General Arthur W. Lichte
Commander, Air Mobility Command
AFA Air Warfare Symposium
Orlando, FL
February 22, 2008
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Moderator: Our next speaker is the commander of Air Mobility Command at Scott Air Force Base, the Air Mobility Command’s mission is to provide rapid global mobility and sustainment for America’s Armed Forces. The Command plays a crucial role in providing humanitarian support throughout the world, in resupplying the embassies all over the world, and in supporting our forces. Prior to assuming his current position the Commander of Air Mobility Command served as the Assistant Vice Chief of Staff and Director, Air Force Staff, Headquarters Air Force, Washington, D.C.
Please join me in welcoming to our stage the Commander of Air Mobility Command, General Art Lichte.
[Applause].
General Lichte: Well thank you, good morning. I can see everyone’s starting to continue to file in. Appreciate your being out here. Mr. Largent, General Dunn, thanks for putting this together. This is always a great, great symposium. Our industry partners, glad that you’re here. You certainly play a key role in everything that we do in Air Mobility Command. I also want to recognize all the attachés that have joined us. Certainly we partner with so many of you as we travel around the world in the air mobility business and I’m glad that you were able to join us, too.
Now, the only question I’ve got, Mike, I kind of was trying to figure out how I got inserted in the line-up where I did. So I was asking Bob, and I asked Mike, I don’t know whether the rest of you guys kind of knew that AFA takes a lot of time to try and figure out who’s going to go when, how are they going to do it, and I said could you kind of help me with the code because I’d really like to know where kind of I rack and stack in this. I’ve found out that this particular symposium they decided they were going to go with speakers with hair and speakers with no hair. [Laughter]. And so I am beginning the segment of speakers with hair. All the rest of our speakers today will have hair, so you can be happy with that. [Laughter and applause].
I’m also kind of happy with the place of the line-up that I’ve become because I get an opportunity to kind of comment on some of the speakers who go before me and I noticed yesterday General Kehler, shameless though it was, had the entire space guys out here to stand up and start cheering when he began. I thought that was a pretty good idea and I started trying to figure out how maybe I could do something like that and I figured I was going to start the rumor that I was going to announce the winner of the KCX source selection. [Laughter]. I figured the place would be packed, there would be no room to stand, but I figured by about the time I got to the end of the speech, there’d only be about half of you still with me and the other half would be waiting outside the doors to lynch me, so I thought I’d better not do that. We’d better stay away from that.
And then the other thing I noticed as we were going through this yesterday afternoon, you know General Chilton and General Renuart were here, and General Chilton and General Renuart spoke of the shoot-down of the satellite and how successful that was, which was very, I mean that made me very happy. I finally took off the hard had that I had been wearing for the last two weeks because I was a little concerned.
But then General Renuart put the fear of God in me again when he said, hey through natural disasters we’re ready to move the Mississippi River. And you know, being a guy at Scott Air Force Base, I said, that’s probably not going to be too good for us.
Anyhow, I am happy to be here and I am excited to talk to you today a little bit about Air Mobility Command and the theme that you have with air dominance, yesterday, today, and tomorrow, I think is tremendously significant and I thought I’d kind of model my thoughts today along those lines because this year we are going to be celebrating the 60th Anniversary of the Berlin Airlift. And so I said, well let me talk a little bit about the Berlin Airlift and then compare it to today’s warriors.
So I’m going to start by showing you a little clip, and in it you’re going to see, prominently favored, two individuals in particular. General Tunner, who really was the mastermind of the Berlin Airlift, and another guy by the name of Colonel Gale Halverson, who many of you know him as the “candy bomber”. And Colonel Gale Halverson is still very, very active today in the air mobility business. As a matter of fact when I have our commanders’ conference in the end of March he’s going to be there to give us a little retrospective on the Berlin Airlift.
But I wanted to start today by asking you to kind of fade back a little bit and think about what mobility was like some 60 years ago. So if you could roll this clip, we’ll put you right in the mood for the yesterday part of air dominance and air power around the world.
[Clip shown.]
General Lichte: That Berlin Airlift has left an indelible mark on Air Mobility Command after all these years. As a matter of fact Tunner and Halverson, as you saw in the video, have left such a legacy that we’ve named our loaders -- the 60-ton loader is named after Tunner, and of course the 25K is named after Colonel Halverson.
