Four-Star Forum
Moderated by General T. Michael Moseley, USAF Chief of Staff
General Bruce Carlson, Commander, Air Force Materiel Command (AFMC)
General Robert H. “Doc” Foglesong, Commander, United States Air Forces in Europe (USAFE)
General Paul V. Hester, Commander, Pacific Air Forces (PACAF)
General Ronald E. Keys, Commander, Air Combat Command (ACC)
General William R. Looney, III, Commander, Air Education and Training Command (AETC)
General Lance W. Lord, Commander, Air Force Space Command (AFSPC)
Air & Space Conference and Technology Exposition 2005
September 13, 2005
General Moseley: Thank you all for doing this and being a part of this forum so we can share some thoughts.
[Acting Secretary of the Air Force Pete Geren], sir, thank you for staying with us and being a part of this. [Under Secretary of the Air Force Dr. Ronald M. Sega], sir, thank you.
I've asked each of the MAJCOM commanders to offer a few things that are on their plate and some of the things that are twirling around within their commands to generate some thoughts and to generate some questions, and then we're looking forward to your comments.
For the Air Command and Staff College (ACSC) class, it's a real treat to be able to get this moved in the direction that you can participate in this for the entire three days and be a part of the seminars and be a part of all the things that the Air Force Association has set up, so we look forward to your critique and your comments on how to make this even better and even easier to get you here from Maxwell Field and back. So what an honor it is to be able to include the entire class.
General Carlson: I guess I would just say two or three things. This is my 25th day at AFMC, so I told the boss this morning I only know about two minutes' worth of stuff about the command so far. [Laughter] So if you want me to answer one question I've probably only got about 45 seconds worth of opening remarks.
The command is involved in everything that we do in weapon systems development, test, acquisition, fielding and sustainment. We have a marvelous group of 80,000 people—57,000 of them are civilians—all dedicated, working hard to provide war-winning capability to the nation.
I think former AFMC Commander General Gregory S. “Speedy” Martin has set the command on the right track. My goal will be just to keep it on that track and maybe tweak it just a little bit.
I've probably got three priorities so far. The first one is our people. When we acquire and bring on new civilians we don't have a formalized training program to provide them the same kind of basic training and upgrade training that we do for our Airmen and we're working on that to make them a more professional junior civilian force.
The second thing I'm working on are our core missions. This involves simplifying our strategic planning so we have a much more streamlined planning effort, so that we’re much more coordinated between our centers than we are the moment.
Finally, continuous process improvement ... Delivering things on cost, on-time is a great way to do things for today, but we have to look to the future and deliver things early and under cost. That's our goal in the future and we're working towards that.
Thank you.
General Foglesong: Good morning, everybody. I'd like to just start off with a couple of words of insight into something that's going on on the other side of the ocean that impacts the US Air Force directly in some situations and indirectly in others, and that's what the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has signed up to do out of Area of Responsibility (AOR). I was actually surprised and delighted two years ago when the NATO ministers decided to move out of their typical AOR and move into Afghanistan. So we're spending a significant amount of time on the other side of the ocean working stability and security for the northern half of Afghanistan through NATO right now. In fact, next spring we will pick up another 25 percent of the country. So that's occupied a significant amount of NATO’s time, which directly impacts the work that we do in USAFE Headquarters as we also try to support that operation.
The other thing I'd like to comment on regarding NATO is that after the 11th of September, NATO actually became very attuned and very focused on air policing. And while that mission has always been in existence, clearly the attention that was given to that mission has expanded substantially. It's especially significant given the fact that we've taken on a number of new nations over the last two or three years, and trying to integrate all those capabilities on the same Air Tasking Order (ATO), if you will, has been somewhat of a challenge.
The leadership over there that's helping do that is typically your United States Air Force because we know how to do that. So we spend a lot of our BTUs and brain bytes working with NATO on a day-to-day basis to make sure we're all on the same ATO and to make sure that we're supporting the operations in Afghanistan as much as we can.
Right behind that, of course, General James L. Jones, who is my boss and Commander of US European Command (EUCOM), would ask that we be ready on a day-to-day basis to pull the trigger on any number of contingencies. About once every two weeks or so, I get a phone call that there's a Darfor kind of activity or something going on somewhere in his AOR that requires that the United States Air Force have its forces postured to work with the US Army and the US Navy and the US Marine Corps to do whatever activities flow out of the policy decisions that are made back here in Washington. So that, right next to NATO, is our challenge, to make sure we're ready when we have to be in case our combatant commander wants to pull the trigger.
The organize, train and equip part of our function has really, I believe, moved fairly substantially down the road as we've organized ourselves into a warfighting headquarters. A year ago in January, we published the first ATO across the entire command and we are still learning things about ourselves and the way we would like to wire ourselves up, if you will, with the rest of the Air Force to make sure that we have insight into what's going on around the globe, and that's still a challenge for us. But we're well down the path with my fellow MAJCOM commanders here in trying to put ourselves together, if you will.
What we've done is we've identified four goals, kind of broad goals that we would like to improve ourselves on. I'll give you an example. Readiness, services to our people, and quality of living have been the mantra that we've established.
