General William T. Hobbins
Commander, U.S. Air Forces in Europe
Air Warfare Symposium
Lake Buena Vista, Florida
February 2, 2006
General Hobbins: It's great to be here and share this stage with our Secretary of the Air Force and our Chief of Staff and what you see here with the talent on this stage and these four stars that are here—Paul Hester, Ron Keys, Bruce Carlson, Bill Looney, Lance Lord. I've got to tell you, Chief Murray, it's not about the years of service and experience that sits there. It's about the warrior ethos that this team brings together. The team said that. There's no parochial blockage. This is a team that's going to achieve the Secretary's vision.
I would be remiss if I didn't say it's a great honor to recognize AFA after 60 years of great support to our people, to our units. The annual awards that they give every year and the support on the Hill have been absolutely fantastic. Of course this symposium is just another example of how we put our air power advocates together.
So for me it is a great honor to say it's truly appreciated by the multinational team in USAFE, the men and women there, from Allied Air Component Command as well. It's a total force team, an Active, Guard, Reserve team.
So I've got a great opportunity today to share a little bit with you about some of our great accomplishments and show you how we're working towards achieving the Secretary and the Chief's vision of interdependence.
I have four hats. Many of you know that I'm the Air Component to EUCOM. That's kind of an anachronism that's carried over from the Cold War because it really should be European and African Command. I also have a NATO hat. That NATO hat is the Allied Air Component Command. I have a four star general who works in Brusen, Germany. He's a German four star. I am his air component. You heard Don Peterson mention the fact that I'm the Director of the Joint Air Power Competency Center. In that capacity I work for Lance Smith under the transformational hat that he has, Supreme Allied Commander, Transformation. And of course I've got this patch that you're all familiar with, the United States Air Forces Europe. It's your oldest MAJCOM. And I want you to know that regardless of which hat I wear, I'm really out for flying, fighting and winning as a valued and recognized member of an interdependent team of allies, joint services and coalition.
So let me tell you a little bit about USAFE. First of all, interdependence is a way of life. We work together, we live together, we fight together. This is an enormous continent. Much as Paul Hester told you about the thousand languages that he has and the tyranny of distance, et cetera, but we have three continents and 91 countries. For 64 years this has been a way of life for us, and I want you to understand that these are the wealthiest nations. We do over a billion dollars worth of trade with them annually. We have a theater that has delivered proven coalition forces—17 of 22 OIF coalition members and 12 of 19 OEF coalition members are all from this theater. And it's not just a coincidence. It's because active engagement pays off when it counts in going to war. In fact following 9/11 you would find the very first activation of the NATO's Article 5 where an attack on one is an attack on all and they sent their NATO AWACS to be part of Operation Noble Eagle.
I will tell you, the force protection events, it's challenging for our force. It's been here. And we have demonstrated that these terrorist attacks on 9/11 are in our own backyard. Madrid, Istanbul, and London are all parts of what we concern ourselves with every day.
We have an interdependent team with the Germans, 142 Bundeswehr Army officers are in fact guarding our gates today so our security police can be down in theater. They are proving that forces there are in fact to protect our bases.
We need our allies there in peace, and our allies there in war. And so you know, my bottom line point here is that really what we're building is trust and confidence through this daily interaction amongst our allies.
Now history has proven that interdependence has in fact an enduring concept. We have a heritage of success with interdependence in this theater. We've capitalized on the collective strengths. You notice Billy Mitchell there on the far left side of your picture. Three thousand sorties during World War I, our first CFACC—1,456 airplanes supporting 650,000 troops, allied and U.S. troops.
It was Carl Spatz who demonstrated with the precision bombing that he could pave the way through interdiction for our maritime and our ground forces.
Finally, you've got General William Tunner during the Berlin Airlift, along with seven nations on the ground and six nations in the air, all helping to achieve interdependence and helping solve a Berlin blockage.
