General Paul V. Hester
Commander, Pacific Air Forces
Air Warfare Symposium
Lake Buena Vista, Florida
February 2, 2006

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General Hester: It’s great to be with you this afternoon and with our Secretary and our Chief, to be here in Florida, once again to be with AFA. It's always a proud privilege for me and I echo the words both of our Secretary and our Chief of how important it is to have an organization association that is dedicated to representing all of the members of our Air Force back to Members of Congress. Keep them alive with all of the issues of the day and to help us then tell those issues backwards of what's happening in their nation and in their Air Force, backwards to each one of our Airmen with a Big A in our United States Air Force. So it's good to be with you and with Pat Condon and all the others.

The Pacific is an interesting place to be. I think each one of you in here could probably describe the Pacific as well if not better than me and how big it is. I think what we'll do today is spend some time talking about interdependence, because we live in an interdependent world in the Pacific already. You'll hear that same theme from Tom Hobbins who will follow me here on the stage. As the two forward MAJCOMs in our Air Force you'll find that that is our daily life. How do we do business with not only other services that are forward deployed outside the United States, but also how do we do business with all of those in the other nations that we have to interact with every day?

We take seriously that opportunity to get to know our friends and allies across the Pacific arena. We take that opportunity gladly to go and learn about the cultures and the different cultures we have with all of those folks.

It is important that we learn from them, and as I used to say when I was in Japan as the U.S. Forces Japan Commander as well as 5th Air Force Commander, it was interesting to learn inside their culture and for them to teach me how to stand on the shores of Japan and look outward and see not only America, but see those who would stand by our sides in a coalition. It's interesting that you view the world differently through American eyes standing on someone else's shores. We do that every day. It's exactly what Tom Hobbins does every day with the variety of people that he has in Europe to be. For me it's only 43 countries, a thousand languages, 16 time zones across the great expanse of the Pacific. [Laughter].

We meet those very very much head on.

I think that Gandhi had a good idea about cultures. You'll remember as he said this, about taking into account the swirling cultures inside your house and letting them in fact be a part of your daily life, part of the fabric of what you do every day, but not to let those cultures overwhelm you in the possibility of doing business with so many.

He knew this was a challenge. He knew it as a part of being in South Asia. He knew it as a part of being in the Pacific arena. He knew how to unite people to get them to want to do things possibly together.

Here's that AOR I was talking about. Fifty-two percent of the world's surface. When I heard that statistic for the first time I had to think about that. Because I said heck, we don't have any land out there in the Pacific. That's exactly true. Fifty-two percent of the world's surface doesn't mean that it's all good, hard earth that we can walk on. Only about 15 percent of our AOR is earth. Some 80 percent of it is in fact blue water. Our Navy is proud to point that out. I retort back to them in the very understated way that I always do, that 100 percent of our AOR is covered by air and space. [Applause].

One of the things that I envy Tom Hobbins a lot about, not only being a good friend and what he is doing for our great Air Force over in Europe, but one of the envies I have for him is that he has an organization known as NATO. He has a land mass that he in fact can fly over, walk over, and do autobahn highways on. The railroad system runs on time. Well, you can't get on a railroad from Hawaii to go out to China or even to Indonesia or over into Sri Lanka. What you can do is fly to those places. Consequently, there is also no NATO that all of the people of the AOR can get together around a common table. Of course being around a common table doesn't mean that you always agree on things. It just means it's an opportunity for you to sit face to face with your friends, allies and opponents and also do a little arguing, do a little communicating, yell at each other, and then afterwards, because you're in close proximity, you in fact go off, sit down, have a meal, and get to know each other a little bit better. Strengthen those bonds of military to military relationships, which is a challenge for us in the Pacific.

We try to do that through bilateral relationships and that works pretty well, but we'd certainly like to have an opportunity to do it in a multilateral fashion, which we do not have, which would increase that interdependence that we are talking about this afternoon. So we look for opportunities every time we can to get together to strengthen those bonds with folks.

I recently flew out to Malaysia just to have a dinner one night, and at that dinner were the Air Chiefs of five countries that I never get to see, maybe once a year, but I took that opportunity to go out and have dinner with them for one, to let them get to know me and me in turn to get to know each and every one of them. Then I will individually visit them over the next year to try to keep working that interdependence. But the opportunity to sit at one table for three hours that night to talk to those five Chiefs was an important piece of opportunity for me that I don't get very very often.

