AFA Policy Forum

General John W. Handy
Commander, U.S. Transportation Command and Air Mobility Command
Air Warfare Symposium - Orlando
February 17, 2005

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General John W. Handy: Thank you all very much. General Peterson, thank you and AFA. What an incredible group. I am absolutely amazed, 4:10 p.m. on a Thursday afternoon and the crowd is still here. I had bets with [General] Lance Lord that by the time we got up here this place would be empty, so I do thank you all for sticking in here with us.

As General Peterson said, as the Commander of U.S. Transportation Command, we have found ourselves rather busy and so part of my goal this afternoon is to give you a bit of an update about the things that we have been doing since we last gathered. There's no better way to tell you about that than just to read off some facts, some hard, cold facts about what your Air Mobility Command and, more importantly, the joint team at TRANSCOM has been able to do specifically for the warfight in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Since October 2001, 38,154 missions—that's missions, not sorties—have been flown. That's nearly 840,000 flying hours. That's almost inconceivable as I tell you about it.

We've now moved over two million passengers since October 2001 and 1.1 million short tons of cargo by air and an additional 4.5 million short tons of cargo by sea.

Now try this statistic. 56.2 million barrels of fuel by ship. Taken back to an oil-rich region of the world. Figure that one out. [Laughter]

We've moved nearly 320,000 containers worldwide and nearly 12,000 20-foot containers of high explosive ammunition to that theater without one single incident or accident.

Another figure that surprised me: 139 million meals.

Just think about those figures, if you would: Two million plus people, 5.6 million short tons of cargo.

I asked the staff to give me some sort of way to think about that because, in my humble opinion, and the mind that works in my head, I can't conceive of what that's really like. I don't have any idea what two million people really means, or 5.6 million short tons of cargo. As I look at this audience, you're far less than that, thank goodness. [Laughter] That's the size of the city of San Antonio, Texas, and every man, woman, and child; every automobile, every taxicab, every bus; and all the furniture, all the food and water and everything to sustain them halfway around the world—and then to sustain them the entire time they're there and bring them back again.

That's what your Air Mobility Command as a component of TRANSCOM and its other two components have been able to do in that very short period of time.

They're staggering numbers when you think that that's just Afghanistan and Iraq. Throughout this same period of time, every October through February of every one of those years, we've had the Antarctic mission on the South Pole. Right now we're wrapping up the Arctic ice season with 411 missions just from McMurdo down to a point across the south polar ice cap. Some of these missions in our Guard ski-equipped C-130s have flown to places we've never been before—so far across the Antarctic ice cap that we've had to refuel on the way back home, creating two critical stops. And it's all gone on in support of the National Science Foundation with rarely even a mention in the media at the same time that we've done the extraordinary things that I've talked about in Iraq and Afghanistan.

If that wasn't enough, then we had the tsunami challenge. As of the 7th of February we're up to almost 3,500 short tons of cargo airlifted to that part of the theater and all the men and supplies and equipment that have gone over there. TRANSCOM and AMC were able to react virtually instantaneously to support that terrible, terrible tragedy that Mr. Teets talked about.

So there is a trend emerging that I would tell you about. The Chief mentioned part of it in his talk about the number of countries we visit. You know, in an average year at TRANSCOM, we are in all but four countries in the entire world. Think about what that means. It's an amazing effort that we're engaged in.

In a typical week we have 1,900 air missions flying all around the world and an average of 25 ships underway. Right now we have 62 ships underway just in support of Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, when I talk about a ship, I'm talking about something that's 950 feet long, 150 feet wide, displaces 34 feet of water and hauls 420 C-17 equivalents. You hear that figure and you understand why I really enjoy the sealift business. It saves our critical air for the things we really need to do. And of all these things that I've talked about, if you look at what we do with our organic capability in the Department of Defense, barely 15 percent of the passengers go by organic air. Roughly 15 percent of the cargo goes by organic shipping. So who does that? It's our commercial partners.

