Four Star Forum
General John Jumper, Chief of Staff, USAF,
General Gregory Martin, AFMC Commander,
General Hal Hornburg, ACC Commander,
General Don Cook, AETC Commander,
General Lance Lord, AFSPC Commander,
and General Paul Hester, PACAF Commander
Air & Space Conference 2004—Washington, DC
September 14, 2004
General Jumper: I am just going to take a few minutes here. I want to start by first of all saying how proud I am to sit up here with this line-up that you can only find in a Post Office. [Laughter] It's a pleasure to be here in front of Dr. Roche, Chief Murray and AFA Chairman of the Board John Politi. It's good to see you all.
It is a privilege for us to be able to sit up here in leadership positions in the greatest Air Force on the planet. It's also a point of pride with me to make sure that each one of our Airmen out there understands exactly how important their job is to the nation, to the Air Force, but especially to themselves.
This is a time when our nation looks at our Air Force and our Airmen as a symbol of the pride and the strength of the entire nation as we face today what is probably the greatest threat to free societies arguably in the history of our young nation. What you do is vitally important. We're going to talk about that here, I'm sure, in the questions and answers that we get. We'll talk about some of those things and some of those issues.
But there are two things I want to point out as we start off, things that are on my mind as the Chief. The first one is one that the boss pointed out yesterday during his presentation and that is the growing alarm that we all have over our young Airmen taking their own lives.
In the age groups of about 20 to 24 years of age, this year alone, we have 48 suicides. This time last year we were looking at about 23. The highest period of our suicide rate was from '92 to '96 when the rate went well above 14 per 100,000. From '96 to 2000 we got that rate down below 10, to about 9.8. Today, as we sit here with another suicide just yesterday, we're looking at a rate of 12.8.
The boss put it very well yesterday when he talked about young people trying to find permanent solutions to temporary problems. We and the commanders that are arrayed on this stage can only do so much. We can put out programs, we can talk about commanders’ responsibilities, but in the end it's the people who are the best friends, who are intimate with our members that know when the problems reach a critical stage. What we have to do is make sure that our processes and our procedures and the programs that we have out there increase this awareness. Increase the awareness of one to another, so that steps can be taken and intervention can be taken at the right time.
The other thing that's on my mind, and the mind of all the commanders you see up on the stage, is the subject of sexual assault. This gets to issues and troubles we've all been through together starting with revelations at the Air Force Academy and on through to other areas in our Air Force.
As the boss pointed out yesterday, we thought we were better than we are. As we've taken a close, honest look at ourselves in the area of sexual harassment, we found that indeed there is much room for improvement. From the way we respond with first responders to assault situations, all the way to how we follow through and take care of victims and their concerns as they cope with their situation.
When we compare ourselves with society at large, our problem doesn't seem so bad. But in our Air Force, our whole performance and our whole set of standards is based on mutual respect. It's that respect we have for one another. It's the ethos of the wingman, where we have to depend on each other for our success in wartime. And it's that ethos that we need to make sure is spread round our Air Force and that we understand that no assault of any type is tolerated, one Airman to another. And that our first charge, one to another, is to take care of each other. That's the way we find success in our Air Force.
So it's those are things that are on my mind. With all of the successes and the positives that you've heard talked about from this stage and other venues around this conference, we've got a lot to be thankful for. But of the things that I worry about the most, those are the two things that are on my mind. There are a lot of other issues, of course, and we'll look forward to hearing about those.
Let me turn this over. I'm not sure who's on the agenda to be next, but Hal, why don't you take it?
General Hornburg: Thanks, Chief. I certainly echo your comments on the two significant topics that you covered.
I'm going to speak tomorrow for the better part of an hour on what ACC's doing. If I tell you two minutes about what we've been doing, I'm afraid that I'll lose 58 minutes tomorrow, so please come back.
Let me hand this over to General Martin. I would be most pleased to answer anyone's questions on anything we're doing in ACC, but for now let me wait for your questions and let Speedy take a whack.
General Martin: Thanks, Hal, thanks Chief.