Through our region, 735 billion dollars worth of our trade, our United States trade, came through in 2004. That's only about 32 percent of the United States trade, but that's a heck of a lot of money. Certainly more than we normally see or if you and I were to funnel through our checking account on any one day or any one year by any means. It is ripe for commercial growth in the Pacific. China's growth is going tremendous in their economy. Japan's growth is exceptional. Korea is doing okay. The other countries are starting to encourage and enjoy the market economy as well.

But the growth of market economies also produces an opportunity for folks to want to protect their economy and to look internal and try to then look external to protect those lines of communication and lines of commerce that give them that growth opportunity. That also gives them the opportunity to become adventurous in the military realm. So military competition is high and growing in the Pacific arena.

There's also a thing with the number of straits that we have out there and the number of opportunities of commerce moving on sea, we've got a lot of criminals who like to do mischievous things in places like the Malaccan Straits and take down a lot of commerce. The loss of $16 billion worth of commerce in one year alone is dramatic and it sets the tone for what we need to set some of our attention to because, quite honestly, a part of our business is not only to fight America's wars, it is also to protect America and that means protecting our way of life which means protecting our economy.

So a lot of our work in the Pacific is doing just that, encouraging others to be interdependent with us, to provide peace and stability all across the region, and that means protecting the Malaccan Straits just as well--being interdependent.

President Wilson had some thoughts on this. I found this one very interesting—as my CAIG dug back through a variety of comments that talked about interdependency and how you then joined with someone and project power or assume power because of your position—"to lead by reason and a gift of cooperation." In other words we must in fact find a way for our interest to overlap others' interests and to be able to encourage them to join us in worthy causes. It also helps us find higher ground to be able to participate with them and to do business out in the region.

Collocation I think is very very important in our region, and collocation means that we've been invited to participate in other countries with forces in some of those countries. I'll show you a little bit of that in a few minutes. But also it's an opportunity for us to invite others to join us. Others can be our other sister services who join us on some of our Air Force bases, as well as on some of theirs, as well as some other countries to send people to be part of my headquarters.

Guam is a great place, for instance. The Navy and us share Guam. The Marine Corps is trying to come to Guam in great numbers to potentially be a part of the Andersen environment and other parts of the environment on the base. The 36th Wing is out there doing magical work with the bombers that Ron Keys and his staff sends out there every year. They've been there for two years. We're going to have them for at least one more year, and I don't see PACOM backing off of that opportunity to ask and make the request through the Joint Forces Command for continuous deployment of those bombers out there. Four to eight tankers also come.

All that means is now Guam is growing in its importance. those of you who remember Vietnam will remember 170 or so B-52s lined up wingtip to wingtip out at Guam, doing business and flying off for magical moments over Vietnam and dropping bombs there in that conflict.

We can't put 176 B-52s out there any more because of the weapons we now have and the arcs that are required because of our safety rules and regulations, but we can sure put a lot out there. We've poured a lot of concrete. And if our plans for the future in fact develop as we would like for them to, when I retire I'm going to have a fleet of six cement trucks and I'm going to show up at Andersen's front gate every day and make a million dollars a month pouring concrete. [Laughter].

It is a very very nice place to be. It is a wonderful place for us to do business. In fact I would encourage those of you who come through the Pacific to come see us. If you get a chance and you've got some work to do, stop through Guam and let Beau Bwera my Wing Commander out there, show you what he is doing and how that works with the Navy.

We have got a joint committee out there headed up by the Navy one star rear admiral who is in fact Naval Marianas. He then leads a group that has got all of our civil engineers working together in an interdependent, joint operation under the guise and under the oversight of PACOM Headquarters to in fact plan for the proper bed-down of all those forces that we would like to have out at Guam.

I'm going to talk some more about Global Hawk in a minute, but Global Hawk which I have fallen in love with, not necessarily because of Global Hawk, it is the only entrance we have in that high altitude persistent ISR that the Chief was starting to talk about. While I'm going to get three initially, six a little later on, I would take a heck of a lot more of those things and put them all at Guam and use LREs across the Pacific to be able to extend the range but have the mother ship be at Guam for them to come back to.

There are other people who have asked about Global Hawk and how they could participate in that. We'll talk about that in a moment.

