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Mr. Robillard: My name is Tom Robillard and I'm in the Senior Executive Service. I'm the Director of the Air-to-Ground Munition Systems Wing at Eglin Air Force Base. What I'm going to do in the next few minutes is take you through a little bit of Air Force Materiel Command (AFMC) stuff, and tell you how we got to where we are today.

“Civilian Airmen in the Combat Zone” sounds like a really exciting and provocative subject, and it is. I'm not going to show you a lot of really cool stuff like that, but Mr. Butler is. This man's going to show you boots on the ground and some people that have actually been in harm's way and people who have suffered from being in harm's way.

On the Air Force side, on the weapons side, quite frankly, we try to keep people out of the combat zone. Stealth is good, speed is good, stand-off is good. So what I'm going to talk to you about here is the weapons side and the air-to-ground weapons side and what we do for that. I'll talk to you about a bunch of different flavors of civilians, and then I'll talk to you about some of the times when we've actually had to put someone in harm's way doing the weapon systems development work.

What we're about at Eglin Air Force Base, and actually in the Air Force Materiel Command, is delivering war-winning capability. As the pressures increase upon us to deliver that capability faster and faster and faster, what we find we're doing more and more frequently is early deployment of our systems supported by our contractors to have them in the field faster. That started in seriousness back in the '90s and then we thought a little about the Joint Stars deployment and we actually had civilian contractors running combat operations.

The Air Force Materiel Command does an awful lot of stuff and it's located in an awful lot of places with an awful lot of sub-elements to it. I'm going to talk to you briefly about the product centers, of which there are three: There's the Electronics System Center at Hampton Air Force Base; the Aeronautical Systems Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base; and the Air Armament Center at Eglin Air Force Base down in South Florida, which until recently was kind of the hurricane capital of the United States.

AFMC is a team-based system through the research and development process. The part I get to do is in the development of weapons systems, the testing of weapon systems, the delivering of weapon systems, and the sustainment of weapon systems.

[Former USAF Chief of Staff] General John P. Jumper used to talk about the “kill chain.” The kill chain is find, fix, track, target, engage and assess. And that's true. But a lot of that is quite frankly defined by the parameters of the weapon systems that we provide. So there's also the equivalent of kill chain analogy on the acquisition side which is design, develop, integrate, prototype, field. The ability of the warfighter to execute the mission is really dependent on the quality of the systems we provide and the capabilities embedded in those systems. I'll talk to you a little bit about that.

If you look at the Air Force Materiel Command, we are largely civilians. About 70 percent of the command’s employees are civilian. This does not include contract support. This is merely the organic workload if you look at the Air Force Materiel Command. Taking a broader look, you have 79,000 folks that are civilians out of the Air Force's total 506,000. Of that, 56,000—most of the Air Force's civilian—are actually in AFMC, predominantly in the depots.

This is kind of neat. It makes me proud to be an American. The Air Force Materiel Command is largely a civilian organization, and it’s the organization responsible for the development and sustaining and the fielding of all of these weapon systems. Joint STARS, the F-117, the F/A-22, you see the weapons, you see the munitions we have put into the field, as well as the future stuff.

So what the product centers do, actually, is deliver that warfighting capability to the no-kidding operational combatant.

The way we're organized at Eglin, we have an Air-to-Air Missile Systems Wing. These are the folks bringing you the AMRAAM, these are the folks that bring you the A-9, these are the folks who bring you air superiority products. If you look at the breakdown of that organization, about 300 people—41 are military members.

You come to my wing, the Air to Ground Munition Systems Wing, where we do things like the JASSM and the JDAM, etc. About 423 people work for me, 75 are military.

So from a practical perspective, if you want to do the rough math, you've got a thousand people doing the acquisition job at Eglin Air Force Base and only about 150 of them are military. Think about that for a second. All right, times up.

What we do then is science and technology, product support for the acquisition, with the 46th and the 53rd, and we test our systems to make sure they're operational and suitable and effective. Our Air Logistic Center services, we sustain and manage the stockpile. What we have at the end of the day, we can't just throw these things away.

Also we run an Air Force base down there which is the largest Air Force base in the country, and we have the second largest deployment requirement for an active duty Air Force base in terms of sending folks overseas.