Readiness is self explanatory. We just want to be ready any time the Air and Space Expeditionary Force (AEF) Center includes us to go do something that the Air Force and the nation has asked us to do. That's an important product that we provide to the United States Air Force.
The services to our people is interesting overseas, as I'm sure General Hester can attest to as well. You should essentially get the same services overseas that we get back in the United States, so we're striving to move forward in a number of directions, and I'll use one tactical example. There's no reason why you can't get the same service in the library at Rammstein Air Base as you get in Springfield, Virginia. The way we're wired today, we should be able to provide those kinds of services around the globe, so we're trying to make strides to make sure whether it's distant learning or whether it's something for our dependents or whatever it is, that we're providing a world class service.
The quality of living part of that is pretty self-explanatory. We pride ourselves, just like the rest of the Air Force, on making sure our folks are living in decent quarters and that they're getting treated the right way so that they will be our best recruiters.
The last thing I'll talk about is something we just opened up called the Joint Air Power Competence Center. In my view, it is the transformation element for the Commander of US Joint Forces Command, Admiral Edmund P. Giambastiani, and his operation down in Norfolk. It's the construct that former USAF Chief of Staff General John P. Jumper and General Martin had thought about years ago and that is now coming to conclusion where we have a single Airman, finally, in Europe in charge of everything from the tactical operations, if you will—the tactics, training and procedure—all the way up to doctrine on the other side of the ocean. It's a Memorandum of Understanding organization that's got 16 NATO members involved in it, and we think it's going to offer the opportunity to allow us to make the transformational types of processes that we need to pursue across NATO.
Thank you very much.
General Hester: From Pacific Air Forces, a lot of changes have occurred over the past few years and they are accelerating as we get the opportunity with resources to make changes here in the future.
My good friend Doc Foglesong just talked about NATO, and for those of you who have studied the Pacific arena, you would realize that in our simplest form we would all wish to have a similar organization out in the Pacific so that we could all gather together under one roof and sit around a table and talk about issues so that we could provide that peace and stability that we have learned and worked so well under the NATO flag. However, that doesn't exist, so we work hard on individual bilateral relationships and extending the bilateral relationships laterally so that we can include more countries. That is both a political issue with the countries of the region as well as a military issue with them.
What we're finding is a great amount of cooperation, and certainly it was a natural disaster with the tsunami last December 26th that brought so many of the nations of the Pacific together to work in cooperation to provide relief to Indonesia and those other countries out there that were affected when we lost over 200,000 people during that great tragedy.
It has provided us an opportunity for future openings for cooperation. We're capitalizing on those openings both in your Air Force as well as in the other sister services that are out there.
Specifically, on some of the Air Force pieces, we view Alaska and Hawaii and Guam as a strategic triangle. It's a strategic triangle if you look at it on the globe regarding where we can take our forces. We can move them both deep into the Pacific under an American flag, or we can use them under the AEF construct and deploy them anywhere in the world that we need to do so.
The policy piece of our business is done in Hawaii. Alaska sits right on top of the globe and provides us with a great opportunity with range space up there to do Cope Thunder which lapses into Cooperative Cope Thunder with our allies and our friends who want to come and join us and exercise together. It also provides us with an ability to do our fastest deployment anywhere in the world.
And of course then there is the deepest penetration in the Pacific, which is Guam and Andersen Air Force Base. America invested so much money back during the Vietnam era out there with a lot of concrete, with the B-52s. 170 of them used to sit wingtip to wingtip, and now that same concrete is available for us to use again for AEF deployments. With General Keys' support, we have had a permanent bomber presence out there now going on two years and it looks like that will continue for a long time. So each one of our three bombers in our service—B-52s, B-1s, and B-2s—sit in AEF deployment out there and are working wonderful exercises with our allies. In fact, we had the Japanese in this past summer to work with not only F-15Es that had deployed out on an AEF, but also the bombers as well, so there's great opportunities for us in growth.
We're going to modernize over the next several years. As you may know, we get our first C-17 off the line this next January. It's coming to Hickam Air Force Base. There will be eight of those in '06, and then there will be eight in '07 that will go to Alaska. And of course we're really excited about the 96 F/A-22s that are going to come to be with us out in Alaska and we appreciate General Keys giving up two squadrons out of ACC to boost our position in the Pacific. [Laughter]
We are building and working on new relationships as well as working with those allies who have been strong and staunch supporters of us over the years in the Pacific. We'll see that those relationships will change as governments decide how they're going to in fact engage not only in the region but across the world, and that is an exciting time for us as well.
Lastly, like General Foglesong described in Europe, we at PACAF have now stood up the General George C. Kinney Warfighting Headquarters at Hickam, and Lieutenant General David A. Deptula is the new three-star. He is going to be the commander of that headquarters.
Essentially what that boils down to is we have a standing Joint Forces Air Component Commander (JFACC) in the Pacific. And it’s exciting not only in that we have a JFACC that runs the business as Doc just talked about, but also we are reaching out to our allies and our friends who also want to send liaisons and maybe staff members to sit on specific desks with us in the warfighting headquarters. With them as well are our Navy counterparts who are reaching over to come and sit in the warfighting headquarters with us. We're going to have a big ‘C’ and a big ‘J’ in the JFAC and CFAC business out there.