Over in Korea, I know that a lot of you have been paying attention as we have for now over 50 years about our bed-down in Korea. A lot is changing under Leon LaPorte and now B.B. Bell is the commander over in Korea. And with Gary Trexler, our 7th Air Force Commander. We in fact are fixing to take Kunsan -- for all of you who have been to Kun before and will go again, you will see a different place. We've invested heavily in military construction out there, but more importantly than that is the idea that we're going to bed-down an entire second multifunctional Army brigade there and with all their helicopters. We're going to build an Army campus and integrate them interdependently with us on the base so that they don't have a section of the base that they can go and play in and call it Army land, but they in fact are on an Air Force base living in Air Force standards, in the same kind of military construction, that we will raise them up to our military standards. So if at some time in the future they are gone and we want to put more Airmen in there, our Airmen will be living in the same style as they are on the other side of the base where the Air Force is going to be.

It is going to be a spectacular place, and in fact they're working very very hard out there now to do that business, and Gary Trexler is leading that.

I think for those of you who won that competition that the Chief talked about, who gets to go to Washington for the month to be with them for the testimony season, you will get an opportunity to meet those in Washington whom we call the interagency. It is a group of folks who are dedicated to the long last of this country as you and I who wear uniforms, it's just that their uniform is a three-piece suit and they either work in some agency across the river, on Capitol Hill, or the other parts of our government. They have an important part to play on how America is perceived in the world and also how our Airmen are perceived when we go over and what our Airmen physically can and cannot do.

We enjoin with them to do business across the world. We engage with them to develop policies and then the application of policies which falls into my in-box out in the Pacific and Tom's over in Europe, as we work then with the embassies across our region to implement those policies and to make sure that our Airmen are properly prepared to do business inside those countries as we go forward.

Last year when we had the tsunami relief out in the southern part of our AOR, it was the interagency who was playing a tremendous amount of business, writing policy, helping us in Washington. This is how we got the relief supplies that we then in the military were able to bring into the theater and to bed-down. At the same time it was part of the interagencies as well as those non-governmental agencies that we did business with out there in the AOR for distribution, to make those relief items come into the hands of the right people and get to the right place so that we can save lives, to even the loss of over 200,000 lives that are there.

This is difficult business. You only get a chance really in the Washington environment to get your feet into that pool, but what an important pool it is to take your standards, to take your ideas, to take your knowledge of how the United States Air Force is supposed to operate, put it into the interagency so that you bring all things good from the Air Force to that agency, and then be receptive to learn from them. It is serious business and they are partners in helping us around the world in this war on terrorism, et al.

Through our embassies we have a remarkable ability with some of our, not only the State Department personnel that are stationed there but also the military members who are stationed in the embassy as well. They are part of those who have been on the leading edge of learning those languages that the Chief talked about, and they are out there speaking the native language of the host country that we're in, helping us do business as well. And I have in fact brought a couple of those folks out of embassies back to PACAF Headquarters and they're on my team helping me understand how to rethink about different countries that I've not personally had the chance to live in and do business. In fact I tagged one of those folks to be my political military advisor and he's been absolutely spectacular in being able to work back through the State Department and back through Ms. Pam Frazier who advises the Chief every day on all things that are diplomatic in nature and how we engage with the State Department. Ron McNeil does that for me as well. An old F-15 pilot I first ran across years and years ago when I was the OG down at Kadina, and I watched him grow in that international arena. We need more officers like Ron McNeil in our business every day.

Let's go back to globalizing, internationalizing Global Hawk. The Japanese have been interested in Global Hawk. They want to buy some if we will release that, and Bruce Lipkin is sitting here about five rows deep. He's been working with me heavy in the international affairs department on how we in fact expose Global Hawk to our friends in Japan. They have an idea to buy some. I have been in private conversations with them to extend the offer of how they would look at stationing their Global Hawk at Guam.

Let's make a Global Hawk pin down at Guam. Let's put them all in there and let's PCS some Japanese into Guam and let's all work Global Hawk issues together.

If you think about Global Hawk, which needs an opportunity to be away from airports so that it can spiral up and get over the top of airlines and then do its business. We're pretty far away, about three hours or so, where we're at Guam as opposed to Iwo Jima or even up on the island of Okaido. Singaporeans answered as well as the Austrians and the Koreans. We haven't gotten through some issues with the Koreans yet to be able to offer this to them in our serious thinking but we certainly have with the others. In fact the others are internationalizing Global Hawk in a way by considering putting money into the research and development and the sponsorship of certain sensors to put on the package.

