General Hal M. Hornburg
Commander, Air Combat Command
Air Warfare Symposium - Orlando
February 13, 2004
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Donald L. Peterson (Moderator): Thank you. Good morning and welcome to day two of AFA's Air Warfare Symposium. We've got another great line-up today of heavy hitters for speakers and we're looking forward to getting started.
We're especially proud today to have the opportunity to start off with General Hal Hornburg. He's of course the Commander of the Air Combat Command. He's also the Air Component Commander of the U.S. Joint Forces Command and the U.S. Northern Command. A highly respected leader, General Hornburg is responsible for the organizing, the training, the equipping and the maintaining of combat ready forces for rapid deployment. ACC operates more than 1200 aircraft, 25 wings, 16 bases, and over 200 forward operating locations.
Most importantly, General Hornburg is a graduate of Texas A&M. He's also a great supporter of our Air Force Association. Please help me welcome General Hal Hornburg.
Hornburg: Thanks, Pete-O. I appreciate it. Welcome to everyone today here at the Air Warfare Symposium. For those of you who were unfortunate and couldn't draw a morning tee time, it's good to be with you. [Laughter] The crowd is vibrant, it's here, and it's thinner than yesterday, but that's okay.
I want to thank Tim Brock and Tommy Harrison of the great Central Florida Air Force Association Chapter here for another magnificent seminar, another Air Warfare Symposium. I think that with the four star leadership and the Secretary and his assistant secretaries and deputies here, it gives us a rich mixture of leadership and it gives us an opportunity to talk about things that are important to the future of the Air Force.
Lance Lord told me this morning that yesterday he signed a waiver of his appearance fee so I can have his, too. [Laughter]
This is my third time to have the privilege to speak before you and I want to take you back a couple of years ago. In 2002, I had just come to Air Combat Command in 2001 and we were trying to find our way along. You might recall that I told you that the greatest partners that we had at that time were the partners that enabled us to do what we did in the kinetic part of the Air Force. We were in a very intense operation in Afghanistan and the two enablers that enabled us to do the things that we could so well were the magnificent transporters that John Handy had and, at the time, Ed Eberhart and now Lance Lord, the space enablers that allow the reachback and the things that we do from a technical basis to occur. My admiration for those two gentlemen and their two commands and the enabling forces has not changed. In fact, if anything it's even greater. So to you guys, well done.
The following year, I'd had the opportunity to get my feet on the ground a little bit, and I last year laid out our six strategic thrusts. What I'd like to do is reestablish contact with you and tell you where we've gone in the context of using these six strategic thrusts as a bridging force to take us from today into tomorrow.
They remain the same. We talk about people first, mission always. In these six strategic thrusts, we decided as a command that if we could only do a half a dozen things well and do them properly than these were the six things that we wanted to work on. If they didn't conveniently fit into these six things, we elected to ignore the taskings with the permission of the Chief. I think we got them right.
With each of these I assigned a flight lead, a senior general officer on the Air Combat Command Staff that marshals these six strategic thrusts through to completion and that's always a work in progress, but the one I didn't delegate was people. So I'm the flight lead on the people part and I'd like to talk to you first today about the people in Air Combat Command.
We say people first, mission always. We've got to get the mission done, but without the lifeblood of the Air Force which is our airmen, the mission won't be accomplished and it certainly won't be accomplished properly.
As the slide says, they are the lifeblood of our global operations. Let me tell you about a few of them. They're all over the United States, but that's not the relevant part. We have 15 main operating bases and nine major tenants, but where we fit into the global structure is more important to me and it's certainly more important to the Chief and the Secretary.
As you know, we opened 36 contingency operations to deal with Afghanistan and Iraq, but more importantly, ACC people are in over 150 locations all around the world. We do not, as John Handy does, have the global reach part, but we do have a wrap-around global responsibility and we try to take that seriously as we use the United States as a launching pad for the AEF.