But the Berlin Airlift was really the first shot of the Cold War and we really started to think about airlift and the business that we’re in a little bit differently. It was certainly the first major challenge of the United States Air Force and we were only about six to nine months old, and the new command that we had stood up to handle the military air transport business was only three weeks old when this crisis began.
And if you think about it, this was right at the end of World War II, we had just been bombing Germany. we had a terrible infrastructure that we had to work with, but yet we were able to amount the largest humanitarian airlift relief ever. And we established the fact that global airlift could be used as a U.S. foreign policy option so that when people like the Secretary of the Air Force talks about sovereign options that we could offer to the President, the mobility piece became another tool in the tool kit, just as steaming a carrier group to a certain area, just as bombs on target by our B-2s as we can hold any place on the face of the earth and make sure that everyone understands what we can do with air power.
You heard General Corley talk about the global power part and so now I want to talk a little bit about the global reach part because air mobility in and of itself can have an effect. When you look at the comparisons of back then and today, I think they’re pretty significant.
First of all, when you consider the aircraft that they used, they used some C-47s and some C-54s. The C-47s were old and considered obsolete, even at that time. As a matter of fact, some of them still had the black and white paint markings on it from D-Day where they were dropping the paratroopers out over Normandy.
When you think about the aircraft that we have today, the number of C-17s and the capacity that they have, coupled with our 130s to go that extra mile in intra-theater, it’s an amazing comparison to realize how much we can do today when you look back on what they did in Berlin. But the fact that they were doing that in Berlin so many years ago with those old aircraft was a testament to the great work that those airmen could perform.
Back then their business was cargo. Cargo, cargo, cargo. They were taking the coal, they were taking the flour, all they wanted to do was to get the cargo in place at the right time. Today, of course, we not only take cargo, but we take a lot of passengers. And today, the reason why we’re taking so many passengers is that we want to get the convoys off the road. Last month alone we took some 12,000 soldiers and Marines off the roads so they didn’t have to use convoys because we were using airlift to accomplish the mission.
Back in the Berlin airlift it almost failed because of some fuel problems. We told the C-47s, you need to cut 200 gallons of fuel in order to carry some more cargo and get that cargo into the theater. Of course today, as you all know, we have orchestrated and integrated air refueling right into all of our operations with our great tanker fleet. And I’m going to talk more about the tankers later, but those tankers are really what makes our airlift go and it puts the global in global power, global vigilance, and global reach.
So back in Berlin, you can see with the number of aircraft that we had, compared to today, we still lift over half the Berlin’s daily tonnage, but we’re doing it with one fifth the aircraft and we’ve been doing that for the last six and a half years.
Now, when you start talking about fuel, it is the critical link. Back in the old days, they were using 250,000 gallons of fuel per day. It was really the entire amount of fuel that was allocated to the United State Air Forces in Europe for a month, and it almost halted because they didn’t have enough fuel.
Remember, we had been bombing the oil refineries, so there wasn’t much fuel. We had to turn three oil tankers around that were ocean-bound, turn them around so that we could use the fuel.
Today, of course, it’s second nature to us to use tankers and to use refueling. We’ve offloaded 408,000 gallons every day. That’s pretty impressive. When you start thinking about how much fuel we’ve offloaded since 9/11, we’ve almost offloaded a billion gallons of fuel, just for the global war on terror. When you start looking at other events going around the world, we’ve actually offloaded over 1.2 billion gallons of fuel. And some of you may remember that in Washington, when I gave a little presentation, I said you’d have sit in front of Niagara Falls and watch it come over at its highest peak to get an idea of what 1.2 billion gallons of fuel is, and right now you’d have to sit there watching it for 27 minutes and 29 seconds in order to figure out what 1.2 billion gallons of fuel is.
Obviously my staff doesn’t have much to do, and they can figure out what they do at the Niagara Falls. [Laughter]. I think they went up there on a TDY and clocked it. But fuel, back then, was important was because we didn’t have enough of it. Today we have enough fuel right now, but the problem that we have to deal with is the cost of fuel and when you look across the U.S. government, the Department of Defense is probably the biggest fuel user. And when the Department of Defense looks out, they turn to the Air Force and realize the Air Force is the biggest user of fuel and of course with the aircraft that we fly in Air Mobility Command we are the biggest fuel consumer in the Air Force.