First let me just say to the AFA how proud I am to see this room filled with people you have sponsored and helped us bring here to show as many people in the Air Force as we can what this Air Force is all about, what the senior leaders think, what our industry partners are doing for us, and many of the other seminar activities that are going on. This is really a very, very special event, so to the AFA, my hat's off to you. Thank you. This is a great thing. [Applause]
Let me just say, as I think through the comments that the Chief mentioned, and I will get to those at the very end, how proud I am to be in the command known as the Air Force Materiel Command. It is the command on which the entire Air Force rides. They ride on the backs of the men and women in the Air Force Materiel Command. That doesn't mean to say anything about the other commands—they're the war-winning fighters that are out there carrying the fight wherever it is, and certainly now with the global war on terrorism. But everything they use comes from the people of the Air Force Materiel Command. It's a great organization. I'll talk a little bit about some successes here in just a second.
One of the things that we're dealing with in the command right now is this concept, there's an awful lot of people that think, “well, you know, you're 70% civilian so you're sort of different.” The fact of the matter is, these are not just civilians, these are Air Force civilians. They're not a business. We are in the business of national security. We're a military organization with people who care about getting war-winning capabilities to the warfighter on time and on cost. We've benefited from the work of General Les Lyles and the Chief and Mr. Nelson Gibbs and Mike Zettler and now Don Whitacam; the work they've done over the last four or five years in our depot and our supply management areas last year and this year, the first time on record we've not delivered a bill at the end of the year. Our production rate on aircraft now is at 93 percent on time. We turned back $500 million this year that has gone into the global war on terrorism, out of our supply and depot working capital fund. We have a force that's on the move and it's taken about four or five years for the folks to understand how powerful and how potent they can be in that area.
Then after the PEO restructure that we had with our Acquisition and Air Force Materiel Command communities, we've tied together a group of people that are producing the world's greatest air and space stuff, partnered with the Air Force Space Command. There is no air force even close. I just think we need to feel a little bit better about that, hence, the comments that the Chief made.
Why is it that maybe we don't feel as good about what we're doing? Why is it that maybe someone feels a bit despondent and takes their own life? Why is it that we find ourselves mistreating each other? Ask yourself each day if there are things you could do to inspire and motivate rather than to criticize and detract, because we are the finest air and space force in the world. You should feel good about it, you should be proud of it, and you should make each of us even prouder the next day.
So I'm delighted to be here, I thank the AFA, and I just want you to know that the men and women of Air Force Materiel Command are on the team, providing war-winning capabilities on time, on cost.
General Cook: Let me add my thanks as well to AFA for this wonderful format. Not only this one, but the professional development seminars that have been going on I think have been marvelous. The Chief panel yesterday was very good and insightful. So again, my compliments John, to you and your team for a job well done.
The challenges in AETC are many, but I think the challenge I would like to discuss right now is the one of creating a culture and developing a culture of expeditionary Airmen. To me, this is most important because in reality the Air Force we have today is more like our grandfather's Army Air Corps than it was our father's Air Force.
It begins, of course, with recruiting the right folks off the street. Recruiting people who have the right attitudes, who have the right aptitudes, who have character, and who have the intellect to stay up with this high tech Air Force. No matter if you are a chef or you are a communicator, or whether you're a pilot or whatever, it takes a lot of intellect to be successful in this United States Air Force of ours.
We also need to have people who can teach, who are AEF-qualified, who are AEF-experienced, who have hands-on deployment experience. If you don't have that kind of experience in your instructor corps, how can you teach your folks with any credibility about deploying, about going on an AEF and doing those kinds of things?
Coupled with that is we need assignment policies that we have changed in AETC. It is a command where we are not going to let you homestead. We don't want you to get comfortable in AETC. Our assignment policy is three years on the platform, and then you're back out to the field. It doesn't matter if you are a recruiter, if you are a TI, an MTL, an IP—three years and then go back to the Air Force. Don't lose the skills that the Air Force trained you to perform.
Finally, we need courses that are relevant in content, again, taught by people who are experienced. But the courses also need to be taught in classrooms that are technically modern. I'll talk about some of that tomorrow in my presentation. If I say any more, then you'll not want to hear me or General Hornburg, so I'll stop now.
