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AFA's 2007 Air Warfare Symposium Transcripts |
General Ronald E. Keys Thanks, Don, for that introduction. And just for all of you folks in the front row—these things will not work for you, so just don’t bother in writing any questions down. (Laughter.) Don asked me is there any questions that I wanted him to ask me, and I said, No. Thanks for that introduction, it’s always great to be here. This is an opportunity for me to get out and see these new technologies that the industry is bringing to the table and try to be able to share my views on what’s happening in the combat air forces and where I think we’re heading. Now since we’ve just finished a significant election in our country and we’re bearing down on another even more significant one, it reminds me of the crowd that was listening to one political speech and a fellow in the back was having a hard time hearing and he loudly asked his friend near the front, “What’s he talking about?” And his friend from the front row just as loudly called back, “He ain’t sayin!” (Laughter.) So I’ll try to be clearer. In order to do that I thought I’d start out with a Cliffs Notes. Now I always try and enrich your life when I come down here, I don’t know if you know, but did you know that CliffsNotes is all one word, and a CliffsNotes was started by a Nebraska native named Clifton Hiligas in 1958, and I thought not (Laughter). So that’s your educational enrichment for the symposium. To be serious there really are some cliffsnotes that you need to note, because they aren’t just bumper stickers, they’re the way that we, and certainly in Air Combat Command, weigh our programs and our processes and make our decisions. You heard the Chief talk about, and the Secretary, global vigilance, global reach, and global power. That’s a key to understand what we’re about, because our aim is to see first, to understand first, and to act first. And those are sort of our first principles. And that’s across air and space and cyber, integrating those three domains that we intend to dominate forever. When we talk about the war, and we talk about our people and we talk about recapitalization, there’s a balancing act. We’ve got to balance that particular force. You’ll hear me talk about faster, cheaper, and better, and that’s the filter that I use across all of my command. To do those things faster but only those things that really need to be done faster, I can’t afford to do things faster that really doesn’t give me the payback, that doesn’t leverage my investment. When I talk about cheaper, those things that I can actually afford to invest in to do things cheaper, the business case, and to constantly review that business case because the world changes. The cost of living in the world changes, and then finally better, and that includes those things that I can’t do at all. But particularly in better, it’s important that I focus on doing those things that’s the first leveraging capability, the first slice of leveraging military capability that’s affordable to me. Because I may not in today’s world be able to apply it all across my force, so I’ve got to institutionalize that where it makes the most sense, gives me the most pay-it-back, and I’m not interested in novelty. Several years ago as we started talking very seriously about UAVs, advantage of the UAV was its persistence, the advantage of the UAV was not the novelty of not having someone in a cockpit, so we look at these things as faster, better, cheaper, not novelty. Now, running through all of these CliffNotes, if you will, is a theme we picked for this symposium—striking the balance, today’s war, tomorrow’s threat, and the future’s technology, because overall I do balance really defines the challenge I face as COMACC (Commander, Air Combat Command) every day. In fact from my perspective this balancing challenge is one we all face, including you, the talented industry, that gets me the technology to do what I have to do now, and tomorrow, and 30 years from tomorrow. I have to balance risk, I have to balance capability, and then I have to balance transformation. Our ability to balance those things is really why we’re here as a service today. This is a year of celebration for the Air Force; 18 September this year we’ll have been in business for 60 years. And before that celebration (Gen. Kevin P.) Chili Chilton and his folks will celebrate 25 years as a space force, September 1st. And before that on July 5th of this year, we’ll remember that a year ago, we stood up AFNET (Air Force Network) operations, our initial consolidated defense of our cyber systems. And we also stood up that same day our first network warfare wing, the 67th with integrated surveillance, attack, and defense on our way to a major Cyber Command. And there’s a story there, it’s a story of progress and taking risks and meeting challenges and balancing that risk and capability and transformation. We’ve come along way; remember