqi military activity against Kurdish safe havens as four B-52Hs from Barksdale's 2nd Bomb Wing deployed on a 16-hour mission bound for Guam, half-way across the Pacific. Less than a day after their arrival in Guam, two B-52s, loaded with CALCMs [Conventional Air-launched Cruise Missile], launched for the Persian Gulf. After reaching their destination and launching 13 missiles at Iraq, aircraft and crews returned to Guam, nearly 34 hours and 13,000 miles later. The result of the mission: in just over three days from initial notification, our CALCMs scored 13 hits on critical air defense targets, eliminating threats to an expanded air occupation zone. Once again, our global air power provided the means for us to answer aggression and to demonstrate U.S. resolve without a massive and costly deployment.

On the other side of the equation, the trend toward precision attack stresses the capabilities of our command and control, surveillance and reconnaissance resources to provide timely information for our global attack forces. We are meeting the challenge by modernizing older systems and bringing some new systems on-line. ACC took delivery of our first Predator unmanned aerial vehicles in 1996. Our 11th Reconnaissance Squadron from Indian Springs in Nevada has been writing the book on UAV operations over the course of this past year. These professionals have taken the Predator from an advanced concept technology demonstrator to an operational weapons system. Since April 1996, Predators have logged 196 operational sorties and 1,345 hours in support of U.N. operations in Bosnia. Today, we are operating two vehicles in that theater. Another system that provides unrivaled surveillance is Joint STARS [E-8]. Joint STARS completed its operational test and evaluation in the midst of a real-world deployment to Bosnia in support of the Dayton Peace Accords. It was truly a joint effort, with about 350 airmen, soldiers and contractor personnel accomplishing the mission. Through its moving target indicator and synthetic aperture radar, Joint STARS provides the warfighter with near real-time imagery. General Joulwan, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, proved the system's great utility when he used Joint STARS-provided imagery in his negotiations with the Bosnian Serbs. As Secretary of the Air Force Sheila Widnall put it, Joint STARS creates an environment akin to a poker game in which you can see everyone else's cards.

This only scratches the surface of a very busy year. But I'd like to leave some time for your questions and also look ahead to some of the accomplishments we will see in 1997 as well as some of the challenges that we will face. We will still be heavily engaged with ongoing contingencies in Southwest Asia, Turkey and the former Yugoslav Republic as well as counter-drug operations in South and Central America. There is no letup in sight as we continue to prove that it is a lot easier to get involved in a crisis than it is to disengage from one.

AEF IV will deploy to Qatar in late February and, once again, demonstrate the ability of land-based air power to move quickly to provide a visible deterrent and tangible combat power. AEF IV will put combat sorties in the air in less than 72 hours of receipt of tasking to deploy, when only 13 airlift missions will have closed from a total of only 54.

Nineteen ninety seven will see the promise of mass precision attack move ever closer as we take delivery of our first Joint Direct Attack Munitions [JDAM], an acquisition success story that meets the operator's charge to the acquirer of "Better, Faster, Cheaper." Our core competency of Global Attack will be further enhanced as we take delivery of our first Block 30 B-2s and achieve IOC [Initial Operational Capability] with that most stealthy and capable of our long-range bombers. Our ability to ensure America's dominance of the skies over any future battlefield will move a step closer to reality when the F-22 flies for the first time in just four months.

But warfare in the information age will require equally revolutionary approaches to the way we train people. It becomes ever more difficult to train our crews in the whole range of tasks that they will be required to execute in combat flawlessly and in close coordination with a wide-array of capabilities that commanders must synchronize to achieve dominance on the battlefield.

We face constrained air space and restricted ranges, limited adversary support, and an inability to bring together all the elements of our increasingly joint and interdependent force in the same place at the same time. The percentage of tasks to which we can train adequately in the air is shrinking daily. But the good news is that the potential of simulation to redress these shortfalls is growing even faster. Therefore, the year ahead will see initiatives from Air Combat Command to make better use of this emerging potential. Together with our partners in industry, we will chart a course toward the day when every fighter unit will have access to a linked four-ship formation of high fidelity visual simulators, supported by a dedicated force of adversaries, both live and modeled and linked via networks to other fighter and bomber units as well as all the other weapon systems and supporting forces with which they must be integrated on the battlefield: AWACS, Joint STARS, ABCCC, Rivet Joint and our Air Operations Center. We can make this happen. And, when we do, we will have a better trained, more capable force and we will provide that training at a much reduced cost to the nation.