General Lord: Let me add my congratulations and thanks to the Air Force Association. I think the focus on force development is excellent. You can see it represented here today just as it was yesterday with the panel with Chief Murray and the Command Chiefs, as well as all the young people here, the Arnold Air Society folks. They're eager to learn and be part of our overall strategy.
I've found in my command, and I know this is probably true across the rest of the Air Force, that we cannot over-communicate, certainly with our young people. The face-to-face mentoring and spending time with each other and talking about the goals and objectives of the organization are absolutely important to where people fit within that overall strategy. That's something we've been working hard in Air Force Space Command, to make sure that we totally integrate space into air operations in a way that people understand their role, whether they're a space crew at the 460th Space Wing at Buckley or they're pulling alert at F.E. Warren Air Force Base, and everybody in between. So we're working hard day-to-day to make sure that people understand that they're part of that process.
I think the best way to take care of our Airmen and take care of each other is to make sure people understand the critical nature of their part in the overall strategy.
General Hester: Good morning from PACAF. Most people think of PACAF, when they hear that word, they think of Hawaii and the islands, and quite honestly it is of course where the PACAF headquarters is, and we have the Air National Guard with the Hawaii National Guard there, but the preponderance of our forces are spread throughout the Pacific area, especially out in WESTPAC all the way north from Alaska down to the Western Pacific.
So as you think about the stresses that the Chief talked about a moment ago, think about taking and PCSing our fine Airmen and their families overseas into Korea and into Japan, and then to leave them there when the military member goes on an AEF deployment. So we find some unique challenges associated with stressful conditions by having our people living in a different culture away from the United States doing magnificent work for us not only internal to the Air Force, but also their own personal engagement with those in those foreign countries as they continue to show the side of America that we want them to see, which is the families of America.
The distances of the Pacific are well known. They also are the reason that we talk about the tyranny of distance. Those of us here can talk about how to solve the tyranny of distance in of course airpower and the flexibility it has—the speed that airpower has—helps us in fact, collapse that tyranny in being able to be anywhere, any time, almost immediately with our airpower.
For the future, we're looking at some changes. We will have new C-17s that will be stationed in both Hawaii and Alaska. It gives us an opportunity to marry up with our friends in the Army in the Stryker brigades and be able to move those assets much faster.
In addition, we are looking for a potential ISR strike task force out in Guam, out in the Western Pacific. We look forward to trying to develop some of those plans as we migrate through the next four or five years out in the Pacific.
Q&A Session:
AFA Executive Director Donald L. Peterson: If you've got a question, just come forward to the mike and we'll take it there. But I'll start off with one—Chief, without the benefit of a crystal ball, what can you predict about the size and shape of our Air Force of tomorrow, and how that force might look?
General Jumper: Good. Which reporter asked that question? Right over here I see Elaine Grossman from Inside the Pentagon and Amy Butler from Defense Daily. [Laughter]
As we get more and more capable systems on board in our Air Force, we're looking forward to the F/A-22, the F-35, enhancements in our bomber fleets. We just several months ago dropped 80 individually guided GPS bombs out of the B-2 with the new bomb rack system.
What we find is that each individual system is becoming more and more capable. We used to size our Air Force, looking all the way back to the Vietnam days and before, by how many aircraft it was going to take to destroy a single target. With the accuracy of today's weapons, we're looking at how many targets each aircraft can destroy.
We've known for a long time, for instance, that we're going to replace several hundred airplanes of the F-15 variety with about 750, actually with about 400, F/A-22s. And if you look at the advent of the Joint Strike Fighter, it's reasonable to assume that we're going to replace our very large fleets with a smaller number of airplanes that are much more capable. The sizing mechanism and the analysis then becomes a capacity issue. How many places am I going to have to be at one time? How many orbits do we have to sustain 24 hours a day? And that becomes the mechanism by which you size your force and it's based on the national strategy and we have to track all the things back to the guidance that we get from the Secretary of Defense.
So when you go through all of that, we do see a smaller force in the future. How much smaller? I'm not sure. Not a lot smaller.
We see it smaller in equipment, but not necessarily that much smaller in people. Somewhat, but not that much.
