General Paul V. Hester
Commander, Pacific Air Forces
Air Warfare Symposium - Orlando
February 18, 2005
General Hester: Thank you, General Peterson. It's great to be with you this morning. General Jumper, it's good to see you and the rest of the Air Force leadership, and all the Airmen who belong to our great Air Force.
I was surprised, to a degree, that yesterday we listened to the leaders who talked and the centerpiece of their conversation was about people, and yet I knew that when I was going to show my first slide this morning it was about Airmen—not about PACAF, not about the Pacific, but about Airmen and what they do to support our Air Force in everything that they do.
I was also pleased yesterday to hear General Peterson and others recognize great leaders who have been mentors to us all. As you wander the halls in the exhibit center, you run into many more that you hadn't previously seen in here. One I think we failed to introduce yesterday was General Jimmy Adams, who was PACAF Commander. So if you'd join me in a round of applause for General Jimmy Adams. [Applause]
I've got a cousin that I have an intense interest in getting him to be an Airman. He's got a little ways to go, he's 17 years old, but Budreau's only in the 8th grade. [Laughter] We're working on him pretty hard.
His teacher asked him last week, “Budreau, what do you think is the greatest invention of the world?” I mean, in the blinking of an eye, he said, “the thermos bottle.” His teacher looked real puzzled at him and said, “Budreau, the thermos bottle only keeps things hot or it keeps things cold.”
He said, “may yeah, but how do it know?” [Laughter]
So we've got a little work on Budreau before he gets up to knowing what he wants to do and understanding he wants to be a part of our great Air Force.
We do have a great Air Force with great Airmen. Just a few short years ago, when they still let me fly F-15s, I walked out to the flight line one day in a hot, sweltering afternoon in August at Kadena Air Base. Those of you who have been there know how hot that is. As I approached the shelter where the Eagle jet was, there was the crew chief, a young kid in his black T-shirt out there working very hard. He saw me coming and he picks up his BDU shirt and he puts it on and he buttons it up the front and he's standing there at the ladder as I walk up. Salutes very proudly, hands me the forms, and he says, "Welcome to my jet."
The difference in a word is the difference in our Air Force. He didn't say, “Welcome to the Eagle,” “welcome to ‘the’ jet, good to see you,” he said, "Welcome to my jet."
We had given this young man responsibility. He had very proudly wrapped it on his shoulders and carried it very strongly. And he had taken ownership of the job we had given him. He now was a full-fledged member of the Air Force. He had ownership in the Air Force and he was committed to the Air Force. He was a part of the team. That's what we find completely throughout our Air Force, with all of the Airmen who work wherever it is in our service, whether it is stateside or whether it is overseas in one of the commands or it's on an AEF deployment.
Let's focus on the Pacific just for a second. Let me remind you of some of the details that you already know and maybe have forgotten. 105 million square miles; 16 time zones; 43 countries; 1,000 languages; 90 percent water, 10 percent ground, 100 percent air and space. The Pacific is a large area. The tyranny of distance keeps us on our toes of how to properly prepare, how to properly posture. And as we transform the Pacific over the next several years under Secretary Rumsfeld and also our Chief's guidance, we will find ourselves moving assets around, maybe growing a little bit bigger in the Pacific, because you will remember, before we turned the millennium, the number of articles written that the next century was going to be the Century of the Pacific. The past century had been the century of Europe. We got sidetracked by 9/11 and yet we didn't get sidetracked because we saw the connective tissue between what happened on 9/11, where people got trained in the strains and where they ran, and there's a lot of those strains that run into the Pacific.
So as we transform the Pacific I think it's important to look at that triangle you see on the slide and realize that we have from Alaska through Hawaii out to Guam at Anderson Air Force Base a sovereign, strategic triangle that allows us to be in a defensive posture for our country and yet a deep penetration into the Western Pacific for engagement, any kind of operation, any kind of action, all under an American flag. Very important.
