General Ronald E. Keys
Commander, Air Combat Command
Air Warfare Symposium
Lake Buena Vista, Florida
February 2, 2006
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General Keys: Last year I was here as the Air Force XO and I talked a lot about joint interdependent concepts. I spoke about the importance across the Air Force of balancing our portfolio in terms of risk and in terms of transformation, and about the dawning of the age where we fight together no longer because we can, but because we must. We can't afford to fight apart. I explained the emerging difference between interoperability, which we've talked a lot about over the years and which I more or less define as the capabilities that I have that are compatible with yours and leverage both our capabilities; and interdependence, or the idea that my capability is something you don't have, you can't live without, and you trust me to be there when you need it. That's a big step. That's a difficult step. We're still working our way through a lot of that interdependence.
Today what I want to do is just tie those ideas to what I think they mean for you, the talented industry that gives me the technology, the things to go and do the missions that I must. I want to start by putting it into context, the context in which I and many of you operate, and giving you my view of where we're going in Air Combat Command (ACC), and then telling you where I need your help and your focus.
As you know, we had a challenging 2005—Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Iraqi Freedom, Operation Noble Eagle, Katrina, Rita, Wilma, and Pakistan. We were busy around the globe, and that's where our priority focus still is. Despite all the things you see in the media and all the discussions about budget and everything else, the primary focus is that as long as America's sons and daughters are in harm's way, we'll continue to ensure that they get the best equipment, training, organization and leadership that we can provide. That's the only easy choice that I have. It forces hard choices back home. We're going to take the shortages there. Every decision is about what we must stop doing if we're to start or continue doing what we must do.
Those wars and operations, if you will, are my operational challenge, but meanwhile there are a number of institutional challenges for all of us. I use the shorthand, and some of you have heard this before, of barbecue (BBQ), budget, BRAC (Base Realignment and Closure) and QDR (Quadrennial Defense Review). I'll step through them quickly.
The budget, it's a tough look out there. People say you're not really losing a budget, we're not cutting the budget, we're just cutting the rate of increase to the budget, but against the plan that I had, money that I thought was going to be there is not going to be there. It's the same effect as a cut to me.
We've reduced our personnel expenditures by almost $12 billion over the Future Years Defense Program structure (FYDP). The Air Force needs to cut another almost $3 billion through '11. That squeeze is due to the federal deficit, operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, O&E here at home, the hurricane reconstruction supplementals, not to mention the fuel price squeeze. That puts us square in the middle of what looks to me like a money drawdown.
Last fiscal year in ACC we cut back $402 million, including $132 million in facility projects and $71 million in peacetime flying hours. That's a philosophical divide that we have never crossed before, to cut flying hours in order to pay bills. We got a lot of that funding back, but while we waited to get it back, time was wasting. Sorties didn't get flown, training didn't get done. You don't make up that loss in readiness, so we lost some combat capability. We deferred maintenance. Everything that we deferred, everything we didn't do, built a bow wave for tomorrow, which is today. Things we put off the last fiscal year didn't get done, and while our budget increased this year, it's really not for the programs that I need to modernize my force. It's for transfer of programs. And I'm spending the majority of that money on the Global War on Terrorism; where I need to spend it. Where I ought to spend it...
But that's forced us to think in ways that we haven't before. The foot-stomper for you that are out there trying to make the things that I need is that when I sit with my staff and we make some of these hard decisions, I ask now what's the first increment of military-useful capability going to cost me? Is that going to integrate both with my legacy force as well as my future force? And could I buy that first increment now and still get the next increment if I find another discretionary dollar? And this is really important…the central question is, and which increment is good enough? I may not buy the whole elephant, but I need to buy the part of the elephant that's going to fix one of my problems in a leveraging way.
When you come to me with a program that I've got to eat it all or I get none, that program I don't think is going to compete well certainly in the near future, because that reduces my options to plug and play upgrades to my force. Then this will frustrate you as it frustrates me, because you're going to come in with something that is really a great piece of gear and I'm going to look at those great ideas and I'm going to convince myself that they actually work, and then I'm going to walk away because I'm already good enough in that area and it's not the leveraging point in my force, and I am not good enough in another area that does leverage my force. I just have to make that hard call. Another day, another time, I would have bought it and slapped it on, but I won't be able to do that.