when warfare started and then rapidly became about commanding the high ground; fighting for it, occupying it, and controlling the flow of battle from it. When man took flights many years ago, it was quickly acknowledged that air was the high ground. Vigilance, reach, power, freedom from attack, freedom to see and attack, and then we entered space considered by some at the time to be the ultimate high ground. And over years of pain and turmoil, we went from the begrudging tactical exploitation of national capabilities to now what we call national tactical integration; satellites and aircraft in machine-to-machine conversations, and space underpins everything we do—space-borne, early warning, ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) , communications bandwidth, the ability to exploit weather, not just react to it, and situation awareness that tracks over 14,000 manmade objects in space, which truly global vigilance, reach, and power. Now we’re at the dawning of a new ground cyberspace, and as many manifestations it’s the new high ground. And just as we’re clearly seeing the way that we may have to fight with and defend the high ground of space, we’re assured that we must fight within and defend cyberspace, and certainly learn to command and control at least the things that fly through cyberspace. Across all of our domains we need to have freedom from attack and the freedom to attack. And I think there’s another domain out there that we probably need to consider, and I call it the cognitive domain. We talked much about the battle for hearts and minds, but frankly we do little to have practical effect. On one hand, we attempt to bring mathematical over-precision to things like cultural and ethnic anthropology and societal or cognitive engineering, and on the other hand, we insist on forcing ourselves into asymmetric warfare by being too noble to use our asymmetric strengths. And those things are not just GPS-guided (Global Positioning System)500-pound bombs; remember Blitzkrieg and guerilla strategies both depend upon infiltration and isolation, and so it is with this war on terrorists and in information operations. We need to be able to probe and test for strengths and weaknesses and exploit opinion differences, internal contradictions, frictions, obsessions, (inaudible), distrust, discord, and (inaudible) disorder. We need to create mental confusions and contractions and indecisiveness and panic, corrupt and inject and confuse and create ambiguity—why do the terrorists get all the fun? (Laughter.) the hand doesn’t have to be faster than the eye if the eye doesn’t know where to look, and so perhaps in another time, another COMACC will stand here and commemorate not only the birthdays of air and space and cyberspace, but perhaps the cognitive battle space as well. Now the theme of the last symposium was forging an interdependent force, the path ahead, and we’re still on that path, a joint, interdependent, globally responsive, persistent, precise force. Last year, we were all tied up in budget battles—the BRAC (Base Realignment and Closure) was just signed into law, we were all waiting the QDR (Quadrennial Defense Review) release, and we’ve been busy since then, and these are exciting times. We’re putting the Raptor (F-22) to work at Langley, and it’s on its maiden overseas voyage right now to participate in PACOM theater security operations from Kadena (Japan). The first production F-35 has eight or so flights under its belt. We brought CSAR (Combat Search and Rescue) back to the CAF (Combat Air Forces) last April and we’ll soon get a new CSAR platform. A few months back, (Gen.) Tom Hobbins’ folks from USAFE dropped the first small diameter bombs in combat as a Strike Eagle struck insurgent positions back in November. My 55th Wing from Omaha (Neb.) (inaudible) just celebrated having our RC-135s gone for 6,000, that’s 6,000 consecutive days in Southwest Asia. That’s a perfect underscoring that we continue to fight the Long War. We had a challenge in 2006; OEF, OIF, and ONE (Operations Enduring Freedom, Iraqi Freedom, and Noble Eagle) — last year, we flew our 14,000 sorties in support of Afghanistan and Iraq. Last month I had 127 Air Combat Command aircraft deploy to 16 different locations, and I’m proud to say not only did we kill our share of people that needed killing, but last year we also had the safest year in the history of Air Combat Command in tact. So in all of the turbulence and stress our professionals are keeping their focus where it needs to be. Our chief goals remained at: prosecute the war on terrorists, provide for airmen and their families, and provide for new capabilities that will keep America and allies in control of the air and space and cyber domains globally. We need to fight the fight of today but we need to look beyond that, and we need to look beyond tomorrow, and that’s the easy part is saying it, but doing it forces hard choices that we balance today’s fight with tomorrow’s