Gen. Michael E. Ryan, U. S. Air Force chief of staff

Keynote address to the National Air Force Association Convention, Washington, D.C., Sept. 14, 1998

I'd like to give a special welcome to the international air chiefs here today and our good friends: Lt. Gen. (Ladislav) Klima from the Czech Republic, Lt. Gen. (Attila) Kositzky from Hungary and Maj. Gen. (Kazimierz) Dziok from Poland. (Acting) Secretary (of the Air Force F. Whitten) Peters, Air Force Association leaders Chairman R. E. Smith and Gen. John Shaud, AFA delegates, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen.

It's a pleasure to be with you for this important AFA convention. Many of you attending this convention are a great part of our heritage and have made so many critical contributions to aerospace power.

This Air Force Association has been our partner on aerospace issues for more than five decades. Our mission, together, is fundamentally unchanged from 1947. In those early days, we knew that control of the air was key to freedom of action in conflict. At this very convention in 1947, then Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Carl Spaatz discussed the critical role of "an airman's faith" in the importance of control of the air to achieve wartime victory.

Since that convention, the airman's faith has continued to be justified by air actions from Berlin to Bosnia. More than 50 years later, we continue to keep and nurture that faith. Only today, we speak of aerospace power because we no longer view space as a remote place beyond our reach. Capabilities in space are inextricably linked to all our military activities, in the air and on the ground, in ways not imagined in 1947.

Our evolution to an era of aerospace power has been boosted by the enthusiastic support of the Air Force Association. You bring together advocates and industry, in such a helpful and focused way. So, thank you AFA for your unwavering support and for continued faith and foresight.

After nearly one year as the Air Force chief of staff, first, I'll give you a report on what your Air Force has done over that period. Next, I'll give you an assessment of the challenges we face in the near term and finally, the vector your Air Force is on as we prepare to enter this next millennium.

During the past 12 months, the U.S. Air Force has responded to crises across the spectrum of conflict and around the globe. Last September, we began the build-up of our forces in the (Persian) Gulf to more than 200 aircraft and 10,000 people in response to Iraqi provocation. We have now drawn down the force by over half, but are on alert to return to the area immediately, if needed. We have continued our deployments to Turkey to enforce the northern no-fly zone, and we have deployed and placed forces on alert to respond to uncertain situations on the Korean peninsula. We have maintained continuous deployments to Europe in support of NATO operations in Bosnia.

We've also responded to humanitarian needs around the globe. When Typhoon Paka hit Guam, we provided rapid relief. And when the Indonesia forest fires were blazing, we sent special Air National Guard C-130s to help. After earthquakes near Beijing killed 47 people and displaced 20,000 from their homes, our C-17s delivered medicine, tents, clothing and blankets. And when an earthquake struck Adana, Turkey, we were there to help.

We've been involved in more than 100 joint and combined exercises around the globe. Last week we had a "whale of a time" flying Keiko, from the movie "Free Willy," from the West Coast to Iceland in a C-17. Our missions are truly diverse and, excuse the pun, it's not spouting off, or a fluke that they are performed so well -- it's because of our people.

Air Force men and women have responded to our national tasking with great professionalism and skill. They've done whatever we've asked of them and more. Our aircrews, maintainers, security forces and all the other professionals that forward deploy continue to put themselves in harm's way, to accomplish their missions. We must never forget that during peace and war, our people take risks daily. They belong to a profession that is unforgiving by the nature of its medium, that is compounded by the perilous situations we often ask them to enter.

In the recent helicopter air tragedy near Nellis (Air Force Base, Nev.), we lost 12 of our finest practicing the rescue of downed airmen. Their motto, "That others may live," has a special meaning to us as we mourn their passing.

This profession takes special people dedicated to their teammates, committed to their nation and brave enough to face the uncertainties associated with being "first in" and "last out" of global crises. America's airmen are a treasure to our nation and the soul of our Air Force. You can have the most modern and reliable equipment, but without quality people, it is merely machinery.

Unfortunately, we are not keeping as many quality people as we would like. The backbone of our Air Force is our well trained, highly skilled and self-motivated enlisted force. Because they are so good, they are also in high demand in a booming American economy. Many of you in industry, in this audience, want them because they are selfless, disciplined and innovative.

