Moderator: Our next speaker has flown combat missions in Operations Desert Storm, Deny Flight, Northern Watch, Southern Watch, and he’s held a number of commands. Prior to assuming his current command he was the Senior Military Assistant to the Secretary of Defense. Please join me in welcoming the Commander of the North American Aerospace Defense Command and US Northern Command, general Gene Renuart.

[Applause]

General Renuart: Mike, thanks. Bob, good to see you. Chief, I think you’re leaving out there but I’m damn proud to follow you.

Wow! How do you come on behind that? Pretty tough.

We are Americans. We are American airmen. And we are the heart and soul of this nation. We wear its cloth, we protect it, we ensure that our families have the opportunity to enjoy it.

When you looked at the Chief’s slides you saw in there a number of priorities, a number of concerns, a number of looks into the future. And as I was sitting over there watching it, after my staff had put together this speech, a really good speech, I realized that the Chief really captured what I wanted to say. So I’m going to put the speech aside and I’m going to talk a little bit about what that means to each of you as you expect that your families are preserved, protected, assisted when disaster strikes, watched over as some of those asymmetrical forces in the world threaten us.

So that’s really what I want to spend some time on today. I want to talk a little bit about how NORAD and NORTHCOM as really dual combatant commanders tasked to defend each of you and your families all over this country looks at air power and what it demands of air power for the future.

I know Chilly’s on his way in. He’s been a little bit occupied trying to shoot that bow and arrow up into the sky and knock a satellite down. The good news is, he’s pretty good at that and we were successful. But behind that scene is okay so what happens if it doesn’t work exactly the way you want? What happens if that somehow disrupts, and I have no expertise in orbital dynamics, but what if it creates some turmoil in the orbit changes and pretty soon that thing falls on the ground? And it falls somewhere near a town close to you? Does the nation expect that we can deal with that, that we can respond to it? Does the nation expect that we know where it’s going to go so our friends in Air Force Space and our friends in STRAT can put together the mathematical solutions to kind of tell us where we think it will be? And then if it falls, how do you take care of that? How do you respond to it? How do you ensure that the consequence of that event is managed in a way that our America people expect?

What do you do with air power when there is a hurricane? What do you do with air power when there is a series of wild fires in southern California? How do you integrate space and cyber as you begin to manage the maritime warning mission that NORAD has? How do you knit those things together so that you fuse intel with international partners, our two in particular being Canada and Mexico, and in federal agencies who are tasked to do the law enforcement, in some cases develop the intelligence. How do you share all that in a way that we can go from warning to consequence management of a particular event and do that in the maritime domain?

The Chief talked a little bit about Billy Mitchell. I’d argue today that we’re sort of returning a little bit to that but in a very different way. Our target is that rogue ship out there that leads an unnamed rogue nation bound to a port here eventually in our country carrying a potential weapon of mass destruction. How do you find that in the middle of the ocean? How do you sort, for those of you that have done a little air-to-air, and [8B many] is a lot of fun, and one of the key elements of that is sorting the good guys from the bad guys. When you have tens of thousands of vessels on the ocean every day, how do you ensure you know where that one is that you’re really concerned with? And how do you get to it at enough range that you can prevent it from accomplishing its mission and allowing us to accomplish ours, and that is to defend the homeland?

Now I’ve got to scold the Chief a little bit. He left so I can do that. He talked about our warfighting headquarters. Does anybody in here know who the JFACC for America is? For our homeland? 1st Air Force. Hank, stand up out there. This is a Guard officer who is commanding our numbered Air Force who is tasked to be the Joint Force Air Component Commander for the United States.

I know Nordo’s pretty busy over there in Southwest Asia. He’s probably the busiest AOC that there is. But Hank Morrow is the second busiest, and probably most of you don’t even know that. And in many ways that’s the role that we have in our homeland -- to maintain that security, to ensure that things go as we expect them, and not to make a big deal out of it. But every day Hank is launching fighters to intercept some aircraft that is not complying with the rules of our national aerospace system. Fortunately, most of that is buffoonery, but every one in a while there are some areas where we’re pretty concerned. Those Air National Guard and active duty fighters launch, loaded with combat loads, prepared if need be to shoot that aircraft down. We’ve come pretty close a couple of times because we just weren’t sure what the intent was. And I would submit to you that since 9/11 you cannot afford to allow an aircraft to fly in or to approach our national airspace system whose intentions are unknown and is not complying with our rules of the international aerospace system.