Now Ron Keys, those over in CENTCOM AOR, Tom Hobbins, all have different needs for a sensor than I do. My sensors are almost all maritime. They're not for a land mass application. They are to look for ships at sea and for pirates at sea in the Malaccan Straits. The ability to do patrols. All things that are interesting to every one of those countries out there that want to join with us. The Global Hawk provides us an opportunity, as I like to say, on the soft end of military power or on the left end of the military application of power, as we slide from there through humanitarian relief and ISR operations all the way up to where you're going to shoot somebody in earnest and while they're firing back at you. It is an opportunity for us, as the Chief said, and in the Pacific we are working this very very hard. In fact the Chief just agreed to it, Ron Keys is helping us, ACC is giving us an opportunity, we're bringing a Global Hawk in the next couple of weeks out of the AOR and bringing it back to the United States to Edwards, and we are working a process to bring it through the Pacific to do airspace penetration over Singapore and over Japan so that we can in fact start that process of demonstrating to ourselves as well as to our friends and allies in the region that Global Hawk is in fact a way to go for the future, and it is a way that they can feel comfortable and safe.

In '07 we're going to bring a full-up model back with sensors so that we can do download into the Pacific. We're going to station it out of Guam. Fly several sorties. And do the things with an operational context of how we might operationalize that and then internationalize that into the Pacific. So we're very very excited, at least I am very excited about Global Hawk coming out to be with us.

I touched on this earlier. I'll just let you look at that slide for a second. There's probably no greater place that we've been able to see the interdependency of people to be able for the common good of solving a problem as we were in the tsunami relief last year. Sixteen countries joined us in that. Strong leadership by all the countries who brought what they could. But leadership in the region was provided, we would like to think, by the United States and while that is true, the leadership on the scene of those countries who were most closely affected with India and Thailand and Australia and obviously Indonesia, were paramount in making that a success story. We're continuing to learn lessons out of that in our business.

Let's go to Korea for a second with the next slide, please. Korea, as you well know as I talked about with Kunsan, but let's talk about the 40 F-16Ks they just had.

I was there at the air show when the first two came in. They're very very proud of those, as we are proud of them because they selected a wonderful airplane that we have in our inventory as an outgrowth and a model of the F-15E, an opportunity for us to continue interdependence with each other as well as to be interdependent on the battlefield should that be necessary.

We've already started that process with the Koreans with the F-16. Now we're expanding that with this F-15K. An opportunity for them to buy some more and of course as an Air Force guy I'm always encouraging them that if you're going to buy another fighter, if you're going to buy another piece of equipment, you must be thinking about how you're going to use it on the battlefield and who you're going to be on the battlefield with.

That leads me at least, in my very simple approach to life, in that you want to buy all things American and you want to in fact buy things that the United States Air Force is going to be doing so that I can exchange officers and NCOs with you and we can teach you and you can teach us, and we can then mesh those together on the battlefield, on the ATO. We don't have to parcel out sections to each other. We then will be interdependent on the battlefield fighting together as well.

While Korea has the F-15K, as you well know our friends down in Singapore have just bought the new F-15SG that they have named. It's now in the United States. As they're buying and building those they'll be building their training base. Then in the near future they'll be taking some of those back to Singapore as well as leaving some of them here in the United States for training.

We already know that out at Luke Air Force Base we have two other nations out there with wonderful opportunities to train in the F-16. This will be yet another good airplane when we decide with them where to station it in the United States to continue to build on that process of having the F-15.

I'm pretty partial to the Eagle jet. I flew it for 20 years. This as an Eagle jet is a great opportunity for us to have that kind of firepower resident in our allies, our friends, and across the AOR who will join us in coalitions if the time is ripe and the interests are good for their nation. These are wonderful pieces of equipment that we, our own Airmen, know what to expect out of these airplanes as we have sold them around the world.

If we can in fact take those very very significant steps with the hard power of military capabilities with airplanes, certainly with soft power, we can take even further steps. We can do it even more magnificently as we have demonstrated.