If you look at what's happening now, you've got our A-10s that are working with the Army. You've got our AWACS—NATO AWACS and U.S. AWACS who are flying together, maintaining the situation awareness. You've got the NATO UN humanitarian missions through our C-17s and through our C-130s. We're leveraging what I call these diverse capabilities and our heritage has proven that our success will really capitalize on those diversities.
If you want to look at a good example, take a look at the NATO Response Force. This is very much like our Air Expeditionary Force. It's made up of modules of capability, and truly it is a coalition of the willing. The nations have to offer up that capability. You can see some samples there with the Czechs operating off of Sburni. And the Norwegians, for instance, offering the sea strategic lift. Of course the U.S. with its ISR and CEDE. France with its airlift, the air base ground offense from Netherlands and Spain. We're working these partnerships.
This is not totally something we can just brag about yet because a coalition of the willing means the nations that offer up those capabilities have to be willing to pay for them. So we're looking for NATO common funding procedures, and I know our COCOM is very much interested in that, making these multiple mission types from crisis management to non-commissioned evacuation, to humanitarian lift work.
A couple of good examples: NATO Katrina relief. What we had here was 12 flights, 39 NATO and Partnership for Peace nations contributed to that. What you see is German pumps, German trucks, German people, Czech blankets, Czech tents, and you've got airlift coming from Ukraine, from Canada, and of course using Ramstein. This was the NRF's first mission.
The second mission involved Pakistan just a month later. The NRF was called to conduct this mission in Pakistan and it marked the very first time a land component commander deployment. There were 42 nations involved with this, offering assistance of over 1,000 troops, 11 C-130s from six different nations—Denmark, France, Greece, Italy, Turkey and the UK. All supplies coming from 42 countries, and we even managed to put a mobile medical NATO team on that Ukrainian 124 and dealt with over 2,000 patients.
Now in an alliance that its effort is to break from its fight in paradigm, to slowly set this expeditionary mindset.
We have to look at now this international security assistance team. For those of you that don't know it, NATO is in fact occupying the blue and yellow circles with Provincial Reconstruction Teams—nine of them. Thirty-eight NATO and Partnership for Peace nations are participating in stability ops. The security ops are going on in the southeastern and northeastern sections below, but as we will see later this year, that stability ops will grow. It will actually have 16,500 NATO and Partnership for Peace troops contingent on these, setting up 15 Provincial Reconstruction Teams. This happens to be my four-star general's number one concern, getting this to happen the right way. I'm his air component for it. So when NRF 7 and 8 comes up, as a NATO Response Force we'll deal with our vulnerability for a year.
Many of you also know that following 9/11, NATO went into a NATO air policing role. That air policing role is shared by Wally Morehead as NATO Air Ismir South, and my Air North hat—responsible for 26-member nation territorial sovereignty and integrity. On 9/11 the need for air policing to defend became quite clear.
Now if you ask my British friends what this amounts to they would say this is "a dog's breakfast of command and control," multiple fighters, multiple nations. We have Poland. We have Slovakia with their MiG-29s, we have the Danish F-16s, and of course the Czech Grippins. Romania has MiG-21s that have brand new internal cockpits with color MFDs. Of course your German F-4s are participating as well as our Spain F-16s. These contingency operations have in fact proved that the force can act and achieve its capability in a situation where overflight happens in as little as 20 minutes for one specific country down to as little as five minutes.
We're doing a lot of joint and coalition training. You'll see that an immediate response, the JCS exercise Immediate Response is our rapid deployment of our forward deployed forces and strategic reserves. Clean Hunter is another example of how we're trying to train and certify the NATO Air Response Force, multiple nations participating. Cooperative Key, a Partnership for Peace exercise designed to promote interoperability. And of course I think many of you are familiar with the Anatolian Eagle which is our Turkish friends employing in their Conya range. And of course you have the tactical leadership program that occurs up at Firenz. There we have an Air Warfare Symposium that goes on six times a year. Our interdependence is strengthening our joint coalitions. It helps mitigate these challenges in this interdependent team. That's why these countries are all participating with us.