threats, while also pursuing future technologies. All of these priorities are competing for limited resources. Sometimes it forces us to stop doing things we’d like to do or delay things that we need to in order to meet some future demands, and that’s why you see buys being truncated, installs of equipment not being done fleetwide, and us being much more demanding about plug and play ability and that readiness of the systems we come to you for. We made some tough choices about reducing the force in order to self-finance our future force. We’re in a one force, one fight, one shot world right now—one interdependent joint force, one combined focus on a fight, and one shot to get it right for the next 10 or 15 years. When I talk about one force, we’ve got to have a total force, and I call it a one force force approach to meet the challenges that we face today and tomorrow and 30 years from tomorrow, and I’m talking about integrating the Air Force Reserve and Air National Guard—new missions, new organizations, and new expectations of our air reserve component. We’re continuing to develop programs that benefit the Guard, the Reserve, and the active duty with classic associations where the active owns the iron, and the ARC (Air Reserve Component) provides augmenting manpower and active associations which is just the reverse. And these are imperative in times of numbers that are being reduced and certainly important for me to gather the advantages of that great experience that I have in my ARC force and apply it to my young force that I bring every day into my active duty organizations, and maximize combat capability not only for the big war, but for this grinded out AEF (Air and Space Expeditionary Force). As an example of what we’re doing, right now we’ve associated risk in Virginia Guard with the F-22 wing at Langley Air Force Base. We’ve got 31 Guard pilots that’ll be flying the F-22, along with associated maintenance and support skills. We’ve got five already trained and we’re training two in every new class. That was sort of a heartrending decision that I had to make, because that’s 31 active duty pilots that’s not going to fly the newest, best fighter on the planet, but it was the right decision to make when you look at the total force capability. We’re going to do the same thing at Holloman (N.M.), we’re bringing the Raptor in there, the F-16s we’re going through essentially the same drill at the 388th and the 419th right now, and by putting those units together, I can draw out some active duty and send them down to McEntire (Air National Guard Base, S.C.) to plus-up the unit there, so across the force as we bring this thing out, we’ll have more day-to-day capability, more AEF capability, and then a greatly enhanced go-to-war capability when we mobilize. Predator operation is another example of where we’re fully integrating the arc. California Guard is trained and just stood up a squadron at March Air Reserve Base at a ceremony not long ago, the 163rd Air Refueling Wing is no more. It officially became the 163rd Reconnaissance Wing. Arizona and North Dakota Air Guards have operators ready and will receive their ground stations some time over the next year. The Texas Air Guard will be on line in 2008. The New York Air Guard will operate the Reaper around 2010, and it will have the capability to carry 500-pound bombs, multiple Hellfires (AGM-114 missiles), a CSAR radar, a great capability. So we’re building these new organizations using a blank sheet of paper, without the influence of what we used to do or what we did in the Cold War structure. Those are some hard choices that we have to make. One of the great successes we’ve had is out of Beale (Calif.) —if you go to Beale and you watch the U2s and you watch the Global Hawks flying out there, you find we’ve got actives, Reserves, and Guard all working together on those missions, whether it’s intel analysis, whether it’s keeping the comm. up, to keep the links going with those airplanes and UAVs, and that’s a great example of taking the best of both breeds, the ARC end and active duty, putting them together, and getting ourselves more combat capability. It’s not easy. I mean, I’m sure there’s folks out here who are in the Guard and Reserve, and you’re in the Guard and Reserve because either you couldn’t be in the active duty or you didn’t want to be in the active duty and the concern is, as you take those two cultures together, you’ve got to bring in the strengths of those Reserve and Guard operations and marry that up with the strengths of the active duty, rather than taking all the weaknesses. We’ve been doing that for years and years in big airplanes, and (Gen. McNabb) Duncan knows that well, and we’ve been partnering with them to figure out how they do it and make it look so easy because if we get into these other airplanes we’ve got to work through some of the same issues that we haven’t before. We talked about one force, but it’s one fight. That’s