So we’ve got to figure out better ways to do business. We’re doing that as we look at diplomatic clearances and the shortest routes between point A and point B to get to where we need to go and we are looking at better efficiencies by using alternative fuels. And we’ve proven on our C-17, which just flew cross country on an alternative fuel, by the way, that it’s possible and we can do it. Now we just need to develop all the sources so we have enough fuel available to us.
So the tanker has added great efficiencies to what we do, but another area that we have great efficiencies is by partnering with the Civil Reserve Air Fleet, our partners in the airline industry. By the way, we didn’t just think of that, they did it back in the Berlin Airlift.
Now, it was considered at that time a one-time good deal and they used it primarily to haul fuel, liquid fuels, and it was the Brits who really came up with the idea first. Turns out that the Americans had a lot more crews than the Brits did and so we had the capability to kind of keep our crews flowing and the Brits didn’t have quite that capability and so they said maybe we could go out, contract out to get some fuel lifted, so we worked with the Brits and we did actually use, kind of what I would call a precursor of the Civil Reserve Air Fleet for some 22,000 sorties back in the Berlin Airlift.
Today, the Civil Reserve Air Fleet is totally integrated with what we do. They’ve flown a lot of sorties, they’ve carried a lot of cargo, and quite frankly they carry the bulk of our passengers going from the United States to the theater and then we move them internally in the theater in our organic fleet.
We’re also contracting out with some different partners. In fact, we are contracting out to get the AN-124s to carry our Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles to the theater. Every day between 12 and 15 of these MRAPs roll out of the factory in Charleston, they drive the short distance over to Charleston Air Force Base and they’re loaded up on the AN-124s to get them to the theater.
You might ask, why are you doing that? Wouldn’t they fit on C-5s and C-17s? Well they do, and we’ve carried some over on C-5s and C-17s, but the bulk of them have been going on the AN-124, and part of the reason is because the reliability of the C-5 has been so low, when the Secretary of Defense said he wanted those MRAPs to the theater quickly, we had to get them there as quickly as possible. He wanted 1300 by the end of December in theater. We accomplished that goal, but a large number of them were carried by AN-124s because when we put them on C-5s, first of all, it would take three or four C-5s to have ready on the field before we launched them; and then when they made a stop, either in Europe or wherever they made a stop in route, a lot of times they would break. And so it was critical to saving lives and so what we did is we partnered with AN-124s and contracted them out, along with our C-17s, to get them to the fight.
By allowing us to use commercial carriers, it allows us to concentrate our organic lift on other higher priority missions or missions where you can only send a C-17 or a C-130 on semi-prepared or unprepared surfaces. It also allows us to have those aircraft quickly available when we have to use aeromedical evacuation, and we’ve been using that very successfully, although I wish I could turn that operation totally off so that we didn’t have to carry wounded people back home, but you can be very, very proud of the AE crews and the great job that they’re doing.
Another challenge that the Berlin Airlift folks had to face and we face today is in the area of airspace deconfliction. Back in the old days they were launching sorties at about a rate of every 90 seconds. Someone was taking off or landing in Berlin every 90 seconds.
Well, you know what? We’re doing the same thing today, except we’re doing it on a worldwide basis. As a matter of fact, you heard people talk yesterday about the Falconers, the AOCs. You heard General Renuart stand up here and talk about his AOC down at First Air Force. But there’s another AOC that’s in the fight, and that’s the 618th, Tanker Air Lift Control Center. In the last 24 hours they have planned 1,051 departures.
Now I used to say that that meant once every 90 seconds, there was an Air Mobility Command aircraft rolling down the runway somewhere in the world. Well, after yesterday’s performance, I’ve got to say once every 82 seconds they’re rolling down the runway. It’s very, very impressive. And when you compare that to what they were doing back in Berlin, of course this is on a global basis, it’s pretty impressive. But back in Berlin, they had some problems.
Berlin Airlift kicked off in June. The first problem they had to face was weather. You wouldn’t think weather would be a problem, but it was. It turned out it was the worst July in Europe for 40 years. Fog affected just about all the countries in Europe, there were storms all around, so weather was a big challenge. And, as I said, they’re flying at about a rate of every three minutes and landing and takeoff about every 90 seconds.