We have a product line, a family tree if you will. Regarding the JDAM, Joint Direct Attack Munition, what we did in response to an urgent warfighter request for this is basically downsize this from approximately a 500-pound version and put it on a bunch of different Operational Flight Programs. Whether you know it or not, it's not easy to just hang a weapon on a jet. We usually change the software for the Operational Flight Program, have all kinds of testing, so we're pretty proud of that. Also we do JASSM work, which is the long-range stuff with cruise missiles, and we're completing our operational testing on that. And don’t forget the Small Diameter Bomb.

Looking at our product line as you move from the past into the present, what you increasingly see are smaller packages, better precision, less collateral damage, and better accuracy. So at the end of the day, where in Vietnam you would have had to launch several hundred airplanes and several hundred bombs, now you can send one jet and 50 weapons and be virtually sure you'll hit all 50 targets, individual targets. That’s amazing. It keeps people out of harm's way and quite frankly is a much more lethal response.

The AAMRAM, that's the air-to-air guys. Centrifuge weapons, JASSM, Small Diameter Bomb, and that sort of thing.

Now to civilians on the battlefield... How many of you guys know Joseph McDade, Jr.? Joe asked me several months ago, he said, “Tom, why don't you come on down here to this AFA thing, and I'd like you to do a little presentation on the civilian contribution to the Air Force.” “Okay I can do that,” I said. “That's easy. I know something about that.”

As luck would have it, several months later I get a nice letter from AFA Executive Director Donald L. Peterson….”Tom, come on down. We've got a seat saved for you. We're going to do ‘Civilian Airmen in the Combat Zone.’” I said I don't know much about civilians in the combat zone. “It's too late to back out, Tom.” Oh gosh.

As luck would have it, I'm flexible in talking about civilians in the combat zone. Okay? And I do want to make the point that there are different kinds of civilians out there. We have acquisition support contracting people. Roughly a third of my workforce is contract and support. Some of my workforce is actually GS Civilians. That's what most people think of when you say ‘civilian.’

Just like when you hear ‘Airman,’ I'm going to challenge you to think of ‘Airmen’ in a few different categories … You've got the blue-suiters including the Airmen; we have the GS types, Airmen with a capital ‘A’; we have industry partners and they share with both our warriors and Airmen as well. And I'll talk to you about some of the people who do that…

Contractors in Afghanistan and Iraq are getting some notoriety of late. I picked up a sample of current magazines recently. “Civilians Behind the Lines” or “Pitfalls of Contractor Services in Wartime”…

This is really interesting because it raises all of the legal, ethical, financial and liability issues associated with having civilians, whether they're GS civilians or contracted civilians essentially providing services in what is effectively a combat zone. You can imagine there are a number of issues, and I'll point out some of those as we go forward here. One of the interesting ones is what happened to these people, what are their benefits, what are their liabilities? What is their status in a combatant situation?

The more pressure on deployment and the more that we send our folks … For example, every one of those military officers in my organization is expected to deploy a minimum of every year or two. What that does is it creates additional pressure on the civilian workforce to, quite frankly, fill the void and to step up. It also creates pressure on the military organization because as the leadership turnover accelerates, it's harder and harder to maintain continuity of command and continuity of operations. You'll find that sort of thing is starting to happen as well.

Contractors have been helping the country for a long time. If you back and start with the Continental Army, civilians were hired help. If you go into World War II, you'll see an enormous amount of contractor logistics support, largely in the transport area. It started getting serious in terms of combatant responsibilities really in Operation Desert Storm. We had over 9,000 contractors deployed as part of that operation. The same thing in Operation Enduring Freedom.

I'm going to talk a little bit about the Joint STARS, Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System, which was first deployed from development from an AFMC base, and later deployed again in Operation Joint Endeavor.

We're going to talk a little bit about Operation Enduring Freedom with Global Hawk which was also deployed. Real operations supported by contractor industry personnel. Okay? Then I'll talk a little bit about Operation Iraqi Freedom and the Global Hawk.

The military are busy. I don't mean stressed in a negative sense, but just the OpTempo, the PersTempo, the demands on the blue suiters. These demands are substantial and ever-increasing. And what you find more and more is we are finding ways to fill the jobs that they don't need to do, the traditional tasks they did once perform. So some of the support functions that were traditionally done by the military are now being contracted out.