I was the Director of the Joint Air Power Competency Center. There are some really unique challenges that we have going on. First of all we've got to solve our way ahead for the airlift for this NATO Response Force. Clearly the C-160s and C-130s do not meet the outsized cargo requirement for NATO equipment. So taking a look at this they came up with a need for an aircraft like the A-400 M which nine countries are going to buy, delivering a load that's somewhere between the C-130 and the C-17. They took a page out of our Contingency Response Group and formed up what we call this NATO airfield activation concept. We're studying the C2 concept. We're studying the ability to use simulations. And we're taking a future page out of exercises and trying to work those exercises into the actual NATO Response Force timing.
The air defense in 2020 is there and of course the 2006 focus of the UAV and UCAV.
If there's ever an example of trying to leverage your experience, it's looking at what's going on with our NATO nations. Twenty-six countries with over 900 different systems, each service has its unique and independent system. Trying to put this together with the Joint Air Power Competency Center in a way that forges UAV interoperability between our allies is really an important role for us.
You may have heard of the African EUCOM humanitarian mission. In this case you've got C-130s flying out of Ramstein and going into Rwanda to pick up peacekeeping troops and actually flying them into the Chad and Sudan, on either side, to try and stop the dying there. This is enabling the African Union's success.
If we look at our strategic guidance you'll see our President has talked to us about expanding our role in Africa. You'll see that our Secretary has talked to us about not being intimidated by the tyranny of distance and time. And you'll see that our COCOM has said over and over again that we've got to no longer consider this as a single threat, but we've got to look at opportunities that require a commitment to multiple axis.
Finally, our Chief has told us that it's really important, interdependence between the total force sister service and coalitions are there for us to seek out. They know that our heritage supports that.
Many of you have heard of the arc of stability and the arc of instability, quoting Thomas Barnett's, "The Pentagon New Map." Well, these emerging threats of WMD and terrorism and narcotrafficking all exist in that red area. We didn't pay attention to the gap in the '90s. It was coming, so the gap came to us. What we wound up with in USAFE was 70-plus contingencies in this gap area, which proved that we needed to pay attention to each other and the capabilities that are required as we start thinking about which directions to move in NATO.
So you'll listen to my COCOM, General Jones will tell us we need to move east and we need to move south. The reason for that is quite simple. There's a lot of roots of terrorism, there's a lot of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, there's narcotrafficking, and of course there's some very important economic interests that are in the Black Sea. So moving east to Bulgaria and Romania makes a lot of sense. That's why you see the Army's, two divisions going down to multiple light, modular, deployable brigades like the Eastern European Task Force. They will use fields like in Romania to run exercises. And moving south with the Southern European Task Force based out of Dal-Molin. And of course we have this OEF trans-Sahara situation where the line that exists between Chad, Niger, Mali, Mauritania and Algeria is also important there because that's where we're finding the roots of terrorism growing.
So our presence in these areas is really important to us and that's why our COM, our combatant commander, wants us to go there.
I think I've showed you that USAFE is in fact an engaged command. We have an expeditionary mindset throughout all these missions. And just like General Hester has talked about his warfighting headquarters, we've stepped out to do the same thing. At 16th Air Force we've combined 3rd and 16th into one NAF. We now have a Joint Force Air Component Commander, or Joint Force Commander capable leader. We have the ability to set up a CFACC and move them anywhere.
You can see that what we're doing today is we're very close to the EUCOM Operation Center. We have an Air and Space Operation Center that's deployed to al-Udaid. We're working this space problem of getting imagery to our friends in Ghana, getting imagery to those people in Guinea, in the Gulf of Guinea where it's so important for that imagery to help those host nations work on betting the terrorists back. Of course we've got our DCGS which is linked directly to our AOC.
We're working on forging an interdependent mobility picture. As you can see, we're halfway on the way to most theaters. The aircraft are moving that way and I don't need to remind you again, but it's just really important that as we move that mobility forward we do that in concert with our joint sister Army service and Marine Corps services as they move into those expeditionary locations.
Many of you have seen this picture of Ramstein, the new gateway projects that are going on. The largest DoD military construction project this year.