important; we’re in a Long War together with our joint and coalition partners around the world. And it’s not just for this war in Iraq and Afghanistan but it’s for the next 30 years. The enemies in this Long War are not our usual suspects, not traditional military forces but extensive, widely dispersed global terrorist networks. These enemies use terror, propaganda, and indiscriminate violence to advance their beliefs. And so this war, in turn, requires unconventional and approaches from us to prevent the terror to defeat this range of threat. So our challenge is to strike this balance between the golden BB that I’m always being promised that’s going to solve my problem in developing effective and flexible tactics, techniques, and help us adapt and prevail at irregular warfare. On a technology side, I need foliage-penetrating sensors and ground-penetrating sensors and hyperspectral sensors and multi-amp fusions and machine-fused intelligence and open architectures and collaborative systems, and weeks, even months long, persistence, but I still need to recapitalize my force, and I need a fifth generation force that’ll give me a globally responsive and persistent vigilance, reach, and power. Now I’ve already said that cyberspace is our new high frontier and almost everything I do is either on an Internet, an Intranet, or some type of network—terrestrial, airborne, or spaceborne. Everybody out there knows that they can get into my network and slow them down or corrupt them or cause me to lose faith in them or shut them down completely, that’s going to give them a big advantage, because cyberspace is our primary medium for command, control, communications, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance. It’s where we provide that reach and speed, distance, stealth, massed effects, and precision across natural and manmade boundaries. And it’s inseparably entwined in everything that we do. We’re already at war in cyberspace; have been for many years. Those of you who are riding on a “dot org” network know that the last couple of weeks, there’s been a big attack against the “dot org” servers across the United States. That becomes the challenge, as General Cartwright said: How do you react to that attack? How do you trace it back? What are the legalities included in actually finding the organization or the people that’s doing it, and what do you do when you do find them? And can you do anything—is a huge challenge. So it’s time to get our CONOPS (Concept of Operations)together and bring that concept to something we can institute because we have to have something that covers a wide range of electronic signals from satellite communications and internal computer networks to electronic warfare. You know, the terrorists are using cyberspace now, remotely detonated roadside bombs; terrorists use global positioning satellites and satellite communications, using Internet financial transactions, radar and navigation jammings, blogs, chat rooms, and bulletin boards aimed at our cognitive domain; e-mail, chat, and others providing shadowy command and control, and finally overt and covert attacks as I mentioned on our servers. Technology’s evolving exponentially, and this is probably the only warfighting domain in which we have pure competitors and we have to stay ahead of them. I mean, just to use a present day example, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to you that three old retired guys in COMMACC won an AFA golf tournament when the winners were calculated with computers (Laughter.) I mean, 8th Air Force and all these cyber guys work for me, so we see this threat clearly and it’s not just in Iraq and Afghanistan. A few months ago, the Chinese government issued a defense white paper clarifying its military policies and offered some rare insights into the Chinese leadership’s strategic view of the world, a paper harped repeatedly on the need for technological modernization. By the middle of this century, China should be capable of, quote: “winning informationized war.” It said, referring to the computerized battlefield on which future wars will be fought. (Inaudible) aside, I would note that, you know, this is the same Chinese government that just fired a direct ascent weapon and hit a target satellite, so this is not just a theoretical threat. Now these symposiums are important because they help us unify our message. Now’s the time to tell our story; now’s the time to bring our message to the new Congress, to our representatives back home, and deliver it with a common voice. It’s one force, it’s one fight, and it’s one shot. The time to recapitalize is now; from 1975 to 1990, we purchased an average of 230 Air Force fighters each year. From ’91 to 2000, we averaged just 28. We operate the oldest in air and space inventories in the history of the United States Air Force. We have a growing fleet of aircraft that we need to retire in the next five years. They’re aging, they’re increasingly expensive, and they’re