Again, I've just talked about the Global Hawk, but think about the C-17. And in fact this Sunday I'll go to the Boeing plant out in Long Beach and they'll teach me how to taxi and take that thing off next Monday. On Tuesday I'll be flying the Spirit of Hawaii, Kaoloha, back into Hawaii for the first C-17 that will be stationed outside the continental United States. This is the first of eight to come to Hawaii. Then in '07 when I get a chance to talk to you again, I'll tell you once again we'll do the first of another eight that will be going into Elmendorf up in Alaska and we'll have 16 C-17s out in the Pacific.

It is through the magnificent work of the C-17 and that program that has been so spectacular that we have the opportunity to take soft power and apply soft power in a way with an American flag on the tail as we land in places that need our help—places that we offload medicine and food and supplies to people. And out the back end of that airplane, who goes out of it? Certainly there are Airmen that go out the back end of that airplane, but our other services go out the back as well to do business. The Marine Corps to help in the reconstruction of places. Some of the SEABEES go out there, and engineers of all kinds, of all services are doing that kind of work. Of course we never forget that what Duncan McNab's people who he has trained and done the great work with the C-17, they also fly into the dustiest of strips that C-130s have prepared and been flying into for years. Now in Afghanistan and Iraq, in places like that, into the teeth of danger, the C-17 will go.

So this airplane, this magnificent airplane that helps us be able to deploy Stryker brigades and Marines and Airmen and Army Airborne Corps troops, we can in fact take them from soft power all the way to the application of hard power from our United States with the C-17. We are excited. My Admiral, Fox Fallon up at PACOM, is excited about it as well, to have the C-17 stationed out there in the AOR.

Up at Yakota we've got some magnificent things that are happening. Bruce Wright, Orville Wright to many of you, is doing a great job of working with the Japanese. And quite honestly, if you'll look down the left hand part of that slide you'll see what's going to be resonant in the very near future in an interdependent kind of way, internationalizing obviously Yakota Air Base. When I was there it was all U.S. forces. Now we're going to have 5th Air Force there, U.S. Forces Japan is going to be there, the Air Defense Command is going to move from Fuchu across the way. We're going to build a new intelligence center and a new BJOC, which is the Bilateral Joint Operations Center which is going to be the first ever center for the Japanese to do their Missile Defense Command. They're going to take Air Defense Command which is an Air Force led organization by a Japanese three star and they're going to make him the joint commander there, their first JTF in Japanese military, starting in March. So all of this is unfolding at a very very rapid rate there at Yakota and we're very very excited about operationalizing that.

I think the model for what we have done for so many years successfully in Japan has been Misawa. I had the privilege of being up there as the wing commander and observing this firsthand, that I as the wing commander also shared that base with another wing commander, the Japanese 3rd Air Wing Commander, and his boss who was a Japanese three star general and their air defense sector commander was up there. They had three other generals besides those two on the base, and we had every one of America's services represented up there in our intelligence center. What a marvelous capacity we had of good will to share, to learn from each other. We finally got over some major hurdles so that we could in fact off of that same air patch, I could take those F-16s off, the Japanese could take their F-4s off, we could run intercepts, we could do DACT, and we could also have the Japanese doing the controlling from the ground in the ground controlled radar sites. What a magnificent opportunity. We're going to try to think about how we do that and expand that now through Yakota and all the way down into Kadina as well.

Lastly I'd like to talk to you about something back in Hawaii that the Chief has mentioned which is Warfighting Headquarters Construct. You've heard this for the past couple of years out of the Air Force. We're now absolutely ready to step off into the abyss and make sure that we can in fact do this well.

If you'll think of warfighting headquarters as nothing more in its simplest form than a standing JFAC, you've got the right side picture. Now we can make it much more than that and we will over time.

The George C. Kenny Warfighting Headquarters is being stood up in Hawaii. The birth and the culmination of work started by Pat Gamble, two PACAF Commanders ago, through Bill Beggart whom I replaced out in the Pacific, and now it is a reality. It's just across the street. We stole one of the old historical hangars from the 15th Wing. We gutted it, spent about $15 million, and made a world class Falcon AOC out there.

I've stolen Dave Deptula, as you might know. Dave Deptula was my Vice Commander and he is now the Commander of the George C. Kenney Warfighting Headquarters and I have a two star as we've downsized the Vice Commander position in PACAF to a two star, Chip Utterback out there. Another Aggie -- yes, they run everywhere. You just can't get rid of them. Another Aggie is my Vice out there, doing business every day.