The year ahead will also see us make strides in pursuit of our goal of improving the safety of our operations. We had a great year in 1996, but for too many years, our safety record has failed to show significant improvement. The Air Force Safety Center can make remarkably accurate predictions of how many aircraft we will crash and how many people we will lose in accidents. That is because our safety record is at a plateau. Predicting accident rates is no more difficult than predicting the weather in John Lorber's Hawaii.

But there is a way to break through that plateau and achieve dramatic improvements in the safety of our operations. It is called Operational Risk Management: a common sense, command philosophy that will lead to excellence. It is based around three simple tenets: Never accept unnecessary risks; make decisions to accept risk at the appropriate level; accept risk only when the benefits clearly support it. The success of this initiative centers around education and training. Nineteen ninety seven will see the investment of time and resources needed to fully deploy Operational Risk Management across Air Combat Command. The payoff will not be instant, but it will come. Nineteen ninety seven will see other exciting developments as we stand up three of the Air Force's six new battle labs, labs designed to harness the spirit of innovation that remains alive and well in the force, but which too often is frustrated in finding expression because of the bureaucratic obstacles that loom so large in our management structure. Our AEF battle lab at Mountain Home [AFB, Idaho], our UAV battle lab at Eglin [AFB, Fla.] and our C2 battle management battle lab at Hurlburt [Field, Fla.] will help break down those barriers to innovation. They will tap the innovative talents of Air Force people to help us develop and field new concepts faster and cheaper. They will help us apply that Yankee ingenuity that has helped make this nation and our Air Force world leaders.

But the year ahead will not be without its challenges. Too many people, including some senior military leaders who should know better, still fail to understand how dependent this nation's warfighting strategies for the next century are on complete and total dominance of the air. We talk of information dominance and digital battlefields. But how dominant will we be if AWACS, Joint STARS, Rivet Joint and the other information gathering systems on which that vision depends, to say nothing of penetrating unmanned aerial vehicles, are subject to attack by long-range air-to-air missiles launched from aircraft operating in sanctuaries--sanctuaries guarded by impenetrable networks of modern, long-range surface-to-air missiles? How precise will our precision attacks be if the attacking aircraft are forced to react continuously to determined air and surface-based defenders? How effective will our maneuver-based strategies on the ground be if our enemies have the ability to observe our movements from reconnaissance aircraft operating in those same sanctuaries? The answer to these three questions and to a host of others we could pose is the same: Not very.

Everything else that we must do to prevail on tomorrow's battlefield depends on our ability to dominate the skies over that battlefield. This nation has invested billions to achieve technological dominance in aerospace. But when we propose to spend less than two percent of a much-reduced national security budget to provide guaranteed air dominance through the first third of the next century, we are questioned at every step of the way and held to a standard that no other development program has ever been asked to attain.

Cost comparisons are bandied about that make no attempt to use dollars of equal value, that fail to attribute the full cost of development for the systems against which the F-22 is compared and that fail to acknowledge even a penny of the billions in F-22 development that are directly supporting other competing and complimentary systems. Emotion is beginning to take over this critical debate that should be decided on its merits. If the facts are allowed to speak on both the cost and the capability side of the equation, the outcome will not be in doubt. But at this juncture it is not clear that this will happen. This, then, may be our greatest challenge in the year ahead, to keep this most important of our modernizations fully funded and on track to full deployment by the end of the first decade of the 21st century.

Then, of course, there is the Quadrennial Defense Review and the potential that it will lead to further reductions in our already heavily committed force structure. As a primary provider of air combat forces to our joint warfighters, I advise caution as we contemplate this course. Our nation's strategy of global engagement is a sound one. But it is one that is imposing heavy strains on our already much-reduced force structure. Many of the men and women whom I meet as I travel around Air Combat Command are tired. We are testing their commitment to "service before self" and, so far, they have not been found wanting. But there are limits on how much we can ask these wonderful people to give. It is my sense that we are close to that limit. Once we cross that fine line, the exodus will be devastating and difficult to reverse. We must find a way to keep our force structure and our commitments in balance. I believe we can do that.