starting to lose relevance. We have to change and we have to consolidate and we have to focus on what we can afford to do, and what we can afford to maintain. I recently read a story by some think tank guru about 1st Lt. Dave Deptula, flying the same aircraft that his dad, (Lt. Gen.) Dave Deptula the elder, flew 30 years ago. That’s not a good story. And if you go to the B-52 community, you go to the KC-135 community, it’s a worse story. The last pilot to fly the KC-135 has not yet been born. That is another not good story. Most of us don’t have 30-year-old cars, but if you do, I’d imagine that you drive them on Sunday afternoon when the sun’s high, it’s not raining, the streets aren’t crowded. And I got a lot of 30- and 40-year-old cars and I’m taking to Indianapolis every day, and it’s on the backs of my great maintainers and our repair depots that we’re able to do that. Remember the last time we did this we were struggling for B-1s and F-15s and F-16s and we took the money out of readiness, the hollow force of the ‘70s. We can’t do that today, we’re in the middle of a war. We have to preserve our readiness and still recapitalize and the only place you get that kind of money is from reducing people and platforms. The imperative is this; since 1996, our average mission capable rates across the force have slipped in only single-digit percentages really on an average, but the cost per aircraft in Air Combat Command to hold that line has gone up 87 percent, and it’s climbing. That is a staggering cost. I sign a lot of letters to people we lose in Air Combat Command and what I don’t want to have to do, is write a letter that says, “Dear Mr. and Mrs. Smith, your son or daughter is dead because a wing fell off their jet on takeoff. I knew it was going to happen, but I didn’t know when, and I’m sorry I had to take a chance with your kid’s life.” You know, that’s a stark reality of what we’re facing, and of course, we’re dealt a hand and we’ve got to play it so we’re going to balance that acquisition and sustainment and ensure that we can do the things we have to do today in the war, and we’ll build a force for the future. Twenty-two years ago this week, President Reagan delivered an important State of the Union address in which he outlined what was eventually dubbed the Reagan Doctrine, and his elegant words are universal and timeless, and especially applicable today. He was especially fond of reminding people that freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass the torch (inaudible), it must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same. Reagan’s warning can be portrayed as this: “The history of failure in war can be summed up in two words—too late; too late comprehending the deadly purpose of a potential enemy, too late in preparedness, too late in uniting all possible forces for resistance, and too late standing with one’s friends.” So we must strike a balance now to execute today’s war, prepare for tomorrow’s threats, and explore the future’s technologies to ensure that this great Air Force continues to have birthdays in air and space and cyberspace. And it’s you and I and our children and grandchildren that walk out of this shadow of terrorism into the sunlight of freedom and choice—it’s our birthright. And I leave you with this thought, the last time that I spoke I was chided later by some folks that thought my closing thoughts were better suited for a pep talk at the line of departure for combat than at a symposium. Now let me clear to everyone—your United States Air Force left the line of departure for Desert Shield in 1990, and we never came home. There were 32,000 of us gone from home this morning, most in harm’s way, and we intend not to come home until we have finished this war. We will go wherever we must to do what we must for as long as we must. There’s a United States Air Force so that there could be a United States. “Too late” is not in our vocabulary, so on behalf of the 105,000 of America’s sons and daughters that make Air Combat Command, I thank you for your support of us and for listening to me this morning. (Applause.) Moderator: Thanks, General Keys. We’ve got a couple of questions here from our audience. We know we’ve taken a, looks like an ’08 budget of 10% cut in our flying hours. How do you see that impacting us and do you see the role of more simulation in training making a difference in that gap? Gen. Keys: Well, two things—one, we’re pursuing distributed mission operations in high-end simulations, and we believe that that is an important part. In fact, I took some of the money out of our flying hour accounts in order to fund a DMO (Distributed Mission Operations Center). I think it’s important, we have to do that because some of the high-end, time-sensitive targeting, fusing of information, we really don’t have the live systems available to do that on a regular basis during training, because essentially they’re at war or training to go to war, and I don’t have time