Our President went on to say that the "success of this region is going to be essential for us to move forward into the 21st Century." Pacific will be where things will grow. Thirty percent of our trade is in this area—the largest percentage of any area in the world. Now granted that's skewed just a little bit, it's a large area as we talked about. There are a lot of countries out there. We've got two countries that compose together one-third of the population of the world. A billion in China, a billion in India of a six billion planet. There's a lot of folks out there in the Pacific.
How do we focus our attention? Through the four Ps out there. I'll let you read those. We're going to concentrate on each one of them just a bit.
We posture our forces in a variety of places. You know where those are. We're going to have a Warfighting Headquarters. We're not ready to announce where the Warfighting Headquarters is going to be stood up, but the Warfighting Headquarters is going to give the Pacific, just as it does with Doc Foglesong in Europe, the ability to have a standing construct with an Air Operation Center that can in fact watch daily operations, smoothly transition to wartime operations, have a standing JFAC as well as the capability with the staff to be the core of a JTF if the PACOM Commander asks an Airman to be the JTF Commander. It's exciting new work for us and it's going to take a bit of time for us to position the forces at the right location to stand it up and get it operating so that this Warfighting Headquarters with its AOC is going to be in contact with 9th and CENTAF, with 8th, with 12th, with General Foglesong's over in Europe. It is a vision for the future. It is attainable by us, and we'll start that process later this spring.
As you well know, on the northern tier at the part of that triangle I described up in Alaska, we have forces that are arrayed up at Eielson Air Force Base in the cold of the north as well as at Elmendorf in Anchorage. No changes are expected there, except in 2007 we will see C-17s come into Anchorage at Elmendorf for the first time.
Now, just in front of that, in 2006, we'll get the first C-17s stationed outside the United States at Hickam Air Force Base, and we'll get those airplanes throughout the entire calendar year of 2006. It's also the Headquarters of PACAF, as you well know, and it's also the location of our Air Operation Center there at Hickam. The work that we are looking forward to doing with our C-17s and working with General John Handy in the TACC is to provide the same kind of great capability we're doing with our C-130s and our 135s in the Pacific as we work through our AMOC in the TACC to make sure that we in fact fill out all the requirements that are asked for by all of our COCOMs around the world.
Then we switch to the deepest penetration out at Anderson Air Force Base. Some of you are too young to know when this picture was taken. It was in 1973. There are 175 B-52s at Anderson Air Force Base as we were in the latter throes of the Vietnam War. That's a lot of iron sitting on a lot of concrete at Anderson. And as you well know, we have taken Anderson into a kind of a caretaker status over the past number of years. We've got great plans for Anderson out in the future.
Guam has a significant capacity and capability. It has two 10,000 foot runways. All that concrete is still there, we're still pouring more. We have a B-2 hangar that will be completed in the near future, and other hangars that are there, and obviously people find an opportunity to station through Guam. We also run Code North Guam for our Japanese allies as they bring their fighters off of the mainland of Japan, out to Guam, deploy there, and do operations with us. We'll do another Code North Guam later this summer with F-15Es coming from the States to work with the Japanese out there. It's a great opportunity for us.
Currently, and for the past year, we have had a rotational capability with bombers. Right now it's B-52s. In fact, it is a Reserve unit that's out there. I went out and visited them just two weeks ago and they're doing great work. They'll leave here in about another month, then they'll be replaced by a series of airplanes over the next year as we continue this rotation to provide this capability to our COCOM, the PACOM Commander, out in the regions with B-1s, B-52s, or B-2s as they come available to us from ACC.
It has great room to grow. I've kidded my staff as we've looked out into the distance, that when I retire I know exactly what I'm going to do. Linda and I are moving to Guam, I'm buying five cement trucks and I'm going to show up at the front gate every day. I figure in about a year I will have made a million dollars and we can retire, by just pouring concrete on Guam. It's a great place, and if you want to go set up your business, it's a good place to go.
We also have, in terms of pouring that concrete, ideas of how to take the 36th Air Expeditionary Wing—you notice I didn't say Air Base Wing—which we used to have there. We took the 36th, transitioned it into the AEF construct, relabeled it into AEF, AEW. P.K. White is running that wing out there and it grows and flexes; it gets bigger and smaller depending on what the threat is, what our exercises are, or the needs of the PACOM Commander.