This is the new Kaiserslautern Military Community Center. It's about $344 million. It's got 844,000 square feet under roof, four-plus multi-theater, a Macaroni Grill, Power Zone of your Dreams, and a 350-bed hotel. It's a holistic approach that we have to this whole setup.
We have a cargo demonstration. This is the advanced cargo terminal. It does everything automated. You see that train moving up and down on those tracks, there are no human beings allowed behind the walls. This train moves about, picks up pallets and puts them into pallet hotel. There are 534, I call them Hollywood squares, and they load the pallets in order and they pick them off in order, and they can load a C-5 in an hour where it used to take 4.5 hours.
The refueling hydrants are located underneath the ramp on the base, allowing refueling of a C-5 in just 30 minutes instead of the two hours it used to take with the multiple trucks.
So our AMC cargo ramp—this has really become a central hub for our mobility of the future.
For those of you that are familiar with Spang, you'll see that there's a brand new parking area there. They filled in the complete side of that hill that dropped off into the woods. All of you will remember that. There's parking for at least 13 C-5s there now and they've already begun receiving their airplanes.
We've got a revolutionary medical mindset going on right now. I think you heard the Secretary talk. It takes less than an hour to get off the battlefield with a wound and into surgery. It takes less than 24 hours to get you back to Ramstein, to the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center where there are 2,000 Navy Corpsmen, Marines, Air Force, Army medics, all working together. They take the injured off the battlefield; they've done it over 5,000 times in this war. They've moved 25,600 patients from 38 different nations. This is such a success story because we get them back to Ramstein, we get them into the hospital at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center through what we call a contingency staging facility. Then we move them back off into the aeromedical evacuation system which our troops do so well, to get them back to the States where they need that surgery. We've taken care of 38 nations and they're doing it extremely well.
I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about the fact that our fighters from Aviano, Lakenheath, and of course Spang are doing quite a number of AEF days with our sister services in support of the war on terrorism. Seventeen exercises, 274 days, 17 countries, and we're still doing the AEF mission. So joint training is building that joint relationship.
We're building this trust and confidence that I mentioned earlier. It's about stability and security through engagement. If you'll notice the first picture I put up, it's about the 86th Airlift Wing who has got their C-130s down in Iraq. I had the pleasure of visiting with the very first three Iraqi C-130 crews. That's their E model with their flag on the tail. They have 50 maintainers who were very proud to be there.
We're working on the medical side in areas like Georgia, and that's on the other side of the Black Sea. Again, to build good will, build those trusting and confident relationships. Jumping out of airplanes with our SOCEUR forces in Senegal, doing static line jumps, and of course up in Mali the same way. Romania gives us an opportunity where we can train in ROMEX '05. I build that interoperability with this continuous engagement of the Total Force—Guard, Reserve, Active, PFP nations. This happens to be Alabama's Partnership for Peace nation.
So all in all I want to leave you with the concept that we're building an interdependent force. Our engagement, I believe, leads to specific partner credibility. When we show up, the power of our presence, just like it does in the Pacific as Paul Hester mentioned, it means a lot to those people. The fact that you're there gives their Air Force Chief an awful lot of credibility and power. The credibility then leads to their independence. And their independence strengthens our interdependence.
So I'd like to thank you for the opportunity to be here today to tell you a little bit about what USAFE's doing to create and forge this interdependent force. I send hearty greetings from my men and women that are there and all those multinational forces. I'm proud to be here, proud to serve, and I'm looking forward to your questions.
Thank you.
Q: What have these centers meant for your command and what new areas of focus do you anticipate turning your attention to in the future in this area?
General Hobbins: The Centers of Excellence have just started. Really, the Air Power Dominance Center has just started to really collate ideas from some great fighter, fighting ethos that comes to us from the various nations around. We haven't really got into the Air Dominance Center, but the Center of Fires, control fires up at Spangdahlem, for instance, we're forging ahead with the airspace initiative there down in Baumholder and [TRA-205] where we have the ability to bring lots of fighters in.