That leads me to another challenge we will face in the year just ahead. We must find a way to restore an appropriate balance between the force structure that remains, after cuts of nearly 40 percent since 1988 and the supporting infrastructure that has been cut by less than 25 percent. We have too many major headquarters, both service and joint. We still have more bases and depot capacity than we need, even after a painful series of base closure commissions. And, our forces are not organized in the most operationally effective or efficient way. The citizens who live around our bases value the contributions of Air Force people to their communities, not just the economic contribution, but the volunteers who serve in the schools and in countless other ways. Those citizens' voices are heard in the Congress and generate pressures that make it very difficult for us to achieve the kind of infrastructure reductions that are essential if we are to take the steps needed to provide for this nation's national security needs within the constrained defense budgets that the nation seems willing to support. I can't help but note the outpouring of federal and state assistance that follows every natural disaster, such as the ongoing flooding in the Western states. Perhaps we need a similar system to help ease the plight of those who have come to depend on the contributions of our people and their missions. The alternative is to continue to force inefficiencies on our military: inefficiencies that will make it increasingly difficult to deliver full value in return for the treasure that we ask the citizens of this nation to invest in their security.

On that note, I'd better heed the advice of that wise old sage, whose advice to speakers was to stand up, speak up and shut up, and do it quickly. Before I do that, I must thank this great Air Force Association for arranging this forum and for its continued efforts to explain the value of air and space power to the American people. American air power has been called the wings of democracy. That is an apt description. Not only because air power is a flexible tool, ideally suited to our nation's goals and interests, but also because our air and space superiority rests on the collective will of our people, citizens who believe in the necessity of an Air Force and do what they must to support it. The Air Force Association is doing just that and I thank you on behalf of all those fine men and women of Air Combat Command who serve so willingly and so well under conditions that are often more difficult than we can imagine.

Questions and Answers

General Shaud: The first question from our audience concerns your comments about infrastructure. What do you see as the next step concerning depot capacity?

General Hawley: We have probably twice as much depot capacity as we need. Lots of people tell you that. I am focused on a part of that right now: how we organize the fighter force. As we drew down the force, we changed the structure of the typical fighter wing and fighter squadron from a notional organization of a three-squadron wing of 72 airplanes. Even today, we say that a fighter wing equivalent is 72 airplanes. We don't have any of those anymore. We have two or three-squadron wings with squadrons of only 18 airplanes. In many cases, squadrons may have different airplanes in each squadron. That is not a very efficient way to run an Air Force. It didn't catch my attention until a year and a half ago when I was in Europe and looked at our units as they tried to support operations in Turkey and in Italy.

For an organization that started out with 18 airplanes in a squadron and a typical deployment was 12 airplanes, there wasn't anything left at home. They only took 12 airplanes with them but those were the good ones. They left six back home. Probably a couple weren't in very good shape: there was one in depot mod, a couple going through phase maintenance, and one that was in maintenance training. By the time you deployed, there wasn't anything left. The part of the squadron that stayed home didn't have anything to work with. I found that it was driving high ops tempo, which, as I pointed out earlier, is a major problem for our Air Force today. So, I started looking at how we could reorganize and get ourselves back toward squadrons of 24 airplanes and wings of squadrons with the same MDS. Then my XP showed me how, on a fairly modest scale--not one that requires any base closings or the movement of more than three or four hundred people from any one base to another--we could save 1,500 manpower slots and $30 million a year. That is what I am talking about when I say restructuring the force in order to make it more efficient and effective. My real focus was on operational effectiveness. It turns out we can save quite a bit of money by doing this kind of thing, too. That is where we are trying to head, and you will see initiatives along this line very soon.

General Shaud: Dick, a follow-on question zeroes in on the three composite wings. Will the concept survive, and will air expeditionary forces take the place of composite wings?

General Hawley: As you may know, on the 1st of April, the airlift C-130s are going to move from Air Combat Command to Air Mobility Command. That impacts the wing at Pope [AFB, N.C.] and part of the operation at Moody [AFB, Ga.]. Mountain Home [AFB, Idaho] is a great composite wing and has been a great success. I view the composite wing at Mountain Home as a laboratory. It is an experiment in progress. We are learning a great deal out of that operation. We learn a lot on the ops side about how to integrate the employment of different weapon systems, and on the support side, we are learning how to combine some of the support structure in ways that can allow us to operate in a deployed mode where you have different kinds of aircraft operating off the same airfield more efficiently and effectively than we have in the past.