As you start deploying more and more complex systems and trying to field them early, there is no substitute for that rocket scientist who actually helped develop the system. We talked about taking Joint Stars over to run in the desert back in 1990, the only people who knew how to do it were in fact contractors. If you wanted the system, you wanted the contractors. If you wanted the contract you had to find a way to get them over there and you had to find a way to make that legal, ethical, supportable and sustainable. It's also harder to stand up a unit if you've got a new capability to deploy.

The second thing is reduced acquisition cycle time. I mentioned that you don't want to wait for the contractor to train a cadre of operators; you don't want to wait for a sufficient number of those assets to appear because by the time you get those things in theater, the action's over. You have missed it.

So we deployed Joint STARS several years ahead of when we otherwise would have delivered it. It made a difference in the desert.

Also, reachback ConOps. We're not sending forces over there to just garrison any more. The idea is get what you need, bring it back. Then, just in time, resupply. Contractors are pretty good there. They know how to do that in a reasonable way. So there are good and sufficient reasons for doing it.

The other thing is accelerated acquisition time. Everybody thinks we're too slow, and we are. It's not my fault, but I am responsible for it. There's lots of reasons why it takes as long as it does, but the bottom line is, speed is life. The quicker we can get a capability into the theater, the quicker we can save American lives, and so we find ourselves pressing more and more and more to get there quicker, faster. As I heard in the presentation last night, the last thing we want to do is send American warriors into a fair fight. We want to go in with overwhelming superiority, we want overwhelming advantage, and quite frankly in the old days we had numbers. These days we live with technology. Not necessarily better numbers, but what we have is far better than anyone else's if you're going to have a deployment.

Take for example a 35 year-old airplane, a Boeing 707, previously commercial version, refurbed, modified … What we did is we put a 24-foot canoe on its chin and that's a suppression-based radar. That's a Joint STARS radar. That does for the ground war what AWACS did for the air war.

Joint STARS pictures. Joint STARS is essentially tracking every moving target in an area the size of the state of Rhode Island. A very useful thing. A very useful thing to have if you're trying to stop some situational awareness and understand what's going on with the ground war. I'll talk about that really quick.

I was in the program office when a crisis with Joint STARS happened. I was scared to death because we were having trouble getting the damn thing to fly every day and to work, because it was in fact a development system with a lot of issues to be worked. But in what was nothing short of a miracle, the government got it together three weeks after the deployment order was delivered, brought the system in theater, and in 49 straight days they worked 100 percent of the time. Eighty percent mission reliability.

You heard about the battle of Khafji, Joint STARS cued that. They sent in two A-10s and one C-130 and took out 71 vehicles, or “targets of interest.” That's the mother of all retreats.

Operation Desert Storm showed Joint STARS in battle. Moving targets didn't stay moving very long. They found out with Joint STARS if they moved they died, if they stopped they died, if they hit they died. So really a very effective capability. It worked very, very well.

Civilians have received the Air Medal from the Chief of Staff of the Air Force. Seventeen Air Medals were presented to them, and some of them over on their second contract.

Global Hawk. I do not know a lot about Global Hawk myself, but my deputy does. He's real excited about it. It's some really, really cool stuff. Okay?

It takes 30-plus contractor personnel necessary to make the system work and employ this in theater. Again, these are people in harm's way. Again, I don't have to dramatize it because our point is we don't want to be in harm's way. We build systems like this so we don't have to put people in harm's way. It's an unmanned system. The reason for an unmanned system is because we don't want anything bad to happen to our pilots.

What an impressive capability. See, Joint STARS carries a crew of about 30 people on it. A 707, if you know anything about airplanes, is not the most agile airplane on the planet. Twenty-five years old, we haven't re-engined those things. You don't want to get in a knife fight and be on Joint STARS. What's nice about this is nobody's in harm's way with this particular asset.

Operation Enduring Freedom. I apologize, I don't have the breakout of the civilian workforce here. Again, a very important combat capability. Everybody's been hearing about Global Hawk. The Chief of Staff was talking about Global Hawk a lot. Industry partners are making that happen. They're with folks on the ground, they're the guys running that in theory.

