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AFA's 2007 Air Warfare Symposium Transcripts |
General Duncan J. McNabb Thank you, Peto. Peto and Bob, it is great to be here with you in Orlando, in sunny Florida. When I see all these old friends, folks that we’ve been together doing this a lot of years and when you think about industry, when you think about the partnership that we have to take our Air Force into the future, there’s none better. A convention like this, bringing everybody together and talking about the future and saying hey, here’s what’s in the realm of the possible. That’s what’s so exciting, to kind of take you through and say hey, here’s where we are in Air Mobility. I’m very honored to be here to talk a little bit about that, so I appreciate the invite. A lot of good things are happening. What I thought I’d do is say here’s what we’re thinking about, here’s what we’re doing, and as we think to the future here are a couple of things that are being talked about a lot, because it is in fact a very exciting time. You heard a little bit from the Secretary yesterday, a little bit from the Chief. Gen. (Ronald E.) Keys mentioned that. As we think about the math, we think about C-17s in the Pacific, something Gen. (Paul V.) Hester and I talk about as we try to say hey, how do we best do that? As we think about how we support the war, the Long War, the Global War on Terrorism in the CENTCOM AOR (Central Command Area of Responsibility), how do we integrate with the CFACC (Combined Force Air Component Commander)? How do we make sure that this whole thing works together seamlessly? It’s a very exciting time. With that let me begin. Next slide. AMC (Air Mobility Command) vision. Very simple and very appropriate for the theme here. Unrivaled global reach for America always. We’re in the middle of fighting a war at the same time that we’re preparing for a future in which something like the President announcing the increase in ground forces of 92,000, when that happens you know the impact it has on our whole Air Force, but you know that on mobility we sit there and go okay, so what does that mean for us? So we’ve got to be thinking about the future and how do we get better? How do we get faster? How do we do those kinds of things which again, industry partners can help us, as we think through that. Next slide. We’re fond of saying that the Global War on Terrorism has already been longer than World War II. As you’ve heard our Chief talk about, General Keys just mentioned, really we’ve been at pretty much constant war since Desert Shield and Storm. And when you look at these major operations, if you counted those up, 45 major operations since Desert Shield and Storm. Thirteen of those are kinetic. The other ones are humanitarian or non-combatant evacuation operations like Lebanon, the Pakistan earthquake, tsunami relief, and Hurricane Katrina. The last three kinetics obviously have lasted five years plus. So the kinetic operations tend to be longer. The ones, during those operations we’ll end up being asked to go do something like hey, we’ve got to get the folks out of Lebanon right now. Now do we do that without affecting an ongoing war? Those are the kinds of things and the effects that we’ve got to bring to bear. Next slide. So a snapshot, if you look at it, kind of summarizes the kinds of things that we do. Aeromedical evacuation. 13,000 sorties. You think about that; 85,000 patients moved in this global war on terrorism -- 85,000. That’s something that’s almost unfathomable. But we do that so much better, and I’ll talk a little bit about that here in just a little bit. The Pakistan earthquake. We were in the middle of moving C-17 operations, moving some helicopters and equipment into Afghanistan and were told hey, we just had an earthquake in Pakistan. Drop everything you’ve got, pick up those other helicopters and take them into Pakistan to help with earthquake relief. At the same time we deploy a contingency response group that goes in there and sets up operations and enables all the rest of that relief to take place. It’s kind of interesting, the commander of the contingency response group that was down at Katrina in New Orleans Airport that had to bring that all together was sent home, had about four days off before he was asked to go to Pakistan and get ready for that. He spent about two months in Pakistan. Those are the kinds of things that are happening daily, and if we’re doing this right it’s all seamless. You look at the number of sorties and passengers that we’ve moved. Look at the cargo, look at the fuel that we’ve moved -- almost six billion pounds of fuel that we’ve moved. I’ll talk a little bit more about that. But when you think about the complexity of this and then how much it’s happening, it’s incredible. One departure every 90 seconds to 2 minutes. We do about 900 sorties a day. So somewhere out there in the world about every 90 seconds an airplane is taking off and landing with that beautiful American flag on that tail and I will tell you that those crews that are out there that are flying those airplanes are absolutely dedicated to what they do. All the people that support that end-to-end supply chain, the aerial porters, the maintainers, the command and control folks, the intel. All of that is what makes that all happen. I’ll tell you, where that American flag lands doesn’t just represent America, it is America. So this becomes something that everybody is very very proud of. It’s awesome. It’s awesome what they do every day. And you’ll find the places that they go. They’re going to places like not only Afghanistan and Iraq, but it may be down on the ice. It might be one of Gen. Hester’s folks flying down to Antarctica and dropping supplies. It may be down to Africa or South America. It may be into one of the Stans (Kurdistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, etc.). Or it may be into Russia, into Korea. They’re all over. You think about the complexity of that, to make sure that we keep those airplanes out of harm’s way and make sure that we do this effectively, that’s the part that we’ve got to play. Next slide. Here’s what we call our six-pack slide. Every day if you went to the Tanker Airlift Control Center, this is kind of the centerpiece slide. It kind of gives you a feel