What was happening was when that bad weather came in, the crew would make a missed approach and be told to go to the holding pattern because they didn’t want to mess anyone else up. And as everybody was cycling in, all of a sudden that holding pattern was getting bigger and bigger, and one day, it was August 13th by the way -- they called it Black Friday because, yes it was Friday the 13th -- General Tunner was inbound and as he was coming inbound one of the C-54s landed, blew all the main tires, was stuck on the runway. Another aircraft landed short of the runway and crashed. And another one landed on the wrong runway on an auxiliary field and went head over tail and it crashed.
Every time this happened, more people were being stuck in a holding pattern and General Tunner was one of them. He called and he says this is Aircraft 5549, Tunner speaking, you listen. He goes, I want you to send everyone who’s in the stack right now, send them back home and get me on the ground. There was a shocked silence, of course, and then “yes, sir” and the next thing they sent everyone home and of course Tunner landed and then he sat down to figure out how they could do this better. How could they deconflict this airspace?
He and his folks came up with the idea that first of all we should have two corridors going in, one corridor going out. Everything had to go on IFR rules, not VFR, and everyone had to be on time. If you didn’t make your time, you turned around and you went back and you started all over again and we just lost that sortie. And if you shot an approach and missed the approach, you didn’t go to the holding pattern, you went all the way back home and started all over and got in the flow.
That allowed them to be successful. That was what made them successful. Of course you know that in today’s modern world we’re having some of the same problems. How do you get all of these aircraft in one space? And we’re doing it with all the modernization of our equipment for global air traffic management.
We have about 63% of our fleet complete, but that’s not good enough if we’re going to do big operations in the future. As a matter of fact, it’s not good enough because we won’t be allowed to fly in certain airspace in 2015. We have to get on with this, and this will help us to continue to save lives, and of course help us to save a lot of fuel.
We haven’t had an aviation-related safety fatality yet in the last six and a half years and we want to try and keep it that way. Comparison to the Berlin Airlift where they had 29.
Now let me talk a little bit about some of the trends we see in the mobility business, which affects all our air force. First of all the trend that we call the tyranny of time and distance.
Back in World War I, it took some 17 months to get the troops employed and over where they needed to be. That shouldn’t surprise you, we were using a lot of sealift, it took a longer time, and of course we were an isolationist country, it took a long time for us to mobilize and to get going.
You see just a few years later in World War II, it still took some 11 months after December 7th to get our folks to Europe. We were still using a lot of sealift to get the forces to the fight and it just took time.
Fast forward to Desert Shield and Desert Storm and it only took six months before we were ready to fight. It took time to build a coalition, it took time to get everyone in place, and we had a UN mandate date that we were waiting for.
And then you look at OEF and Afghanistan and really in less than one month from the time the towers were hit in New York, we had bombers overhead in Afghanistan. I think we’re going to be facing those same challenges in the future.
To a mobility guy, this is a big deal because as we look at what we’re doing right now and looking out at the forces, we find that a lot of our forward based forces are out there based on old Cold War strategies and it seems that no matter where the forces are, they may not be in the right spot when it comes time for a fight. And as you know, everyone is looking at bringing forces back either to CONUS or in the case of the Marines, moving them from Kadena down to Guam.
What that means to a mobility guy is the shorter timelines are going to come into play, but also, we’re going to have to move those forces a lot farther distance, and that’s all very, very important because we’re doing it at a time when our aircraft are pretty stressed.
You heard this yesterday from the Chief, you’ve heard this from General Corley, you’ve heard it really from all our speakers, that the size of our fleet is going down, the size of our force is going down, and yet the requirements continue in upward trend. I don’t have a problem with that, I mean we understand what we’re doing and we made the right choices as an Air Force to start drawing down our force, but it’s a factor that we have to weigh in when we start thinking about future operations. And when you look back to the old days of the Berlin Airlift, their manpower actually increased as they were going through the Berlin Airlift and since we started this global war on terror our manpower has gone down some six percent, and we’re doing this with some tired aircraft as well.
When you look at this slide and realize that the mobility air forces, we have some just short of 500 KC-135s which is the variant of the 707. There are only four 707s that are still left in operation in the United States. We do operate the oldest heavy airframes in the United States.
Now, I work for a nonprofit company, I understand that. But when I look at these guys who are in here making a buck, they don’t keep the aircraft quite as long, and I think that tells me and all of us that we should be thinking about moving our aircraft through at a much quicker pace so that we can gain efficiencies.