I want to tell you about three folks. The first one the Chief will recognize and some of you might in the lower right hand corner. His name is Lieutenant Colonel Jeff Rochelle. Jeff Rochelle is a part of the Air Operation Center that works for Buzz Moseley and Jeff's job going back to Operation Iraqi Freedom was to run the time critical targeting cell. But he did something more important than that as we built up to Operation Iraqi Freedom. Probably a lot of you don't know, but the mission that could not fail in Operation Iraqi Freedom was to stop what could have potentially gone on in western Iraq which is the launch of Scuds against other nations. So what we did with the Chief's urging and with a lot of good people is we practiced how to mitigate Scud attacks. We practiced at Nellis how to take over western Iraq with 300 SOF forces and a lot of ISR and a lot of thought and it worked brilliantly, and Jeff Rochelle was the choir leader on all that.
Chief, I want to tell you that Jeff retired two weeks ago. I want to tell everybody here that he didn't retire as a lieutenant colonel with a Meritorious Service Medal. We were pleased to get approved a Legion of Merit and it's well deserved. Jeff is just one of the many airmen who are out of sight, out of mind, but they're always present for duty 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
That was the preparation part of Iraqi Freedom. There was also the operations part…
Let me show you a picture of an A-10 pilot. You think there's a picture of a guy climbing into a cockpit, right? Nope. This picture you may have seen before, but this is a picture of then Lieutenant, now Captain, John Bloker. John Bloker was with the 3rd Infantry Division. He was one of our airmen on the ground. He's an A-10 pilot who was detailed to the 3rd Infantry Division. What he did was pick up a dead Iraqi's gun so he didn't have to expend his own ammunition. He used this weapon until he was instructed by his battalion commander to get rid of it because the sound of an AK-47 made them nervous.
There's a great story about John calling in close air support, danger-close close air support, in the vicinity of the bridges crossing into Baghdad proper. He called upon some A-10s to put in absolutely danger-close CAS to our soldiers and the A-10 pilot who won the Silver Star for it was very reluctant to do this until he recognized John's voice on the radio. He said, "John, is that you?" "That's me." They exchanged a little fighter pilot coded information and the mission was a success.
But as the Chief and the Secretary yesterday talked about battlefield airmen, you're talking about guys like John and you're talking about our controllers out on the ground making it happen, calling in close air support and working with our friends on the ground to enable them to live to fight another day and they do it exceedingly well.
Let me show you another story. The aftermath…
You may have seen this picture before, but these are some of our Red Horse engineers standing at Baghdad International Airport. The crater we made, it's 40 feet deep and 130 feet wide and their job was to fix it. And they did. And they did a whole lot more. They laid in 820,000 cubic yards of concrete in the prelude and the aftermath up to now. How much concrete is that? Well, you could pave a four-lane highway from here to Miami Beach with that much concrete. They also built 3.2 million square feet of contingency operational space. How much space is that? It's big as the Mall of America. But they didn't do it in three years, they did it in less than one.
So our airmen are engaged 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and I'll tell you, they are the lifeblood and that's why we have to pay so much attention to the nurturing and sustaining of our airmen. Building tomorrow's leaders because tomorrow is where we're going to spend the rest of our lives.
General Bill Creech used to say the first duty of a leader is to build more leaders. We want to build leaders for the Air Force that can grow more leaders, not just manage followers. If General Bill Creech could be teamed with John Maxwell, who wrote a great book on leadership, it would go something like this: If you're serious about your future you build teams of leaders. You do it through leading, mentoring and coaching. You build leaders who don't want to horde their power because to do so only creates followers. You want leaders who will give their power away. You don’t want to build leaders who don't spend time with others. You want to build leaders who invest their time in others so you build teams of leaders, not teams of followers. You want teams of leaders who don't add to their ranks by addition. They add to their ranks by multiplication because the leaders they develop are people they have never seen because the first duty of a leader is to build more leaders and to build more leaders and to build more leaders.