There are actually not a lot of opportunities in the acquisition business for civilians to deploy to theater. Every now and then the opportunity comes. But when it does pop up a hand pops up. In one case, a GS-13 volunteered to deploy in the summer of '03 and he got to go to Baghdad. His job in Baghdad was to help set up an infrastructure for things like acquisition. You wouldn't think that would be an important mission but it sure is when you're trying to do some nation-building or reconstituting a force. This guy was taught to say “18.6 billion” in Arabic.

We did a lot in terms of planning, in terms of developing systems, starting with Lance Slade. A lot of this is cultural. This guy really did a great job. He made us real proud. He had some personal lessons learned. How do you get there, where are you going? It's a life insurance situation, okay? How do you think you're going to live if you do not have hotels? That, by the way, was a huge issue when we had the contractors going to deploy to Riyadh for Joint STARS because they were not permitted to bunk with the military even though they were sitting in the operational centers.

This is not whining. This is reality. When you deploy, we deploy.

One of the issues we had back in '90 and I think it's still out there, although to a lesser extent today, in nation state warfare—Germany, France, United States, and to a certain extent the Iraqis—there are rules, there are standards. People understand what's going on here. And being a member of the armed forces has an actual precise definition to go with it. Being a civilian does not.

So some of the definitions are, you are a combatant, you are a non-combatant. You could be an unlawful combatant. What is your status? Are you a prisoner of war? Are you a PNE, that sort of thing? These questions have enormous personal consequences for people and enormous personal consequences for their family members. So the question you ask yourself, and this is stuff we're still working through, and by the way, it's only an issue if we lose or if someone is captured. As long as you win and come home I guess you're alright.

For example, a military vice civilian/contractor. Hmm, you carry a gun. You don't get the traditional definition of what a military professional would be, and consequently you're not classified as a combatant and consequently are not protected by the law. Do the math. There's an issue.

So one of the questions you have is, let's say a civilian contractor conducting recon ops, whether it's a Global Hawk or a Joint STARS, what is their status? What would be his or her entitlement under the rules of war when they go in harm's way or are captured? It’s an interesting question. I'm not sure that we've resolved all of that. My attorneys are looking into it and they promised me they'd have an answer before this briefing. They will be dealt with harshly when I get back.

So issues that you have here, and I think you can say they’re critical. What is your combatant status? What does the law of armed conflict say about all of this? What's your view of the enemy’s status? Would you be a POW? Would you be a criminal, would you be something else? Status of forces agreements... Who's responsible for making sure the training and medical readiness of these civilian people who deploy is what it needs to be? Who knows where their shot records are? Who's helping with their power of attorney? What is their situation should they be killed or captured? What benefits do they have? What entitlements do they have? These are real issues particularly whether they're GS or contract personnel. It makes a difference.

And how about legal support, family planning? I think you're going to talk about life insurance issues for folks. All that stuff needs to get worked when you're starting to send people into theater.

My thought is that these issues are here to stay. The PersTempo, the OpsTempo, the taskings are increasing. I don't see us increasing the force structure any time soon. I think there's a growing dependence on civilian specialists as the weapon system complexity and the urge to get the systems deployed earlier limits our ability to develop more organic capability to do that. The pressures on the acquisition cycle time are kind of driving us to the same behavior. “I can't wait to train an organic capability of warfighters so I'm going to bring my industry team in. As long as they're part of the ConOps, that seems to work and to be a good thing.”

So the bottom line, we're trying to rapidly deliver warfighting capability, war-winning capability and part of that through the civilian workforce.

I know you're all disappointed because that wasn't very sexy, but here's the good news and the bad news. I'm done. We'll take questions at the end if we're not out of time.

Mr. Butler: Okay, folks. As Tom said, I'm Dan Butler. I'm the Executive Director of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. Tom, thanks for the lead-in.

When we talked about this a few days ago we agreed that Tom would go from big issues and I would move down to really where they impact on people personally in the field, and what impact that potentially has on our mission—our mission to support the Air Force and to support national security policy. So what I'll be talking about is mainly the people involved who have been those muddy boots on the ground in the combat zone, or as I like to say, “Civilian Airmen in Harm's Way.”