Everybody at this table who has commanded, and those of you out there in the audience who have commanded a flying unit, especially those of us who have commanded fighter wings, always knew that it took three squadrons to make sure you could get two off the ground and deployed somewhere. What we want is an Air Force where you've got three squadrons, you can deploy three of them, and they can go anywhere you need them to go.
We've always known that in crew rations the machines could fly more than we could generate with the pilots that we had in the squadrons and we made those squadrons robust up from the third squadron in each of the wings. Demands have now increased such that a lot of our operational units out there, Hal Hornburg and Paul Hester and Doc Foglesong and Lance Lord and Don Cook and all of our commands, Speedy's command, all deploy large numbers of Airmen to man air operation centers. Hal Hornburg has first-hand experience. He can tell you that when we had the air operation center up in Bosnia, when we had the operation center up during Operation Allied Force and in the Gulf, many of those AOCs were upwards of 2,000 people. They come out of many operational units.
So we've got to get the packages right. We've got to know how many people it takes to do command and control. We've got to put the people in the right place to make sure all three squadrons out of three squadrons in a fighter wing are deployable. Then we get the crew ratios right, not only in our small airplanes but in our big airplanes. What I think that means is that we are going to come down somewhat in equipment, and I can't give you the right number yet because we're still working with the Army on their changing concepts of operations and there's still work to do on getting that size right. Somewhat less in manpower overall, but not a lot. And we're going to see that unfold here when decisions have to be made over the coming years.
So it's a long answer, but it's a very important question. We don't have all the answers yet, but we're going to work through them and we're going to make the very best decisions we can when we have to make those decisions.
Q: Good morning, sir. My name is Captain Michelle Hill, I'm from Robbins Air Force Base. I have a two-part question. The first part has to do with the '05 round of BRAC. Do you envision mission movement between the Guard and Reserve back to the active duty? And do you foresee Air Force installations receiving sister service missions? The second question is how can I get my picture taken with Richard Dean Anderson? [Laughter]
General Jumper: The second one we can probably help you with. [Laughter] But you know, I'm really the rock star of “Stargate.” I don't know how you missed that. [Laughter and applause] Actually, as I was told by a member of the cast, “keep your day job, Jumper.”
I'm going to start off on the BRAC and we can share some of these with other members of the table here.
Not necessarily to do with BRAC, but certainly to do with the smart future of our Air Force, it is imperative that we make sure that we take a good look at the right way we blend our Air National Guard, our Air Force Reserve, and our active units. Regardless of BRAC. And that we ask ourselves how we deal with the issues that I talked about in my previous answer with crew ratios and the ability to put units together in ways that give you what I call virtual crew ratios. The National Guard and the Air Force Reserve are greatly experienced. They don't require the same training tempo and pace that the active duty units do, but when it comes time to go to war you want to deploy people with robust crew ratios and a very vast experience on the flight line and with maintenance. How do we put those together the right way?
Hal Hornburg and the rest of the guys here at the table are out there experimenting with that right now. Again, we don't have answers. As you know, we put together in the JSTARS unit a blended organization. It's not without its problems. We have to look at how we work out the Title 10/Title 32 conflicts, and we are working on those sorts of things, but there may be other models. But we're trying to figure out how to do that the best way.
It's also a fact that, in our active duty Air Force, we're coming along with greater emphasis on command and control, on unmanned air vehicles, on space, on information operations. We want the Air National Guard and the Air Force Reserve to join us in the greater emphasis in those areas and be with us as we gain new capabilities and new skills in those mission areas.
So, and it doesn’t necessarily have to do with BRAC, but certainly to do with what's right for our Air Force, we march down those roads.
Hal Hornburg, I will tell you, has been involved first-hand in many of these issues. I've asked him to work this and he's been down there doing the grunt work of trying to sort out exactly how to do these interfaces. I'll ask him to make a comment.
General Hornburg: Chief, I really have not much to add to what you just said. I think you've covered it quite well.
There are things that are incredibly good about what we're doing in the 116th and it has some warts. What we need to do is steal the good parts and divest ourselves of the warts and it's going to take some analysis and some time to get this right.