to bring them into a big exercise. The high-end simulation allows us to do that, so the first time you go four v. 20 against a high-end threat is not the first time you’ve gone four v. 20, or the first time you do a time-sensitive targeting with some troops in combat screaming for air is not the first time you’ve done that. But there are certain things that today we don’t simulate well, and so there’s a certain balance of, you’ve got to be able to fly the airplane. The other concern that I have is that a lot of the cuts we’re taking in flying hours right now are being masked by the war. When I said send kids down flying F-16s to the war, I go down and see them down at Balad (Iraq) or Bagram (Afghanistan) or wherever they happen to be flying out of—they’re flying 70 hours a month. So in four months, you get a lot of experience, and that is outside the peacetime flying program. So that means that we’re holding our own right now despite the fact we’ve taken some cuts beyond what I would take for simulation. I think the Chief realizes that, and we’re on a road now to start adding that money back into the flying accounts because when we come out of the war, we’re not going to be able to. My B-1s, for example, were 1,700 sorties short last year in meeting their contract flying program, but they were 7,000 flying hours over. That makes a big difference, so it’s going to be a balance between what we can do in simulation and what we have to do to fly the airplanes. I think we have crossed that psychological divide that everything has to be done in an airplane. There’s a lot of stuff that can be done in some of these very great simulators. Moderator: Thank you, sir. What impact or changes will the establishment of an ISR command have on ACC’s traditional role of train, support, and equip? Gen. Keys: I don’t know that they’re going to make an ISR command. I put (Lt. Gen.) Dave Deptula, the elder, as the A-2, in charge of ISR, and really that’s a unifying force because across ISR, we’ve pretty much managed that as a series of closely associated but not closely integrated stovepipes, and so to have someone in charge that says, these are the roadmaps we need for the sensors; these are the roadmaps we need for the platforms, and try to bring some order to that and certainly have a one-stop shop at Headquarters Air Force, I think it’s going to be useful. I think that operating commands are always going to be operating the airplanes, I mean, that’s my sort of red line, when we start getting staff people operating and executing operations, then I think we’ve run the train off the tracks. Moderator: Thank you, sir. How much will buying only 48 JSFs (Joint Strike Fighter) a year alter ACC’s planning and ability to fight future wars? Do you expect the lost JSFs will be added back in future budgets? Gen. Keys: Well, I hope so. I mean, 48’s the wrong number. The problem I face is I’m going to start taking my legacy fighters down around 2025, and I’ve SLEPed (Service Life Extension Program) the F-16 for the last time. We’re going through the Common Configuration Improvement Program, CCIP. That gets me the last bit of capability, the last bit of life out of those airplanes. If I don’t buy about 80 JSFs per year, then I get to the point when I’m starting to draw down my F-16s and my A-10s and my other airplanes that I’ve got out there before I’m bringing up the numbers of JSFs, I got a huge bathtub in there, and beyond, that’s a threat that I’m not going to be able to take. I just don’t have the numbers to make the war plans that I need to have, so 48 won’t get me there. If I buy at 48 then that means I’m going to have to go back in and re-SLEP some of my legacy airplanes, but if I had the money to re-SLEP them because that’s a very expensive program, I’d be better off buying more JSFs. So we’re in this (inaudible) here, trying to discuss what’s the best way to go at this. I think what’s happened really is all of the naysayers about the F-22 has given up and said, you know, I guess they were right. It’s a great airplane, and it’s working. It’s ready to go to war. Let’s move on and attack the F-35, and so that little band of (inaudible) are now screwing with my Lightning program (Laughter and applause.) There’s always termites out there, and they’re looking for something to feed on, so I think we’ll work through it. Moderator: Thank you, sir. You once said that if the Air Force had 1,000 Predator UAVs, it still wouldn’t be enough. Can you discuss the ongoing evolution of UAVs from strictly ISR assets to powerful strike platforms? Gen. Keys: Well, if I had a thousand I’d still need more. I think, originally, we’re going to 21 Predator orbits, but the worldwide requirement is 53 Predator orbits, and when we get to 73, you know, some will say we need 70. It is an insatiable desire; I think it’s part of the voyeurism in all of us. We just love to stare at full-motion video. (Laughter.) And originally we brought the Predator on as an ISR