So this delicate balance between our commercial partners and the organic assets that we have at TRANSCOM create this incredible capability that you see as we exercise these amazing talents of people. And it's not weapon systems—it is indeed our people who make these things happen.

There are 156,000 people in the United States Transportation Command—that's active duty, Guard, Reserve, and our military civilians. That doesn't count our commercial partners. That does count our merchant marine capability—the incredible capability of these people, each and every one of them trained to do the things they do so well. Without any one of them, we'd be lost. Any one of them is a special cog in this wheel of progress, this incredible capability we have to support the warfighter.

So the honor that I bring to you today, the pride that I share as Air Commander, is in the people of the United States Transportation Command and what they're able to do, and the fact that they've rallied together and day in and day out they do the things that I'm talking about. And it's not just moving things. It's sustaining, as I talked about in my analogy, using the San Antonio model.

Our responsibilities have grown just from deployment and redeployment to a distribution requirement through the Secretary of Defense. TRANSCOM is now the distribution process owner. Those are fairly fancy words. They roll off your lips, and suffice it to say in the world of most of you in the commercial sector, TRANSCOM is now the supply chain manager for the Department of Defense and within those responsibilities we've seen some dramatic progress made. Yet we're still just picking up such low-hanging fruit that I frankly refer to it in audiences as fruit that was rotting on the ground. It was very easy to see and identify and pick up. And yet in this last year, from January of 2004 to January of 2005, our supply chain management initiatives just between TRANSCOM and our DLA and service partners (it's not just us, it's our entire joint logistics team) just in support of Iraq and Afghanistan have saved an identifiable and auditable $359.6 million. That's savings and cost avoidance, but what it really means is that nearly $360 million is now in the pockets of the Air Force, the Army, the Navy, the Marine Corps. That's money they didn't have to spend either by sustainment items or buying lift—either air or sea or land. It's an amazing capability when you put one person, one group of people in charge of an entity such as our incredible DoD supply chain. And yet you can tell by my words, if we had been able to take that kind of money out and it was that fruit laying on the ground, imagine what the future has in store.

The future, folks, is dependent upon our partnerships between us and you, between logisticians and each and every one of you who can help us look for greater and greater ways to partner, to integrate, to improve our information technology systems, to give us that capability for the 2020 visibility all throughout that supply chain. And imagine what we could retrieve in terms of dollars and hand back to the services. We'll do that.

A lot of people look me in the eye and say, “gee, general…FedEx, UPS, U.S. Postal Service, DHL…” They list off all the package carriers. “General, why don't you just do it the way they do?” We do. We benchmark each other. They benchmark us, we benchmark them. Throughout this entire campaign, if you look at the in-transportation piece of in-transit visibility, if something's on an airplane we've been averaging 98 to 99 percent ITV—in-transit visibility, capability through Global Transportation Network. If it's aboard a ship, same numbers. If it's on a C-130 intra-theater, same numbers.

The problem is not just in transit. It is from our aerial ports or seaports back to a factory, or from an airport or seaport forward to a foxhole or point of consumption in the theater of operations. Imagine if we could connect both ends of that supply chain with your help, with industry partners, and provide 20/20 visibility along it. Look how long it would take just to lean out that supply chain and look at what that would mean in terms of dollars saved. It's an incredible notion, and we will persist—both us at TRANSCOM, and as I said, our national partners. We will make things happen.

If you look at some of the simple technology, radio frequency identification is getting an awful lot of publicity. Wal-Mart has certainly declared things; the DoD has declared things. We've had all kinds of test with radio frequency tags. We put them on some containers to the Port of Karachi. It was great. Huge visibility all the way to the Port of Karachi until someone beat the tar out of them thinking they were something that didn't belong on the container. [Laughter] I'm serious. Tire tools and baseball bats. What is that thing? And we'd lose track of it. Great visibility. Now it wasn't U.S. Soldiers, Sailors or Airmen or Marines that did that, it was some dock workers in the Port of Karachi—not understanding what our technology was.