The B-52s are out there in the long-time distance. We look forward to Global Hawk being stationed permanently out there. And with rotational capabilities with tankers, fighters, bombers, and other assets, we expect to see the full breadth of inventory of the U.S. Air Force flowing through there on an AEF at some time in the long-term future. Guam has a bright future for us.
Let's turn now to the next P. I thought before last week that we were on a very slow, very methodical road to engagement with the North Koreans. Today, we're not sure exactly where we are, on what road with the North Koreans. We're back consulting with allies because, as you know, they backed out of the 6-Party talks and they declared that they had already built nuclear weapons. So now we are reinvestigating what our U.S. policy should be in concert with those others who are in the engagement process with us and North Korea.
Linda and I visited the DMZ just last week. It hasn't changed. It's still a scary place. There are two slivers of hope on the DMZ. On the east and west side of the peninsula there are two transportation corridors—magnificent interstate highways that have been built by the South going north to the border, through the DMZ—where they cleared out all the mines. They're building a rail network to take goods and services up there, and also in theory to be able to bring goods and services from the North down to the South to sell to the world. We'll have to wait and see exactly what goods and services.
The first goods and services that have come through there were pots and pans made in South Korea, put on the trains, shipped North, taken into the economic zone in North Korea where the North Korean workers then polished up the bottoms of the pots and pans, put them back on the truck, brought them back down South and claimed victory for what they had produced. [Laughter]
It's a start. We can laugh about it, but it is a start. It is a slow, methodical start of engagement that we need to continue to do and to figure out how to make a soft landing out of this place rather than a hard landing.
It's still a very, very dangerous place. You've seen the facts and figures. I won't reiterate them for you this morning. Seoul is at great risk in any scenario with North Korea.
This is just to remind us, I don't have a picture of Orlando, but I think if you look at that one that's about in the middle of the screen, that's probably what Orlando would look like. As we drove out to dinner last night I don't think there was a dark spot in this area, and I think it looks a little bit like Seoul. But look to North Korea at night. It looks like you're out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. In fact, I wouldn't be a bit surprised if you wouldn't see more light in the Pacific Ocean than you do in North Korea.
Service before self is not a tenet of North Korea's government. It is self before service there. Taking money in, hoarding it, taking care of their military at the expense of their population. Diametrically opposed to the way that we believe, the way we work, and the way our Air Force has its core values.
Our Airmen in Korea, as you know, are principally on a remote tour. Osan Air Base, down at the Wolf Pack, Thundering Herd with the 51st, they're just doing magnificent work. They're there for one year. The training environment is very difficult. Gary Trexler has them all under control, has a training, methodical plan that leads through a variety of exercises as we take those young Airmen in there every year. He spins them up, makes them ready to fight, and they are prepared and their morale is sky high. You would love to be with them to see what they're doing. No different than you would love to be with the Airmen who are on an AEF deployment into the CENTCOM AOR. They love what they're doing. They would go back tomorrow, just as soon as they got home and washed their clothes, they'd turn around and go back.
We are a part of the AEF—a full partner in the Pacific, both as a giver and as a receiver. We give to the AEF and we send our Airmen from the Pacific to wherever they're needed. Those that drive in the convoys that Ron Keys just talked about, those who are flying overhead, those who are doing BOS and running the bases wherever that happens to be.
In addition to that, we have those AEFs that come and support us when the carrier is out of position out of Japan. We bring the AEF in, the bombers we have in Guam, those who go into Kadena from Alaska on an in-theater AEF deployment to position themselves closer to the threat, the potential threats—also to dissuade our enemies from causing any havoc during the time that we feel there is a slight increase in risk.
We're not normally in the business of doing test and evaluation, but a year ago PACAF came up with a plan on how to engage targets at sea through all weather. Moving targets at sea. We found between us and the Navy we didn't have the capability to do that, and what capability that existed that theoretically could do it was diminishing and was going out of the inventory very soon.