The second B is BRAC. We've all suffered through that, you probably more than I. Now it's law, and we're going to implement the basing and realignment decisions. It's going to cost me $255 million to implement BRAC. That, I guess, is the good news. The bad news is that closet full of money that I talked about last time I was here did in fact have a secret trap door in the back and someone did in fact raid that account, and so there's not enough money in there to pay that bill. So a lot of these BRAC bills have to come out of the top line of the MAJCOMs as they operate, and that means less money to do other things. Not all bad. BRAC got us some of the things that we wanted to do. It didn't get me everything I wanted to do. I'm still facing mismatches in infrastructure, platforms and people, so we're not finished by a long shot, but we're working our way through it.
QDR. Everybody I'm sure is excited about the QDR. The report's about to be rolled out. Many of you have probably seen the sub-rosa copies, I'm sure. It's a perfect example of making some hard decisions now to preserve a force that's affordable, adaptable, and relevant for the next 30 years.
Those Vipers and Eagles that we bought in 1974 and I flew against when I was flying F-4s, have carried us well to today. They will carry us short term for the future. But 30 years from today, the Vipers and Eagles will not be relevant to the fight that we may have to fight and we've got to make sure that we preserve the capability to make that next leap.
And that's not just platforms. That's infrastructure. I'm sitting in a situation where my infrastructure is getting old. I've got things spread out all over bases that are eating me alive on maintenance. They're difficult to maintain. They're difficult to heat. They're difficult to cool. They don't have fiberoptics in them. I can't bring all of my force together and get those economies of scale.
That's what we're hoping to do through the QDR, but it breaks some glass and I'll tell you the war clouds are gathering and you can hear the tribal drums. They're beating. These are some tough decisions. We have to stop doing things that we've always done and do things differently. We've got to do it, deliver precise, responsive, persistent global effects to the warfighter today, tomorrow and 30 years from tomorrow, and all else is rubbish.
Now in ACC we're working on five focus areas to kind of get our arms around some of this so we don't ride off in all directions: people, expeditionary operations, recapitalization, organization, and transformation. And these ought to look fairly familiar to you because you started us down the road on many of them.
On these paths, the first focus area is people. Just like everyone has said, people underpin the foundation of our combat power. People that are intelligent, skilled, highly trained and motivated. Those are the professionals that are the indispensable ingredient of our warrior culture. We need to strengthen that culture of Airmen of courage, Airmen of commitment, Airmen of discipline, and Airmen of honor, because these are hard times. A climate of change, of shrinking budgets and personnel rosters, a climate of dangerous operations. We're a culture of wingmen and leaders, leading, training, mentoring and protecting each other, and we need that focus more than ever now. And it doesn't matter what we have and it doesn't matter how good the equipment is if the people can't operate it, if the people aren't healthy, if they aren't trained, if they aren't enthusiastic about their job and about what they're doing.
So we've got to make sure we retain that edge. Make no mistake, there are people who have figured out that the strength of our training is the strength of our force and they're coming after us. They're as smart as we are, they're starting to train like we are, they're developing tactics like we are, and they are a potent force and they are not our allies.
Our second focus area is expeditionary operations. If you take that plus the people, that sort of bounds that. We're at war, we've been at war, we need to focus on those areas with people in expeditionary operations. That's why we exist, to take the fight to the enemy whenever and wherever. The ability to pick up, pack up, deploy expeditionary, unpack, plug in and execute, in a coalition environment as well as a unilateral or joint operation. Quickly, surely, repeatedly, plugging and playing across the Air Force, then sustaining operations for as long as it takes. That's an absolute. That's why we're here.
So we've got to cultivate this light, lean sort of force that can do all those things, but we've also got to cultivate in our minds that it's not just about airplanes and getting there quick. We've got to be able to think expeditionary in our culture, in our processes, in our training, in our rules. I'll give you an example.