I mean, if it’s smart enough for all these airlines to be keeping aircraft young and moving them through their fleet, I think the same efficiencies would be applied to the mobility forces. I’m not going to kid you, I understand that tankers and airlifters don’t have to be as young and as modern as our fighters, our frontline fighters and our bombers. I’m willing to accept that. But I’m not sure, as you look at this scale, that it should be on the scale that it is. And as they say on TV, but wait there’s more, because we plan on flying our KC-135s another 40 years. Now that will really throw that little slide out of balance.
The Chief stood up here yesterday and said you know that the fleet was only about eight years old when he came in and served. Back in Berlin the fleet was under six years old when they accomplished the Berlin Airlift and today, just looking at our mobility forces fleet, it’s an average of 31 years old, and of course you all know we’ve been getting a lot of new C-17s, which has been helping with that average, but the C-17 will be celebrating its 15th anniversary this spring at Charleston Air Force Base.
So, we’ve got a lot of challenges ahead of us and we’ve got a different number of strategic trends that we have to take a look at because as you look from Berlin to Baghdad, mobility has always been there. I mentioned that the Berlin Airlift was the first shot of the Cold War.
In the ‘50s through the ‘80s, we were told that we had to do direct support of our allies and we had operations like “Bluebat” and “Nickelgrass” and “Rubberwall,” forget about the names, but that was responding to calls by our allies for help. Bluebat was with Lebanon; Nickelgrass, as you may recall was when Israel asked for help; and Rubberwall was in the timeframe of when we were sending Marines over to Lebanon in the early ‘80s.
After the Wall came down we had this obligation to be the super power and therefore we went out and we said we can be all things to all people and we had operations like Provide Comfort, Provide Hope, Provide Promise, or Provide Relief, which were all operations, humanitarian type operations, where Provide Comfort was where we were getting relief to the Kurds in northern Iraq; Provide Hope was when we were getting relief to the former Soviet republics that were out there; Provide Promise was Sarajevo; and Provide Relief was in Rwanda.
Then you fast forward all the way to where we are today and on the first night after 24 hours of bombing, C-17s were flying almost the same route as the B-1s and they were dropping humanitarian relief to the people in Afghanistan.
It gives us pause to think about what all this has in common, and I would tell you with air dominance, as well as everything that the mobility forces do, it gives people hope. It gives people hope to realize that there can be a better future, and I think the mobility guys are really at the forefront of that when we talk about using mobility as an instrument of national security.
We provide non-lethal air power and we provide hope. So I’d like you to think about that as I show this last clip, to put it in context for you to think maybe there is a better way of doing business in the future and air mobility will be at the heart of it.
[Clip shown.]
General Lichte: Yesterday, today, and tomorrow, Air Mobility Command has been there and will be there. They do bring hope, not only to our Air Force and to our nation, but around the world.
It’s been my pleasure to be here with you, Mike. I’d be happy to take any questions. Thank you all for your attention.
[Applause].
Moderator: General Lichte, impressive presentation.
The first question is really easy, so who is the winner of the KCX competition?
[Laughter].
Moderator: Let me get you a real question.
General Lichte: I don’t know.
Moderator: We’ve heard in the press how the Army and the Marines have been expanded. What does that do to strategic lift requirements?
General Lichte: Well, that’s what we’re looking at right now. The expansion that you talk about, as well as the concept that the Army is talking about for Future Combat Systems, how does that apply, how will that all figure out? So we are crunching the numbers and that’s why we’ve said several times that we don’t think this is a smart time to shut down any of the production lines for C-17s. We’re going forward with the C-5 RERP business. That will all help, but we still need to continue to define what the real requirement is because, as you saw in one of my slides there, the requirement keeps going up and when we talk about flying 1,051 sorties in one particular day, you would think that we’re not in a real surge, this has kind of become business as usual.
So we’re still crunching those numbers. I don’t have the results of the actual because we need to find out from the Army where are they going to put those particular people, how are they going to line them up, and how that’s going to impact their load out plan.
Moderator: We’ve all noticed that with the Army surge in Iraq that there are a lot fewer U.S. casualties than there have been in the past. The mobility forces haven’t gotten the credit that they really deserve for this. Can you tell us a little bit about what mobility forces have done in Iraq to help with this issue?