That's where we're trying to do in the Air Force and with the great help of the people in the front row here and many others, this is really starting to take hold. We're seeing people who aren't in a three-point stance with a mouse in their hand ready to attack that next e-mail like I told you last year. They're out talking and being with their folks. Chief Murray and his Chiefs are out there leading our Air Force. And we're not only talking about developing officers, we're talking about developing all airmen—officers, civilians and enlisted—to make this Air Force as good in 2025 as it is in 2004. And as the Chief said yesterday, this is the best Air Force in the world. I don't say that in a crowing manner. I say that in a very humble manner. But it's a great privilege to be a part of that.
I want to thank all of you who help us sustain and nurture our future. It's our corn seed and our lifeblood.
The second thing we do is AEFs, and the rest of this is in no priority order. The only priority is that people come first. But let me talk just a little bit about AEFs. The thing that we've got to continue to do is have ten equally capable AEFs, and you all know how the AEFs roll out. You know that we have training cycles, we have at-home cycles, we have exercise cycles, we have windows of potential deployment. Like Ron Keys says, you don't just become notified on the day you come into that deployment window, you're notified a year out. So have the bag at the end of your bed and be in a three-point stance, ready to roll.
Now, this construct called the AEF, how does this happen and what does it look like in real life? We have ten of these things. We have ten AEFs, they're all paired. They're all staggered. Like I said, they're all staggered.
We need AEFs, not just with the right number of airplanes and people, we need AEFs with the right capability. As we start to modernize, we're not going to be able to replace our things one for one, but we have to replace the capability with perhaps less but more capability which keeps these things healthy and vibrant. That's what the nation pays the Chief and the Secretary to ask us to do for them in the AEF center.
Let me use Iraq as perhaps the best example we could come up with, but maybe not the best that you all could. Let me provide a notional threat. This is the threat Buzz Moseley saw when he was helping General Franks succeed so brilliantly in Iraq. And to get into this IAD system we had to attack it with stealthy platforms. Once we did that, we were able to bring in the persistent force, the non-stealth platforms in—the F-15Cs, the F-16s, the A-10s, the tankers, the command and control airplanes—all flying over the liberated skies of Iraq, proving again that with air dominance everything is possible. Without it, nothing is possible.
But then we look at what does this force look like today and how's it going to look in 25 years?
This is the force of today. This is the force due to only attrition and service life in 2025. I appreciate the Chief and the Secretary helping me so much. I went to Washington a week ago today. In fact, I guess one week ago today we were in the Secretary's office. The Secretary said you are going to have so much to do—ACC will, not me. ACC will have so much to do and so much money to obligate, we need to make sure that we shape this properly, especially as we bring on the two airplanes that we need most dearly, starting with the F/A-22 and also the F-35.
So we won't be replacing these one for one, but I can tell you, don't worry about counting airframes, worry about monitoring capability. Because if we go back to that Iraqi slide and we let Iraq or some other country grow from their SAMs of today into double digit SAMs, you can see why stealth, supercruise and integrated avionics, in the hands of capable airmen, are the way that we have got to go in the future, so we've got to stay the course. So that's basically what we're working on with respect to AEFs.
Let me now turn to transformation. I think all of you know that transformation just isn't about equipment, but it also has to do with what you have, how you use it, and how you're organized. Your concept of operations determine how you use it.
Let's turn first to the F/A-22. About the only thing I want to say is I am elated at how the F-22 is showing itself proudly in tests. Felix Dupree and Aggie Pearson are working the initial and the operational test and evaluation on the Raptor. I just visited Tyndall Air Force Base and Don Cook and his trainers are primed and ready to start rolling our initial pilots through so we can march with success toward IOC later next year.
The F-22 is on track and the only thing—I was talking to Ralph Heath today—the only thing we need to do is work together to make sure that our delivery schedules remain intact, and if they do, watch out if you're our adversary. It's just awesome.
The next part of transformation we work on are organizations. I want to highlight one organization. Down at Robbins I think you know that we have a blended unit, the 116th. What does blended mean? As Dan James would call it, ‘integrated.’ Some people have trouble with the word ‘blended’ because they think that blurs really what we're trying to do.