I'm excited to talk to you about the Pacific later on in your questions.
General Keys: In ACC, just as in every major command, it's a busy time and the thing that faces us right now is sort of the outfall of Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC), the outfall of the budget, and the outfall of the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR). That's going to cause a lot of turbulence across our force in balancing our portfolio because we're going to have to accept more risk than we'd like to in some areas in order to buy down the risk in areas we have to do.
At ACC, we're hired to go fight America's wars and win them when called upon to do so, and we're engaged in at least three of those wars right now—Operation Noble Eagle overhead, down on the Gulf Coast with Operation Katrina, and then down-range in Afghanistan and Iraq. We've got to make sure that we're ready to fight that war today and we can fight it for as long as it has to be fought.
That then comes to the focus areas that we've got in ACC. The first one, of course, is people. That's how we're getting the job done. We have to absolutely make sure that we are following that wingman culture that stood us in such good stead for so long. We're looking out for each other, we're taking care of each other, we're not putting ourselves in over our heads, we're making sure we've got trained people ready to go where they have to go, making sure that we've got the right number of people in various skills, trying to reduce the turbulence, reduce the stress, and increase the predictability of our people. We get back to that culture of Airmen of honor, courage, commitment and discipline.
The second focus is on expeditionary operations. That's why we're in the business. We go and fight America's wars. We've done a good job in being able to pick up the things that we have and develop ourselves into an Air Expeditionary Force (AEF) that's light, lean and lethal. Now we've got to work on the business of business part of it; the part that says that your processes, rules and regulations have to be just as expeditionary, flexible and adaptable as your people and platforms are. If it takes you six months to put a concrete pad in so you can put up an antenna to run Predator somewhere, that’s too long. If your contracting rules drive you to do that, we've got the wrong rules. If we're on a 20-month AEF cycle, but we have requirements for currencies that come in at one year, and when you're in the middle of a fight down-range but you don't have the facilities or the capabilities to do those kinds of qualifications, then we've got the wrong sort of qualifications. So we have to work through that in our expeditionary operations.
Then, of course, we've got to recapitalize. Not just on our platforms that everyone tends to think of, but we've got to recapitalize on our information technology that connects all of our bases together and is really the strength of our Air Force; the ability to move information to the point that someone's going to act on it, but also in just the basic infrastructure so the roofs don't leak, so the runways are not breaking up, and that's going to be very costly. We're going to have to make some hard decisions on what do we repair and what do we not repair; what do we keep at 80 percent of its capability in order to develop that fiscal head room so we can jump to the next level and make a 40 percent increase? That's going to be very difficult.
The first thing we want to do is what we call new/new. We want to buy new stuff with the most leading edge technology or capability so we're ready to fight today, tomorrow, and 30 years from tomorrow. When I was a young captain we were delivering F-4s to Iran. No one back then thought we'd be in the situation we're in today with Iran. So there's a lot of uncertainty out there, there's a lot of danger out there, and this new/new recapitalization allows me to be prepared to face that.
Then I have what I call the old/new. That means I'm taking my old systems that still have life in them, and I'm taking the new technology and fusing them in them to make them more net-centric, to make them more capable. I'm putting targeting pods on B-52s. I'm putting a lot of my ability to move and cross-cue targets into my older platforms so that they remain relevant for the fight as long as they have life left in the truck part of the system.
Then I finally start to look at what I call the new/old. I buy more of the systems I already have, they're just newer. The concern I have with being forced into that situation just to get numbers is the fact that many of these systems have done well for us, but the F-15 came on in 1974. It was great for the last war in Iraq. It won't be great in the next war 30 years from now and we've got to make that leap and we have to be careful about this purchasing new/old.
Finally, organization ... As my brothers have talked about, getting ourselves down to warfighting headquarters that can focus on the particular area of operations and understand what's going on. We talk about fighting the war 24/7/365, 360 degrees every day, looking out, finding out what's going on, making sure that our Air Operation Centers around the world are connected and arranged so that when something goes on in Combined Air Operations Center (CAOC) A, we know what's going on in CAOC B, and we actually have our ears on and we're leveraging the things that are happening there into sensing in areas that we're in in another area of the world.
We've got to also look at balancing the force in the Future Total Force. We've done extremely well with the Guard, the Reserve and the active organization. Now we've got to look at the next kinds of organizations we may need to operate within, just so we can leverage the new technology to give us more sorties and more capability if we had the crews to fly them.
One of the limiting things that I have in my Air Force today is the fact that I don't have enough crews or I don't have enough analysts and we've got to make sure that we balance that out. Some of the things we're doing to get around that is out at Nellis Air Force Base we stood up the UAV Center of Excellence, so we're bringing the Army, Navy, Marines and the Air Force together so we can start to understand these 300 different UAV systems and how they feed into the system of systems, which is the way we fight.
Along with that, we've gone away from the Air Warfare Center and are now standing up a Warfare Center so we can bring the best of the breed from space and near space and manned and unmanned together so, again, we know how to fight as a joint, interdependent force.