So whether it’s F-22s or F-15s or Canadian F-18s out of Canada or Alaska intercepting long range aviation bombers from Russia who are not on a flight plan, who are flying in congested international airspace, or whether it is two F-15s from Buckley running at full afterburner across Colorado and Oklahoma to run down a guy in a twin Beech who has decided that you can fly with your cell phone in one ear, Blue Tooth, and your voice activated headset in the other ear and explain to your buddy on the cell phone how you’re undergoing a hostile takeover. The FAA guy kind of picks up on that and that raises some concern about what is the intention of this when that airplane’s flight plan is going across a nuclear power plant and downtown Kansas City, it tends to get your attention a little bit.

So no matter which kind of threat it may be or potential threat, we’ve got to be ready now. The forces I need for my job can’t be put together in an RFF that will be ready to deploy in three months where you can have the opportunity to build and train and prepare. Our nation demands that the forces we have and our reliance on air power is immediate. When the bridge collapsed on I-35 in Minnesota a few months ago what was really needed by the sheriff in the county in Minneapolis-St. Paul was dive capability. People who knew how to get into ugly conditions and work in and around iron and concrete and tangled masses of the highway and recover bodies of individuals who had been lost.

Nordy Schwartz, who will talk to you a little bit later on, was able to put airplanes together, so reach and agility and speed all fit together. Put divers, Navy divers, active duty Navy divers on the ground in a Title 10 role in support of that sheriff.

Nobody fussed about who was in command. Nobody fussed about whether it was Title 10 or Title 32 or a dual-hatted status commander. Everybody was grateful that those Navy divers could get in and reunite those families, sadly, with a loved one who had lost their life.

We talked about space and cyberspace. If you own a house in San Diego County you know that this fall many of those houses were lost and certainly many more in danger. In fact the first casualty of those fires was a DoD civilian. So how do you take advantage of space to assist? How do you demand of really air and space power a capability that will alleviate the need of San Diego County from those fires?

So we were able to take, with the help of John Corley and our friends at ACC, we took training missions of Global Hawk and we put tem over top of San Diego County. We found a way to declassify and then move through unclassified portals, IR imagery from 60,000 feet overhead San Diego County down to the fire chief sitting in his truck so that he could reposition his warriors, his warfighters, his fire teams to go at hot spots that they didn’t know exist.

The Chief talked about unmanned vehicles. We flew both manned and unmanned full motion video capabilities, P-3s, RC-26s, OH-58s and Predator over those fires. We deployed in Rover units that we, again, attached directly to those fire teams out in the field, and gave them real time full motion video of their battlefield.

Now were we the dominant force there? Absolutely not. We brought in niche capability. We put it at the right place at the right time. And we made a big difference. We had a big effect for those warfighters.

That’s a little bit about what air power, air and space power can bring here in the homeland. It doesn’t get a lot of publicity.

We had C-130 crews, both in the Guard and the Air Force Reserve, deployed with the modular airborne firefighting system. As Mike was nice to mention, I’ve flown a few combat missions and I’ll tell you what, I’ve not flown anything tougher than trying to take a C-130 filled with fire suppressant at 100 feet over a raging fire and put it on target. These kids did magnificent work. They were part of a team. That’s what we do in our role every day. We’re part of a team to support federal agencies to ensure that your families, your families are protected.

So where do we need to go for the future? Well, I’d argue just as the Chief did, that we don’t know exactly, you can’t put a nation state to every threat out there in the future, but some things are certain. Some countries are developing and moving rapidly towards a fifth generation capability, whether it’s surface to air defense, or if it’s air-to-air capability in their new fighters.

Do we know if they’re going to be an enemy or a friend? The future’s uncertain. But can you afford to lag behind those elements and wait and see? I think not.

Today there are terrorist threats that we focus primarily on militant extremism. I don’t know that you can always attach a particular religious background to that because we’ve seen throughout history militant extremism used by many many groups. But one thing is clear. It will be a threat that we’ll see for some time into the future.

So how do we link together the threats that we see in today’s world and parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and how do you tie those back to potential extremist groups here in our country? Somebody has asked me on a previous talk, do you believe there are extremist cells in our country? I’ve been pretty forthright to say yes, I do. I don’t know where they are. But if we think there are not, we’re being naïve. So if you don’t anticipate, and the Chief talked to that. If you don’t anticipate where that next threat may come from and if you don’t begin to pull together air power, space power, cyber capability to try to defeat that threat, we’re not doing our job to protect you and your families here in this nation.