General Lichte: You’re right. The air medical evacuation people’s story has been a success. We used to have dedicated airlift for aeromedical evacuation, the old C-9 aircraft. We’ve changed that. Now all of our aircraft, any one of our mobility aircraft can take patients and get them out of harm’s way. We are up to a, if you can make it to the hospital, the field hospital in Iraq or Afghanistan, you’ll have a 97% chance of survival.
The folks are pulling off miracles every day. Sometimes we just get them from Iraq or Afghanistan up to Landstuhl where they can get more treatment before they’re moved, but sometimes people are so critically injured that they need to be moved all the way back to the United States, and that’s really where the entire mobility team and all our Air Force becomes involved. Where we launch a C-17 to go pick up a particular patient, but then we count on United States air forces in Europe to provide a tanker and we bring them all the way back nonstop either to Andrews, well first of all to Andrews, and then they get moved to Walter Reed or Bethesda. Or sometimes we go all the way down to San Antonio to the Burn Center.
It’s saving lives, it’s absolutely fantastic, and if we have a team of the critical care folks to stand up here today, I guarantee there wouldn’t be a dry eye in the place because they tell some great stories and they have the loving care and attention. But it is the obligation that we owe everyone who puts on the uniform that if you’re injured and you’re down in a country far away, our country will stop at nothing, absolutely nothing, to get that individual back home and back to the care that they need.
Moderator: And another small thing that’s occurred at about the same time is the great work of mobility forces in getting convoys off the road. Can you talk a little bit about that?
General Lichte: Right. As we’ve looked at the mission, the key is getting those convoys off the road, and a lot of times they were carrying water or supplies to a certain spot and so we’ve been able to first of all, put aircraft up with the equipment on it to get it from point A to point B, and also, especially in Afghanistan lately, we’ve been doing precision air drop. So if you are a forward based group of soldiers on the ground and you’re running out of ammunition or you’re running out of food, we can drop within meters of where you are, through the joint precision air drop system that we have, to get you the supplies and the required food and ammunition.
So between precision air drop as well as moving thing on airplanes as opposed to moving them on the ground -- just last month alone we’ve taken 12,000 people, troops, off the road and we don’t have to do convoys. We’ll continue to do that.
Moderator: The Air Force has listed 15 C-17s in its unfunded requirements document. It’s asked for eight more C-130Js. What’s the overall scheme for balancing the C-17, the C-130, and the C-27 for the future?
General Lichte: Well, all of them, you’re right, it’s a big balancing act and we need to look at that. The problem that you’ve heard all the MAJCOM commanders talk of and even the combatant commanders is the amount of budget.
If we knew ahead of time how much budget we would have, we’d be able to fund more C-17s, to fund C-130Js, and to fund the new Spartan aircraft; however, in some cases, we don’t have enough money, so what we have to do is put them on our unfunded list. You’ve heard reported before the required force and the programmed force and we’re always striving to get to that required force, which is what we’re trying to do, and so when we put aircraft on unfunded lists it’s just simply because we don’t have the money to do the job and what we’re asking for is consideration by OSD and of course by Congress to say is this something that you want us to do.
It goes back to the simple question of what do you want your mobility forces to do. If you want us to do all that, if you want to increase the size of the Army, if you want to move people back from forward basing, then do you want the mobility forces to be able to do that? Do you want the mobility forces to be able to save lives with aeromedical evacuation and on and on and on? And so that’s why they are on the unfunded list.
Moderator: One last question. The Army’s future combat system, the press has reported that it’s going to be too big to fit in a 130, which means it’s going to put more stress on the so-called strategic force and to move it around intra-theater. Do you have any comments or concerns about that?
General Lichte: That’s the same concern that you asked about earlier as to maybe why we need more strategic lift. I don’t have the answers yet and that’s why we say don’t shut down any options for us, keep those options open. And with the Future Combat Systems, it won’t fit on a C-130. That leads you right to the C-17 or C-5. And when you start talking about the concept of operations, if they want to land on semi-prepared or unprepared surfaces, well then that automatically goes back to the C-17, and so that’s our challenge and we’ll just keep tackling it every day, Mike.
Moderator: Well, unfortunately we’re out of time. General Lichte, on behalf of those of us at AFA and in the audience we want to thank you for your time and your leadership and wish you Godspeed.
General Lichte: Thank you, Mike. Thank you.
[Applause].
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