What we know is that in the future we can't just have active and then over here Guard and over here Reserve. We have got to work together in organizational constructs like we don't work today. This is working like a champ down at Robbins. We don't miss sorties, the people work well together, and we take great credit when we stand in front of people and say if you line up a Guardsman, an active duty and a Reservist, I dare you and defy you to tell who's who. Not every service can say that, but we can and we should be proud of it and crow the capabilities of our Guard and Reserve as often as we possibly can.
Let me show you a chart just to illustrate this point one more time. If you'll look at this chart, you'll see that both during Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom we deployed about the same number of airmen, but if you'll pay particular attention to the percentages you'll see that we deployed 13 percent of our active force to Iraqi Freedom while in Desert Storm we only deployed six percent.
I told you that we built up 36 contingency bases. We only did 33. So think about a force 40 percent smaller working with all the bases that we maintain in the United States plus 36 extras, and all of the expeditionary combat support that it took to support and sustain that. Then let's look at the iron we deployed.
Look at the percentage of Air National Guard and Air Force Reserves that deployed at the pointy end of Iraqi Freedom. The question we ask is, is this a proper balance? It worked beautifully, but as we go forward we will continue to blend these units and it won't matter what percentage of A or percentage of B. It's going to be a percentage of C and C equals everything we have working together like we never have before.
So this is a good story and I'm very, very proud of Jimmy and Danny and the help that they give us in the leadership to make this as good as it is.
The next thing we work on is concepts of operation. Just to give you one example of the concepts that we're working on is the one that you've heard before. This isn't new, but how do you go from thinking about aim points or barrage bombing, bombers or fighters per target, and get into the concept of DMPIs serviced per sortie? With the capabilities we have, with the precision we have, with the stealth we have, this is just one of the ConOps that we've worked under the rubric and umbrella of Global Strike Task Force and there are many, many others in Space Command, in AMC, in others, in Air Combat Command, that are going to enable us to transform ourselves with the way we work blended with how we're organized to work, given on top of that the capabilities that we're buying to help us work and the Air Force of 2025 in my view as the Air Combat Commander looks very, very good.
So let's put transformation aside and let's work into command and control.
We're starting to get a lot of traction with the way we're trying to size and the way we're trying to think about our command and control. Why is this important?
I remember the aftermath of Desert Storm, when I was driving around al Karge with General Chuck, Horner. I said, “boss, how did this work so well?” He says, “if you want a one-word answer, it's Creech. If you want a three-word answer, it's command and control.” I said, “how did you learn how to command and control?” He said, “I went to Blue Flag.”
See, Chuck Horner was one of the only guys that ever went to Blue Flag that was not [DNIF]. [Laughter] Because John Jumper and Hal Hornburg and all the others, if we were on the flying schedule we didn't want to go to Blue Flag. That was what the sick did.
An epiphany. A few years later, I wind up in the command operations center working for Mike Ryan in Vicenza. It was like the Gong Show of command and control. It was the best we had, but it wasn't very good. It was all procedural. In fact, the thing that Mike Ryan was proudest of other than the integration of Predator, was getting what we called ‘CAOC to Cockpit,’ which meant that we could talk from the CAOC to an airplane over Bosnia. That's where we were in 1994.
Jump to Desert Fox, which was the next time I operated out of an AOC with Steve Plummer. Much, much better.
Then jump to Iraqi Freedom and what we had, and with netted, integrated, joint, tactical, integrated datalinks. Right now, someone in the AOC knows how many bombs an F-15 is carrying. They know the functionality of the pods. They know whether they're running out of gas. They know whether to remind someone you better get a tanker over to that orbit. We can do things we've never been able to do before because we realize that control is the hub of everything that's important, and we realize that if we can't control it we can't command it. And if we don't command it, somebody else will figure out a way to do it.