platform. Now, we’re arming the Predator so that when you’re there, the way to shorten your kill chain is one, you make your, you pre-decide what the ROE (Rules of Engagement) is going to be, and then you’ve got your sensor sitting right there with your kill mechanism, and so that’s why we’re putting Hellfire on the Predator and we’ve got 500-pound bombs and even more weapons, we’ll be able to put all of the J weapons on the Reaper. So, that’s the way forward. The next step is, now what do you do as far as a real, I’ve seen the articles that say, well, the Reaper is like an F-16—well, that’s bull----. (Laughter.) It’s nothing like it. Don’t say that. The Reaper is not like an F-16; it can’t survive where the F-16 can survive. It can’t carry the tonnage that the F-16 can survive. It is a great piece of gear, but it’s a specialty piece of gear and you’ve got to have air dominance in order to fly the Predators and the Reapers and the Global Hawks. So let us not forget that, back in 1990, we got into Iraq, and then we went back in there again and made sure the SAMs (Surface-to-Air Missile) were down and the airplanes were down and now you can fly all this wonderful stuff in there. So again, it goes back to a balance and what your concept of operations—I think there’s a great future for UAVs. It gives you great persistence, I’m very interested in these concepts that put stuff up and they stay up for seven, eight, nine, 10 days. That really helps me when I have that sort of persistence, so I think there’s a great future in it. Moderator: Thank you, sir. What do you see as the future of manned reconnaissance in the Air Force? Gen. Keys: Well, I don’t know. We’re looking at that now. I mean we’ve got some of our allies have stuck with manned reconnaissance, and then there’s a number of areas where manned reconnaissance is handy. We’ve got manned reconnaissance to a way of doing manned reconnaissance with the target pods we put on our F-16, but that was more or less a stopgap (inaudible), and I’ve asked my staff well let’s go out there and look. Let’s look at all these pods that everyone else’s putting on their F-16s or F-15Es and C, what does it give you as far as responsiveness? What does it give you with—I don’t want to have something that I have wet film that I’m going to have to download and process; I don’t want to have something that I got a cassette that I have to download and then put into the distributed common ground stations. I need something that’s rapid, that’s responsive, gets me the (inaudible) rating that I need or whatever else that I’m reconning, whether it’s ground penetration radar or foliage penetration radar. So we’re on a quest right now to see, well what is the future of manned reccy (reconnaissance)? What do you see in manned reccy that you can’t see in any other way? It goes back to faster, cheaper, better. Is this a novelty of saying, yeah, we love manned reccy, or does manned reccy really get you something that you can’t get any other way in an affordable approach? I don’t know the answer to that. I mean, there are lots of little bands of people out there that are very zealous about one thing or the other—I can’t afford to be a zealot, and I don’t got the money to be a zealot, so I got to figure out what the right answer is. Moderator: Thank you, sir. Question says, I understand we’re going to pursue son of B-2 for the LRS long-range strike solution. Why is another subsonic night-only solution the right answer? Gen. Keys: Well, I don’t know that it’s son of B-2. I mean, I’ve said that the next long-range strike is going to be the next generation bombers, so it’s going to look a lot like what we know bombers look like. I’m not ready to tell industry, you know, I need something subsonic or I need something supersonic. We’ve said we need something that goes about this far, it needs to carry about this kind of weapons tonnage, we need to have these kinds of sensors so we can take custody of a target. Does it need to be manned or unmanned—I don’t know. If I’m going to take nukes with it, someone’s going to want me to have a man in there, I’m pretty sure. Will it be dual-role, you can put people in it or not have people in it—I don’t know. I know there’s attractiveness to being subsonic, and if you’re going to get something by 2018, and you’re going to use technology that you have in your hand in order to make that date, then you’re going to be less exotic than if you’re going to wait until 2075 and so something hypersonic and E-flat double clutch all-aspect kind of airplane. So I’m not willing to say, I don’t know. I know there are advantages to subsonic because you don’t have some of the heat problems, you don’t have some of the acoustic problems, you know there are a lot of problems. On the other hand, any time the faster you go, you compress some of the kill chain, and there’s some advantages to that. And so that’s what we’ve asked our folks out in industry—this is what I want to be able to