Through all of that is this ability to transform. That's sort of an over-used word, perhaps, but across all of these focus areas we've got to look at them and make the hard decisions of do I want to pay money to get four percent better or am I going to stay as good as I am and I'm going to get 40 percent better three or four years down the road? I'm going to have to stop incrementally getting better. We all are Type As and we all want to get better every day, but looking at the budget and looking at the other pressures on how we acquire things, we are not going to be able to do those kinds of incremental things day in and day out. We're going to have to save up, make the fiscal head room and make the hard decision that something's not going to get any better in order for something to get a lot better down the road.
So that's sort of the focus ... How do we get through the budget, the BRAC and the QDR and come out of it with a force that's stronger than even the force we have today?
Thank you very much.
General Looney: First and foremost, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank the Air Force Association for not only putting on this symposium which you all do every year, but more importantly, for being our champion in this AOR and helping us build the world's greatest air and space force. Thank you Air Force Association for what you do.
Using my good friend Bruce Carlson's math, I've been at AETC now for about three months, so I've got six minutes, which may be two minutes too long, but I look forward to the opportunity to talk to you a little bit about the command.
As most of you know, our mission is quite simple. We develop America's Airmen today for tomorrow, and our job, quite simply, is to deliver a full-up round to my brother commanders here at the table so that they have to do very little if any training to bring those individuals up to speed so that they can execute the mission required.
We focus in three areas. We recruit the force, we train the force, and we educate the force. We're doing great in recruiting and will continue to do so, and I'm very confident that both this year and next year we will meet our numbers and probably exceed them. Additionally, when it comes to training, we focus not only in the technical training and flying training which you all are familiar with, but we also are significant players in our medical training. We are doing a fabulous job both at Wilford Hall Medical Center and Keesler Air Force Base and we'll continue to do so.
With regards to education, as you can tell, we've got a number of folks that we are educating today here with us from ACSC, but education essentially goes from the newest members of our military, whether they're in the enlisted or the officer corps, all the way up to our chief master sergeants and our three-, four-star generals, because education is something that occurs throughout your entire career in our business.
If you would, I'd like to just take a moment and recognize those members of the ACSC class of 2006, because I'll tell you, they are the future leaders of our Air Force. We appreciate your commitment and service to our Air Force.
One of the big areas that I'm focusing on during my tenure at AETC will be realizing the Chief's vision of a training command. That is one in which every single member of our Air Force can expect at one time or another in their career they will come back and become part of our instructor force. I see this as a two-way street for both the command and the individual. First off, it's an opportunity for that individual to come back and recharge themselves as they return from some very demanding and heavy OpsTempo where they've had to deploy and be separated from their family. They can have a little bit of predictability in their life. The OpsTempo is still going to be heavy, but it's going to be in the local area.
Additionally, it's a chance for the command to get recharged because we will bring in people who have been there and done that and are very current and can ensure that our techniques, tactics, procedures and syllabuses are correct and current and teaching exactly what our folks need to know as they go into harm's way in support of our nation's interest.
I want people to want to come to AETC, not because they have to because that's the requirement to realize this vision. In order to do that, I feel as though there are two objectives. The first one is that we enhance instructor duty so it is professionally rewarding, so it is something that is good for your career and enhances your potential for future service. And then we must create an environment where our quality of life is second to none, along with all the other MAJCOMs in our United States Air Force. If we do those two things, I think it will be very easy to realize General Moseley's vision with regards to instructor duty.
Finally, as most of you know, Keesler is one of our bases, critical in our technical training world, and I'd be happy to talk about what has occurred at Keesler Air Force Base with regards to Katrina and the recovery that we have made if there is interest in that. So if someone would like to hear about that, please ask the question.
Thank you.
General Lord: I'd like to cover my quick comments here in three main points. Unfortunately, two of them are tied for first and the last one is number two, but let me quickly go through the space portfolio here very quickly. [Laughter]
Number one is we want to continue to provide at the operational and tactical level of war the joint warfighting effects from space that I think have been critical not only in what we saw in Operation Enduring Freedom, but also Operation Iraqi Freedom and support to Joint Task Force Katrina and the operations on the Gulf Coast. Space has really played a major part in all of our activities. So I think we're fully integrated. I'm really pleased to report that to you. We have that mission assurance that goes with continued excellence in joint warfighting with space.
We're also looking at near space, that environment of 65,000 to 350,000 feet, and we think there are some capabilities we can do and we're going to demonstrate that over the next six months. We will deploy to the Southwest Asia AOR to really test our capability in that environment.
The second number one priority is our continued and unwavering commitment to the nuclear deterrence mission we have north of Interstate 80, and 10,000 members of my command are part of that mission every day. What I'm proud to report is that we took eight of our airplanes, the UH-1N Iroquois helicopters plus 20 crews, down to Columbus Air Force Base, Mississippi, and they've been flying search and rescue and supply missions in support of operations down on the Gulf Coast. It's their first real deployment outside of our AOR. We managed the operational risk in a way that we can take the crews down there. I got a chance last Friday to go down and visit with them and they were really supporting that and proud to be there.