I was telling the Chief the other day at Corona, Tom Hobbins and Tommy Crawford are taking our command and control to a new level. If we were in sports we would say we're elevating our game. We're looking now at ways to take this command and control capability we have, right-size AOCs, give them to warfighting commanders, and work the functionality of doing important things like compressing the kill chain.
Now you'll see breaks on the chart on this kill chain. There are no breaks in the F2T2EA, but for illustrative purposes I just wanted to tell you a vignette that happened in Iraqi Freedom and then end with assessment because there's a message here.
Here's a Global Hawk. The Global Hawk is conducting wide area surveillance in Iraq and finds surface-to-surface missiles cleverly hidden somewhere in the Iraqi desert. This, by the way, is a true story. They called the AOC and they put a Joint Stars on it, so nothing moves unless we know about it.
Back to the AOC. We decide we're going to strike it. They call up to the AWACS and they say, “who's available that can slide over and strike this target?” It happened to be a flight called Kujo 11, two F-15Es. They were on another mission, but our pilots were good enough and our sensors and our systems were good enough that they were able to put aside what they were doing, snap over, make one pass for positive identification, and then strike this thing. Now there's no doubt in my mind if you'll watch this movie that this was a successful strike. [Clip shown]
My question now is on assessment. Why would anyone in their right mind having access to this film need to send another recon flight over to assess it? What are battlefield effects and how do they play into our kill chain? Why do we have BDA? Why don't we have battlefield effects assessment?
I thank Bill Beggert for writing a great paper that we've taken liberty with and we're trying to put a little bit more meat on it to help us understand the concept of battlefield effects assessment.
Why do we have to do BDA on specific turrets and tanks when there may be a tank platoon leader, a young Army lieutenant, who says there's nothing ahead of me and I'm proceeding apace? That's a battlefield effect. And all of those things need to go into how we assess what we did today and how we use what we did today to base our plan for tomorrow without having to go back and get into the bean counting CPA mode, and we're working this very, very hard.
So that's where I think the next part of command and control is going to lead us, to tightening this kill chain. Our goal is, with respect to the kill chain, that we want the longest part of the kill chain to be the time of flight of the weapon. Once we get into some integrated information types of weapons maybe we can compress this kill chain to milliseconds. It's a dream, but as they say, if you don't shoot you can't score. So that's command and control.
Let me talk to you very briefly about information operations. We've made great strides in codifying and defining what IO is and what it's not. If you'll recall, I told you a year or two ago, information operations gave me a headache because it meant everything to anyone. Everything was information operations. Even in our doctrine we said if a B-52 goes out and drops kinetic weapons on a command and control system, since a command and control system was an information system, that B-52 strike was an information operation. That was just pure baloney.
If everything is information operations and information operations is everything, then information operations therefore becomes a self-integrating strategy. Nobody can understand it, nobody can get their arms around it, nobody can operate in that environment.
So with the help of David McGee and Ron Keys we have parsed this down into three things that we can understand. IO has a cognitive dimension, it has an electronic dimension and it has a cyber dimension. We've taken a great step forward with Dave McGee and his doctrine people, with Ron Keys, rewriting Air Force doctrine to make affirmation operations yet another arrow in the quiver of the Joint Air Force Component Commander instead of something that stands alone. And as the Chief likes to say, the measure of merit is the cursor over the target and in this one I think we've got the thing dialed in, we've got the bull’s eye focused, and I think we're ready to make greater strides, because now we know what we're talking about. So thanks to everyone who's helped in IO.
Just as an example of IO, think about it this way. What if the JFACC could have a menu of capabilities from which to pick? For example, he wants to do a little influence with some potential kinetic. These things transfer perhaps into dropping leaflets with the threat of a B-52 strike. This was an actual leaflet that we dropped. And the result, the effect that we got from that operation, was a capitulated enemy formation.
So we know this works, especially in the hands of someone like Buzz Moseley that knows what they're doing with information operations and as an Air Force we're starting to grow people who understand this and we'll be better off for it.