I think as we go through the process, though, we should always remember that we are blessed, truly blessed not only in America but in the United States Air Force, because if you line up three Airmen from the Guard, three from the Reserve, and three from the active duty against that wall back there, if you don't know who's who, it's impossible for you to go back and sort them out because of where they come from. We are all Airmen to the core. That's our DNA. That's our molecular makeup. Some of us are active duty, some are Guardsmen, and some are in the Reserve.
I think it's also important as we go through this blending/integration that we protect the goodness of the militia concept and the reservist and the active duty and we don't blend ourselves so much that we're homogeneous and we forget there are good and positive things from all three.
General Martin: Part of your question was also about joint services. From my perspective in the Air Force Materiel Command, we've tried to spell out what we call the materiel force imperatives. In other words, what are the things that we need to be able to do in the Air Force Materiel Command to ensure that we remain the most dominant air and space force in the world? As many of you know, we have the Air Force Research Lab and the technology directorates, we have the acquisition support which includes not only where the system program offices are, but where all the test and evaluation activities occur and all of the data that goes with that and the simulation and modeling and all. Then we've got the sustainment centers in our logistics centers, or as many of you know them, depots, where we continue to sustain the aircraft.
Clearly there are places on many of our bases where we already have joint participation. If you go out to Tinker you'll see that not only do we have a sustainment center and the AWACS wing, but we also have the Navy TACIMO wing for their strategic command and control.
So wherever it makes sense for us to merge missions where the mission can then have a synergy, we should do that.
By the same token, when it comes to ownership, there are things that I think we have to stand up to. I want to make sure that the United States Air Force is in control of the sustainment activities on which all of our warfighters depend. We may have some joint sustainment centers, but when we deal with air vehicles and deal with space vehicles and deal with engines, we want to have a very, very strong influence and leadership responsibility and resourcing responsibility, because that's our core.
So we have to as we go into BRAC realize where our strengths are, and out of it make sure that we have those facilities and capacities that can continue to keep us a strong and progressive, dominant air and space force.
General Lord: I'd like to talk very quickly on this same subject with respect to what we're doing in the space business. The 310th Space Group at Schriever are involved in day-to-day operations supporting what we did at Buckley as well during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Reserve parts of the space warning mission were provided absolutely impeccably by those folks day to day.
In comparison with Hal and his team where he's probably 25 to 40 percent of game units, we're only about five percent in the space business. We're looking to push as hard as we can in the Total Force area for both Guard and Reserve to be involved more and more in what we're doing. Plus the exiting mission that we're looking at in the future which is the near space medium which is from 65,000 feet to 300,000 feet with new systems and capabilities with lighter than air ships, although there are a whole series of problems we have to get over with in terms of logistics about operating in that medium, but there's another place where we think the Total Force can really support a growing mission in the space business.
So we are certainly proud of our Total Force commitment and look forward to doing even more as we go.
We're also looking in the missile field with security guards and security forces augmentation with Total Force support. That meant we had to ask questions about the personnel reliability program and make sure we had the same kind of standards. But once we broke through the paradigm and were able to ask those tough questions and make sure we could provide the right kind of answers, we're looking at Total Force support, and the Chief's given us permission to test that. It's coming up very soon. So we look forward to even more of that kind of work.
General Cook: I think it's important to look at where we are historically. That is we've had a BRAC in '89, '91, '93 and '95. During that period of time you'll recall we were going from a force of 650,000 down to 360,000 and we retired 40 percent of our aircraft, if you will. So that was an opportunity to close a lot of infrastructure.
We're at a different point now, and I think it's important now to take a look at, and take credit for, what we have done not only in the past, but what we're doing today. We in AETC closed Mather, Chanute, Lowry, Reese and Williams. So we were having pilot retention problems. Now, as a result of that, we have 520 reservists who are IPs who fly within the command day-in and day-out.
We have approximately 20 Guard F-15 IPs that are instructor pilots at Tyndall. Thirty percent of our technical training is done jointly with other services. We need to do that where it makes sense, but we don't need to have Air Force Basic Military Training conducted at Fort Jackson, because we want blue people training blue people. It does not make sense to go too far in one direction or another. [Applause]
We have 120 Navy hostages at Vance. They have 140 Air Force hostages at Corpus Christi. In terms of Guard and Reserve, we are so intermixed in our command, the Texas Guard trains F-16 pilots; Springfield Guard trains F-16 pilots; Tucson Guard has the international.
