Access to Overseas Bases
"Any country that is worried about its survival is not
going to stall on [granting USAF forces] access [to its bases].
But our job, in the meantime, is to posture ourselves so that
our presence is valuable to those who are going to need our help.
I'm not sure we have always taken that sort of a look at it before,
but this is the way in the new expeditionary air force that we
have to think about it.
"We have to think about [the] cultural and diplomatic
end of this ahead of the game-that, along with exercises and
a helpful presence, [like] some of the sort of things we've done
in Bahrain, where we've gone in and helped the F-16 maintenance
people and the Bahrain air force achieve new efficiencies that
they hadn't been able to do before in the maintaining of the
airplane.
"This is very valuable to them. Little things like that
make you valuable to a country."
Missile Threat to Access?
"In the short term, ... I don't see the numbers of missiles
out there that would be able to take out ... an airfield [being
used by USAF units]. We struggled for years in the Cold War [to
develop means for] taking out Warsaw Pact airfields and finally
decided [that], with all the might of the United States-[using]
conventional weapons-you really can't do it.
"With a few Scuds, can you take out an airfield? No,
you cannot. You can contaminate with chemical weapons, but that
is what we practice for."
Dealing With Chemical Attack
"We were vulnerable to it during the years of the Cold
War. We practiced the art of doing our business in chemical protection
suits the whole time, for 30 years, that I [have been] in the
Air Force. When I was a wing commander at Eglin AFB [Fla.] in
1988, we practiced generating airplanes in chemical gear. I'd
prefer to forget those summer days in chemical gear, but the
fact of the matter is that all services have practiced doing
these sorts of things through the Cold War."
Defending US Access
"None of the [US armed] services are sitting still and
quietly watching other nations build missiles and not [doing]
anything about it. Just like any other threat that emerges, yes,
we are dealing with this. ...
"Now the question is, how do you defend yourselves against
this sort of missile problem? ... Is it an easy problem? No.
"The policy of this nation is that we are going at it
from many different directions, through the technologies being
built [for] theater missile defense and offense, to include the
airborne laser. ...
"It is interesting to note that there are technologies
that can do things like delimit terrain, even in the desert.
If you digitize the terrain and you put the right limits and
filters in there, and look at [areas] where [you] could really
launch a Scud missile-... places that have access to roads, that
have access to good hiding spots, where the terrain meets certain
requirements, et cetera-... you'd be surprised at how few places
there are.
"It is things like that [which] tell us where to search,
where to focus [our] capabilities, where to put [our] Joint STARS
search pattern, where to take the picture from the U-2 from many,
many miles away, [how] to identify that and take care of it."
Levels of Access
"The best example [of gaining local access] is Desert
Shield. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney personally went into
the area, took irrefutable evidence of a vital threat to the
nation [Saudi Arabia], which perhaps at that point was not fully
accepted, and received the response, 'We need to go deal with
that threat.'
"In NATO, it tends to be different because ... access
[and] interoperability [are] the code word[s] of the Alliance.
So, when we talk about going into the Czech Republic or Poland
or even the Partnership for Peace missions-Bulgaria, et cetera-you
are welcome. ... We practice servicing each other's airplanes.
Their technicians can work on our airplanes. Our technicians
work on theirs. There is a different spirit in the Alliance that
gets you around these sorts of problems."
Getting Lighter
"[The Air Force wants to become] lighter and leaner in
the command-and-control world. Those of you who recall the Gulf
War [know] we had this compact little package of about 2,000
people that we put down in the basement of the Royal Saudi Air
Force headquarters in Riyadh. That is what it took, in those
days, to run a 2,000-to-3,000-sortie-a-day air campaign, which
is what Desert Storm was.
"What we want to get to is the ability to get that number
down [by] orders of magnitude. ... I want the joint force air
component commander to be able to deploy forward with an 18-inch
[satellite] dish, a laptop computer, and a printer and, if he
had to, be able to do his job with not much more than that."
Forward to the Past
"The Air Expeditionary Force idea was born of a need
to be able to react quickly. It was to get us back to the rapid
part of deployment. It is something we actually did very well,
back in the mid-1950s. ... In the mid-1950s, [the job of 19th
Air Force] ... was to pick up and rapidly deploy anywhere in
the world. They did so to Turkey, Lebanon, and other crises around
the world. We were very much into the business of light, lean,
lethal, rapid deployment.
"The [development of the] AEF was about getting back
to that sort of discipline. It put a force on the ground that
was a deterrent force that could transition to a fighting force
that was small enough to be lethal but not so large that it took
away a CINC's ... ability to make a further decision."
Reaching Back
"Where will this take us in the future? I think it takes
us to a place where a lot of the work that we saw done in Desert
Storm in the basement of the Royal Saudi Air Force building might
be done in some central location like Langley AFB [Va.], where
you are doing the data base manipulation, you are doing the computation,
and running out the air tasking order-[doing it back here] so
you don't have to have all that equipment forward.
"Those people who are living at Langley, helping you
fight your war somewhere in the Middle East, are wearing fatigues,
and their body clocks are on that other theater's schedule to
do that job. They even belong, perhaps, to the person who is
deployed forward as the joint force air component commander,
but they are doing their job in a place that practices that sort
of stuff day in and day out."