But Dave Deptula has now been given, just two weeks ago, the first consistent opportunity to be a standing JFAC with a JFAC mission as he runs all of the SRO missions in the Pacific to include the Navy SRO, the Air Force SRO missions in the Pacific, and the Navy is at the doorway of giving us a Navy person to come and be the Deputy JFAC for that operation.

You might also know that we're pleased that just this past December Dave was also named to be a JTF Commander. He's a JTF Commander running all things associated with our operation in support of the National Science Foundation in Antarctica and into the South Pole. So we have that consistent mission. It is active from August until March of each year, going through the summer cycle which is the big cycle for them down there.

Admiral Fallon, Dave Deptula and I just went down to the South Pole to watch those magnificent Airmen from up in upstate New York who fly those C-130s that are on skis and how they do business, landing on the snow at the South Pole. It was magnificent.

I thought I was pretty proud of myself as Dave and Admiral Fallon and I stood at the South Pole. Minus 26 degrees centigrade, lighting our victory cigar so we could bring it back to our wives and show them that we were actually there. And I felt pretty proud of myself that I had survived such cold temperatures until my good friend Chuck Wall wrote me and said he's just been to Kazakhstan and it was minus 40. So I knew that I had been living the good life out in Hawaii and down at the South Pole and it wasn't really as cold as I thought it was.

We've got an opportunity with the George C. Kenney Headquarters to also continue this internationalizing our business, interdependency, because we have also asked Australia, Thailand, Singapore, Korea and Japan to come and live with us. Not send us a liaison. I don't want somebody who can in fact then only prepare a liaison and do the protocol pieces for visiting Japanese or visiting Koreans or visiting Thais, I want those officers supported by NCOs if they want to send them, I want them to be in the AOC, sitting at a desk, working an integral part of the business. Just like, and we're capturing this and stealing these ideas of course from our friends over in CENTAF as Chuck and General Moseley did the business over there, and Buck Buchanon is doing today and Gary North's just about ready to go do that here in just a couple of weeks. What they have done and learned there in CENTAF, we want to capture it and pull it into the Kenney AOC. Korea, Japan, Australia have already done that for us and we're looking for more to come and be a part of us.

On the other hand, Singapore has also reached out that hand of interdependency. They are building a command and control facility out in Singapore that they have asked us to come and participate in, and they've got a, as my friend Major General Rocky Limm, who is the Air Chief out there says, we've got a U.S.-only room out here that we have built just for you so you can go in and talk all things American and U.S. secrets. Now I've had a lot of fun with Rocky on this particular piece and I asked him if he got those folks who built the embassy in Moscow to come down and build it for him down there. [Laughter]. He surprisingly hasn't answered that question very much.

Let me tell you that I believe that in the Pacific, in PACOM, across our AOR, as big as it is and stretches so far, I believe we already have a footprint on interdependency. Interdependency lives there every day and continues to do good work every day. There's much more we can do. But there are opportunities, as our partners in industry who are giving us the next implements that will come into our service and as we bring those into the Pacific and bed those down with PACAF forces in PACAF locations, there are opportunities for us to make it even stronger.

I look forward to your questions. [Applause].

Q: How does PACAF figure into the U.S. effort to influence China in terms of force laydown changes or operations? Is there any progress toward mil-to-mil contact with your counterparts in the Chinese Air Force?

General Hester: Just on the wave top of the answers without going in great detail is that I have hosted over the past year three, four, five delegations of about 20 general officers each from China. We've had some nice discussions. We've been very very open, as open as we can possibly be. I've shown them everything that we are going to bed down in the future and what we're bedding down now and all of the exercises that we're running and who we're doing them with, and who is joining us to do them and what countries we go to to participate in exercises from India all the way around to Korea where we are every day.

I also took the opportunity to show them the results of Resultant Future last year when we had the opportunity to ship moving ships at sea. Now the Navy folks don't like that, but that's okay, because that's a part of the business we have to do, when 85 percent of our AOR is water, we need to find all of those targets that are on the water and be able to sink them. Dave Deptula did a great job of running that program for me, and when we dropped those JDAMS and they went through that ship and sunk that ship, it makes a powerful impression that we can in fact hit things that are moving and we can sink those big ships.