for what we do. There’s your planned sorties -- 927. I say 900 sorties a day, that’s about what we do. On the weekends it’s a little bit less, so it ends up averaging out in the 800 to 900 range. But you can see the different AORs and kind of the pace that we do. You heard the Chief talk yesterday, saying about 300 airlift and tanker sorties. You can see it comes up to about 300 there in the CENTCOM AOR. Interesting enough, you’ve got about 147 commercial airplanes, again, fit into the seamless flow that nobody really knows. They don’t know if it’s a C-5 or a C-17 or a Civil Reserve Air Fleet airplane and our partnerships with them that will come in and bring the passengers or cargo in. But it’s all seamless to the warriors. I will say those 900, if they’re doing it right, you never even talk about it. You don’t hear about it. I’ll tell you that if one goes off, one doesn’t go well, you all know you may see that on CNN. And when the Chief calls me and says, you know, what the heck happened on that? When I say the other 899 went really well, Chief, he doesn’t care. [Laughter]. He doesn’t care at all. We might have one month without having anything that goes out there that is of incident, but it only takes one for us to have to go back and say hey, how do we do this better? The best part about this is after five years of pace on this global war on terrorism, we have gotten pretty good at this. We always want to get better, and that’s what I need your help on. Next slide. What do I lose sleep at night over? This is what I lose sleep at night over. Next to helicopters, your airlift airplanes are the ones that are the most shot at of all the assets that we have. The reason is because they come in, they’re a little bit slower, they’re fairly predictable. Most of these are small arms, but shot at 215 times in ’06. Most of that, again, is small arms. You can see the graphic here. But you know there’s nothing that our enemy would like better than to bring down one of our airplanes. You know if they could do that they would be celebrating. So the defensive systems becomes a very big issue for me. But these tactics, techniques and procedures, the ability to spiral in, the ability to come in at night using night vision goggles, be able to operate randomly. I go out there and fly with our great crews, and I’m just amazed at what they’re doing and they’re having a ball. You basically are told okay, come in here, and you’ve got to be random on how you come in there. Of course they’re going, we love being random. We love doing that. [Laughter]. I remember come in, fly, the ILS (Instrument Landing System), make sure that, it’s a safety issue. So you come in there and make sure if you can fly a precision approach, you do. If you did a non-precision you really talked a lot more about that. That’s not what we do in Afghanistan and Iraq because of this threat. So they’re coming in, and many of you all, and I know the folks in the front, as you go in there, congressmen, the President, you think about all the folks, we’ll put them on a C-17 or a 130 and we’ll spiral on in. They go wow. Secretary of Defense (Dr. Robert M.) Gates came out to visit at TRANSCOM (Transportation Command), we had a little bit of time with him. He’d been into Iraq. He remembers his C-17 sortie. He goes oh, man, that was amazing. Of course he goes, are you allowed to do that? That was our normal operation. But it’s to keep us safe. I go into Altus (Okla.), I check out in the C-17. I’ve flown a lot of hours. I’m an old air drop guy, special ops guy. Flown a lot of sorties. So I go in there and now I’m going to check out in the C-17. My young captain instructor at Altus comes over and he starts telling me how they employ the C-17 and kind of puts his arm around me and says come on over here, son, let me tell you how we fly this in the war. They are flying today on things that only our special operations crews would do because it took such intensive training, and all of our crews are doing that every day and they’re doing it safely. It’s huge. So this is the one that I watch. This is the one that I go how do I build in a little bit more safety? How can we do this a little bit better? Can I get more defensive systems on the aircraft so I have a larger suite of airplanes that I can pick from? All of those kinds of things are what we have to manage. Next slide. The one I would say we’ve really made progress on is the fact that we used to have five command centers all around the world. We had one in Europe, one in the Pacific. We had one on each coast and we had one at Scott. We said let’s collapse those and put them all at one place, the TACC (Tanker Airlift Control Center). Let’s make sure they have the communications capability and the datalink capability that we’ll grow to, and let’s give them the systems so that we can really optimize the flow, be able to see -- not unlike when you think about the Predators being flown from Nevada, the fact that from the TACC you can see all this and then you can sequence it, and it doesn’t really matter where you are. We just say if you put that all together this will be huge because then you can do things like total asset visibility, you can do airspace control and flow. You do that with a CFACC. There are places where the CFACC goes okay, I want you to land every 30 minutes or every 15 minutes or every two hours, and he also wants to be able to say stop the flow. He wants to be able to have that kind of control because if a threat comes up you want to be able to get hold of that airplane and go okay, slow this down, I need you to go into holding, let’s hold for a second because we’ve got something come up. This allows us to do that right in conjunction with the CFACC. So we’ve got the TACC, we’ve got the CAOC (Combined Air Operations Center), we’ve got the DDOC, which is the Deployment and Distribution Operations Center, which is a joint center that works for CENTCOM and also they have the DDOC at TRANSCOM, so it’s the joint fight. It’s our place. It’s how do we work with the CAOC? And this is all seamless. If we’re doing it right, everybody goes okay, good, this is going well. You just don’t hear about it. That’s what we want. This rapidly tailorable for max effect, I would just say that if you’ve got this flow going, these 900 sorties