We have another enemy that doesn’t wear a watch, that doesn’t believe in cycles of the year, that does things at her own time and place of choosing and that’s Mother Nature. We have to be prepared to support our states with the capabilities they need to ensure their people are taken care of when disaster strikes.

So we learned some tough lessons. We took a few knocks on the chin at Katrina, although on the whole when you really look at that it was a pretty amazing effort. The largest co-location of combat rescue capabilities ever in the world was there at Katrina.

The Chief and I have talked a number of times about sending our own babies off into combat. Just a side anecdote if I could. The night we began operations in Iraq after each of the components gave their briefing to the President, the President went off to VTC and there were 12 flag officers sitting there remaining. Nine of us were sending our own children into combat that night. So this notion that somehow generals are detached from the effects of combat is a bit ludicrous.

The Chief and I have talked about our own sons. Mine had just returned from a combat tour in Afghanistan, two weeks later was in and amongst all that combat search and rescue in New Orleans. What a great effort. An integrated team effort. But not one that we had prepared for very well. That’s not the case today.

We built relationships with the Department of Homeland Security and with FEMA and with each of the states that will allow us to be much better prepared than we’ve ever been before. But we’ve got to make sure our JFACC is enabled with the tools and the responsive capability that he’ll need, whether it’s lift or whether it’s information from space, whether it is search and rescue capability, and it’s got to be available to them right now because Mother Nature chooses her own timing.

I don’t know if any of you are geologists or, I don’t know if that’s the right term, but there’s this thing called the New Madrid Fault. It has a bit of concern for many of the states in the center portion of our country. A few years ago, about 200 to be exact, this fault shifted with enough force that it changed the course of the Mississippi River substantially. Interestingly, as you go back in time, it’s happened about every 200 years. The last time was in 1811. Now I don’t know if Mother Nature’s clock’s very good, but if it’s about every 200 years we’re sort of getting close to something that may be relatively catastrophic.

How do you defend against that weapon of mass destruction that we talked about? How do you ensure that you’ve pulled all the strings on intelligence? How do you ensure that you’re then prepared to respond even if all of that good intelligence leaves you lacking when an event occurs?

We’re not where we need to be in our country today. You might have read this thing called the Commission on the National Guard and Reserve, and in there Chairman Panaro makes the point that the nation is not prepared to respond to a WMD attack. I’d argue with Arnold a little bit. But what I’d tell you is we’re not at the level that I’d like for us to be. We have a force that’s capable of responding today across the states and our country. There are 54 civil support teams that understand how to go into a [saburney] event and decide what’s happened and what may be required. But they don’t bring the mass to necessarily manage that consequence.

Those Guard units are augmented by something called a SRFP and that’s basically another [saburney] capability. A little bit bigger, about 200 folks that can come in and manage. But there are only 17 of those around the country today. Then we have a great U.S. Marine Corps unit called a CSNRF which is about 400-500 Marines that train for this mission every day.

But as we saw in Ardent Sentry last year where we simulated the explosion of a ten kiloton nuclear weapon outside of Indianapolis, that’s bigger than a bread basket. It’s bigger than the capability that those units will have.

So what do we as the Department of Defense do when, as it will occur, when the Governor says we need help? So we’re in the process now of building three organizations, some of you may have heard them called CSMRFs. It’s kind of a dorkey name. I haven’t figured out a better name yet, but it’s a [saburney] consequence management response force that is trained and equipped and ready and exercised so that if you do have that event occur, within 48 hours they can be on the ground managing that process. Assisting the state, assisting those smaller units.

Again, there’s no big buildup to this. If it happens, it happens tomorrow. The nation demands, in fact this is a no fail mission. The nation demands that that force is trained and ready now. So we’re working hard with the department with the support of the Secretary, with support of all the services, because many of those unique capabilities exist in our Air Force. We’re working hard to ensure that we’ve got that force in place and it’s ready.

I talked a little bit about the maritime domain. This is an area that is truly in the heart of the capabilities of our Air Force. Not necessarily as its principal mission, but what about a network of sensors as they’re out flying around, and I had a chance to visit Fort Worth a week or two ago and spent some time with both the F-22 and the F-35 folks. What if your new generation of aircraft allowed you to network sensors from airliners and fighters flying missions and tankers as they move back and forth around the world. You link that together with a network of the Chairman’s vision, Mike Mullen’s vision of a 1,000 ship Navy. How do you create that network in cyberspace that gives you virtual visibility on the maritime domain? That’s somewhere we need to go. That’s a direction that this country has to take. And our Air Force is leading the way in many regards of that, both in terms of the follow-on aircraft we get and the kinds of both offensive and defensive capabilities we build for cyberspace.

