Foundation Forum

Lt. Gen. Charles T. Robertson
Vice Commander, Air Mobility Command
Global Presence--The Mobility Command Perspective
Mid-America AFA Symposium
St. Louis
May 3, 1996

It is good to be here and see so many partners in this business called air mobility.

I've been at Scott about a year, and it has been an exciting year, needless to say. You turn on CNN every morning at 4 o'clock and see what you are going to be doing the rest of the day.

In my view, you as the players in the arena and former alumni of the air mobility arena, our supporters in the corporate structure or in the Air Force Association, are all customers or shareholders in this company that we call the air mobility business. What I want to do is give you a "Report to the stockholders" on Air Mobility Command since our creation in 1992.

First and foremost, in keeping with the theme of this symposium, I'd like to tell you that your corporation is a significant global player. Since 1992, we have shown the American Flag in every country of the world except for five: Iraq and Libya, and three small countries that only have a small runway Lesotho, Swaziland and Guinea-Bissau. With the C-17, we may be into one of those very shortly. In many cases, when you see an AMC banner on an aircraft's tail on TV in some far off part of the world, that aircraft and crew are not just representing the United States of America, they ARE the United States of America in that country. That is global presence for you.

In a typical week, your Air Mobility Command visits over 40 countries and flies over 1,300 mission around the globe.

As vice president of your company, I am delighted that we see continued growth in the international segment of our business. As the nation's military strategy has changed from overseas basing to overseas presence, our market share and the Air Force's efforts has continued to expand.

As most of you know prior to coming to Scott, I spent four years out of Air Force operations, two years in personnel and two years in the joint staff. It was amazing to me then when I came back to the operational Air Force just after that short time away, how much the focus of our efforts had changed. But it seems to me that from the end of the Cold War in 1989 and Desert Shield/Desert Storm in 1991, the pendulum of Air Force effort has shifted from dropping bombs to today where humanitarian operations and military operations other than war are in the forefront.

In fact, when you look at the various manifestations of U.S. foreign policy around the world today, one of the most striking evolutions you see is in the Global Reach side of this Global Reach/Global Power paradigm Air Mobility forces, tankers and airlifters are being called on more and more as a primary instrument of national power.

Simply put, your corporation has been very, very busy. Granted we are not in the business to make money, but in our business of satisfying customer's needs, our bottom line has been very healthy. I can assure you that for the foreseeable future, our products will be in high demand.

As you will recall, we were born out of the end of the Cold War, out of the lessons learned from Desert Shield and Desert Storm and the Air Force's decision to reorganize in 1992. Strategic Air Command's tankers were combined with MAC's [Military Airlift Command] strategic airlifters to satisfy the nation's requirement for global reach. Theater airlift, on the other hand, was combined with the bombers of SAC and fighters of TAC [Tactical Air Command] to form the power projection side or Global Power side of that two-edge sword.

Since 1992, we at AMC have worked hard to combine our two pieces, tankers and strategic airlift, into a truly responsive power projection capability for America. It is a challenge every day. There are two separate cultures we have to marry, and we are not done with that job yet.

Just like every other corporation, our corporation has a strategic plan. It defines who we are, what we are and where we are headed. We call ours the Air Mobility Master plan. It looks out 25 years. We update it every year and it focuses both on quality processes and quality products. It is a public document so everyone can help us work on them. Our master plan is divided into these four areas.

First, as you'll hear in every report that comes out of Air Mobility Command, our people are our greatest asset and our highest priority. There is no more candid way to put it than to say they are the heart and soul of our organization. Your company is the very best example in the entire U.S. Air Force of a true Total Force team. W are currently comprised of only 43 percent active duty, 8 percent civilian, 18 percent Guard and 31 percent Air Force Reserve. The successful accomplishment of our mission is only possible with the whole-hearted effort of all four pieces.

As many of our civilian partners have done, we have also spent a lot of time and energy reengineering, restructuring and right sizing ourselves. Active duty levels are soon to be at or below the lowest level they've ever been since the post-World War II drawdown. We are demanding more and more as a result from our Air Force Reserve and Air National Guard partners. We call on them every day to go all over the world and perform exactly the same mission that your active force accomplishes on a day-to-day basis. We are so dependent on this force, that when totally mobilized, Reserve forces comprise 41 percent of our airframes, 54 percent of our aerial port personnel, 58 percent of our strat airlift air crews, 63 percent of our air refueling air crews, 77 percent of our intelligence personnel and 93 percent of air medical evacuation crews. We absolutely cannot do the job without our Guard and Reserve partners.