First, the obligatory infomercial. I think you do need to have a little context and understand the Office of Special Investigations to truly appreciate why we do put civilians in harm's way. We're an organization of about 2,600 people, lean and mean, worldwide. We have locations in over 200 places in the world—offices in over 200 places in the world. About 2,000 Special Agents, comprised of officer, civilian and enlisted. We have a quarter of our agent force—and they are the weapon system of Air Force OSI—that is civilian. Civilian Airmen, Civilian Airmen Agents.

Prior to 2001, we didn't have to think too much about deploying those civilians. After 2001, to keep those folks, to keep that cadre on the sidelines, on the bench, out of the front lines in the global war on terrorism, just wasn't an option. We really needed to take advantage of that expertise, some very unique expertise, and I'll talk a little bit about that later in the presentation.

Here's what we did. Prior to September 11, 2001, Air Force OSI had only 12 civilian agents who were technically designated “emergency essential” and “deployable” for our agency and for the Air Force. We quickly changed that, ramped up to today 398 civilian agents that are technically emergency essential, deployable, and we are making them fit to fight. They are ready to deploy and I'll talk a little bit about what they've done in the deployment environment.

Since 2001 we have deployed 193 OSI civilian agents. We'll be above 200 here very soon. I don't want to leave out our analysts. We have in the GS scheme of things, GS-132s, intelligence analysts who work for OSI. They are critical to our intelligence cycle, our counter-intelligence cycle, and we have deployed five civilian analysts in harm's way since 2001.

We currently have 20 Civilian Contractor Analysts deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan supporting the OSI mission and I think Tom made that point very clearly. This is here to stay. We will be using civilian Airmen and contractors as we fight the force and fight the battles of the future for our Air Force and for our country.

Let me give you a little sense of what we do on the ground and why we need to put civilians on the ground in these locations.

First of all, our agents are extraordinarily well trained. They are trained to gather information, to support the commander on the ground. And in the case of an environment like Iraq or Afghanistan, the Air Force commander on the ground has a very significant life or death force protection responsibility. We provide counter-intelligence support to his force protection effort.

We had a Civilian Airman Agent in OSI, an Arabic linguist ... His job was to go over there, develop source networks, begin to work outside the wire of the air bases where he was assigned to perform his mission, and begin to find out who was who and identify the threat for the commander, identify for the teams that were going to go out and neutralize that threat who to go out and get, where to go find the weapons that threatened our forces. It was critical, too, to identify the good folks, the innocent Iraqi people from the nefarious Iraqis and insurgents and people coming in from outside Iraq who meant to injure and impede the Coalition forces.

Key to this mission is getting down and getting to meet the people outside the wire. This agent obviously became very effective at this. You identify who the key leaders are in a community, and as you identify them and as they begin to identify with you, the entire village, the entire tribe begins to recognize the Coalition forces and the United States Air Force as the good guys and the good gals. So you begin to develop a source network, very informal, but I'll talk more about the formal source networks we develop in a second.

Kids. I wanted to highlight children because children see and hear everything. We don't recruit children, I want to make that clear, but [Laughter] what they do is they talk to mom, dad, their uncle, their aunt, their teacher. And mom, dad, the uncle, the aunt and the teacher are the people that we're talking to who don't want these children harmed. They are just like you and me. Their families, their children are dear to them. These little kids are an amazing source of intelligence indirectly which comes to us via the adults in their community.

If you're really good at this you get invited home to meet the family. This is one of the things we do. This is sort of an intangible. You probably have the impression that OSI agents walk around with bundles of cash and we just hand out wads of money to recruit people and to earn their loyalty and respect. Not true. Really what we do is we develop relationships, strong relationships. We learn the culture. It helped being an Arabic speaker and understanding the culture. The agent that I mentioned earlier we trained for nine months at the Foreign Service Institute, the State Department's Foreign Service Institute, and he learned not just the language, but he learned the culture, and then we deployed him to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and then ultimately Iraq.

Let me give an example of a take-down, an individual that was apprehended who was a common thug, an Iraqi criminal. What he was doing was waiting outside the entry control points at one of our military installations and he was identifying Iraqis who were coming and going that were working with the Coalition forces, then he'd approach them later and he'd say I know who you are and I'm going to tell the bad guys if you don't stop working for the Americans or you don't pay me some money. I want a piece of the action. I want some of your pay.