Talking about new airplanes. My mission every day has about 40 aircraft or so sitting air defense alert. Many of those are Block 25 and Block 30 F-16s, lots of hours on those. Many of those were F-15s. As you all know, fortunately we didn’t lose a pilot, but unfortunately we found a flaw in our F-15 fleet that for a long time grounded those aircraft. That aging weapon system, oh by the way, and the tankers that have to keep those aircraft aloft, oh by the way, and the AWACS that give me situational awareness on many parts of our AOR are aging at an increasingly alarming rate and we’ve got to replace them.

So where do we go in the future for air defense alert? Some of our friends in the Guard have, and I happen to believe it’s a good approach, something called the four corners. Really what it does is it bases some of our fifth generation fighters in key areas around our country that gives us longer reach with our sensors. Allows us to look further out both in range and in sensor capability into both the air and the maritime domain. That’s something we desperately need in the NORAD and the NORTHCOM role for the future. But I’ve got to get them out there and keep them, so I’m glad to hear the Chief is talking about a decision on the tankers. I’ll just tell you, I have no preferences, it just needs to be there soon and let us stay airborne as long as we possibly can. So we’ve got to move on with that. It has a direct affect on my mission every day.

I need a system of sensors, not just airborne sensors in an AWACS or the next generation, but a system of integrated sensors -- air, land and potentially maritime, that can be knitted together and be less expensive, more effective, more agile than the many fixed radar sites that we have around the country and around our continent today.

We’ve got to look at better technologies and over the horizon systems that will allow us to use the same radar capability for both air and maritime. We’ve got to find a way to get better at low observable and cruise missile sensing and then interdiction, and we’re not there in the homeland just yet.

So as you look across all the Air Force can do in air and space and cyber, you look across all that list that the Chief said are priorities for the future. Every one of those describes what we do every day. I’ll bet you if we did a survey before I walked in here, 75 percent of you would say NORTHCOM, NORAD? Gosh, I don’t know much about them. We’ll find out more when the guy speaks to us. But every one of you demands that your nation is safe, that it’s protected against those threats that we see, that people are ready to respond if a threat comes or if Mother Nature comes. Every one of you expects that if a hurricane or a tornado or a wildfire or a flood occurs in the hometown of your mom who’s up somewhere in the mid part of the U.S., that somebody in a uniform is there to assist. Guard, active, Reserve, it doesn’t matter. We want an integrated team that is there to protect each of you and each of your families.

I want to wrap up just by saying thank you to the Chief and to the folks that have worked on that White Paper because it captures, and I sent the Chief a note, in a very cheaply way the strategy of what our Air Force is all about. It’s not just we need to defend against this nation or have that capability, but it is how do we ensure that the capabilities that we develop, the people that we train, and the systems that we equip ourselves with are ready to meet that uncertainty that we see I 2020 and beyond. This is a great piece of work that talks to what you do for combatant commanders, but talks about what our Air Force does for the nation.

So I appreciate the chance to come and spend a little time with you, and I will if I could maybe open it up if there are any questions.

Moderator: We’ve only got time for a couple of questions and I’m going to use the prerogative of the chair to ask them, unless someone’s got something overwhelming.

Noble Eagle is unknown in most of our public’s eyes. Would you tell this audience about how many sorties we’ve flown since then? And do you see Noble Eagle changing much in the future? How long is it going to go on? Forever?

General Renuart: That’s a great question, Mike, and thank you. It was probably in one of my speechwriter’s comments there. He did good.

First, Noble Eagle really began in earnest after 9/11, of course. We’ve flown about 48-1/2 thousand sorties, I think, give or take a little bit. I mentioned we have about 40 fighters every day sitting alert; 20 or so locations. That varies up or down on any given day. Primarily manned by Air National Guard fighters, although the active component and the Reserve contribute to that in varying degrees. Again, as we rotate through. Their role is to provide air sovereignty for the United States and for Canada. Every day we are scrambling at least a couple of those fighters to investigate something that’s a little bizarre, and as I mentioned, some of it buffoonery.