Some of you have heard me use this before, it's one of those apocryphal examples. As we were fighting the war in the Balkans we were going to move our Predators into one of the friendly Balkan states and we needed to put in a concrete pad so I could put the tower up so I could control my Predators. It was going to take six months to contract that. Hell, as it turned out, we were only in the fight for 78 days. So we've got to have a process that lets me put up a pad to control my Predators faster than the war is over.
But as we worked through the procedures and rules we had, they were perfectly fine for an in-garrison peacetime situation because we wanted to make sure the concrete was the best price and it was going to be military standard and it was going to last for a thousand years, but I needed it tomorrow and I needed it to operate for 78 days. Those are the kinds of processes and rules that we've got to get back into. That's part of being an expeditionary air force, and there are lots and lots of those examples out there.
What I need from you is the new technology that's relevant in an expeditionary sense. That means it's going to be sustainable in an expeditionary environment. The heat of the desert, or the humidity and rain in Southeast Asia, wherever, it's got to work, it’s got to be mobile. So if I've got a pod that's running at 60 percent Full Mission Capability (FMC) because of dust and heat, or pedo tubes that peel in the humidity of an aircraft shelter, I'm not getting expeditionary equipment. I'm not happy.
If it takes a C-5 to move a fire truck, I'm not getting expeditionary equipment. Help me here. I need stuff I can pack up, I can take, I can operate, that I don't need an army of contractors to maintain, and I can at least fight for 90 days with an austere sustainment line. We need to be self-sufficient and we need to be sustainable and we need to be plug and playable.
The third area for me is recapitalization. That sort of sets aside the first two which are really war-focused, making sure that we've got people that are ready to go into harm's way; then recapitalization. We talked a lot about that, but it's absolutely critical to my future. I don't know how many of you out there are driving 50 year-old cars, but I'll damn bet you that you're not driving them today. You bring them out on Sunday afternoon when the sun is high, the traffic is low, you drive about 30 miles an hour down the middle of the road, particularly down here in Florida I know you drive down the middle of the road. [Laughter] But my 50 year-old cars I'm taking to Indianapolis and I’m running them in the mud and the blood and the beer every day. It is tough to do.
My maintenance man hours are going up, my unscheduled maintenance is going up, my fixed rate is going down. For all of those of you who are in the business, you know that's bad news. The next thing that falls off a cliff is how many airplanes you have on the ramp ready to go and fly. I've got to fix that problem.
My approach to that is three-fold. One, I talk about new/new, old/new, and the last choice, new/old. New/new means I have to have a new buy of the most relevant technology that I can get my hands on and afford; both for my infrastructure and my platforms. The Raptor, the JSF, the Global Hawk, the Predator B, new buildings that are energy efficient, plumbed for fiber, all those kinds of things. I need that sort of recapitalization. I'm on a recapitalization for my buildings in ACC about every 227 years. Now if you ran your capital account like that you'd be out of business fairly soon. You’d spend more time patching the roof than getting your work done.
Then I go to old/new which means I take those legacy platforms that have good life in them, and I take that great technology that you bring to me, and I make these platforms networkcentric. I get more information into and out of the bombers. I get more information out of the F-22. I make sure I can share all of that capability across my force. I give airplanes the ability to do things precisely. I change the data buses so they can carry the J series weapons. All of those kinds of things. I do the R&M upgrades. That means that if I have to reengine a fleet or if I have to reskin wings, I do that so that I can carry these airplanes at the area where I now have got enough money and enough time to renew the force. There are some hard choices because in some cases it takes so long to put some of this stuff in that I don't get my return on investment. So in some cases, there's going to be the gold team and there's going to be the not gold team, and we're going to take that not gold team and when it stops getting supportable we want to get rid of it.
As [Secretary of the Air Force Michael W. Wynne] said, that's not easy either. There are a lot of people out there that are worried about me being efficient, but not being efficient in their particular district. [Laughter] That's a national tragedy. I've got 110,000 people that work for me and 1,000 airplanes, and I've got a lot more people managing my airplane fleet and my people than really is productive. We have to work our way around that.
The next focused area, the fourth area, is organization. That's just a realization that the way we organize, it matters. The way our warfighters organize and how we plug into their operation; that matters. Air dominance isn't just about airplanes. It's about our operators and analysts. It's about weapons. It's about the operating node between us and the enemy and how we plug into the joint force becomes very important.