The 1992 Air Force reorganization combined with a couple of Base Realignment and Closure Commissions [BRAC] has reduced the active side of AMC's continental United States operation to 10 bases. We'll go to 11 core bases this year when the 43rd Air Refueling Group at Malmstrom moves to MacDill Air Force Base in Florida and on October 1, 1996, MacDill will become an AMC base.

We need a heck of a command and control organization to supervise this operation as it spreads out all over the world.

The organization of which I speak of is the lynchpin of our air mobility system and that is the Tanker Airlift Control Center or TACC. In a nutshell, TACC provides one-stop shopping for planning, scheduling, tasking and executing air mobility operations all around the world. Here is how they do it. As the command's focal point for air mobility for strategic mobility, the tanker airlift control center monitors every facet of ongoing operations. They coordinate aerial port operations; they do logistics recovery; and they work command and control communications and computer support. They work the flight operations; they provide the intelligence to the air crews; and they provide weather support to crews whether they are deployed anywhere in the world. As our customer, the TACC will be your single point between your requirement and the unit they task

Your company is not only global, it is also a self-contained system. Not only do we fly the airplanes that deliver and support combat forces at the front or transport humanitarian aid around the world, we also maintain the fleet and we also maintain the end-route infrastructure. As in any global company, we have a whole host of overseas offices. Although the 1992 reorganization reduced our End Route System from 39 to 13 locations throughout the world, the resulting structure is even more robust and flexible than the one we had before.

To meet the challenge when a day-to-day requirement exceeds our capacity to operate in this 13-station system, the TACC has, at its finger tips, two Air Mobility Operations Groups, a 600 to 800 person operation, at McGuire Air Force Base, N.J., and at Travis Air Force Base in California. These two AMOGs are our "Global Reach Laydown" capability. These organizations comprised of command and control personnel, security police personnel, aerial port personnel, and maintenance personnel and can be formed into an almost unlimited number of packages to go out and meet a crisis wherever it happens throughout the world. We generally deploy these in Tanker Airlift Control Elements , or TACEs. These are provisional organizations designed to just meet the contingency that has popped up in some remote area of the world. Recent operations in Somalia, Rwanda, and Liberia are perfect examples of this concept.

Air Mobility Command, as a self-contained structure, regardless of what you see on CNN in the morning, is usually the first one into that location and usually the last one out. When you see Christiana Amanpour talking about the current crisis of the day, that T-tail with the American flag behind her or the TACE communications van sitting behind her were there before she got there. AMC resources will most definitely be there long after she has gone on to her next assignment.

Our number one equipment priority is the C-17 Globemaster III. It is built to handle the Army s and the Marine Corps' largest, most outsized and oversized bulky equipment. The C-17 was designed to combine that large payload capacity of the C-5 with the short field and ground maneuverability of the C-130. It is capable of landing on unimproved runways as short as 3,000 feet and, as it has proven over the past six months, can operate into the most austere locations. It is hard to imagine that a year and a half or so ago some called the C-17 a "troubled program." Last December, the Defense Acquisition Board approved the acquisition of the next 80 C-17s up to a total of 120, which, coincidentally, replace over 240 C-141s. As if to prove that value of the decision, the C-17 arrived at St. Thomas and St. Croix in the Caribbean after Hurricane Marilyn ripped through and literally saved those islands with disaster relief. Remember the headlines on the C-17 in Bosnia the President's choice of transportation in Bosnia. Most recently, we received approval for a multi-year procurement contract for the C-17, which will also save an additional hundreds of millions of dollars and provide even more stability for this program.

Your company s number two investment priority is in Materiel Handling Equipment. I don't think many of our shareholders understand the importance to us of MHE. The measure of our success in a major contingency operation is not how much cargo we carry on an airplane, but how fast we can unload it, and get that airplane out of there and get another airplane in. Throughput is the measure of our success. Materiel Handling Equipment is the key to our success in throughput. We have been laboring with MHE that are 25 to 30 years old and were designed for only a 10-year life. Air Mobility Command made a big decision to replace the older MHE with the 60K loader. This ugly beast is critical to the way we are going to do business tomorrow.

We still have many superstars in the fleet. The C-141 continues to be the workhorse of the fleet. We are under 200 now, and they are retiring in rapid numbers as they reach the end of their physical life. We expect all the active C-141s to be retired by the year 2003 and the final Reserve C-141 to be retired by 2006.

The C-5, with its tremendous payload capacity continues to serve as the marker for Air Mobility Command throughout the world even though the C-5a will soon be as old as the C-141 was when we started replacing it. Its departure reliability is not what we want.

The KC-135 continues to be our primary air refueler, comprising over half of the aircraft in Air Mobility Command. The KC-135, freshly reengined in the active force, is expected to last us for a long time. Our KC-10 is our only true dual-purpose airlifter and it continues to provide highly reliable service. I just wish we had more of them. Our only challenge in the KC-10 is keeping up with the standards of the commercial fleet.