General Dave Deptula, the DO from PACAF, put together a plan, organized it, got the money. The Chief gave us $10 million last year to run this. We did so in November out in the Pacific ranges. The results were astounding. From space through command and control through the JSTARS through the JDAMs on the B-52s, we engaged small targets at sea—25-foot boats that were targets at sea, drifting at 15 knots; and then a larger boat, as you see here, that was essentially adrift at about five knots, we engaged with JDAMs. The results were dramatic.
On the first day we engaged the ships; the smaller ships going through cloud layers that started at 1,500 feet and ranged all the way up to 30,000 feet. We didn't see them except for being able to find them through the technology that we had put on those airplanes. It was a pretty clear day when we hit this boat on the second day. I think you would agree Billy Mitchell would have been proud and Dave Deptula did a great job of running this exercise for us.
One of our jobs is to, in this large area of operation (AOR), is to find an opportunity to engage our potential allies, or coalition partners, and to work with them. As you know, unlike the European theater where NATO collects a group of nations together under one umbrella and operates together in that cooperation, we do bilateral cooperation in the Pacific. There's no multilateral cooperation that we run in terms of a defense set-up. So, consequently, we work that bilateral scheme very closely. We do so through exercises, we do so by sending our folks out on the ground from young sergeants and Airmen all the way up to colonels, working both on the ground in maintenance through medicine as well as through flying airplanes in our exercises. It is a cooperation and interaction that builds trust and cooperation so that we can put the coalitions together when coalitions are necessary out in the Pacific.
One of those was last year at Cope India. We took F-15s from Alaska and went to India and fought against them with the F-15Cs. This Fall we're going to go back with the F-15CJs from Misawa in the CCIP mod. We'll do that in November and we're looking forward to that very much. It will be a large force exercise. We'll have people on the ground, people in the air. It will mark a growing respect between our two nations as we work together. And of course our friends the Indians now have turned and come to Cope Thunder, and we'll talk about that again in just a few minutes.
The Thunder exercise up in Alaska, we have wonderful ranges up there. It gives us the ability to bring people from the Pacific together. Thunder is a great exercise. It supports the relationships that we've already built down at Red Flag at the Nellis range complex in the western as well as the air-to-air range complex that Shedbob has down over the Gulf off Florida. We have an investment that has been carefully crafted with our friends in POM and our friends in Congress and it is a long-term investment that will keep this both with emitters on the ground and range airspace that will enable us to use all of our weapon systems when we go up there.
You can see by the numbers on the slide as well as those who have participated in the past and those who will participate in the future with the kind of weapon systems that they have, that this is a growth industry for us. Surprising to me are the number of friends and allies from Europe who want to come when they come to cooperative Cope Thunder up in Alaska. That's a long way for them, but it's also a short way if they come over the Pole, if they've got the ability to do so. Alaska is a growth industry for us in Cope Thunder and it provides us a great joint and combined training exercise.
The last thing I'd like to talk about is our people. I started with talking about Budreau and how I wanted to get him in the service. Well, Budreau is way behind all these young Airmen that we've got in our service. They in fact are the heart and soul, they are the strength of our Air Force, and they provide you and me the ability to reach out and formulate friends with other coalition partners. They are on the ground, they're there day and night, they fly, they work in the back shops, they work in the medical centers. They deploy on the AEF. They go in harm's way and they help those who have been in harm's way and need assistance to get back into the fight the soonest. Occasionally, they join together and win the 50th Anniversary of William Tell. We're very proud of them from up at Elmendorf as they won that. [Applause]
The tsunami aid effort. Probably no better demonstration of what America is like is when America reaches out to those in need. You're well aware as General John Handy walked you through some of the dramatic numbers yesterday of the tsunami relief. As you look at that wave going across that area, realize that that area is roughly 4,500 miles wide. Dave Deptula was the JFACC from this operation. The distances that we operated in when we were out there, from Thailand down to Banda Aceh, was a thousand miles, and it was over two thousand miles out to Sri Lanka just off the coast of India. It's the best of America as we reached our hands out.