Those who stay with us do so because they love what they do. They enjoy the common bond of loyalty with their fellow airmen, and they know they are contributing to America's security and prosperity. But they also want to share in it.

Given the complex nature of our business, we need an experienced and mature enlisted force. When I travel to bases where our forces are deployed or from which they have deployed, I get a constant and convincing message: "We love what we do, we are a team, we know our part in the force, but we are also a family." When what we ask of the force requires such dedication, the family must be on-board. The fact is that we recruit individuals, but we retain families.

And that is becoming harder when, on the average, the military is paid almost 14 percent less than the going rate outside. That difference is even higher for our technically skilled enlisted force.

To address this demand on our enlisted force, by 1999, we will have doubled the number of career fields eligible for re-enlistment bonuses and doubled the overall amount of the bonuses. But those are only stopgap measures.

Of equal concern is the retention of our aircrews -- particularly our pilot force. The demands of the 14 major airlines are more than double the number of fixed-winged pilots available -- from all the services -- who have completed their service obligations. Last year, we doubled the bonus we pay our pilots to remain with us for five years beyond their pilot training commitment, and while that program paid for itself in increased retention, it did not solve our pilot shortage. Our goal is for at least half of our pilots to stay with us beyond the nine-year point. Currently, only a quarter are electing to remain. To deal with that reality, we are doubling our pilot training rate to 1,100 active duty pilots per year by the turn of the century, and we are extending the active duty service commitment to 10 years, vice eight, for those entering pilot training in 1999.

Those actions will not take effect for some years into the future. We, therefore, must continue to work on the incentives to serve, such as improved mission satisfaction, sustainable operations tempo, reasonable stability and family security. We must also offer our servicemembers competitive pay, comprehensive medical care and a reasonable retirement, if we are to retain a quality force.

Just as retention of quality people plays a major role in readiness, so does the equipment and training we provide our people to do the missions. Over the past several years, we have seen a steady decline in the readiness rates of our major weapon systems. Across the Air Force, we have seen more than a 10 percent drop since Desert Storm. I attribute the decrease to three factors -- operations tempo, an aging force and funding.

Over the last year, we have decreased our operations tempo by decreasing unneeded deployments and exercises, and by limiting those that we do execute. While current optempo is high, it is sustainable. But it does impact readiness due to personnel and equipment recovery times.

Our force structure is aging at a rate we have not experienced before. Next year, the average age of an Air Force aircraft will be 20 years. And even if we execute every program we have on the books today, the average age in 2015 will be 30 years. That's why it's so important to stay on track with all our modernization efforts both in new replacement procurement, such as the F-22, Joint Strike Fighter and C-17 -- and investment in revitalizing our older, but still critical aircraft like the KC-135 and C-5.

Not only do we need adequate funding for new procurement and revitalization, we need it for sustainment of this aging force.

As we grapple with these issues, we must also meet the security demands of the 21st century in a world that is unstable and unpredictable, while trying to provide more stability and predictability for our people. Meeting that demand requires us to change. The kind of change we need must be designed to improve our effectiveness as an aerospace power. That's why we are moving forward toward an expeditionary aerospace force.

Our Air Force has always been expeditionary, but in a more reactive way. The first air expeditionary force occurred in 1916 when the army's aviation section saw combat operations into Mexico chasing Pancho Villa. Gen. John Pershing was the commander. During World War I, Billy Mitchell organized and led another expeditionary force of aircraft in the battle of St. Mihiel.

And we operated in an expeditionary manner through much of World War II, in Africa, the Pacific and Europe. We were expeditionary in the 1950s with Korea, and in the 1960s in Vietnam. But, in the Cold War, we focused more on robust forward-stationed forces and substantial forward infrastructure. The Cold War is over, the Air Force's forward stationing has been cut by 60 percent, and where we are needed, there is little prepared infrastructure support. In short, the world has changed, and we must also change.