We also took 105 of our security forces down to Keesler Air Force Base to give the guys that work Keesler day to day, that security force team, a break so that they could work with the storm damage and their families and work their personal property issues. So our folks are standing in for General Looney and the 81st Wing's folks down there side to side.
Our folks are happy to be part of a broader mission that certainly shows their capability. But we're committed to the nuclear deterrence mission. Next Monday, we celebrate the drawdown of the peacekeeper ICBMs that have been taken out in support of the Russian President Vladimir Putin/President Bush Moscow agreement done over a three-year period with absolutely no errors and no damage, no equipment problems. I'm really proud of the team for doing that, but we're committed to that.
Lastly, assured access to space and space superiority is number one on our mind, making sure we can get to space routinely and as cheap as possible as well as making sure that we maintain our space superiority mindset. Space superiority ought to roll off our tongues just like air, land and sea superiority, and it's important to us, it's critical to our success in the missions in space.
While you're here you ought to take advantage of the professional development seminars because key to space superiority is creating the space culture with the people who are educated. Our enlisted pros, officers, civilians, contractors and government partners are all part of this team and we look forward to continuing to hone their skills as we shape and influence this future in space, and we are really part of the integrated air and space team. We're delighted to be in the lead with our Chief as he's really focusing our legacy as well as helping us shape the future.
We look forward to your questions, thanks.
Q: Could you give us a synopsis of the Mobility Capability Study and the Tanker Alternative Study? Where they are and when might we see something from those reports?
General Moseley: The Mobility Capability Study is still working its way through the QDR, but what we're beginning to see is finessing down on the number of C-17s that will be useful for us to meet global commitments. Perhaps we’ll also have an opportunity to look at the number of C-5s and how to work properly the Aviation Modernization Program (AMP) and Readily Releasable Pool (RRP) programs on the C-5s to get aircraft with the right capability. We also have inside that or parallel to that an IntraTheater Lift Study that's going through the Joint Staff right now, the J8 being the lead. It’s going to give us a little more insight into the C-130’s future, what we're able to do with C-130Es, problems we're having with center wing boxes, and how to perhaps look at the C-130Hs so we don't have those problems, both in the airlift and in the special ops world. It will also look at the 80 C-130Js, how to incorporate those, and then perhaps it will look at an emerging requirement for a light cargo aircraft.
Based on our experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq, I think all of us would agree that there is some utility in having an aircraft that you can get in and out of at about 2,000 or 2,500 feet, that you can carry two pallets or so and 25 or 30 people in. And think how useful something like that would be now down on the Gulf Coast, being able to get in and out of those airfields.
So between the Mobility Capability Study on the C-17, C-5 and C-130, and the IntraTheater Lift Study on C-130s and light cargo aircraft, we're beginning to get some closure on what options we have.
Relative to the tankers, with KCX and the Tanker Analysis of Alternatives, the Analysis of Alternatives (AOA) is in the building and being looked at now. Office of the Secretary of Defense Program Analysis and Evaluation is in the process of conducting a sufficiency study on that, then there will be a follow-on independent study done by the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), at which point we'll be able to get some insight into what the options or the alternatives are. We can then take from that some programmatic notions about where we go next. Those options are across the board, from re-engining to new procurement to big tankers, medium tankers, across-the-board options that we're having an opportunity to look at.
I don’t think there's anyone in this room who would disagree that the keystone of Global Mobility and Global Intelligence Surveillance Reconnaissance (ISR) and Global Strike on the air-breathing side is the tanker. The ability to project force and the ability to project mobility capabilities and to do things—whether that’s tsunami relief or air bridges or air strike—is dependent on those tankers. The asymmetric advantage of this country is Global Reach and Global Power and Global Strike and the way you get there is with those tankers.
Think back to those early days of Afghanistan where the 509th Wing out of Whitman Air Force Base flew the longest bomber mission in the history of combat aviation, which was 42.5 hours from Whitman, Missouri, to targets around Kabul and back. No other country in the world and no other air force even comes close to that capability.
Or early in Afghanistan where the largest humanitarian airdrop in the history of aviation occurred with C-17s operating out of Europe, refueled all the way across the Caucuses to be able to provide that desperately needed humanitarian relief.
Again, there is no other country, no other air force, in the world that can project force and humanitarian assistance and mobility like that. And all of that is dependent on the ability to get tankers in the air and be able to refuel.
Q: Looking at the Pacific, China has been causing the Pentagon some heartburn with its large, sustained military buildup. It seems inevitable that China will at some point in the next decade or so try to push out into the Pacific where it could collide with US interests and forces. What should the US, specifically the Air Force, be doing now to prepare for rising Chinese military power?
General Hester: I think the issue with China, and the one that we talk most often about, is the inability to see into their budget and their government structure to know exactly what their plans are for the future.
It's pretty easy as we look at the demographics of China to know how big they are in terms of land mass, but also in terms of how their population is growing. What we see are snippets of their capabilities as they buy new equipment and they start doing some research and development on that equipment. We see that from a variety of sources, but what we don't know is what their long-range plans are. Unlike the United States where we are fairly open with most of our work, as you see it in the newspaper, you see it with testimony on Capital Hill as our Chief goes over and articulates along with our Secretary what our Air Force's plans are, there's no such comparable setting in China.