a day, and you’ve got them all en-route, and you can just imagine, they’re all over the world, and you go, we’ve got to get the folks out of Lebanon, right now. This allows us to take some of that flow and say which one are we going to pick off to be able to drop in to Cyprus to pick up our people to bring them home? Can we get with commercial and figure out how many of these sorties can they take care of and we’ll take care of the rest? We’ll send the contingency response group in to Cyprus, to make sure they work all that. Again, if we’ve done this, it’s an end to end look, and nobody else in the world can do this. But that rapidly tailorable for max effect is the part that allows us to bring this to bear very quickly. I again could use the Pakistan earthquake relief. I could bring in the President says we want to move a division ready brigade, take that forward. If we want to do that here’s what we’re going to do, this is how we’re going to do it, and if we’ve done it right it doesn’t impact the rest of the flow, the rest of the war. Next slide. This is what our day to day global operations, this is what it looks like. I would just say these are the kinds of attributes we have to have -- responsive command and control, long haul and last tactical mile. We’ve got to worry about it all the way to the end. We can’t just dump it in Kuwait and say okay, we’re done. We’ve got the responsibility to get it all the way to the warfighter where it’s needed. That deployment and redeployment of forces, can we do that so that it optimizes their use as well? That’s kind of what’s on our plate. Next slide. Here’s the part that I think is really remarkable. I say this is truly one of the nation’s crown jewels because no other nation has this strategic ability to move. Nobody can do the global operations the way that we can. Other nations have some capability. Some of our greatest friends and allies have this capability, but we bring that mass, and ideally we do this together. But I will tell you that no other country in the world has our strategic ability to move. It gives us great ability to slow down events or speed them up, to play or to not play, but everybody knows we have it. (Gen.) Ron Keys came down to our Airlift Tanker Association and spoke. He said what the mobility air forces does is it puts global in global reach, power and vigilance. That’s truly what it does. This is the part that we play large, and you can see, if you think of a highway or you think about a pipeline, we can expand that and contract it at will. It is the en route system that we have out there that allows us to do those 900 sorties every day. But if we’ve got to go to another 300 sorties in one part of the world, what we do is we expand that pipeline by putting additional people into that system, again, for an end-to-end look. That’s that expandable and bring it back down that gives us great flexibility. Who would have thought we’d go into Pakistan for earthquake? You now have to do a flow, if you will, into these places, and our ability to take that all the way to the end to include offloading the airplanes and getting them distributed, that’s the part that we bring to the fight and it’s huge. Air refueling and airlift. You put that together. I’m going to talk about air refueling here in just a second. This is what we do. Next slide. Let’s talk a little bit about global airlift. Here’s places in the States. This is our en-route system. If you think about the 900 sorties a day, this is kind of the basic foundation that allows us to do that. But when you talk about from those places they will go out and touch all these other locations, they’ll be asked to go into, and you see these little green lines coming down here. That’s Gen. Hester’s mission that goes down to Antarctica. Those are the things that allow us to do this mission. So it’s huge; 150 countries. Some of the places, again, they’d like nothing better than to shoot one of our airplanes down. There are other places we go that are very austere and we’ve got to make sure that we can get in and out and we’ve got to take care of all that. Again, if we’re doing it right, nobody even notices. It’s good. Next slide. A little vignette. Like the Chief was talking about being out in the AOR, I visited Iraq and Afghanistan and all our folks out there in the AOR in December, kind of a pre-Christmas visit. Went and talked to them. I got to hear a bunch of different stories. As I went in there the crews would tell me a story, or hey, here’s something we did that really had an impact. I got to meet with in Afghanistan, meeting with (Brig.) Gen. (Anthony J.) Tata (Deputy Commander, 10th Mountain Division) who is like their head logistics guy who’s watching the supply chain, and here’s what you did. Brig. Gen. Tata talked to me about this Operation Tiger Crossing. He said I can’t even relate to you the affect that this had overall. Well, as I kept going around the system, I was very impressed. I get back to Aviano (Italy) and they tell me all about, here it’s EUCOM (European Command) and USAFE (US Air Forces Europe) and the whole team, and they start telling me about how they got this tasker and how they loaded up the airplanes there at Aviano, the Bailey Bridges came out of Livorno which is Camp Darby, and basically it was a team that all came together and they said hey, this would really make a difference if we could do a Bailey Bridge up in this province and it would make a big difference to influencing the local population and winning the hearts and minds. That’s kind of what it was after. It’s up in kind of the northeast province, very remote, and basically it’s the Peck River, and it’s basically between two valleys, and six to eight months of the year this is flooded so there’s no bridge, there’s no way to go across unless you wade across the river. That tends to be in the spring when you can’t get across because of the melting of the snow, so you can imagine how nice it is crossing that river and wading across it because it’s the snow melt. So you sit there and you think about well, how are we going to do this? How can we help? Basically the local tribal leaders said you could sure help us here. So that’s what they did. They called up and they said okay, we’d like to build a bridge across this valley. Not