So I think before we rush, we need to make sure that people understand that there are a lot of points we ought to be getting before we start willy-nilly going down a road that smashes everybody together.
Q: Captain Wade Dillard from Headquarters AIA. Is there any initiative to change the Geneva Convention so that service members don't have to give their social security number if they're captured? With the intent of protecting the member and the family members from identity theft or anything like that.
General Jumper: I don't know. You've got us stumped. We thought we knew everything, but we don't. [Laughter]
I think if you're in a Geneva Convention situation the Privacy Act is probably the last thing on your mind, but it's a good question and we'll research that.
General Martin: That's really a great question because back in the day we used to have military serial numbers that were different from your social security number, and we merged all that together and I don't think at that time when we did it we thought about the electronic world then beginning to invade your privacy. So it's a great question. It's one we probably need to look at. I'm not sure I want to go back to military service numbers, although they were shorter, but a great question.
General Jumper: FR31935... [Laughter]
Q: Good morning, General Jumper. I'm Lieutenant Devon Christiansen from Edwards Air Force Base. Sir, you've been talking about force shaping and the expanding capabilities of our new aircraft. I was just wondering what your desires are for the future of UAVs such as JUCAS and the X-45 in that force shaping.
There's a second half of that question. General Cook, right now all UAV operators have to be rated pilots. I was wondering, sir, if you could give us some of your insights into possible streamlining, a separate training track for UAV operators, separate from the standard UPT track.
General Cook: Great question. I have always been an advocate for people who don't necessarily have wings to be able to fly UAVs. There are some restrictions right now with the FAA. Flying in controlled airspace you've got to have a commercial pilot instrument rating, etc.
Having said that, flying Global Hawk, in my view, is not a great deal different than flying a GPS satellite or anything else. It is a point and click, it is not a stick. That's kind of a philosophical answer.
The practical matter is we are, and I'll cover this more tomorrow, but we are changing the concept of what a navigator is to a combat systems officer. One of the tracks will be a UAV track so that not only do we take navigation skills, but we take the best of navigation skills, electronic warfare skills, and combine them in this one officer who understands some of airpower employment, battle management, broadens the career field, and then one of those tracks is a UAV pipeline, if you will. We're working on that. I'll talk a little bit more about that tomorrow.
General Jumper: To the first part of the question, the first principle as far as I'm concerned is that we have UAVs out there today that can designate targets. You can shoot weapons from UAVs and as long as we're in the business of dispensing kinetic firepower from UAVs we will have credentialed warriors at the controls who feel the full weight of responsibility just as they would if they were piloting an A-10 or an F-16 and dropping a weapon on that target.
It is not a video game and we have to make sure that those at the controls feel the full weight of responsibility, authority and accountability for their actions.
As far as things like the Global Hawk, Don Cook's exactly right. You are at controls that don't look like airplane controls, but when you bring that UAV back into a controlled airspace environmental round an airfield, you need to have a sense of what the airspace restrictions are. You have to have a sense of where you can fly and where you can't. You have to know, if you have to send that UAV around because of conflicting traffic, what do you do next?
There's a sense of Airmanship that goes along with every basic employment of things that are in the air that has to accompany it.
I agree exactly with what Don says. This doesn't need to be done necessarily by traditional pilots the way we've always thought about them, but it does have to be done by people that have the right credentials, that have the right skills to do these sorts of jobs.
As far as how we think about UAVs, many of you have heard Dr. Roche and I talk on this subject before.
We have to make sure that we are not thinking in tribal or cultural stovepipes when we think about UAVs. I think back to the start in 1996 of the Predator UAV. I was the Air Force XO. It got thrown over from TRANSCOM to the Air Force out of a technology demonstration. Quite frankly, I was there, and the Air Force didn't exactly know how to treat this thing. We get accused of not embracing it. It wasn't that we didn't embrace it. We didn't know exactly what to do and how to deal with it.