There are issues as simple as that that we need to have at our hands. That line from the Port of Karachi all the way over into Afghanistan is a long line. High threat. We want to know where our stuff is. We can't afford to have huge convoys arriving anywhere in theater without the receiving end of it knowing what's happening. So all of the efforts that I'm describing to you today are issues we're working but we can't do it unilaterally.

I talked about our commercial partners, FedEx and UPS, etc. One of the biggest differences between us and them is as we deliver to a dock or they deliver to a dock, there's a unique difference. Their little brown truck doesn't get shot at when it pulls up in front of your house. [Laughter] We don't pick where our stores pop up around the world. The entire nation of Iraq is a store for U.S. Transportation Command and the Department of Defense. The tsunami is a store, if you use that analogy. You can't pick where it's going to happen. The state of Florida became a store when the hurricanes hit.

You see, the differences between our Department of Defense and our commercial partners in the package sustainment business are dramatic, and yet our business systems are sharing an awful lot in common, and we will get there because we truly understand each other and we know what's going on, but folks in this audience, we need your help. We cannot do this alone and we rely on you to partner with us.

Let me shift gears a little bit and talk about aircraft as the Chief and our Secretary mentioned to you. The first thing on my mind would be C-130s, not because I have flown them for nearly 37 years, but because this week we had to ground 30 of them. They're center wing boxes are cracked beyond repair, and it exceeded the engineers' design criteria for the C-130 aircraft. Now, 30 of those aircraft are grounded because they've exceeded the life of that center wing box. There are an additional 60 that are so restricted that all they can carry are passengers. They have so many restrictions on them—I'll give you a couple of examples. Avoid turbulence. You can see yourself flying along, whoops, there comes some turbulence. [Laughter] Duck, dive, climb. How do you do that? I've not seen turbulence yet. I've felt an awful lot of it. [Laughter] How do you do that? Sixty more aircraft.

If you keep flying them, you know what happens. Their equivalent baseline flying hours marches towards the grounding point, 38,000 flying hours. So 30 grounded, 60 more restricted, that's 90. Twelve of those restricted aircraft were in the theater. On the 19th of this month we'll have replaced all 12 of them. That's how quickly the Guard and Reserve and active components reacted, looked at the problem, provided aircraft. We didn't get pushback from anybody. No pushback from unit commanders, no pushback from TAGs, everybody knows what the problems are and we rallied together and we're supplying that capability to the theater. We're getting those restricted aircraft out of there and replacing them with good aircraft.

But it shows you that the C-130E model is an old aircraft. I can go to Pope Air Force Base today or Rhein-Main or Yokota and fly aircraft I flew in Vietnam in 1970. That's not so bad, but some of my landings back then weren't nearly as good as they should have been and so it's no wonder those center wing boxes are struggling today. [Laughter]

We need the C-130J. That decision you heard debated here was a decision made in the dark of the night in a budget drill. My humble opinion is it is supported by darn little analysis, and I'm pleased and have been told by the Secretary as well that we will look at that decision in the QDR. We need C-130Js, folks, need them badly because we can't afford to continue the decline in the C-130 fleet to the extent that we're seeing.

And by the way, lest you think it's just in the E model fleet, some of the H1s are starting to be affected. We have H1s on that restricted list. Virtually no unit in our Air Force is untouched by that serious situation.

And if you're wondering what a center wing box is, just picture a C-130. Inboard engine all the way to inboard engine on the other side of the airplane. It is a huge piece of structure and we've been only able to examine a small part of it.

I don't want to belabor the point, but it points to the fact that we have geriatric aircraft in our inventory. Don't get me started on tankers, either. [Laughter]

That E model 135 fleet, 28 aircraft are off the flying schedule today because we're worried about pylons. We're talking about dissimilar metals that the folks back in the Eisenhower administration knew for sure would work as long as that airplane would last and yet we've extended that aircraft way beyond its service life through incredible maintenance. Look at what Speedy Martin's folks are doing down at Tinker Air Force Base. It is amazing to go down there and see what they do there, literally rebuilding KC-135s. Especially our E model fleet.