The question we have to ask is if we started with a clean sheet of paper, would we look like we do today? Would we still have BattleLabs? Would the Air Expeditionary Force Center work for me? Would we have 17 networking operation security centers? Would we have different skills on a tactical air control party team?
For those of you who want the cheat sheet, the answers are no, probably not; no; definitely no; and yes. [Laughter] And there are a lot more of those questions out there. From Air Operation Centers to warfighting headquarters to associate fighter units to city basing, we're changing the face of our organizations and the processes that we run on.
The final area that I thought about long and hard is transformation. Every time you talk about transformation, you get a group of folks in there and it's like a goat looking at a new gate. They know the word, but they really don't know what transformation is and you can't go to a store and buy a box of transformation. Transformation is a culture. It's challenging the old ways of doing things. It's not a product. Part of transformation is as simple as stopping some of the stuff we've been doing for 20 or 30 years.
I went out to my folks and I was explaining this. I said, “you know, when I was a young major down in the bowels of the Pentagon, we didn't have e-mail. We got a hard copy message. And I got this message when I was managing the missile program and the target program, and I read that. [Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Air Force General] Dick Myers was down there with me. We read that and we went, ‘this is the dumbest idea I have ever heard of.’ Now back then I just took the message crumpled that beauty up, put it in a burn bag figuring that no one would be stupid enough to send a message like that a second time and if they did I could look in my files and honestly say, ‘you know, I've looked here. It's not in my file. Could you retransmit that and give me another month to work that?’ And it never came back.”
The point of that is if you're doing something that you really think is not value-added, skip it one time and see what happens. See if anybody notices. [Laughter] [Applause]
If nobody notices, let's get the message out to stop it and we'll declare a victory. If it's not going to help us win today's fight or prepare us for the future, we can't do it anymore. We've got to stop doing that. Take our people, take our money, and go do something relevant. We get that relevance by asking the questions … How much recapitalization and transformation can I afford? How much is good enough?
In the realm of smart operations, because I've been through the pain of quality Air Force, and I'll tell you kids, we ain't going down that road while I'm Commander of Air Combat Command. [Laughter] We're going to change our processes and we're going to save some people and we're going to make some money.
I communicated to all my wings. I said, “all right, you guys are so smart, I know you're at least as smart as I was when I was a wing commander and I always thought I was smarter than the folks that were writing the rules, so come tell me what are you doing better than anybody else in the Air Force, and tell me what you could be doing better than anybody in the Air Force but you're prevented by policy or rule or law.” They came back with 191 things they thought they were doing better and they came back with 227 things that they were prevented from doing by some law or policy, etc.
When I sent it out I said, “now, I want you to understand I'm serious about this.” And I realize as I go around and I meet with my units, one of them will say, “sir, I've got a policy question for you. I know this is a policy that I signed and my name is at the bottom of it and I know it is dumber than dirt.”
So when I sent it out I told the folks, listen, if it's dumb, it's not my policy. Even if I signed it the first time. [Laughter] So do not be bashful about this. And they weren't.
We had 31 initiatives that just by the stroke of a pen, and it happened to be my pen, we could institute. That's the road we're going down. We're going to shed some of this administrivia that we can't afford to do anymore. We're going to push back up to the Pentagon those things that they're making us do or we're going to stop doing them and see if they've figured out we've stopped doing it.
Here's the important part. Even when we talk about transformation, the money that we spend on transformation has got to provide us capabilities we can't live without, can't get anywhere else, which is the interdependent part of this whole thing. I've got to balance that portfolio that I own with a healthy mix of command and control, Intelligence/Surveillance/Reconnaissance (ISR), kinetic systems, Electronic Warfare (EW), Information Operations (IO), and I've got to manage that on a limited budget which includes the training, the sustainment. Because I don't know when, I don't know where and I don't know what, but I know I'm going to get called out again.
Now are we making any progress on the interdependent front? Yes, we are. I'm a little concerned this interdependent thing only runs one way. It runs from the Air Force to everybody else. So far the only interdependent stuff I've gotten from the Army is I'm driving their convoys and they're not guarding my bases. [Laughter] So I'm a little bit agitated about that.