Just as another anecdote, when the President goes and is somewhere we have a temporary flight restriction that’s placed around that and we have aircraft that are available. There is a crop duster down in central Texas that’s been spraying his cotton fields, by God, every Saturday no matter who lives near Crawford, Texas. I think the very first time our Raptors were down there on their turn at the air defense alert, they had taken their certification the afternoon before, and sure enough, next morning, 7:00 o’clock, here’s this unknown driving right through this restricted area. So we scramble our Raptors off and they get up there and they intercept this guy. It’s a crop duster. He’s down in the weeds. You can kind of imagine the first time they’re doing this. Okay, who’d going down there at 75 feet to intercept this guy going 80 knots? Not me. Lead, you go do it.

It all worked out great, but that’s the kind of thing you just don’t know. If you assume that we can just let aircraft fly around undetected, if you assume we can afford to let aircraft fly into our national capital region every day not complying, then we can reduce that Noble Eagle threat. But if you assume that the security we’ve demanded since 9/11 is something we’ll want to live with, then we really can’t turn away from that mission. That has a funding impact, it has an equipping impact, because this isn’t a mission you can just do sort of off the cuff. You’ve got to have folks that are trained and are certified and that you evaluate their readiness.

Now that doesn’t mean you build a whole separate air force to do it. We’ve got to be able to find a way to do that within the resources that we have. But there are some in government who would say you get no credit for that. You have to just absorb it out of what you do every day. I think that’s unrealistic. I think we’ve got to have funding in order for us to train. We have to have funding in order for us to man and equip the facilities we use. And for the flying hours that occur in that. I know the Chief’s been working that really, really hard for us for the future.

So I think Noble Eagle continues. I think we ought not to assume it away. That sort of presuppose that you believe we’ll get back to something called normal, and I’m not necessarily a believer in that just yet.

Moderator: The next question is, there’s a common public belief that the local and the state guys in Katrina failed; the civilians and the federal government failed; the military was brought in and saved everybody’s bacon. And there’s lots of lessons learned. Are there any lessons learned you can share with us that NORTHCOM has taken away from Katrina and is still worried about?

General Renuart: Absolutely. There are actually quite a few, but let me just talk about a couple.

First, the first response to any disaster is local. It has to be. We demand our own fire departments and our sheriffs and our city managers and our governors are there, we elected them to protect us. So we have to understand that the first response to any disaster will be local.

Then our role is to fit in to support that with the capabilities that we bring from DoD.

In that state and local response the National Guard plays a huge role in that respect. And so since Katrina we’ve seen a real change in the way states approach response. Each of the states now has their own JTF Headquarters. Each of them has been involved in planning both regionally and with NORTHCOM in terms of DoD support for how you would respond to a variety of issues. We have built a defense support of civil authorities, acronym DSCA, a DSCA-XORD which means the Secretary gives me forces before the hurricane season begins so that I can have them available on my authority to deploy either pre-event or post-event to assist, and that’s key, to assist the governor in their response.

One of the biggest failures of Katrina is that none of us, all of us, had really planned together for this event. Absolutely not the case today. In fact we’ll host the hurricane season planning conference at NORTHCOM next week where we’ll have all of the 18 states that could be subjected to a hurricane, their emergency managers and their state TAGs in to work with us on the plan.

As we moved past Katrina, we spent a good bit of time with the leadership in Louisiana because they do have some unique circumstances there, and how do we prepare and ready for whatever the next event might be.

So the real lesson of all of those that are kind of aggregated together is you’ve got to plan ahead of time. You’ve got to anticipate what may occur and you’ve got to position forces.

I’ll just give you one anecdote that shows that I think we’re making progress. This last year Hurricane Dean, a Category 5 hurricane, headed towards the Brownsville area initially. I don’t know if any of you have been to Brownsville, but you know that from about 70 miles inland it’s about as flat as this floor. So a 20 foot storm surge coming ashore there has a big effect.

We worked with the state of Texas, the Emergency Management Director and the TAG, to ensure that, one of their critical needs was movement of special care patients, critical care patients, elderly patients that we put four mobile air staging facilities in. Nordy Schwartz was able to support us with a number of aircraft prior to any evacuation so that if you have to move people out of there we can do it very rapidly in an orderly fashion.

Secondly, Texas asked us to build a plan to evacuate up to 16,000 kind of able-bodied personnel because that is about what the excess was over and above what the state had built. Again, working in conjunction with the Guard and with TRANSCOM we put together a plan that would have moved those 16,000 prior to the hurricane coming ashore.

So we’re learning some lessons with this, and the key for us is to get out in front of events to try to anticipate what may occur, and to be ready to respond.

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