So our concern is how to properly prepare for either a partner in keeping peace and stability in the region, or a rising threat in the region. That will keep both our intelligence analysts as well as the commanders awake at night trying to figure that out, simply because a misstep in the region will have us in a position where we will be behind.
You certainly cannot engage with China, if it ever comes to it, in a person-to-person conflict. Our number of people in the United States certainly is no match for the amount of people that China has.
I think it's also useful for us to look in the region and see that there are two very, very large countries there, India being the other one, and I don't think we ought to have a discussion of China without considering the other countries in the region. India is on the back side, of course, of China into the Indian Ocean. And they, too, are a very, very large, growing democracy and are in fact progressing in their ability to rebuild their military out there.
So we are as engaged as we can be with the Chinese. Our Pacific Command (PACOM) Commander has had the opportunity to visit recently to China to learn more. I'm looking forward to being with him when I get back to Hawaii to find out what he's learned. We are engaged with our growing relationship with India to know how we can support them in their buildup and the modernization of their forces.
If you were to talk about what specifically we're doing in the Pacific to face growing and changing military countries, militarized countries, you'd only really need to go back and look at what the Pacific looks like and realize that there are opportunities for us to be engaged with friends and allies and growing relationships around the region which provide your Air Force access to potential places where we can move in and out of—not permanent station. We're working hard to prepare to be able to do that and to work training programs with other countries, as well as solidify those relationships we have with Korea and Japan which are closest in that northeast region of the Pacific area.
So it is a wonderful opportunity for these ACSC students to write a paper today and then go back and look at that paper in about ten years when they get into the position of leadership roles in our Air Force and senior leadership roles and refer to what they thought today and what we speculate about and then be able to see if they were exactly right. But it is an open question to us and one that we are trying to reach the right fork in the road, as Yogi Berra says, when we get to it.
Q: General Looney commented briefly on Keesler Air Force Base and Hurricane Katrina. Could you give us an update on the damage there, the impact to the base itself? Also, can you talk about some of the heroic actions that have been taken down there by the folks in the area? Finally, what impact will Operation Katrina have on the Air Force budget?
General Looney: Thanks for that question because it's a great opportunity to talk about our Air Force and truly what an inspiring, motivating and heroic effort has occurred down there at Keesler Air Force Base.
I've been there twice. I went with my command chief, Rod Ellison, about three days after the hurricane hit. At that time, the folks were just digging out. I will tell you that it has been referred to as kind of a battle zone, and it pretty much was. The vast majority of the trees had come down and the power was off. There was potable water which was encouraging, but just about everything else was gone.
6,638 folks rode out the storm in three of the academic buildings because we didn't have any windows in those because we wanted the students to pay attention so that's the way they were built. [Laughter] They were able to withstand the hurricane there. But when we arrived, things were pretty grim as far as the results.
We went into the Crisis Action Team location where there were about 22 folks working. They had been at it for about I would say 72 hours with minimal breaks—two, three, four hours of sleep occasionally before they came back.
The thing that was striking about it, and certainly it brought tears to your eyes, but at the same time there was a lot of pride in our people…every single person sitting at their desk had lost everything. The word had come back that they'd gone through the housing area. Of the 1,800 houses, 800 were completely destroyed by water and mud; and all the people sitting in that Crisis Action Team had lost all of their worldly belongings in addition to the cars they had parked in their carports. To see them still focused and their only concern was getting the mission done, figuring out how to reconstitute the base, how to take care of the family members, the students, and all that was involved at Keesler Air Force Base before that storm hit, was truly inspiring.
Then, immediately thereafter, help began to flow from our Air Force as both Lance and Ron have alluded to, as all the commands came together, bringing in forces and generators, equipment, etc. Red Horse is there and has been working, clearing the roads, in addition to bringing back power. They've got the air conditioning now, they've got water, they've got hot food in the dining halls. People are back in the dormitories, etc. This has all happened in a little less than about six days. I was there yesterday on my way here and spent an hour driving through the base and yes, it still looks like it's had a rough time, but it is amazing the progress that has already been made.
To indicate that, we plan to start classes again next week. We evacuated all of the students save 400 who we kept behind to help with the clean-up details, we had about 1,400 students there. I've got to tell you, my first indication was, “oh, I feel sorry for those 400 that got left behind.” The fact of the matter is there were hundreds of the students lining up and saying, “I don't want to go. I want to stay here.” And we had to order them and force them to get on the airplanes to leave. That's the kind of young Americans we are developing in our United States Air Force today. [Applause] They have worked very, very hard to get that back together.