But what are we doing? Well, we've got a Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Center of Excellence out at Creech Air Base. That is a great idea. We've got it commanded by an Army brigadier general. I saw an article that was sort of bad-mouthing the fact that we had an Army brigadier out there in charge of that. Damn it, that's what I wanted. I wanted an Army brigadier out there in charge of it because I want the Army to come play with us and I want to understand their use of tactical UAVs and I want them to understand our use of operational UAVs. It is a good thing for the force. We need to learn how we can become interdependent on that front.
We're standing up an airspace, Interactive Authoring and Display System (IADS), IO, an all-things-aggressors unit at Nellis Air Force Base. We've got Navy, Marine, RAF, and RAAF members coming to that unit. That's about as interdependent as you get.
Just in operations, we've put an intel officer position on our RC-135 and he's got connectivity back to the big agencies. Immediate, real-time. People sitting there waiting to talk to him. When we've got to get information vetted, he can do it. In some cases we've off-ported signals to a linguist that we didn't have. We got them analyzed, sent back, and we actually consummate an operation that quick. We've off-ported information from the airplane to people on the ground who happen to have the dialect linguist on the ground with them instead of us having it in the airplane or having it somewhere in an agency somewhere, so we collect the information, send it to them, they read it and go, “yes, this is what it means,” they tell us what it means, and we pass it on to the people who have to act on it. That's interdependent. We all don't have to have it, but we all can use it.
We're doing anti-mortar queuing to ground parties, the JSTARS. Nowhere in the book did we buy that airplane to do that sort of thing, but we figured out how to do that. People are relying on us to provide that capability. We figured out Link-16 tasking with our special tactics units for close air support and reduced the time it takes to get a guy on target once he's in the orbit overhead by 50 percent. We're starting to use our Red Horse and Civil Engineers and Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) training to train our aircraft that have pods.
We're going out there and we're looking for change detection, and we're looking for Improvised Explosive Device (IED) detection, but we really never do that until we get downrange. We've got to double up and catch up with our Red Horse and Civil Engineer (CE) guys. They're all the time out there digging holes and filling holes and burying stuff. Then I want to run across that range and see if I can tell what's changed with my targeting pods. There's nowhere in our training tables that says we should do that, but we've got to do it. That's transformation. That's interdependent transformation.
We're working on how we train our folks to work as a maneuver element with folks on the ground. When I say “maneuver element,” that means I'm keeping track of you, keeping track of the bad guys, I'm talking to people on the ground about what's going on, I'm providing overwatch with my pods. We developed ambush training for the folks that are driving our convoys so we keep our convoy operators up to speed. We wouldn't have had that a couple or three years ago. So things are humming. There's an old cavalry cliché that goes “I want gunsmoke more than horseshit.” This stuff I'm talking about, that's the gunsmoke. That stuff you see in the media and elsewhere about the Air Force not being an interdependent joint force is the other stuff.
Now I promised I'd tell you what I thought interdependence meant for you, and here's my basic filter. Some of you have heard this—faster, cheaper, better. That's all I'm asking. Something that needs to be done better at a price I can afford, and that of course includes doing new things that I can't do right now. Something done faster that needs to be done faster. People run into me and I say, “I can reduce your process here by 50 percent,” but I'm already doing it in three minutes, and I may not want to pay for a minute and a half that will cost me a billion dollars. There’s got to be a business case there. Two years ago or three years ago or four years ago I might have said great, I believe in constant improved processes, etc. But now I'm going to wait until I can get the 75 percent increase or that decrease is one that absolutely lets me nail the target. It's got a cause and effect on the battlefield that I can't do now and I have to do in the future.
Cheaper is not just money, but it certainly is money. Like they say in Washington, when they tell you it's not about the money, it's about the money, but cheaper in terms of systems, people, and the sustainment for those systems and people. Can I make it cheaper?
Then there are five abilities that I need you to focus on. Things have got to be spiralable. I can't wait for the entire technical package. I need to push things out into the Global War. I want those spirals to be backward capable. There's nothing that irritates the hell out of me more then when I get a new thing and now I've got to spend $100 million on integration costs because in some cases I've got to back away from that new thing that I wanted because I can't pay the integration costs. We've got to figure out how to do that much, much better.