I don't know what the solution will be, but I can tell you this. The average age of that KC-135 is approaching 45 years of age across the fleet. An interim repair on that strut will last up to five years. Engineers say up to five years. It could be up to four and a half years, three and a half years. Pick a point in between there. And then you're going to have to spend $4.5 to $5 million per airplane to fix them. Now, in five years, something that's 45 years old by even my history major math is going to be nearly 50 years old by the time we start fixing it.

My granddaughter is three years old next month. Her child could fly the KC-135 if we start replacing them today. Think about that.

We just celebrated the 100th Anniversary of Flight. If you looked out on the flight line of our KC-135 base and saw that we had a squadron of Wright Flyers, you'd probably smile a little bit. You might want to fly one, but it wouldn't be in combat. That's what it's going to be like when our grandkids and our grandkids' kids are out there to go fly. They'll look at that thing as we do the Wright Flyer, folks. We've got to do something about it. We have to, we must recapitalize.

And lest you think I'm up here talking about just recapitalization in the Air Mobility Command Fleet, I've got ships in the same category. Our Air Force has aircraft of every category that needs to recapitalized, and even our C-17s, look at what we're doing to them. That incredible airplane. We couldn't live without it. Our last C-141s are at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. It is rare to see a 141 flying any more, there are so few of them left. In the '06 and '07 timeframe, they'll all be gone, and thank goodness for the C-17. Thank goodness for those predecessors of ours who had the foresight across the Air Force and Army especially to make sure that we have the C-17 aircraft.

Mr. Teets was asked about the C-130J in theater. There are two aircraft, he was absolutely right. There are two aircraft that have been over there since early December. Their statistics are absolutely amazing. Right now, because I asked for the latest update, 393 flying hours in combat; 1,743 passengers and more than 627 tons of cargo. Here's the neat thing. They've exceeded a 98 percent mission capability rate when they've been utilized at a 75 percent commitment rate. Think about that. That is absolutely amazing and that is not with some kind of shored-up company-fed logistics system. That is using the existing logistics systems of our United States Air Force supporting that J model aircraft. And if you could talk to any pilot, if you could talk to any one of them or any crew member or any maintenance person in that theater, you would see a smile from ear to ear about what that aircraft does. And when they take our E and H model crew members aboard for an orientation flight, it looks like a mule eating briars when they come down off that crew entry door. [Laughter] Absolutely amazing. It's an incredible airplane and the decision will be revisited.

It's an exciting time in our Air Force and it's an exciting time in the business that I'm in. I'm surrounded by people that do amazing things, and let me finish with one example.

Of all the things that we do from presidential and distinguished visitor lift to these incredible numbers that I gave you, we've also moved from the theater of operations just over 30,000 patients from Afghanistan and Iraq. Now of those 30,000, approximately 4,000 have been battle injuries. All of those patients are supported by the most amazing, unequivocal, highly capable medical teams, both on the ground in the theater and in the air. And in all of those 30,000 plus patients, from the most seriously wounded to too sick for the theater, not one single patient has been lost in that entire aeromedical evacuation system. Not one. That's an amazing feat of medicine and of airmanship.

I had the chance recently to go aboard a C-130 that was bringing some young Marines from Andrews through to Scott for an overnight and then they were going to be distributed to their local hospitals. I wish each and every one of you in this room could have the same experience. You can visit folks in the hospital, but it's amazing when you get on board the aircraft. They had just loaded up and were about to go and my wife and I were out there to say our words of thanks. I defy anybody, tough old general as we like to think we are, or any one of you, to walk down the aisle and look at anybody stacked on their stretchers. Bend down on the knee, look them in the eye, and trying to search for words—what do I say to this young person? It could be my son or daughter. What do I say to them? And while you're standing there or kneeling there searching for those words (if possible), in most cases it happens to you—a hand comes out from under a blanket and either will grab you on the shoulder or grab your hand and squeeze it tight and you've heard it before, each and every one of them will say, “thank you, but get me back to my unit. Get me back to my brothers and sisters. I belong with them, not here.” And if you're not standing there or kneeling there with a tear in your eye and tugging at your heart, you're too cold because it's the most incredible experience of your life.