One thing that shows you the wisdom of the fact that we need to recapitalize our facilities and bring them up to the standards required not only from a quality of life perspective but from a sustainment perspective ... For those of you who have been to Keesler you know in the center of the base is kind of the industrial area, the campus, that over the last 10 to 12 years we have built and replaced the old buildings with new, from dormitories to dining hall to classrooms. Those facilities were built to withstand 175 knot winds. They are intact. They suffered hardly any damage. Because of that, we can start up again. And like I said, we'll have students there next week. We're starting with our critical skills, which is really our enlisted flying training courses, because of the pipeline involved and we need to get them moving along. But we will slowly but surely bring the rest of them back. And initially, when I talked to the Chief, we were thinking maybe March we would be back up. It will not surprise me if we're not back up in a couple of months—full-up training, 1,400 students. Our challenge will be where to place the instructors and the permanent party from a billeting perspective, but I am confident that we will overcome that and get back to where we need to be.
Thank you for the opportunity to talk about the Airmen and the great job they're doing.
Q: We've seen a lot of coverage recently on Future Total Force, the Quadrennial Defense Review, the Base Realignment and Closure process, and in some cases we've seen tensions created between our active duty Air Force and our National Guard. How serious do you see these tensions as being? And what do we need to do to repair those disconnects?
General Moseley: The reality of where we are today is that we are in the middle of a Global War on Terrorism. As General Keys says, we're fighting in three places—Afghanistan, Iraq, and we’re prepared to fight over the top of this country. We're in the business of fighting forest fires out west. We're in the business of flying hurricane missions into the next set of storms. And we're in the middle of recovery with a horrendous event on the Gulf Coast. We're doing this as a Total Force. There's no other Air Force in the world that could do the things that you do and that our magnificent Airmen do out there every day.
The reality of where we are relative to the budgets and relative to opportunities are also limited by our requirements to recapitalize. We are sitting on the oldest inventory we've had in the history of the Air Force with a requirement to conduct all of these operations simultaneously while recapitalizing and modernizing. With the top lines as they are, or potentially as they might be, the reality is we're going to have less equipment. The equipment that we've got needs to be replaced.
So Future Total Force is a powerful opportunity for us to make this better for our country. This is not about the active Air Force or the Air Force Reserve or the Air National Guard. This is about what's right for our country and this is what's right for the Total Force.
As we look through this QDR into the next set of opportunities and missions and decisions by the Secretary of Defense, and as we look at operationalizing this BRAC, we have several opportunities that are presented so that we can do this much better.
From all of our experiences up here, we have never had a failure in the relationship of the Air National Guard, the Reserve or the active Air Force. Not once. Not once have we reached across those pieces of an air force and not presented forces in a satisfactory manner. I would encourage all of you when you say the word “Air Force,” that means Air National Guard, Air Force Reserve, active Air Force and civilians because we're not separate tribes, we are one Air Force. [Applause]
When we look at the opportunities that are presenting themselves and we look at the world that we're living in right now, there will be requirements for air sovereignty, air defense, mobility, ISR and strike, and there will be requirements to be able to conduct missions across Title 10 and Title 32. So what do you think the Governor of the State of Louisiana would have liked to have had immediately (besides our people, which are the best in the world)? I suspect she would have liked to have had more comm, transportation, infrastructure facilities, base operations support, more ability to fly what we would class as “intratheater” lift, more of our expeditionary medical support—all of those things that live attendant inside units of an Expeditionary Air Force.
The challenge is, how do we set ourselves up for the 21st century, an unknown future? How do we procure, acquire, equip and present forces? Because when you walk through the AOR and you look at an Airman who happens to be at Al Udaid, Al Dhafra, Kabul, Kandahar, Bagram, Baghdad, Mosul or Basrah, you don't see someone with “Air National Guard” or “Air Force Reserve” or “active Air Force” on a set of DCUs. You see an Airman.
We are the poster children for a Total Force. We are the gold standard for making this work. We all know that there are capabilities out there that we can do better and we all know that there is equipage out there that we can do better. We all know there are relationships out there that we can make better.
So what I would offer to you is there is a bit of urban myth out there that there is a split between the Reserve, the Guard and the active component. I don't believe that. I don't think people wake up in the morning deciding to be ornery. I think people wake up in the morning deciding to work the problem so that the Air Force can continue to be the finest air and space force on this planet.
We're headed into a world where the President and the Secretary of Defense and the governors have access to the most capable equipment and the best trained people across the Total Force. That's how I see it, and I think we can do this. It doesn't matter if a person is in the Alaska Air Guard or in the Reserve or in an active component, whether he or she can command a unit deployed, because we've seen that, we've done that.
In my brief tenure as Commander, US Central Command Air Forces, we had over 100 Guardsmen commanding major units—from Alaska, West Virginia and South Carolina. In fact, the western desert effort was completely commanded by an officer from the Alabama Air Guard with help from Massachusetts, Connecticut and Colorado. If that's not a statement of trust and a statement of faith and a statement of capability, I'm not sure what is.
So this notion that there is a divide or this notion that there is a rift is not useful. We need to go to work. We need to move out on this so that the Air Force can continue to be the best air and space power on this planet
Thanks for the opportunity to make that statement.
Q: Delivering space capabilities to geographic COCOMS requires integration with their planning and operations. What are we doing to improve integration, especially in the joint warfighting headquarters?