A large number of countries were involved in the coalition that had to be put together—both for the ground piece as well as the air piece. We had to figure out how to work the NGOs into it. Lieutenant General Rusty Blackman was the JTF Commander out of the 3rd MEF out of Okinawa and did a great job of organizing this. And Dave Deptula as the JFACC for the air put all the air together to support this.
In the typical hub-and-spoke fashion that we have been schooled in by General John Handy and the AMC professionals, the C-5s and the C-17s brought that strategic lift in from the United States with all that cargo and brought it in to Utapao in Thailand. We then in the hub-and-spoke fashion put it on C-130s and took it down range to the necessary countries. From there we put it onto helicopters, both our HH-60s as well as off of flattops, with their HH-60s and Marine Corps HH-60s, into the areas that did not have road access and we could go and help those people.
What did it prove to us? It proved to us that America had invested wisely and had the technology and the tools to be able to put this together fastest. America was on the scene, as was said this morning on day one, on hour one, on minute one, with assistance. As soon as this broke out we started moving airplanes. The 374th from up at Yokota was the Air Expeditionary Wing that left, took their C-130s, and went down to Utapao.
I started moving C-130s from Alaska, got them all ready and started pre-positioning them to start coming south and they moved down to Kadena, waiting for their orders of how to pick up goods and services and take them into the region. It was a magnificent effort we are now totally out of as of this past week. We have now shut down and turned it over to the NGO organizations.
As you heard (and have seen so many pictures), the ability for America to bring relief and reach with the humanitarian hand as opposed to the hand on the sharp end of a bayonet or the pointy end of an A-10, it is the best of America lending help to someone in need.
Over 250,000 people dead. I tried to explain this in a speech when I was talking to a group in Honolulu recently. I said the only way I can do that is to think about my own state of Mississippi. You take the three largest cities in Mississippi, you wipe them all out, and I don't mean wipe them out, I mean take away every building, every house, every road structure, kill every person in town, every dog and cat and cow, and you've got some scope of the magnitude.
The unfortunate part of that description is, it only covers a small state, whereas you'll remember, we were spread wide with this tsunami, stretching from Sri Lanka over to Indonesia up to India and over to Phuket in Thailand. A wide area, something we were trying to get our arms and our minds around. Very, very difficult.
But the relief came with 15 nations helping. Those who went down-range to investigate, to see, to do the operation, came away with memories that they will have for a lifetime. The memories of assistance, of being able to put the human touch and the human hand of assistance from America forward. It is in fact what I would like to think is the best of America.
So where do we come? Right back where we started. Talking about Airmen doing Airmen kind of things. Taking their families halfway around the world, positioning them in countries forward with a different culture, and then getting into an AEF construct and deploying forward.
I've been blessed to have a full partner in my wife Linda as we go out to do business. We also have that at the NCO and at the officer level in our leadership positions. It truly describes that Air Force families lead Air Force families. Provide the comfort, provide the care, provide the feeding, provide that family bond when the military member is away from the family at night for long deployed periods.
I'd like to leave you with one last story, if I could. I was in the CENTCOM AOR, walking back from midnight chow. I happened to walk next to a young lady and as I was wanting to do, you've got to engage a young Airman, you want to find out who are you, where are you from, what do you do, why are you here, how long are you going to be here? So we went through that as we walked down this dusty road and she told me she was 19 years old and she was from Eglin Air Force Base and that she was a substitute on an AEF and had been in theater for just two weeks. So I asked her to explain a little bit more, about, “what do you mean, you're a substitute?”
She said, “well, this is not my AEF. Mine's a little bit further down the road. But somebody in my organization had a medical problem with the family and couldn't go and we were fixing to turn that spot back and they asked for volunteers and I threw up my hand.” I said, “why did you do that? You were out of cycle, you didn't have to go, you didn't have to be here walking down this road tonight with me.” She said, “somebody was in need and I wanted to contribute.” Powerful words by a 19 year old. [Applause]
AEF is how we operate. Airmen with a capital A is who we are. It is a life worth living. I'll look forward to your questions.