And you'll stand up and walk out of there feeling more proud to be an American than you probably would ever, ever find any other way. That's the business of our Department of Defense. It epitomizes the business of Air Mobility Command. And it is the heartbeat of our United States Air Force, defense of this nation by great young Americans.

Thank you all for your very kind attention. I look forward to your questions.

Q: General Jumper mentioned that the Army's looking at a future cargo aircraft, a smaller aircraft to support Special Ops and troops on future missions. How do you see that in relationship to say the C-130 and our normal mission?

General Handy: That's a good question and it's timely. I will tell you as we look to our experiences both in Iraq, but especially in Afghanistan, we realize that what we're seeing happen is the C-130, as incredibly capable as it is, and the C-17, equally as capable and doing wonderful work—that the requirement from our customers was to get distances of about 1,000 miles, small pallet numbers in the neighborhood of three pallets, and 25 to 30 people, small stuff. And they needed to get to very, very short airfields, shorter than the capability of our C-130s and C-17s. So we have identified a requirement inside the Air Force and we're working with our partners in the Army because they have the same requirement to replace their aged-out Sherpas. So the Army requirement is somewhere around 53 and we don't know what the requirement inside the Air Force is, but we know it's our obligation and I certainly see it from my TRANSCOM hat as I talk to our customers out there. So we've partnered with the Air Force and are working, as I said, with the Army to come up with that requirement, identify what it is, and it is something smaller than a C-130 to handle the capabilities that I've just described, and it will be that short haul capability not unlike what the Caribou was for us back when the Chief and I were flying that many, many years ago. And we've grown out of that. Now we're finding that the global war on terrorism and the future we see requires that sort of lift. So we're diligently working that requirement and we'll come up with it fairly quickly. That will complement the C-130 fleet, the C-17 fleet, and it will be that low end of the niche that we can fulfill.

Q: We know, we've seen it most recently, the initiatives by the Air Force to take a greater role in transporting our troops and our cargo inside the theater to help our Army and Marine brethren. Have you seen a surge in insurgent activity increasing the threat as we put more airplanes in this environment?

General Handy: Well, I can address it one very direct way. There are 64 C-130s in theater right now, U.S. Air Force C-130s. That number has not grown or declined. What we have done is work with our Army partners in the theater to try to divert as much as possible of the cargo that would normally travel along the convoy routes in theater, but specifically around the Sunni Triangle, if you know where that is. That was the highest threat region from a ground convoy perspective.

As you look at the kinds of cargo that move in theater, of the 100 percent that was going by trucks, roughly 85 percent of that is things that don't go by air—that's fuel and water. The rest of it, Class 9 equipment, parts and people, we were able to work with the Army to get as much of that 15 percent on the C-130 missions as we possibly could and so we've increased dramatically the loads on our C-130s and we have created a situation where we have dramatically minimized the convoy operations within the Sunni Triangle, and that's been the target.

We have also used more direct delivery of C-17s, working again with the theater and specifically the Army and to a lesser extent the Marine Corps, to pick hubs within the theater that we could direct-deliver because we've always known the C-17 had that capability. The problem was the lack of hubs that we could spoke out of. Now we've identified those areas and the C-17s for about a month have been direct-delivering in and we've put two C-17s at Monas and one of the ‘Stans and we've put two in Kuwait. Those four additional C-17s, in addition to the direct delivery, have really had a dramatic impact.

Now I get to the point you ask, has that increased any kind of threat to us? Well the threat has been virtually stable throughout this entire time. Whether we've increased the air movement in theater or not, we still get surface-to-air fires; either rockets, missiles, ManPads, whatever the case may be, small arms. It's been at a steady pace throughout this.

So there's been no increase due to our efforts to download the convoy efforts. There's been no decrease, it's just that stayed about the same. Still, defensive systems are required for all airfields in Iraq and virtually all of them in Afghanistan. We're able to operate in two airfields now without DS.