a bad task, that’s pretty cool. And they end up, the joint team comes together, says how do we do that? Well, we’ve got Bailey Bridges. Where are the Bailey bridges? Well, we’ve got a stock there at Camp Darby. Let’s go pick that up. Let’s move that to Aviano, and the first time that we’ve ever really moved Bailey Bridge material on an airplane, you can imagine kind of the consequences of that. We’ll do that and we’ll pick that up in Aviano and we’ll fly it into Bagram (Afghanistan). In Bagram we’ll put it on jingle trucks, because jingle trucks, the local economy, they know how to do this and you can imagine them trying to figure out how to put Bailey bridges on jingle trucks. They take those jingle trucks up there. The use some of the Army combat engineers. They construct that bridge and it ends up changing the complete dynamics of the feeling towards the United States and what we’re trying to do there up in this very remote valley. General Tata said this was incredible. The JTF (Joint Task Force)commander said, and this was his quote, he said “We used to not be able to even fly up this valley or visit this valley. When we started to build this bridge, they started bringing us tea and bread.” A very very different approach. So that was the requirement. Next slide. We respond. Twelve C-17s. Again, the flexibility of the C-17 to carry this kind of stuff is incredible. But again, it’s a whole team that you brought together. So they figured out how to load them and get them on the C-17. It’s just part of it because they still had to get it on the jingle trucks. I wish I could find those jingle truck drivers. In fact I’d hire them. They must have been amazing. The last flight completed, three weeks. From the time they said go, three weeks later we completed that flight. It took about a month to have the engineers, another week to build that up. Next slide. So you have the longest Bailey Bridge constructed since World War II. This is huge when you think about it, but it’s just one of those missions, those 900 missions that you hear. Here were 12 of them. “And now my mom does not have to wade across the river to get groceries.” This is what a young Afghan child said. My mom doesn’t have to wade across it any more. This is good stuff. Who did that? It was America. America and its compassion. It was shown directly and it completely changed the influence to the tribal leaders. It really did change the dynamics of how the Taliban was viewed and how American forces and our coalition allied forces were viewed. Next slide. Tanker bridge. You’ve heard a lot about the tanker bridge. I would tell you, and you saw this yesterday with the Secretary. Go ahead and show that coming across. He liked my slide, by the way. He said I really like that slide so he’s stealing it now. So I go hey, Mr. Secretary you can have any slide we have any time you want to show any of our slides, we’re good. But it does show you the global nature of this tanker bridge. You’ve got the air refueling points. The airplanes are based all over. Basically these are the points that if you have a B-2 take out of Whiteman and you’ve got to go visit somebody and make sure you send a message, or if you’re going to do an emergency air evacuation of someone, that you can say hey listen, we’re going to set up the tanker. The tankers go where do you need us and when do you need us? It gives us great flexibility. It’s huge. But when you think about three to four million pounds of fuel a day. How many of you all would think three to four million pounds of fuel is passed day in and day out across the world, all over this 9,000 mile tanker bridge, and you don’t hear much about it. Again, if it’s going right you don’t hear about it. I call this though, when you kind of take it for granted. Sometimes we talk about air power in general. Because we’ve gotten so good people begin to think it’s easy. It is not. So I’d propose to you, now we’ve got a lot of industry out there. Probably maybe some folks that know venture capitalists. Let me propose to you that we never had a thing called air refueling. We didn’t have (Gen. Curtis) LeMay say hey, this is how we’re going to do this. We didn’t have the question mark where we showed what air refueling would do, that just never happened. We sat down today, and you have the commercial airline industry, you all are very familiar, and we said to a venture capitalist crowd, we’ve got an idea. We think we could probably do refueling in the air which would extend the range of the airplanes and this would be really outstanding. You all would probably say well, tell me more. You’d say well, here’s what we’re thinking. We’re thinking we can take two very large airplanes, or just a large airplane and a small airplane, but in this case it would be two large, and we want to put them about ten feet apart. We’ll just bring them up. You don’t have to worry, but about ten feet apart, and we’ll put a pipe between them and we’ll pass highly volatile fuel, let’s do 6,000 pounds per minute so we can keep this going, and we’ll pass that between them. And you can’t be worried about the weather or at night. You want to be able to do it all the time, so let’s do it at night. And of course we’ve got to be able to do it in weather because you’ve got to have it. I know, I know. Let’s be able to do it in turbulence. Let’s make sure we can do it there. Okay, here would be the best part. Let’s put a 23 year old pilot at one end and an 18 year old boom operator at the other end. What do you think? Are you ready to put your money in? We do four million pounds a day of that. It’s incredible. It is a miracle. They get better. And this new KCX (tanker) is going to take us to a whole different level on that. And Sue (Payton), I thank you for working that so well, that RFP (Request for Proposal). And with industry and working everybody together because of all the things that made my week, that made my week. Next slide. I’ll give you an idea what happens if you have this air refueling capability. It gives great flexibility, but President Ford’s fly-over gives you a great idea. What we do and the way we do tanker ops is we will put extra fuel in the air over and above what the plan calls for. So fighter bomber airlift folks will say here’s what we need. Okay, we’ll put probably an