The C-9 is the only airplane specifically designed for air medical evacuation. We are going to fix the engines on the C-9 to meet commercial quietness standards, either by reengining or installing hush kits.

Finally, small aircraft in the Operational Support Aircraft fleet are in the process of transitioning from all the services to Transportation Command. Although they will not be the owners, they will be responsible for global scheduling of the OSA small aircraft. The 89th Airlift Wing s biggest issue with our VIP fleet in support of the President and senior leadership in Washington is the replacement of the VC-137, which has also reached the end of its service life. AVC-X program is in high gear have a decision on that within the next several months.

The fourth leg of the air mobility Parthenon is the Civil Reserve Air Fleet. The CRAF is very healthy and continues to support us beyond our highest expectations. Built primarily to support the nation in time of crisis, we routinely depend on our CRAF partners to augment our strategic airlift capability on a day-to-day basis in peacetime missions as well as in the lower level contingency requirements.

I spoke to you a little bit earlier about our Ops Tempo. You just have to look at 1995 to illustrate how air mobility forces are being increasingly called on to respond independently of our combat air assets to serve the nation's security needs. This year we moved 27,000 Cubans to the United States from Guantanamo Bay. At the same time, we moved over 3,000 Haitian police cadets from Port-au-Prince to Fort Leonard Wood for police training and then back to Haiti to help stabilize that fragile government.

The people of Air Mobility Command performed absolutely brilliantly in Joint Endeavor in Bosnia. To accomplish this, we deployed 24 airplanes two C-5s, 10 C-141s, and 12 of our 19 C-17s to Rhein Main [AB, Germany]. We flew in some of the worst weather in Europe since World War II but through the performance of superb aircraft and even more superb people, the job got done and it got done well.

Over the past year, Air Mobility Command has participated in 113 JCS exercises, everything from moving a small civil engineering detachment to South America to building a school to Bright Star, involving the movement of 20,000 Army troops and over 12 million pounds of cargo to Egypt. By the way, during Bright Star, we were doing Joint Endeavor. From Hurricane Marilyn relief in the Caribbean to SUPPORT HOPE in Rwanda, not a day does not go by that we are not moving relief supplies somewhere in the world. Typically, 15 relief and humanitarian operations are ongoing at any one time.

Let's look at the future for a second. We know our operations tempo is not going to let up. Our customers know our phone number, and they are going to continue to depend on us more and more as they draw back from overseas bases to the CONUS. We are and will continue to be the first to go and the last to come home. Lest we forget, when our tactical forces move, we move them as well.

We support the Air Force's Air Expeditionary Force where we send a package of fighters and tankers to a spot in the world to stabilize that region. In the most recent demonstration of the AEF, last month we deployed a package of 30 fighters and 4 tankers to Jordan. In support, your Air Mobility Command used 29 tankers and 25 airlifters to move that package, and it deployed flawlessly. When our troops redeploy from Bosnia, we'll be there, too. When critical relief supplies are needed anywhere in the world, we'll be there, too.

As I close, I want to leave you with this picture and these thoughts. This is the American flag flying over Tuzla in Bosnia. As share holders, your company's people, AMC's people active, Guard, Reserve, along with our CRAF partners are ready anytime to take anything anywhere. Thank you very much.

GEN. SHAUD: Tony, I think AMC defines Global Presence. As you mentioned, sometimes what we see on CNN is not good news such as the tragedy in Dubrovnik with the crash of Secretary Brown s aircraft. Recently, the Secretary of Defense talked about putting data and voice recorders in aircraft. How is that coming?

LT. GEN. ROBERTSON: We have funding for the program and a "tiger team" is meeting, as we speak, to put together the schedule. Passenger carrying aircraft will come first. The program is fully funded in FY96 and John Hamre, the OSD comptroller, is responsible for finding our FY96 and 97 upfront dollars, which is a fairly sizable chunk.

We will start off probably by putting hand-held GPS units in cockpits. It is not the optimum solution, but certainly provides a fix for aircrews to get a quick fact check on navigation. Then we will begin the process of working integrated GPS, in-flight control systems, TCAS, wind-shear detection systems and some things where we have been falling behind.

Interestingly, we are not as bad off as we thought we were. The T-43 is an example of an aircraft that had not been kept up to speed. Obviously, the C-17 is well equipped and most of our airlift, such as the OSA fleet, have flight data recorders, voice data recorders and are already getting their first GPSs. We are not far off the mark, we are just behind schedule and we are fixing it fast.

GEN. SHAUD: Thanks for your candor and a great presentation.

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