Q: You stated a requirement for 22 C-17s. Could you talk about the impact if we end up not getting that number?

General Handy: That requirement is based upon MRS-2005. Most of you have heard that speech many more times than I care to even give it myself. The problem is that's the last Mobility Requirement Study. It was designed, done in 2000, released in January 2001, and it was trying to predict what the world would be like in 2005. We're here now and you can see this world would never have been predicted in 2000. It was not predicted in 2000. And yet that is the very scenario that said we needed a minimum of 222 C-17s and X number of C-5s, and you could move the chart all around you want to and come up with some sort of solution.

So when I have talked about a minimum of 222, it's referring back to a study that I have said repeatedly that it's historical in nature. As best as mankind has tried to predict the future, we have not been able to do that.

So MRS-2005 was a wonderful document, a great piece of work when it was released. Twenty-four hours later, it was already an historical document and it's the only figure we have until we get MCS, the Mobility Capability Study, which is a product of the Joint Staff J4 and OSD PA&E. It's not a TRANSCOM document. A lot of people ask me, “well gee, general, when are you going to have the MCS out?” We are advisors in that process and at a very distant advice role. It is the Joint Staff J4 and the PA&E folks, and those folks are working it diligently. We're hopeful they'll come out with a study that will better clarify not only what the strategic piece of this ought to be, the inter-theater lift ought to be (i.e., C-17s and C-5s), but they ought to identify for us the intra-theater requirement for C-130s, how many Js we might need, how many of the niche aircraft that I mentioned we might need, and also how many tankers we might need. What's the real tanker requirement? I am hopeful, as I said, that by March of this year they’ll have it. I think it will be more like May or June frankly, so we'll just wait and see.

The tanker AOA by the way, was due out 1 November, a Rand product. It was delayed until 30 November, then until December, then January, then February, and now as you know from Mr. Teets, it may be two months away now. These things are important documents, but we need to get them so that we can make the decisions that we need to create the budgets that get us the things that this great Air Force needs.

I'll get off the soapbox. You all understand what I'm talking about.

Q: I guess after the discussion about the timelines on that you probably are not ready to give us any thoughts on the trends that we’re likely to see in the MCS.

General Handy: I am very hopeful that, because we're not uninformed, that we'll get some reasonable expectation from the study. It's been a lot of people working hard, and I don't want to minimize in any of your minds the effort that's taking place. These are diligent, dedicated, hard working individuals that are trying to do something that as I said from the start, how are you going to predict the future? What we can really do is look at today's requirement and say, “what does it take to do the job today?” I will tell you all at the height of the Iraqi campaign we could not service all of Buzz Moseley's fighter, bomber and airlift tracks in Afghanistan and Iraq. We couldn't do it with the available tankers and we had virtually every tanker we owned deployed except for the Es which we had to keep home because of their lack of capability. We could not service all the tracks required. That's not just Air Force, that's coalition and Navy and air, everybody.

On the airlift side, many of you heard me talk about the relationship between Tommy Franks and myself at the time. We had to negotiate all of the lift requirements leading up to the entry into Iraq because we lacked the lift—air, land and sea. We don't have the capability to do what the warfighter wants. And every time there has been a requirement since then, the one thing that we're really guilty of, the Chief stood up here and just said it, we make life look so easy. Our entire Air Force does. And in TRANSCOM and Air Mobility Command, we do exactly the same thing. It's easy because we sit down and we negotiate times and tonnage and passengers and we negotiate when it's going to happen. We pick a date by which we'll deliver and we do that, and we do it very successfully. We are an incredible force to be reckoned with. None better. We make it look easy, but we don't have enough.