One of the initiatives that we talked to the Secretary about was trying to get a situation where we could build a control center and actually use our network centric devices to simulate JSTARS, Rivet Joint, the large aircraft, and take advantage of the fact that we're training NATO sorties every single day in that TRA and in that airspace.
Now Baumholder has not been available for our air-to-surface things, but as the Army moves down, it gets lower in its presence there, we're looking for opportunities to move in. So all in all I would say is we've done a good job with that.
The warfighting headquarters. As General Hester mentioned, we're not sitting back on our haunches waiting for this to happen. We have in fact a CFACC there in General Wally Morehead and he is truly a joint force commander, qualified Airman. We have taken the elements of a warfighting headquarters, which is an AFOR staff, an AFOR and of course the AOC. We've looked at it from the employment standpoint of if it were to move forward how do we achieve meeting the componency role that I have as a MAJCOM commander, if in fact we get down to managing, or getting our management headquarters to shrink. We know that we can, in fact, support that if we continue to keep the right planners and the right engagement people back. We're doing that today. As I mentioned, we have the 32nd AOG deployed to al-Udaid so we're working on that concept. And thanks to the great work by the men and women out in PACAF and the Kinney Center, we are sharing some great ideas back and forth. And that's why I said this team of four stars that's leading right now, really have a great opportunity to bring that together. Later this spring we hope to bring the CAFMAF conference together and bring this to some sort of final resolution we can present to the Chief and Secretary.
Q: Do you anticipate more country to country engagement as you look eastward, the changes that we see in Europe?
General Hobbins: The bilateral piece is very important. There are various capabilities these countries are dying to have us along as their partner. Clearly as new NATO members in Romania, they would love for us to do a lot of our training out of Badabag Training Center. They have a training range that's twice as big as anything we have. They would like to capitalize on the fact that our airborne brigades are going to be available to train with them in a joint air and ground environment, so they see that. So I'm sensing that not only in countries like Bulgaria and Romania, but also Ukraine who is a Partnership for Peace nation, and is very interested in us being there to mentor them along through the social progress as well, and with their militaries. And they are interested in how we do air policing and how they would be part of it.
So I see those kinds of things happening to the east and the south. In Algeria, another area, the Air Chief there really wants us to come down. The Tunisians, the Moroccans are very interested in us doing training in their ranges.
Q: You made it clear since taking over at USAFE that information operations and battlefield awareness are an integral part of air dominance. What steps does the command need to take today to stay abreast with the rapid developments in the field of information technology?
General Hobbins: We have a great deal of command and control differences that are going on. As you might imagine, as we brought countries like Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania into the NATO fold, they came with the old Soviet radar systems. Their recognized air picture does not match our recognized air picture so we've got to find a way to meld these things together.
It's no secret to all of you that [AX] has been on the books for about 21 years and hasn't been fielded yet. That's the new command and control system.
We have a lot of our allies and NATO nations there that are on Link-16 which should really serve us well in terms of being able to share information, datalink with those countries. But there are others that haven't even begun that.
Many are very interested in what we're doing in the tactical targeting network technology. So as the new commander what I tend to do is bring the concepts forward, at least have them understand it, and then we can talk about the ways we're going to connect. On the ground it's even more important. I believe that we've got to get together with our host nation, and we've done this with Germany already, to build these networks—not only our air-to-ground networks, but also our ground-to-ground networks with our first responders. We have very poor connectivity with the medical universities in Germany, for instance. So one of the challenges I've set out to do is say let's connect police, fire, ambulance and medical so that we at least know where our strengths exist. Who is resident expert in bird flu? And who is going to be able to handle meningococcal meningitis? Those kinds of things that we're seeing need to be networked in order to take care of the power and the synergy that we have together.
As you know, we've got the great World Cup soccer games coming up. Italy is going to play the United States in Kaiserslautern. It should be a great event. I'm looking forward to it. But at the same time there is a lot of information that we need to share with each other before we get into that great big event in order to be safe.