Whatever you're bringing has got to be sliceable. This is the eat the whole elephant or the elephant a piece at a time debate. Really, that's sort of a programmatic issue. But when someone starts stealing my money, and I guarantee you people will steal my money, can I salvage that first militarily useful increment of capability and still make a difference? Is it still going to leverage my force? Will I be able to operate better because of it?
It's got to be joint nettable. I want the compatibility built in. If you come to me with some proprietary system that can't get into the GIG or can't speak Link-16 or TBMCS or the wave forms that we're using, I am not going to be keen on changing out my entire network. If it's so good and so much better then I need to have a plan of how do I get to the point that that is the net and how do I bring along the legacy stuff that I have on the net that I have?
Reusable. A lot of times when I spiral everything I have in the platform, you tear all of that out and put all new stuff in. I really would rather spiral in increments. Or I'd like to be able to take that stuff out, put it on another platform that's maybe not quite as smart, and reuse some of that, reuse some of the sensor. Maybe it's not the greatest sensor, but it's better than what this thing has. So think about how do we repackage some of this stuff?
Then of course I've got to be supportable on the road and I've talked about that.
The key things for me are compatible open architectures, web base, self-forming, self-healing, IP addressable networks, collaborative tools, predictive tools, machine-to-machine conversations and fusions, that meta data ability to move information across the battlefield and then fuse it into knowledge, decision-ready. Not decision quality, but decision-ready knowledge.
That's not a theory. We're doing a lot of that every day and we're looking at where we have an opportunity to find that leveraging point of our force. Right now I've got 150 aircraft and nearly 8,000 people deployed at 29 locations worldwide. Since 9/11, ACC has deployed almost 10,000 aircraft and 270,000 people to 222 locations. And it's serious work.
Lee Harris in his book about civilization and its enemies wrote that, "Forgetfulness occurs when those long accustomed to civilized order can no longer remember a time in which they had to wonder whether their crops would grow to maturity without being stolen, whether children would be sold into slavery by victorious foe...” They forget, in short, that there's ever been a category of human experience called The Enemy.
Before 9/11, that was what had happened to us. The very concept of the enemy had been banished from our moral and political vocabulary. An enemy was just a friend we hadn't done enough for yet. Or perhaps there was just a misunderstanding or an oversight on our part, something we could correct. But the enemy is someone who's willing to die in order to kill you. And while this is true, that the enemy always hates us for a reason, it's his reason and not ours. He does not hate us for our faults any more than for our virtues. He sees a different world from ours and in the world he sees we are his enemy.
Ladies and gentlemen, we've been at war for 15 years, but there are again forgetful people in our country. I guarantee you none of them wear the wings and the sword of Air Combat Command. We will go wherever we must, whenever we must, for as long as we must until this curse of terrorism is over.
To those of you who will be our friend in this, you'll find no more faithful friend than we. To those of you who would be our enemies, remember, we will be faithful at that, too.
If you're a terrorist and wish to be the Emir of Fallujah, I've got some good news. I make a new opening about every three days. [Laughter] [Applause] I've got some bad news, you're on day one already. [Laughter] If you're a terrorist and you've got static on your phone, that's me. That contrail overhead, that's me. That shadow passing over you, that's me. That computer that will not boot, that's me. That noise you thought you heard until it's too late, that was me. And that will continue to be me until our children and grandchildren and those of freedom-loving nations everywhere emerge from this cloud of terrorism into the sunshine of security and choice that's our birthright.
So ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of more than 165,000 men and women of Air Combat Command, the Air Reserve and the Air Guard that proudly put on the wings and shield of Air Combat Command when we go to war, that's our pledge to you.
Thank you for listening to me.
Q: In the face of the persistent and emerging challenges, and with notions of jointness and interdependency in mind, do you feel there are ample numbers of air liaison officers, tactical air controllers, and especially combat controllers in the field to meet the future demands in the air-to-ground domain?