I would like to have a day when we have exactly not too many tankers, not too many C-17s or C-130s, or C-5s or go down the list. I don't want too many, but I don't want to be caught as a nation when we are drawing back into the continental U.S. without the capability to get out and do things. I don't want to be so extended that when the next tsunami or hurricane hits we'll say, “gosh, I wish we could, but we're too committed.” I don't want to be caught needing to take instead of 44 ships circling in the Eastern Med and having the time to move them through the Suez around to Kuwait, I don't want to have to look at warfighter in the eye and say, “you know, the C-17s that you needed at Aviano, Italy to take the 173rd in for the northern front at Bashur? Seventeen of them. We don't have them to put up there to do that drop.”

We cannot be a nation that says we can't do something because we're so committed. If you look at today's reality, we are a very committed nation. The folks back at TRANSCOM are running around with their tongues hanging out. Our crews are on the road constantly. The Chief mentioned it. Our deployment rates are staggering. And so we need exactly what we need—no more, but no less. That's the issue. That's the issue for the nation.

Q: Sir, you mentioned a little bit about this talking about our partners in airlift on the commercial side. How about the commercial airline industry? They're suffering a lot of financial challenges right now. Do you see that impacting the Civil Reserve Air Fleet (CRAF)?

General Handy: A viable Civil Reserve Air Fleet is a big deal to TRANSCOM and Air Mobility Command. You heard the numbers. We can't get along without them.

I think if you read much about the commercial airline industry, you'll see one thing is fairly obvious—our rider rates are really up, but we perhaps have too much of the wrong thing in inventory. What really ought to worry us all in uniform who have to get somewhere is you watch the trends and they're going from long range, wide body passenger carrying international capability to smaller, more efficient, not long range, not huge passenger carrying capability. That's the thing that really worries us in TRANSCOM. Trying to work with our partners to as much as we can help them by not hurting them, to try to ensure that we have a viable commercial fleet in this country, and then be able to take advantage of them, work with them when we need them. That's our concern.

Their financial viability is something that we frankly don't have an input into. We watch that very carefully, but our partners are very strong partners and our commercial air industry will survive, but in all honesty, it's not going to look tomorrow like it looks today. It just doesn't look like that's possible.

Question: We know we're working issues on the C-5 to improve its performance. Do you see us looking downstream for a heavy airlifter, maybe an airlifter that's also a tanker or a cargo carrier and a Special Ops aircraft? Do you see anything like that? Are there ongoing future studies?

General Handy: How about if we work on world hunger first? [Laughter]

Q: That would cover it.

General Handy: Frankly, I'd rather do that. Whoever wrote that question down for you, my bodyguard's around … Mike, will you get that name and… [Laughter]

We have looked at a variety of things. You asked a question and I'll give you an opinion. We built the C-5 at a time we could build the C-5. There was a requirement for that kind of capability. But if you look across the military today—Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps—there are still about five items that require a C-5 capability because of the size of the box. That tells you right now you don't need to build that size airplane.

The huge advantage to the C-5 today is if you need to unjam a port (the Port of Charleston gets unexpected cargo in there and you want to clean it out, or Ramstein Air Base or any other aerial port in the world, or you've got a serious problem somewhere), it is the C-5 that you can put in there as we did with Charleston or Ramstein or anywhere else in a weekend, in a couple of days of operations, and that C-5 can suck the lifeblood out of any aerial port you can pick on the planet earth. It is an incredible capability and we need that, and we need it viable. We need its MC rates up, we need its reliability rates up, and we'll get it there, but will we ever build another one like that? I don't think so because there's not a requirement for that capability any more.

Then we've looked at whether the C-17 could be an air refueling aircraft and cargo aircraft. Well, we've looked at that and the answer is the C-17 has a cargo-carrying capability, does all the great things it does, and we need to replace the air refueling capability with an air refueling designed aircraft.

Question: This next one is not really a question, it's more of a comment. It says, "General Handy, from the people of Florida, thanks for the emergency relief supplies delivered by your C-17s after the destruction of lives and property in the aftermath of four hurricanes. When our people looked up and saw the C-17s on day one, loud cheers went up. The C-17 is a symbol that help is on the way." That's from Major General Doug Burnett for Governor Jeb Bush and the people of Florida.

General Handy: Doug, thank you so much. [Applause]