Q: Thanks, General Hester, for that rip around the Pacific. The first question has to do with mil-to-mil contacts. What's the current state of our contacts with the Chinese Air Force? Are there any exchanges ongoing, or dialogue?
General Hester: Absolutely zero at the moment. We'd love to have exchanges. Every once in a while, of course, we run into someone at a conference that we might not be hosting and that provides us an opportunity to have an exchange, but beyond that, I'm not invited to go to China at the moment. I would like to do so, as Admiral Tom Fargo would like to go as well, and we just haven't had the chance.
Q: What's your view of the potential threat posed by the Islamic terror cells throughout Asia and the Pacific region? We know that's a major area.
General Hester: I think the threat of cells is in the recruitment as well as in the fundraising capabilities of any string. We all build our organizations. The Air Force is worldwide and we teach others and we have connective tissue with all Airmen worldwide. So as you develop a worldwide network as a terrorist organization, you also have the capability to reach much broader into a variety of countries to find funding sources and personnel resources.
There are some opportunities in the Pacific for people to hide very easily. It's pretty easy to hide sometimes in New York City. But if you also look at the thousands of islands we have out there that are not well governed simply because they're small, it's easy for folks to hide. Our friends in the SOF business are using their intelligence resources and working with countries to try to keep tabs on that and see what the growing trends are, and how that feeds into how we in the conventional side of PACAF can support them with any operations they might have.
Q: Frequently we hear calls for reduction of forces in Japan. Can you update on that? Do you see changes in our force structure in that area?
General Hester: Our government is in a negotiation with Japan at the moment. Since I've lived in Japan, for a number of years we've had a historical conversation with them about the burden, footprint of Americans. Some of that has to do with the amount of growth around the bases that we have there—Kadena, Atsugi, Yokota, Misawa—and some of it is an opportunity for them to continue to raise the specter of what they think is an overburden by American forces in Okinawa and they raise that to their national government.
I think it's an ongoing dialogue. It is not made public to us by our State Department as of yet as to how this is going to migrate, but I would expect that somewhere down the road we will see some modest, and I don't have a definition for what ‘modest’ is, but I think we'll see some modest changes out into the Western Pacific that will include Japan, maybe a little bit in Korea as well. And of course one of those for Korea has already been announced, a little bit of reduction by our ground troops there on the peninsula.
Q: In the last couple of days we've had a lot of discussion about hardware: the F-22, C-130J, and other platforms and capabilities. What do you see as your top three hot buttons that industry could help you with in the Pacific?
General Hester: I think modernization clearly is one of those. You just mentioned that. We would like to modernize our F-15 fleet. Eventually we want to modernize our F-16 fleet out that way. General Handy and I have talked at length about the E model C-130s. We have some grounded now because of the center wing box piece out at Yokota, so we'd certainly like to see new equipment out there, whether it is J models or whether it is H2s or H3s that come that way for us.
Clearly, for the future, and it was shown in one of the slides about the ISR capability we want to put out at Guam. The growing ability for us to cooperate with our allies and our friends out in the region by the use of ISR platforms, whether that is in near space or whether that's Global Hawk or whether that's other platforms we may use. It's an opportunity for us to grow. So we need to focus on those, have the ability to put those in so that the Pacific Commander can control those, and then we can cooperate with our friends out there in the region.
Q: Finally, do you see challenges with access downstream, restrictions on access to operate in different areas of the theater?
General Hester: I think that the Chief wonderfully answered that yesterday about access. When countries find the threat to their sovereignty, then access falls away as a great concern.
We have very strong allies currently in the Pacific that give us access. We are guests in Korea, we are guests in Japan. Often we are invited through the Philippines, we're invited into Thailand as well and of course our great allies the Australians ask us to come down and participate with them in exercises. Those constant exercises provide us the opportunity to cement relationships and forge allies and coalition partners for the future.
In concert with the F/A-22, which we would like to see stationed in the Pacific as well, we have the capability to kick down a door if necessary across denied airspace, but also with the strong relationships with our friends and partners out there, the ability to be invited in to use airfields that exist in their countries.