General Keys: Right now, no. In the future we think we'll have enough. Our concept is if there are going to be 46 brigades or how many ever brigades that are going to be out there. What we calculate is how many brigades would possibly be online at any one time, and how many tactical air control parties you would need in Enlisted Terminal Attack Controllers (ETACs). Then, of course we teach out at EGOS, joint terminal air controllers from the Army, the Marines, the Air Force, anybody who comes out there. So we've said yeah, the Army is going to have some of these Joint Terminal Attack Controllers (JTACs) and we think by carefully managing who is where, there's no reason that someone who's cleared, for example, to call in artillery can't call in a Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) as long as it's not in a dangerous, close kind of situation. As long as you're not in a situation where you have to stack airplanes and decide how people come in and what's the run-in and have to do bug splat and make sure the collateral damage Rules of Engagement (ROE) are met and everything like that. If you've got a phone and you've got my number, you're qualified to get fires.
We think by balancing that to make sure that true Close Air Support (CAS) is true CAS and handled by professionals, the rest of the stuff that's more like battlefield air interdiction or whatever we're going to call it, it doesn't have to be done by those tactical air control parties. Those folks need to bring that mini-Air Operations Center (AOC) capability to the battlefield, but they don't necessarily have to be with every company.
Q: With the demise of the B-52 standoff jammer, what are you working on as options for this capability?
General Keys: Mostly PowerPoint right now. [Laughter]
I talked with some of you earlier on this. This goes back to the system of systems. Again, this is one of those ideas, a good idea. We've got a big airplane, it's got a lot of electrical power, it's got a lot of area to put some fairly sophisticated antennas on it, but then when you start figuring out the digital receivers and how you're going to tune it and run the wires and do some of the other stuff, the costs starts to get high and the time starts to slip. So now it's not an attractive a feature. So how do you do it?
We're still going to do it with some sort of system of systems. The Growlers are going to be there. We're going to have our stealth birds in there. We will still have expendable jammers in there. We may have some sort of platform, whether it be manned or unmanned, that does some type of standoff jamming. It probably won't stand off quite as far as we would have had with the B-52, but if you can make a system that can get in closer, there's some attractiveness in looking at, “well maybe we can afford to do it this way.”
So right now, essentially, we're back to the drawing board on what is the system of systems.
Q: Concerning the large manpower cuts being proposed, how do you see that impacting ACC and its mission?
General Keys: I've got 110,000 of the active duty folks. That's more than any of the other MAJCOMs, so I imagine we're going to take more cuts than any other MAJCOM. Do the math.
What we expect to do, though, is not just truncate that pyramid, but we take the pyramid and slice off one side all the way from the top down to the bottom, so we can attrit the force in a measured sort of way, in a way that makes sense.
I've got a lot of Air Force Specialty Codes (AFSCs) out there that are stressed. I've got my cops, my Explosive Ordnance Disposal, some of my service guys, my logistics folks and everything. It doesn't make any sense to build those down when I'm actually importing people into those skills in order to get enough. So we've got to make sure that we don't create more holes in the force, and I expect there will be, I don't want to say a fair share, but there will be a share that will come across all the MAJCOMs.
We're not going to take a ten percent or a 20 percent or a 40 percent peanut butter spread and say, “everybody cough up.” We're going to look at what we have to have for today and tomorrow and 30 years from tomorrow and not create a problem for the folks that follow us.
Q: What's the Air Force role in the effort to detect Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) in Iraq? Is there more room for use of ISR aircraft or EW capabilities to detect and jam these devices?
General Keys: Well, if I could find some that work… Hardly a week goes by that somebody doesn't show up on my conference table with some gizmo that is the panacea for all of this, and we've not actually mechanized and seen one work yet across the board. There’s some great stuff that we're doing, but again, the answer has to be a system of systems.
If you're going to go out and look for IEDs and you're going to escort convoys and clear the road ahead for the convoys, you've got to know where the convoys are. That's not a uniquely interdependent skill that we have right now. I do that very well in the Air Operation Center. I put out an Air Tasking Order (ATO), I know where my airplanes are and I know what they're doing, I know when they're coming home, I know when they're going to the tanker. You read some of the reports we get back from our kids who are driving those convoys, and it is a mess out there. It's like you and I see a pallet show up over there and we go, “let's throw that on the truck and drive out of town and go take it to where it needs to go.” That's great enthusiasm, but that doesn't get you covered by an F-16 with a pod. So we need some command and control of this whole operation.