extra 30% over the target so that in fact if something goes wrong or somebody else needs the gas, we’ll do that. Many times they don’t need it and that airplane will bring that gas back. In this case, we’re going to do President Ford’s funeral, we’re going to help the F-15E folks out of Seymour Johnson (N.C.). They’re going to launch 27 airplanes and they’re going to put 21 to fly over target. We basically put a million pounds of fuel in the air. It took 13 tankers and their requirement was 500,000 pounds. So here we sat. We basically said let’s put a little extra. We said let’s put some extra redundancy so we have some flexibility in case something goes wrong. Then what happens is they basically continue to delay the fly-over in about 10 to 20 minute increments, which you can imagine, as they’re trying to figure out to make sure that the fighters have enough fuel to do their fly-by and then recover, how hard that was to sequence. The F-15E mission commander, I think it was the wing commander, just did awesome. But because we put that million pounds in the air they ended up using 640,000. Now if we’d taken off and done 500,000 this wouldn’t have worked. The final fly-over was one hour and 32 minutes after it was supposed to be. It went flawlessly. Twenty-one aircraft right across. You’d never know there was ever an issue. But because of the flexibility of air power and enabled by the tankers, this is why the tanker becomes so critical to our combat air forces. This is why in our air refueling for aeromedical evac (evacuation), I will talk about that later, but that’s what allows us to say hey, we’ve got to take this one all the way home, right now, no notice, let’s do it. Next slide. Of course the key was that we paid proper respect to a great President and made sure that as we paid this tribute it went flawlessly. A great operation. Gen. Keys sent me an e-mail that next morning and just said, thank you. That’s all it said. We really appreciate the flexibility you all gave us because who would have thought? Next slide. A couple of things that we really stress and I think are very important. How do we make our system better? I talked a little bit about this. This is that air bridge. As you look over here you say hey, it kind of does look like an air bridge. There’s airlift airplanes and tanker airplanes in there. When you see that you’ll hear every once in a while the Secretary mention that if we had IP (Internet Protocol)in the air, we had routers, or we had connectivity of all these airplanes, you can imagine what that would do to a network that says hey, we’ve got to have different ways of routing information. You’ll hear them talk about that. That’s what he sees. He goes hey, this has got great potential. Maj. Gen. (Quentin L.) Peterson has been asked, and our guys are looking at it and saying how might we do this? It should be passive to the crew. It shouldn’t matter. But the fact that you’ve got all these airplanes in the air, and if they’ve got this already in there it makes a big difference. So that’s something we’re talking about. This capacity and mass, what we want to do is create velocity. If you think about Southwest Airlines and you think about how they go about their operations, where they made their big money -- if you talk to Herb Kelleher, it was when he said I want to have 15 minute turn times. Fifteen minutes. Everybody would say 15 minutes. You mean come on in, have everybody get off, service the airplane in 15 minutes and then -- it can’t be done. He said yeah, we’re going to do that. It ends up that they ended up at about 16 or 17 minutes. They would start moving the airplane, sometimes people were still standing up, to make that time. Some of the other industry folks complained. That’s why you have that hey, we’re not going to move the airplane until the seatbelt sign -- until everybody sits down we’re not going to move the airplane. But Herb told me, you know, when we started moving people would sit down. It did work. [Laughter]. You go yeah, it does work. And you haven’t really heard of anybody being hurt by the moving of the airplane. You all remember that. But that became an industry standard. But he also said, everybody else has got to follow that too. And it ends up that they went to 21 (minutes). He thinks it will get back to 18. But it’s that turn time, that keeping the airplane in the air and turning it faster on the ground that made all the difference. So when we talk about velocity, it’s weapon systems, it’s command and control, it’s focused logistics. How fast can we turn these? It’s high speed refueling pumps so you can pump up a C-17 in 15 minutes rather than 50 minutes. It’s concurrent operations where you’re loading and you think about NASCAR. They win the race in the pits. They win it not because they went 220 and not 218, they win it in the pits and it’s all synchronized. If we do this right, we create value. We create capability just by going faster. Load platforms like Halverson and Tonner loaders, our ability to offload and onload very quickly. It creates value. It may be the best dollar spent. So that’s what we want to make sure that we do. I talked about the global infrastructure. That gives you a feel. The other one is precision. Can we do it more precisely? Can we do it more efficiently and effectively? Can we figure out ways to do that? I want to talk a little bit about that because these two things, along with, and there’s lots of different ways to do that, we can really make a difference and take advantage of this great investment. Next slide. Convoys off the road. I want to talk about three parts of that. One of them is getting convoys off the road. I’m going to talk a little bit about the air refueling portion because that’s specific, and the aeromedical. Gen. (John) Abizaid said to Gen. (Norton) Schwartz and to I and I know to Gen. (John) Handy (Retired) before, whatever you can do to get convoys off the road, please do. Whatever you can do, because our folks are at risk, and in cases it’s getting high risk convoys off the road and you may be able to do other convoys, but you want to focus on the places where they’re getting people killed or hurt. Next slide. So what do we do? We ended up saying instead of taking passengers on busses, taking our Civil Reserve Air Fleet into