At first, it was true to its development pattern. It was a reconnaissance and surveillance vehicle. It was largely in the hands of the intelligence community. It had great capacity and great capability, but what it did was went out and surveiled and it put its product into the same sort of collect/analyze/report processes that we use for U-2s and satellites and other things that we use to gather intelligence. It was not part of the real-time kill chain.
What we did at that time was decided that this needed to be a part of the real-time targeting process. It was put to work over in Bosnia by Hal Hornburg when he was there and then continued into the Kosovo War where we had our first demonstrable error in the way that we had thought about it. As the Predator UAV sat above the village, and you remember all the villages in Kosovo had red-tile roofs and there was the tank between the two red roof buildings. There was the A-10 probably 4,000 or 5,000 feet above the Predator waiting to try and find the target. The person on the Predator controls who saw the target going through about four or five degrees of radio relay trying to get to the person in the cockpit, and it took a half an hour just to get the A-10 pilot's eyes talked into the same area code. That's when we decided to put a laser designator on the Predator. With this laser designator came the responsibility for guiding weapons to targets.
Now as we think in the future of where we go next, we have to think, what is it that we value most about UAVs? We value the fact that they can persist and they can endure. The Predator UAV stays airborne for 24 hours. It's just as acute—we call it digital acuity. It's just as acute in its last hour as it is in the first. It's something that pilots cannot do. That's what we value about it.
So as you look forward to what are we going to do with conventionally armed UAVs in the future, we have to think carefully about what it is we actually want. If we make a stealthy object today, the first stealthy object that we've ever made that can actually defend itself and fight will be the F/A-22. The rest of our stealthy objects have to fly at night because the only defense they have is stealth. Is that the way we want a conventionally armed UAV, a night-only UAV? We have to think that through.
If we invest in its ability to defend itself, it's no longer a razor blade, as Dr. Roche said, it is not a Norelco. It's no longer dispensable, it's very expensive.
If we're going to have it carry enough weapons to take advantage of long endurance, which is the feature we most treasure, then it's going to be fairly big, and in order to endure for long periods of time over a single target it's going to have to be air refuelable. That's a capability we need to develop. It’s not invented yet.
So we have to think these things through. What is it exactly that we want? And if you think from a ConOps and an effects point of view, what would be valuable to us is to have a UAV with significant capacity that can help us solve what I call the time of flight problem. The time of flight problem is the following.
If I am overhead with weapons that can be dropped by gravity, even from 45, 50 or 60,000 feet, I'm usually within 60 seconds of having a bomb on the target. I might be able to hit the same target from a stand-off position well out over the horizon, but by the time I get that target inserted and the time of flight of a cruise weapon that would get there, we're talking about an hour or more. That is not rapid response.
One of the great things we can have with UAVs is something that could carry a large number of weapons and endure a long time over an area with forces on the ground and maybe even be directly in contact with the Airman on the ground that's with the engaged maneuver forces. He could dial up a weapon that could be dispensed from that UAV within one time of flight, that time of flight being 60 seconds or shorter.
To me, that's the way to think about progress. The way to think about a platform that we would go buy whose main virtue is not just simply not having a man in it. We have to ask ourselves when we consider these vehicles of the future, manned or unmanned. Do they considerably advance the art of war? We don't buy things just for the novelty of not having a person in it. That's the way I think about it. That's the way I think we should go. That's what Dr. Roche and Hal Hornburg and Speedy Martin, and the guys at this table, are pursuing and fighting for. And we think that there's a proud future for UAVs. We've just got to think it through and make sure we've got it right.
General Cook: Just one comment on the UAV. Because there is no pilot in it does not mean that the manpower bill is not very, very expensive. If you fly for 44 hours that's five eight-hour shifts plus five hours. That means intel analysts, that means every other person on that crew times five. So they're not cheap.
Q: George Monroe, defense consultant. At a previous AFA Convention, you announced a redesignation of the F-22 as the F/A-22. Do you envision the same kind of redesignation for the F-35?
General Jumper: One thing at a time. We've got to get it off the drawing board first, get it graduated from brochure status to engineering detail, get the weight problem solved, and see what we have. Then we're going to proceed along the logical line, but right now we're not to that stage yet of talking about renaming it, no.