do, you tell me the best way to do it, and do it in a system of systems because we are not taking one of these things, whatever it turns out to be, and going all the way to downtown China by itself, and if we have to go somewhere we’re going as a system of systems so this thing does not have to solve everything by itself. Moderator: Thank you, sir. Finally, a question on network warfare: do you see that we need people to possess specific skills in this area and could that involve both military and civilians and other career fields that may not be (inaudible) to the fight? Gen. Keys: Here’s the way, when I got the tasking from the Secretary and the Chief, we sat down together and talked about, alright, how are we going to do this, because when you start talking about cyberspace, there’s a dynamic in Washington. As soon as you start a new program, either people are going to stiff you because it’s a new program, or they’re going to run and want to be a part of it because they think they can get some of your money. So you got to figure out what goes into the program. My promise to them is, let me stand this up and let me start with those things that most people on a street corner interview would say, yeah, that kind of sounds like that ought to be cyberspace. The first thing is computer networks and the Internet and the NIPRNET (Non-secure Internet Protocol Router Network) and the SIPRNET (Secret Internet Protocol Router Network), and those things, and let’s get those people under one umbrella, which is what we had previously done back last July, which is to get all of the integrated network operations security centers across the Air Force and we re-patched them to Air Combat Command. And then we started hooking those entities all together so we could say, “Put this patch on your computer now or we’re taking you off the Net now,” those kinds of things, so we had that approach. Then, we stood up the 67th Network Warfare Wing, so as (Gen.) Hoss Cartwright said, we got our surveillers and our defenders and our attackers in the same organization so they can start talking back and forth, because if you’re out there surveilling, then you can come back and say, “Boy, they got a really cool defense. Maybe we’ll use that,” or, “These guys leak like a sieve, maybe we should check our own system to see if we’re leaking the same kind of stuff.” So that was a start. Now the next thing is, there’s more to cyber than just computers. I mean, it’s the ether that all this stuff flies through, so people start talking about electronic warfare. Well, is electronic warfare cyber warfare, or not? I don’t know, but if they’re going to start talking about controlling my F-22s, then I start to be less interested in having F-22s in Cyber Command. I think that’s an aberration of what we’re trying to do. If we want to command and control the frequencies, if we want to try and build something on a pulse-to-pulse basis, we know who’s jamming and who’s receiving, we can coordinate and command and control our cyber environment out there like that, well that might be in Cyber Command. Then you go into what Hoss talked about as the soft tissue of cyber, which I’m not sure it is cyber; deception. Does deception belong in a Cyber Command, or deception a message you send through Cyber Command. If I’m lying to you and I lie to you with a piece of paper, if that deceives you, does that then become part of Cyber Command, or is it just that I was lying to you? I don’t know—same thing with information operations and some of these other things. So, we’re still sorting through, but it won’t be just guys with thick glasses drinking Mountain Dew and eating candy bars late at night. (Laughter.) Now, I’m going to hire some of those guys—I got some of those guys and gals working for me right now. Like I said, that’s how I won that golf tournament (Laughter.) But we need electrical engineers, we need computer engineers, we need strategic planners, we need strategic thinkers. We need all those things that you have in a major command to go to war, and we need people to understand that this is not going to be another geeky stovepipe with a bunch of green doors that nobody can get into; this is going to be an integrated part of air and space. I mean we have fought for 10 years to get space into the CAOC (Combined Air Operations Center) and get integrated with space, and we probably do that better than anybody in the world right now. It really is a thing of beauty, and I do not want to see the cyber train drive off down some dark alley, and go down there and set up shop and nobody knows what the hell they’re doing. They need to be integrated because this is all about warfare, this is not about novelty. This is not about being cool. This is leveraging effects across these domains of air and space and cyber in order to get our job done. Moderator: Well thank you very much, General Keys, for your great presentation and your leadership of Air Combat Command. (Applause.) # # # |