Kuwait and then taking buses forward, we will move everybody by 130s. We’ve been doing this three or four years. That’s what they do. Institute theater direct delivery. Theater direct delivery is using C-17s, C-5s in a role that used to be primarily a C-130 role. They’re in theater. They come, in this case the CFAC says here’s the requirement, here’s what we want you to do, and we’re going to need C-17s. I’ll give you an example of the kinds of things we do. Armor. We’ll have a Civil Reserve Air Fleet take pallets of armor into Kuwait or into Incirlik, Turkey and then we will put it on C-17s and take it forward. You could not do that on C-130s. There might be sealifted stuff into Kuwait. It might even be that. So we may end up saying okay, it’s sealifted into Kuwait and then we’ll take it forward from there. But 21,000 sorties now. Completely changed the dynamics. Established two C-17 squadrons. We had a lot of C-17s that were starting to do this so we said why don’t we just put them on 120-day rotation, much like the rest of the AEF (Air and Space Expeditionary Force), the rest of the Air Force and we’ll put squadrons out there with the squadron leadership so they can watch it. What I was concerned about is these folks were getting, the C-17 folks were meeting themselves coming and going. Twenty-one days gone, come home for three; 21 days gone, home for three; 21 days gone. I think that’s kind of how it was. What we heard was we see them, out of 24 days we see them every three, but if we can do 120 day rotation for some of the forces the rest of the time it’s much more stabilized, much like we learned in the EAF (Expeditionary Air Force). We have done that. Initiated CRAF (Civil Reserve Air Fleet) Tender Express. I would just tell you what we did is we worked with industry and some of the smaller carriers and they said hey, we’ve got excess capacity, we’d like to be able to be in your system. We said great. The big part here is you go if you can track it and you’re watching the whole thing you don’t have a C-130 arriving when you just had somebody put, hey, we had an extra three pallet positions open so we put it on this commercial airplane. Now this C-130 comes in right behind them ready to pick that stuff up and it’s gone. This is how we now can manage this force. Of course that puts economy over there, that if in fact things slow down there’s already economy that the other, the Iraqis and others can use. It’s already established over there because they’ve been flying this already. So there’s some real goodness in this. Next slide. What is the result? Eight thousand to 9,000 personnel per month off the road because of this. When you look at the Marines, they said everything you can take by air we want you to take by air. We started doing that. By September, we had that done. What a difference this made, it has saved lives. Next slide. JPADS (Joint Precision Air Drop System). Again, the Secretary talked about this precision capability, vertical resupply. If you take a traditional airdrop, I’m an old traditional airdropper, you’d come in, you’d do a low level route, then you’d come in and you’d either come up or go down and about 30 seconds before you’re supposed to do your air drop you’d look out and hope you saw the drop zone. If you were leading a 20 ship or a 30 ship you had this long line of people behind you and you couldn’t correct much. So you’d want to look out there. If you didn’t see it, you went oh, this is not going to be good. You also dropped at the green light, and depending on how long the drop zone was, you tried to drop on a point for your first load, and then how long the drop zone was, that’s how long you’d have the green light. So it would spread out. So if you had a large drop zone you’d have a long green light and if you had a small drop zone it would be a two or three second green light. But that’s how we did it. The problem with that is we’d come in low level. Low level in Afghanistan and Iraq gets you shot at. So we were getting lots of airplanes shot, and we said how do we get at this and put this above the threat? This is the traditional method. Next slide. So one thing is, you’ve got the small arms weapon engagement zone, so we said let’s do an improved CDS (Container Delivery System). What we’ll do is we’ll take advantage of everything in precision airdrop except for the precision shoots. That’s what we did. This allows us to take winds and use the computers and do it differently. Also what we call high speed CDS, high velocity CDS, and basically drop above that at maybe 14 to 17,000 feet. So above the small arms threat, and have that -- but it’s still the traditional way. It’s still ballistic. But we have found that that has had great effect. To date we’ve done 164 combat drops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Primarily Afghanistan. What a difference that’s made. We deployed this in August and since August there’s only been 10 traditional drops in Afghanistan. We’ve got everything else above the threat. For the Army, this makes no difference. It’s the same kind of shoots. There’s no difference in what they have to do on the ground. It’s just that now we have our C-130s above the threat. What does precision do for you? Next slide. Now we put a precision shoot on that precision airdrop to coordinates. Remember this drop zone, green light. Now you say here’s the coordinates so your whole load now can go to that IP. Now you're above the ManPads. I was just out at Yuma Proving Ground (Ariz.) and it’s amazing. You can’t even see these shoots coming down until it gets down to about 2,000 feet. It’s up there. You know you’ve seen the airplane go by. If you watch it with binoculars you can track it. But if you weren’t watching it, you can’t find it. What a difference that would make. We’ve done 12 combat drops in theater. The Secretary asked us to go to 10,000 pound loads and that’s what we’ve done. Next slide. This gives you an idea of what this looks like. I always like this because you can visualize this. This is standard airdrop. If you were on the ground and you had a small arms or you had a rocket propelled grenade, does that look like a nice target? This is what 130s and 141 guys, this is what we did in (Operation) Just Cause. You can see kind of traditional drop zone. Very