We're doing other things. Of course we're using our fighter-borne pods for non-traditional ISR, and we're looking at change detection, but again, we need some interdependent help here because I'm putting out a lot of spot reports of stuff that I think is disturbed earth or could be an IED, etc., but I remarkably am not getting a lot of reports back on was it camel dung or was it in fact an IED—unless the thing goes off.
So we have got to work harder on that. We're working on developing our training tape so when we get a hit and we know it was a hit and it was really an IED, we put those in a training tape so everybody gets to look at those beforehand.
We're looking at training our folks here in the United States better on what these things look like. The folks that are running tests for us have done it with multiple sensors and they've got a good idea, but the line fighter pilot who's going to fly his sniper pod or his Lightning pod out there trying to find something, he may not have had the opportunity to actually see any of these until he gets over there. We've got to fix that.
There are a lot of other multispectral, hyperspectral kinds of sensors that people believe are going to solve that, but I've not seen a solution yet.
Q: What do you need for the long range strike mission?
General Keys: Money. [Laughter]
We need something, as I said, that’s responsive, persistent, precise, that has global effects for the warfighter. That's what we're trying to do with long range strike.
You can do that in a variety of ways. You can be a long way away and you can go real fast and you can be there quick. Or you can be overhead, almost invisibly, with your one bomb time of fall-away, and that gets you long range strike.
I think the next long range strike is going to look at lot like a B-2. It will be a B-3, it will be something like that. My personal view is the next long range strike is going to be unmanned in order to do the things that we need to do. There are some problems with that that we haven't quite solved yet, if you're going to do multi-retasking and you're going to attack mobile targets, etc. I'm not sure the technology supports some of that right now, despite what some of you may tell me.
So I think that's where we're going to go. We're going to go to something that looks like an airplane, it may be manned, it may not be manned, and beyond that we need the technologies to mature, to fly in Lance's Area of Responsibility (AOR), if you will, the things that go real fast, go real high, that hit with a lot of impact. Right now we have to make sure that we can in fact do those kinds of things, that we can operate sensors while we're doing that, that we can operate guidance, and we can be accurate, etc. That also gives you Prompt Global Strike and I think there will be a family of that that finally comes out of it.
Q: Your thoughts on the distributed mission operations ... Is there sufficient funding to improve and sustain this training capability?
General Keys: That's a sore point with me. Distributed Mission Operations (DMO) is the most transformational thing we do in training in the United States Air Force, actually across the Department of Defense. It takes all of this high-end stuff that we're busy using that we very seldom get to see in Red Flag, for example, and we put it in a virtual world and we can run very sophisticated levels of training and mission rehearsal in fact, and I can't get Congress on board to leave the money alone that I'm taking out of my flying.
I took money out of my flying hour program to put into DMO. It got cut. Now we were successful in changing the wording on that so that it was not pejorative on my flying hour cuts, but they're worried about oversight of contract services, or services contract, where essentially you're going to build the simulators, I'm going to buy the time from you—just like we do commercially. But somehow there are some people that believe that we have to own those damn things and I don't want to own them.
So I've got a hate on. We've got some pin-headed thinking going on here and somehow we've gotten slimed by the fact that people believe that Distributed Mission Operations has to do with computers, and it doesn't have to do with computers. It has to do with very high end tactical and operational training. That's the wave of the future. We're hooking it up so that we can hook up with our allies because we've got to do that, and what we're looking forward to is the day that the Raptors at Langley Air Force Base call up the Typhoons over in the United Kingdom and they say, “tomorrow, let's go out and I'll meet you over the North Sea at 20,000 feet, and you guys are escort and we're going to Combat Air Patrol (CAP) and then we'll see how it all comes out,” and we do that routinely. Then we come back in after the flight, we video teleconference, we debrief. Just as if we actually flew the airplanes.
That is what we have to do. That's efficiency. That saves me money. That makes my force better today than it was yesterday.
Don't get me started on DMO.
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