We took him down, took him out of the picture. That earns some loyalty from the people that ultimately we depend upon to provide us the information that in turn we can turn into intelligence for targeting and to support the force commander and his force protection responsibilities.

Let me mention ManPads. Ask any pilot what he fears most landing and taking off at Baghdad International Airport, it's those things in the back of that pickup truck. Our source network that we developed in Baghdad in particular and several other locations around Iraq began to get the information that we needed to go out and dig these up, pull them out of chicken coops, pull them out of attics, pull them out of basements, pull them out of water cisterns, and this is invaluable to the United States Air Force. Taking these weapons off the street is critical to our mission. That DHL Airliner that took off from Baghdad International Airport two year ago barely made it back after being hit by an SA-7.

We once took down a cell in the Baghdad area. This cell we learned from source reporting was preparing and planning to shoot down an Air Force C-5. They had IP badges, the Iraqi police badges. When you're working an insurgency problem as we do in Air Force OSI in this theater and in Afghanistan, you have to worry about infiltration. I'll talk about a couple of other instances of this. But this particular cell had Iraqi police arm bands, badges, other identification and as you would expect, they were using that as cover to conduct surveillance and to begin the planning process so they could get into position to effectively take a shot at one of our C-5s.

On another raid, our source network provided the information that allowed us to go out and make recoveries of plastic explosives, partially constructed, partially prepared Improvised Explosive Devices. It’s a devastating impact from an IED if you don't take it off the street, as we all know just from watching the news. The agent that was involved in the raid that recovered that C4 and those partially assembled IEDs was in traffic right behind these vehicles at the time the attack took place. A civilian agent, a female agent, and I'll talk a little about her in just a minute.

The agents, Tom talked a little bit about some of the issues. How do you dress when you go into a combat zone or a denied area or a dicey neighborhood? Sometimes we dress our agents in DCUs like, civilian agents, like everybody else. Now they have distinctive insignia. One of their tapes says “Civilian Special Agent.” But they can't always walk around in the mean streets of Baghdad in the diciest, toughest neighborhoods dressed that way, and they'll dress appropriately. They'll dress as they need to in order to go where they need to go and operate as unobtrusively as possible, meet with sources, protect their sources and their activities, and actually I've seen them dressed much more like native Iraqis than this. But just dressing like this as you're driving through traffic slows down the bad guy just long enough that he might not trigger his IED because he can't quite figure out who you are. We don't always drive around in these up-armored Suburbans and Toyota land cruisers. Our agents over there have purchased a variety of vehicles that are indigenous to the region.

This female Agent that I mentioned earlier developed a source network that resulted in the recovery of 25 RPGs. Her source told her to go to this farmhouse, dig right here, and you'll find some rocket propelled grenades. It wasn't extremely well hidden. A lot of these weapons cachets are very well hidden and it's very important to have good intelligence before you bust down the door of an Iraqi family's home because if you hit a dry hole you just made more enemies. If you find what you're after, you've just taken the threat off the street.

What I wanted to do is make this more personal and talk a little bit about the agents and the analysts that have deployed. I selected five agents out of the 193 that have deployed or that are currently deployed. Two of them you see their names are in quotes. They've been involved in sensitive operations and may be in the future, and so at their request I've protected their names but I'll describe them to you.

Special Agent Nassa Hassan. Mid-30s, Muslim-American. Extraordinarily well educated American. We recruited him into OSI. Speaks fluent Urdu. Extraordinarily well trained. About 12 years experience as an OSI Agent. Service overseas in a seat of government in a major ally's country working with the embassy and with our allies in that country.

As soon as Operation Enduring Freedom was about to kick off, Special Agent Nassa Hassan raised his hand and said, “put me in, coach. I've got unique skills. I speak fluent Urdu. Do you need anybody in Pakistan or Afghanistan?” We said we did.

We assigned him with another government agency to the border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan in the opening days and weeks of Operation Enduring Freedom, and it was his job to apprehend, screen, interrogate Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters escaping from the battlefield in Afghanistan when we took Afghanistan from the al-Qaeda and from Taliban.