So we showed them everything we're thinking and what we're doing and how we're broadening our abilities in the AOR. Then I talked to them about where we're going to put things down.

Now it didn't come as any surprise, we have to put things on land, so it doesn't come as any surprise that their eyes get a little big when I talk to them about Guam and what we're going to have there. They are very aware that we have bombers there. They're very aware that we had fighters through there last summer and we took those fighters and then moved them on down from Mountain Home through Guam down to Kadina. So they're aware of that. That is the part that PACAF plays in terms of the military engagement and the application with the forces that are given to us by those back here in the United States to bed down in the Pacific.

The reciprocal of that, though, which is the heart and soul of what the discussion of engagement and military relationships is—is absolutely zero. I've tried to go. I've been told that I can't go this year. OSD has told me in working this process that they in fact are going to put the focus on getting the Navy into China this year, and a lot of that's because they've had ships that have visited some of their ports as the Navy has often done.

I did volunteer, by the way, to do a squadron exchange. Take a squadron of fighters and go to China, but that wasn't embraced either. So maybe we can get to that next year. [Laughter].

Q: You mentioned using a lot of technology now, and certainly a great part of our audience is producing a lot of that capability. The question here is about your capability to communicate with our allies in multilingual audiovisual methodology. Have you've had any exposure to that or not?

General Hester: We have not used any of that. Again, we rely principally, because so many of our allies have embraced English as the international language and so many of their officers and now NCOs speak the English language, you know from my experience in Japan that I tried to learn just a couple of words of Japanese and in fact was told, don't bother about doing that, said my friends from Japan. We want to practice our English on you. So English is the common language. Those who fly airplanes and we talk to as we fly airplanes in and around their countries, and those that come and live with us in the Kenney Headquarters, they all speak English as well. We just simply don't have a problem.

Let me just expound on that for just one second. As the Chief talked about Red Flag, all things Red Flag from Nellis north through the ranges in Alaska and we do a lot of work through ACC and through our own process to ensure that those who come and participate in those exercises on those ranges have a standard of English that is easy one, to understand; easy to be interoperable on the battlefield; and we've never had a problem with that. So that's where we focus. We don't do much the other way.

Now Mike Wooley, if he were here and had the ability to talk to you about things all SOF, he would in fact tell you that technology is leading the way with him in the ability to be able to engage with people face-to-face on the battlefield with a small computer that in fact he can look up the English word and with a thousand dialects or however many they can put into that chip, he can in fact get the word and show it to them on a computer screen, type out a little sentence, it comes up on a screen in their language and their dialect, and it is helping him to bridge that gap on the battlefield. So it's wonderful technology that we have.

Q: You touched on this a little bit, but you've been very outspoken in your praise of space professionals and the capabilities they bring into your command. Why is space support so integral to the PACAF missions you're tasked with?

General Hester: I think it comes from that slide we showed as to how big the AOR is. For us to be able to sit at a common operating picture in the Kenney Headquarters in the wonderful state of Hawaii there on Oahu and be able to understand what's going on in Sri Lanka, in India, Thailand, come back closer to even knowing what's happening in Guam so that we can prepare for the defense of Guam, we've got to have assets that can help us. You cannot put an air-breathing asset up for that length of time to provide you the persistence that you need. Space helps us with that. Space helps us with it with satellites. He is working on near space applications that will also help us. And of course it is through space that we in fact are able to transmit those images and that information that Lance [Lord] is able to provide for us back into that common operating picture that helps us to do business.

It is also in and through space that we're able then to transmit. As Dave Deptula becomes the JFAC of any operation, and we then deploy an Air Command Element out to be with those in the specific place where the event is happening, it is in and through space, then we in fact transmit that data and have that wonderful connectivity back and forth that helps us do our operation but also the transmittal of that data also helps us in making sure that we don't do any miscalculations. Either across a line or from the other side of the line this way. It is the transmission of that information.

So Lance's folks are very very helpful to us with space and in fact in recognition of that at his suggestion we hosted the first Space Symposium out there this past fall and we're going to have another Space Symposium this next fall coupled with my Commanders Conference, and coupled with the Pacific Air Chiefs Conference out there next October. We're very very excited about that because this gives us an opportunity to expose all things space to all of the Air Chiefs in all of the countries out there in the Pacific.

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