We are learning a great deal. In fact, that is why we've chosen Mountain Home as our AEF battle lab because the base is an AEF. It is an AEF formed from a permanent wing residing at Mountain Home. We are going to give that wing the task, as the host of our battle lab, of developing new and innovative ways that will allow our air expeditionary forces to be more agile, to deploy more quickly and to be lighter so they don't consume as much airlift or require as large a footprint when they deploy overseas. I like them, but I wouldn't organize the whole Air Force that way.

General Shaud: How is industry responding to the Air Force call to reduce the weapon system cost of ownership? Does the Air Force have comprehensive plans to reduce the cost of ownership of systems in the inventory?

General Hawley: One of the principle thrusts that I've asked the Air Combat Command staff to focus on is cost of ownership. We've established a goal of trying to deliver the same combat power from Air Combat Command in six years for 30 percent less than it costs us today. My budget gurus and most of my commanders roll their eyes to the back of their head when I tell them this. What has encouraged me to believe that this can be done is something called Action Workout. Action Workout is a quality tool to drive the big waste out of processes. We've applied it to all kinds of things: phase inspections, mobility processing, physical exams, even aircraft generation which I thought was as clean a process as you can imagine. In no case have we failed to save less than 30 percent of the man-hours and cycle time involved in that process.

That is one part of it. That is not the weapon system part. This is just how to make yourself more efficient and we are going to keep working at that. We will also give higher priority to modifications and other changes to our weapon systems to drive down the cost of ownership. We are absolutely convinced that if we are going to survive as a command in the future, we've got to be able to provide the taxpayer more bang for their dollar. If you look at what we've done with some of our weapon systems that we are bringing on line and some of the changes that we've made, you will see the focus on cost of ownership is not a new thing. If you look at the F-16 and how effective that aircraft is at delivering combat power for a relatively low operations and maintenance investment, you have to be impressed. Look at the things being designed into the F-22: an engine with no hardware that leaves the engine. When a maintainer works on an F-22 engine, not a single piece of hardware hits the ground, which means there is no FOD [foreign object damage]. It also means it is a lot simpler to work on. The simplicity of maintenance that we've built into weapon systems like the F-15, the F-16 and, even more so, in the F-22, will drive down the size of our work force. It will take far fewer people to maintain the aircraft, far less airlift to deploy it and sustain it, and far less dollars to operate it.

We've had this focus for a long time. We are going to continue working on it because we are convinced in Air Combat Command that we've got to drive the waste out of everything we do and make ourselves cheaper to operate so that we'll have the resources left to reinvest in both our weapon systems and our people. If we don't do it, we'll have nothing left to sustain our infrastructure and we'll have nothing left to modernize the force.

General Shaud: The JSF [Joint Strike Fighter] is on track as the F-16 replacement; however, some are saying that the F-22, JSF, and F/A-18 E/F can't be supported in future budget environments. How do you see that being resolved?

General Hawley: I talked a little about that in my remarks. The debate has gotten too emotional. We need to look at the facts. The F-22, in its peak year, will consume about two percent of the defense budget. The JSF has been timed to come on line as a major production program just about the time we stop producing F-22s. As we have phased our modernization program, and this goes back a long time in the Air Force, we move from mission area to mission area and we modernize in a sequential fashion. If you look back in the 1970s, we modernized the fighter force. It started with the F-15, then the F-16. In the 1980s, we transitioned to work on the bomber force.

In the 1980s and 1990s, we brought along the B-1 and B-2. Along there we started modernizing the airlift force and we have the C-17 now in full-rate production. It will produce through the early years of the next century. After that, the F-22 will begin to enter full-rate production. We will sustain that for several years until around the end of the first decade, when we will get the JSF into full-rate production. So, this is a sequenced path of modernization. We are not buying all of these things at the same time. Then, of course, the Navy is bringing along the F-18E/F, which is consistent with their historical rate of investment in carrier aircraft. It is a myth that we can't afford these. The question is, do we want to?

General Shaud: Dick, thank you very much and God bless you and your command.

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