visual. Now here’s JPADS. I say here’s the drop zone. See it? It’s tracking right there. You can’t even see that. So the crew, they’re just being in an envelope just like the JDAM (Joint Direct Attack Munitions), and you can see these starting to fly. They are now tracking, using precision, using steerable chutes, just like you see when you're sitting in one of those stadiums and you see those guys coming down. Here’s what it looks like. That could be a person. That could be one of those teams that you saw that land on the American flag in the center of the stadium. We’ll know we have arrived here when they drop the Cadillac in and it drives off, or the Humvee, and you’ll know you’re there. But doesn’t it look like they’re kind of coming down now? This part was in the last 1,000 to 1,500 feet they’ll pop the large chute that will decrease the rate of descent, and basically it allows us to protect the load. Here’s where they’re trying to hit. It gives you an idea. But that last part is ballistic, so they’re working on that. How do they get that closer and closer? The Chief said, when are we going to get that real precision, like the JDAM? I said Chief, we’ve got a little different dynamic here. You’re not worried about how well the load survives. [Laughter]. I have dropped a few things where the chute didn’t work and I’ll tell you what, we can do some pretty good scoring. [Laughter]. It’s just not worth anything once you get there. Next slide. Here’s the kind of drop zones we’re asked to drop right now in Afghanistan. What we’re hoping to do is have some very precisely come all the way down, and we’re working with (Gen.) Mike Wooley and his special ops folks to say we’ll need to be able to get to some of that very close, but in general, 50 to 100 meters is about right. That’s about what you need. So, this is pretty good. But you can see the kind of locations. Here’s those valleys that we’d have to come in and come out. And obviously if you only have one way in and one way out you’d get shot at because they know you’re coming sometime that week. They’ll just wait for you. So we said we’ve got to get above the threat. Next slide. Tankers. KCX. I’m going to go zipping through this, but it just gives you an idea. These were our key performance parameters. This new KCX is going to change the way we do mobility. Much like the C-17 changed us from a strategic and tactical airlift force and said we have an airplane now that can swing and completely change the whole dynamics. This new tanker will allow us to do the same thing for the overall mobility system. Next slide. First of all, refuel them all. Boom and drogue on same mission. We found out on the KC-10 what a difference that makes. In the KC-135 we could not do that. AR (Air Refuel) with current and programmed fixed wing aircraft. This includes all of our coalition allies. It allows the Navy, that boom and drogue, huge on capability. And simultaneous multi-point air refueling. Very important to the Navy. Very important to us. We can get folks through there quicker. It really works well. So we think this is the best part we’ve got going. Next slide. Anywhere, any time. It allows us to fly into [inaudible] airspace. I’ll just say that sweet airspace is where the temperature, the winds and everything else is the best. It’s where you save fuel, it’s where you go the fastest, it’s where you save money. In industry they fight for this position. So basically what happened was when they started fighting for that position, the FAA said what we’re going to have to do is figure out how we can do better separation and be able to separate different ways. So where we used to have one airplane go through a system, we now will in that same airspace put eight or 10 or 12 airplanes, but you have to have the right equipment to be allowed to fly there. It’s very essential to us overall if you think about a 40 or 50-year life cycle. Next slide. Always a tanker. If it’s needed to be a tanker, it will be a tanker. But when it’s not needed to be a tanker, we may want it to do some other things. So always think tanker first. That’s what you heard, that’s the way it is. If it’s needed to be a tanker, that’s what it will be. If in fact it’s sitting on the ground and we’re not using it as a tanker, we’ve got some other options and that could be in theater trans-load, taking some of that armor forward. It could be aeromedical evacuation. It could be troops carrier. That allows the CFACC to use that for other things. Much like the KC-10. That’s what we do today. Next slide. This gives you an idea, this obviously is pretty dark, but refueling at night. That’s primarily how we fight. We refuel at night, and during the day we land, we regroup, but we fight at night primarily. Next slide. So during the day our idea is okay, you may do some refueling in the day, but in general you do most of the night ops. Next slide. Our traditional message is C-17s, C-5s go directly into the theater. The Civil Reserve Air Fleet because of the threat, they will land at a main operating base and then we’ll trans-load to a C-17 or C-5 or a C-130 to take the stuff forward. This is not as efficient as we would like it to be. It takes C-17s and C-5s out of the fight for what we designed them to do. Next slide. If we have floors, doors and defensive systems on the KCX, we can use, when it’s not being used as a tanker, we can use it to do that mission. We can’t do it all the time because it may be full up in the tanker role. Then we use the C-17s and C-5s. But our whole fleet gets better. We’re pretty excited about this. Next slide. This expandable net ready, IP address in the air, that’s what I was referring to before. We want to make sure we have the backbone to be able to take advantage of new technology, to make sure that we do that. Next slide. Then this is huge. Right now we pretty much have to keep the tankers back away from the fight because they don’t have defensive systems, they don’t know how they may be being tracked. So we keep them back which causes the bombers and fighters to have to come a long distance out to get the gas before they go back in. If the fight demands it, we will put those tankers over the fight. We did in Baghdad. In fact Gen. (T. Michael) Moseley flew on one of those tankers that we put over Baghdad. But