General Lord: What we've done in support of General James E. Cartwright at STRATCOM is we've created the Space and Global Strike Joint Force Component Command, which General Carlson commanded for a while and now Lieutenant General Kevin P. “Chilly” Chilton is in charge of. Day to day, they're hooked up with Willy Shelton out at Vandenberg Air Force Base with the Joint Space Operations Center. So we've got day to day connection for all our space activities right to STRATCOM in support of whatever AOR needs to receive the capabilities. We're doing 24/7 global space missions in support, all controlled through the Joint Space Operations Center at Vandenberg with Army and Navy representatives in the Joint Space Operations Center (JSPOC) and more to come. We do have a true joint flavor in our day to day command and control structure.
Then, as side work, what we're doing is trying to treat the command and control of space as a weapon system sort of like we did with the Air Operation Center which I think paid off. I think we'll modernize that and we'll be able to deliver space effects when and where they're needed in support of any kind of operation.
Q: The Air Force is currently planning to buy more than 50 Global Hawks, 100 Predator A models and a significant number of Predator B models. Can you comment on the performance of these systems including the test models in ongoing operations in Afghanistan and Iraq? And is the Air Force employing any of these systems in disaster relief operations here at home?
General Keys: Of course, the wave of the past is the wave of the future: UAV operations. And as fast as we can build the capability down-range to control more UAVs, we're putting them down-range.
With the Predator A, we basically started out with an ISR capability and we put weapons on it and it's become one of those that if we had a thousand of them I don't think we'd have enough. The real challenge, though, is not in putting more Predators out there. The real challenge is getting the information down to the kid on the street corner that needs to see that information. That's why we've linked up more technology with our UAVs. It's a kit called Rover which allows you to get that streaming video down to the man or the woman that needs to know what's around the corner before they go there.
It's working very well down-range. We're in the midst of a test right now to determine how we can control more than one UAV per control station so we'll have four up. Essentially, two pilots and four sensor operators will have four airplanes up at one time which will give us a tremendous capability to cover the area down-range.
The Global Hawk, of course, is still in operational tests at various stages and it's got something like 4,000 combat hours on it, so obviously it's in high demand. We've got it down-range right now. We see a great capability for that not only within an AOR like Iraq and Afghanistan, but Paul Hester and his folks out in the Pacific, when you start talking about problems in the Malacca Straits and the broad area expanse of oceans out there, the ability to keep track of what's going on, the staring, ruthless persistence that these UAVs bring to us, makes them particularly attractive for that.
Then let’s talk about Future Total Force and you look at the ability to actually use Reserve and Guard Air Force members so that we don't have to mobilize them, pack them up and take them somewhere. They can in fact be at home and either be mobilized or on a volunteer status and be operating these UAVs. It makes it a very quick-reacting sort of capability. So that's one of the future things that we'll see.
As far as what we did not use, we had a Predator unit that was packed and ready to go, but we didn't actually employ it over Louisiana and Mississippi. We did take our U-2 down there and take some pictures for flood assessment and we also did a great deal of work with Lance Lord's systems using our ability through Eagle Vision to download and pass out satellite imagery from commercial sources.
So, again, any time you ask a question like that, the answer never comes back just about UAVs or F-16s or space. It's always going to be a system of systems, the future of how we're going to operate.
Q: Recently the Deputy Secretary of Defense, Gordon Englund, has started a major review of tactical air power. He wants to optimize the TacAir forces of the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps, and they've hired some folks to help work the study. Do you have any visibility on the study itself, where you see us going?
General Moseley: There is an ongoing effort and General John D.W. Corley when he comes back will be the domain expert for that part of the study. There are two other studies going on relative to land warfare or the land component, and maritime and the maritime component as well as air and the air component. My request inside the QDR was that we look at these things as component commanders would look at them, which gets us into joint and coalition contributions, so that's exactly the path we're taking with ground and maritime and air. The Army Vice Chief of Staff General Dick Cody is honchoing the land component, Admiral Bob Willard as the Navy Vice Chief of Naval Operations is conducting the maritime piece, and then John Corley will take over as the flight lead for the air piece.
We're looking across the board at all the TacAir options to see if there are some synergies there or not. But I think one thing that's instructive for this audience is to understand in the last budget submission, we divested ourselves of 682 aircraft to save $5 billion to roll into the investment accounts. So when we think about multiple MDSes, as we neck down into fewer MDSes, and we think about the future relative to the number of MDSes and the support required and the ability to present forces with these aircraft that are infinitely more capable, we will not have a one-for-one swap of an F-15 to an F/A-22 or an F-16 to an F-35. We will have fewer fighters. They will be extremely more capable, but there will be fewer of them.
The art form in this is to not cross over that point where as tails matter you're not able to present forces with sufficient force structure, and so there's where we are in the QDR, looking at the opportunities to see if the synergies exist between Navy and Marine, Army rotary wing and Air Force TacAir. We are trying to see if there are some synergies beyond where we are now. There may not be.
The decisions that we've made prior to PBD-753 in the last budget decision may be where we are. But we're right in the middle of this thing right now looking at those options, and more to follow as that begins to play out a little bit more. And I'll remind you again, it's also playing out with the land component and the maritime component.
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