Nassa received the first Bronze Star of any Civilian Agent in OSI.

Special Agent Randy Redlinger. When we needed to establish a counter-intelligence capability to support Ambassador Jerry Bremer in Iraq, we were asked, OSI was asked, “please do the counter-intelligence mission for the United States of America in Iraq.”

Randy Redlinger when he found out raised his hand and said, “I want that job. I want to go to Iraq. Can I do it, please?” So we sent Randy.

Randy is a GS-15, the most senior civilian we've deployed to Iraq. We've sent three GS-15s altogether now since 2001. It was his job to establish that infrastructure, set up the offices. He built a capability in Baghdad in the green zone supporting Jerry Bremer directly, just a few doors down from his office; established offices in the north in Urbil, in Al Hillah in the south, in Basrah in the south, and directed those operations that were protecting the Coalition Provision Authority leadership that were trying to begin the transition from war time to a recovering Iraq, a reconstituted Iraq with an interim and legitimate government.

The first six months that Randy’s team existed under his leadership, they identified a source network or an insurgent network, former regime element cell that was surveilling to prepare an attack against one of our U.S. ambassadors that was assigned to one of those cities outside of Baghdad and they neutralized that cell. He also assisted with his team in the recovery of the son, a kidnapped son of the President of the Central Bank of Iraq, an important ally of the U.S. Coalition at that time. His team did a number of raids throughout Baghdad before we even had what we call a green zone today, well into the most difficult parts of the city, identifying cells and taking weapons off the street and generally trying to restore order. A tremendous responsibility, very difficult, 18-20 hours days, seven days a week for six months.

Special Agent Kelly Strong. Would, you have thought that a 24 year-old, 5' 10” blonde, blue-eyed American, a co-ed from St. Louis University, two years out of college, would be in Baghdad dealing with 45 year-old thugs, turning them into informants for the United States, and then identifying where the RPGs were hidden that were going to be used against Coalition forces, convoys, contractors, and innocent Iraqis? Five years ago I would not have predicted that.

She did a fantastic job. She was jumping up and down the whole first year she was an agent asking to go. We waited until she had at least two years experience under her belt and then we sent her in. She was an extraordinary source handler and that's the key to this kind of a business. She developed rapport, she knew how to vet sources, she knew how to get sources, and she knew how to work the source network.

Her team ran 10 raids. They recovered ManPads, they recovered RPGs, they recovered C4s I showed you earlier. Tremendous impact when you think about it. She saved lives. You would not have made her the prototype I don't think pre-9/11 for the type of person we would parachute into Baghdad to conduct that mission. She did a phenomenal job. She speaks fluent Spanish, and you would ask is that an important skill to have? It absolutely is when your Coalition partners include the Spanish. They're controlling Al Hillah, and their intelligence officers are there and they need to work with us to collaborate and share information. So she did a superb job.

The next two I'd like to talk about, Tom made reference to the human toll and the sacrifice that all of our Airmen make when they're carrying out this mission for us and for our country. The Civilian Airmen Agents in OSI are no exception to that.

Special Agent Rick Albright exemplifies the type of Civilian Agent that we have in OSI that has a tremendous amount of experience. Active duty Air Force for 20-plus years, an OSI Agent on active duty since 1986. As soon as he retired in 1998 we hired him right back as a Civilian Agent, and he immediately volunteered and was deployed to Iraq. And regrettably, during the course of conducting some counter-intelligence operations in Kirkuk he was killed when a Katusha rocket hit the OSI compound in August of 2003.

This highlights for us, I think, some of those very serious issues that Tom made reference to. Things like life insurance. And to give you an example ... Federal Employees Group Life Insurance (FEGLI), the limits on FEGLI have not been raised and it's something that we know that the Air Force Civilian Advisory Council is looking at, and AFA is looking at, to try and figure out if we can improve on that.

USAA. We just heard two weeks ago from two of our agents that USAA, that company that we all who have a military heritage and DNA have used for years and years and years, our entire lives, for our insurance and other financial services…USAA has begun notifying our agents that if they are emergency essential they are not insurable. They can't get life insurance. That's a pretty significant factor for agents.