The expeditionary nature of the force we are molding today differs from its historical predecessors. Rather than being reactive, it must be proactive to meet the needs of a rapidly changing world. The expeditionary concept we envision involves rapidly responsive forces that are light, lean and tailored to mission needs; and formed in a way to sustain known deployments while hedging against the unknown. It is an integration of our total force -- active, Guard and Reserve -- in a way that helps provide more capability, stability and predictability.

We're still refining our implementation plans and we will further solidify the details during Corona Fall -- but here's where we are right now. We plan to operationally link geographically separated units from around the world into 10 aerospace expeditionary forces or AEFs.

Each of these AEFs will represent the full range of aerospace capabilities. Portions of the AEFs will be packaged, integrated and trained to meet known and likely contingencies. Other portions will be on call to respond to unpredicted crises.

We plan to have two of these AEFs on call at any one time -- ready to meet existing commitments and to provide rapid response to pop-up contingencies. The other eight AEFs will be training and ready to respond to the spectrum of crises as tasked in current war plans.

We intend to have each AEF in a vulnerability period for three out of every 15 months. AEFs will be scheduled well in advance so that our people can pre-plan their absences. That is particularly important in order to leverage the great capability of our guard and reserve forces. This will also provide much needed day-to-day predictability to our airmen and their families.

Our AEFs will have a discrete cycle. When not in the vulnerability period, units associated with an AEF will do the day-to-day training required to meet and maintain the readiness levels tasked by the warfighting commanders in chief.

For a majority of our units, that is immediate response and, therefore, this concept involves no tiered readiness. At an appropriate lead point before their scheduled vulnerability window, we will integrate those forces in a way that they can train together for specific tasks when deploying forward. We will do that with various means -- Red Flags, and local and regional exercises.

Once prepared, the AEF forces will deploy, or be postured to deploy, for a 90-day period followed by a down time to reconstitute. Then, the AEF's 15-month cycle would begin again.

Since 1992, we've responded to multiple pop-up crises, and yet remained committed to protracted operations around the globe.

On average, there have been six or seven pop-up crises each year with an average of 25 U.S. Air Force aircraft deployed to support each of them. During this time, we've averaged approximately 250 aircraft deployed at any one time responding to protracted contingencies. As we look back, two of our AEFs could have provided sufficient forces to handle all of the Air Force commitments -- both pop-up and protracted.

I believe the world we live in today requires us to sustain an expeditionary posture indefinitely. It's driven by the nature of the world we live in and the needs of the nation we serve. From a support standpoint, we can't continue to set-up expeditionary forward bases from resources and people that are needed at home bases. We plan to add more than 5,000 additional manning positions at home bases that support AEFs. These additions will lessen the strain of deployments on those remaining behind, including our families, who continue to need our full support.

What is new here is that we're going to prepare ourselves for expeditionary missions all the time. We will organize and train ourselves before deployments, and we will be even more responsive to the needs of the nation and our airmen. We plan to be in the execution phase of the concept by the turn of this century.

A major part of being able to effectively execute the EAF concept is to reduce our forward footprint, while connecting our forces to needed information and warfighting capability in rear areas. We're already implementing what we term "reach back," and experimenting with light and lean aspects of an expeditionary force.

For example, just last month, we opened our first Rear Operations Support Center at Langley AFB (Va.) which will perform many functions presently performed at forward-deployed air operations centers. We believe we can cut the size of our air operations centers, by an order of magnitude -- to do with 200 what we used to do with 2,000.

"Reach back" concepts are being tested in an experiment today called EFX (Expeditionary Force Experiment) '98. It is an experiment because we're in a learning mode. Experiments like these involving our battle labs are a way to quickly incorporate smart ideas on how to make our expeditionary aerospace force truly light, lean and lethal.

That is the kind of innovation needed today and in the future. That is why we're focusing our attention on an expeditionary mindset -- for our airmen and for America.

I firmly believe that the EAF concept will improve the Air Force's responsiveness across the board, while better utilizing our total force -- active, Guard, Reserve and civilian. It will spread optempo in a sustainable way while putting more predictability and stability into the lives of our most vital asset, our people.

Again, I applaud the enduring support you here from industry and the AFA give to the U.S. Air Force.