I’ll tell you what, the risk increase because we have no ability to see if somebody comes up on the net and is tracking us. Next slide. With defensive systems we can bring that forward. Again, we know where the threat is. Then if somebody comes up we can move. That will make a big difference in our ability to go farther forward. Next slide. Enhanced survivability. Night vision goggles. LAIRCM (Large Aircraft Infrared Countermeasure). Our ability to go forward, our ability to use this airplane across the spectrum. Again, this will change mobility. This will change. It’s just like the C-17 changed it dynamically. It allows airlift capability forward. The right fit fleet. It gives us great flexibility with those 900 sorties a day. Next slide. My last one is on air evacuation. I’ll quickly go through this, but I’ll just say this is huge. We used to have dedicated airplanes for aeromedical evacuation. That’s how we did it. We had 20 C-9s and 40 C-141s. They had crews that were specifically for them. We also had some 130 crews. And basically we said you know, it used to take us 30 days from the time, if you got hurt during Vietnam, it took 30 days to get you home. You had to be stabilized before we ever moved you. Thirty days. In Desert Shield and Storm it was 10 days. Next slide. What we did is we said if we put patient support pallets and critical care in the air, stuff we can load on any of our airplanes, it will completely change the dynamics. Now we can use any asset, any of those 900 airplanes, they’ll roll in, they’ll put one of those patient support pallets and that critical care in the air. Whichever is the next airplane, and we’ll get folks out that used to never move. People that aren’t stable yet, we get them to a certain point. But it’s just like having ICU (Intensive Care Unit) in the air. Completely changed the dynamics. We’ve gone from a 75% survival rate to a 90% survival rate. Visiting the Balad (Iraq) Hospital, they say if you arrive in the Balad Hospital alive, if you make it there, you have a 97% chance of survival. Think of that. That’s with IEDs, snipers, think of what that allows our volunteer force to know, that we will do anything to get them to the doctor or get them to the hospital where we can have their lives. Next slide. USS Frank Cable, great example of this. Great teaming with the Army, PACAF, AMC. December 2006. Polaris Point, Guam. Eight sailors aboard a sub-tender, USS Frank Cable, suffer burns because of a ruptured steam line. Six in critical condition. We’ve got to move them right now. Next slide. Hickam (Hawaii), C-17 does the care in the air. They do a great operation to Anderson (Guam), they bring it to Hawaii, but while they’re doing that we have a McCord (Wash.) C-17 fly down to San Antonio (Texas), pick up the Army burn team, and meet that other team coming into Hickam. They meet at Hickam. Then the Hickam C-17, I think you changed out crews, Paul (Gen. Hester), I can’t remember, but I think you changed out crews. Goes to San Antonio direct with the 18 member burn team. Think of all of the orchestration that has to happen there. Think of how that all worked and all coordinated beforehand. I will tell you, there was a lot of, everybody in the Pacific I think was volunteering for that mission. So they had a lot of discussion of who was going to take them, which is exactly as it should be. Next slide. All six sailors arrived in Brooke Medical Center within 48 hours of the incident, and all are saved. Huge difference. I know Gen. Hester came up on the net and just talked about how tremendous this was. Next slide. Lance Corporate Justin Ping. They told me this story, this gives you an idea of the flexibility. Multiple burns, blast injuries and a complex retinal damage to his right eye. The doctors say we’ve got to get him out right away, and because of the burns and the damage to the eye, we’ve got to get him all the way to Brooke Medical Center in San Antonio, directly, as fast as we can, and he can’t handle more than one pressurization going up and down, we can’t stop en-route, we’ve got to do it all the way. A C-17 crew out of Al Udeid. They’re alerted for a normal mission they’re told, they take their stuff into Balad. They’re told, well you’re not staying here. You are going to pick up Lance Corporal Justin Ping, and you’re going to take him all the way back to San Antonio. You think about the flexibility that entails, and we’re going to do an air refueling en-route, so all that is done. Next slide. Here’s urgent areomedical evacuation filled by the expeditionary C-17, non-stop, care in the air. ATC (Air Traffic Control), it just gives you an idea. They cleared this aerobat, clear direct, any speed, any altitude, anything you want to do, you’ve got it. Pretty cool. Fifteen hour flight. Capt. Adam Bingham told me this story and he’s here in the audience today with his lovely wife Shalisa. He’s at Altus and came back for the night. Adam, if you would stand up and take a round of applause. [Applause.] Next slide. Lance Corporal Ping. A promise kept. We got him back. Got him all fixed up. And Lance Corporal Ping and his girlfriend Amanda are right here. Please stand up. [Applause.] Lance Corporal Ping, we are so delighted you’re here. I will tell you, Adam has to go back to Altus because he’s in the middle of training, so Toones (Gen. William Looney) wouldn’t give him any more time off, so I’d just throw that out. He came out with Shalisa. But Lance Corporal Ping and Amanda, Disney World is treating you to a DV visit tomorrow, so they’ll go have some more fun this weekend. But we cannot tell you what this represents to us. But it gives you an idea, when I go back to those 900 sorties a day, and you think of what’s in them. Every one will have a story. You go out there, it is -- and Bob this is for you. This is awesome. Next slide. I think that’s it. That’s what your Air Mobility Command is doing. That’s what the mobility air forces are doing. This is the kind of thing that we’re bringing and we’re going to get better tomorrow than we are today, and we are much better today than we were yesterday. We’ll continue to drive that. And with industry help you can see the kinds of things and the kind of dynamics we have, and we’re very excited about the future. Thank you all very much. # # # |