I went to a barbecue at one agent's house. He has six kids. For him, life insurance is important and that's an issue that we're going to have to grapple with and that we can use the support of AFA and the Air Force Civilian Advisory Council to address.

I think you may have heard that back in October of last year there was a bombing inside the green zone. Two insurgents had successfully infiltrated the green zone. They set out satchel charges simultaneously, one in a little marketplace where vendors sold little trinkets to the troops; and also in a green zone cafe, a place where the troops went to grab a bite to eat outside the normal dining facilities.

Three agents were unfortunately victims, wounded in the green zone cafe. A young woman, a first lieutenant; a Civilian Special Agent; and an enlisted agent. They were sitting literally ten feet from the bomber when he set off his suicide satchel charge.

Since we're talking about civilians in harm's way, I'll focus in on Special Agent Jim Hamilton. Jim is a remarkable individual. If you look at his pedigree and his skills you can understand why we sent a guy like Jim into harm's way, into Iraq. We needed his experience.

He also served with the National Security Agency while he was with Army Military Intelligence. Trained police officer. Joined OSI in 2000. Arabic speaker. Today he's studying Mandarin. Deployed to SUA twice, once to the United Arab Emirates and then he wanted to go back and he wanted to be right in the thick of things in Baghdad.

He was wounded in that bombing at the cafe in October of 2004. What I'd like to maybe bring home to you is, I happened to be at his bedside the day he came out of the chemically induced coma at Brooks Army Medical Center. The doctors in the first 48 hours while he was still in Baghdad told us there was a 20 percent chance that Jim would survive, his injuries were so severe. He lost a sizeable chunk of his skull, lost his right eye, had shrapnel and serious burns over most of his body. He survived. He not only survived, when he came out of the coma the doctors alerted us that he might not be able to communicate, be careful, be sensitive. I started to talk with him. It was as if he had just woken up from just a long sleep. He was talking to me. It was amazing, his resiliency.

Now he's a physical fitness fanatic and that helped undoubtedly when he was over in Baghdad when he was wounded. But he was seriously injured. His first and his only question to me that day after he woke up from the coma was, "Can I still be an OSI agent?" I tell you that because I think that epitomizes for me the dedication that our Civilian Airmen, our Civilian Airmen Agents and Analysts in OSI, that epitomizes for me the spirit and the dedication that they bring to the fight and it's one of the reasons why, as Tom said, we will not go back to the old days when only our military would be involved going toe to toe with the adversary.

With that I'd like to conclude my presentation. Tom, if you'd join me up here we'll field any questions from the folks here in the workshop.

Q: I have a question for Mr. Robillard. It deals with the differences between a member of the military and a civilian/contractor. Can you address the reasons why the military and Civilian Airmen Agents take an oath and contractors don't? Does this come into your discussion, the ramifications of that in the long term?

Mr. Robillard: Absolutely. And I only started thinking of this about a month ago myself. It's an incredibly rich topic, if the truth be known. I'm not trivializing the oath at all. It is in fact one of the discriminators. But it is interesting...okay, you sit next to this major right here, flying backwards in that same jet doing the same job in the same harm's way, and you're sitting there and the guy across the way says, “hey, we've just been lit up by a SAM, how do you all feel about that?” You start to wonder what matters and when does it matter?

I hadn't seen the OSI presentation until today and I'm humbled and moved by it. I will never complain about a bad day in my shop.

I think the distinctions are diminishing. In Air Force Materiel Command in particular we are more civilianized than we ever have been before. What you see before you today is a civilian, and I am in charge of all of the air-to-ground weapon systems development for the United States Air Force. Ten years ago that was unheard of. I had to be a rated guy ten years ago to build bombs. I had to be a rated guy to be in charge of systems development for Joint STARS. A civilian running that thing was heresy.

Now part of the issue you have here is we were doing that because only the military could do it, because of those limitations in personnel. So some of this is being forced upon us because the demographics have changed. So I think the distinctions are blanding out. We're going to have to really deal with some of those issues. But yeah, they're all real issues. Who takes an oath, who doesn't? What's your motivation? Is it patriotism, is it money?

I will tell you that these folks are patriots. The contractors we talked to doing that 18 hours per day stuff, those are patriots. Yeah, they get paid more than we are, but that's not why they're doing it.

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