Let me close with infrastructure. You'll recall last year I told you a story about the street I live on at Langley with 75 year-old trees poking roots down into 75 year-old sewers over 75 year-old sidewalks. That's not the case any more.
We had a visitor on the 18th, if you'll look closely at this picture, Isabelle shows up. So from what you saw, those 75 year-old trees are not my issue any more. [Laughter]
We've got the programs now to tear these sidewalks up and do the sewer work that we needed to, but that's just kind of a happy ending to a sad story. That Isabelle was a sad story. But there are some investments that we need to make in our infrastructure. You may have seen this chart before, but the way I'd like to describe it, when I was a wing commander at Seymour Johnson I had $6 per square foot to spend on Seymour Johnson infrastructure. Brigadier General Rick Rossburt today has $2 a square foot and it's 12 years later.
I was talking to Mr. Nelson Gibbs about how we're going to try to fix this infrastructure and we'll stay the course. There's a great plan and under Nelson's hands this is going to work just great. But there are some things that we actually need to go out and roll up our sleeves and fix.
For example, we've got $70 million of roofing projects at Air Combat Command. In the upper left of that slide you'll see a roof that leaks into the B-52 RTU at Barksdale Air Force Base. What we'd like to have is when someone's working indoors and it's raining outside, it should not also be raining inside, so we're going to work those problems.
On the upper right, this is a water main, a hot water system at Minot Air Force Base. When they get like this, you've got to fix them. Unfortunately it costs $400 a linear foot to fix things like this, but it happens and we've got to make more of an investment.
The cold water down in the lower left at Offutt Air Force Base, and in the lower right our concrete. This is at Nellis. Nellis is one of the crown jewels of the Air Force, but at Nellis, Tonapah, and Indian Springs alone we have $27 million worth of pavement work that we have to do. So if you multiply that times the number of bases, and you take the number of bases times the MAJCOMs you can see that we in the Air Force know what we need to do, but we need to do this for our airmen because they deserve to work in good working conditions and we haven't been able to spend that money on them before and I hope we'll be able to collectively stem the tide.
But there's a good news story to these installations. I want to tie this to our Air Force heritage. We have a lot of things named Eaker and Doolittle and Mitchell and we should. But as the Chief told you yesterday, there are a lot of people sitting in this room—Chuck Horner, Jimmy Adams, Jack Gregory, Joe Ashy—that gave us the Air Force that we have today. It's our job to hand this Air Force better off to the airmen that come after us.
So I've started naming buildings in Air Combat Command for people who I consider modern day aerospace pioneers. Not to take anything away from the past, but we have also got to thank the people and recognize the people in our recent past.
Woody Woods out at Nellis said I want to name the main gate the Bill Creech Gate. I want to name the other two the Doolittle and the Eaker gates. I said I'm okay with the first one, but why don't you consider the Horner Gate or the Ashy Gate?
We have a new conference center at Langley. It's the Bill Creech Conference Center that the Chief and I will have the honor to dedicate in the presence of Mrs. Creech and some of you next month. We just had a wonderful experience naming our child development center after General Bob and Jean Russ whose passion was the kids.
So I encourage all of you to think along these lines and realize that the Air Force we have today doesn't track all the way back to 1947. While it does in history, it also intervenes with people who have given us what we have today.
I'd like to close by saying that we have an AEF Center and we also have a father of the AEF. Now I don't know if all of you know who this is, but I asked the Secretary if he would allow me to reserve the name of this building for the father of our AEF as we know it today. So Chief, if you'll allow us, this is going to be named for you. We can't do it yet, but the Secretary has blessed this and if you will just allow us to proceed and give us the honor of your presence at Langley soon after you retire, I want you to take part in this. And I would also tell you that we can't do it, so the first order of business for your successor is going to be to sign this paperwork. Congratulations. It's the best thing we could do because the stag bar already had a name. [Laughter]
Let me close with a video. I'd like to show you this because it goes along the theme of recognizing modern aviation pioneers. Just to tell you a little bit about the video, we have a heritage program in ACC and we do it for the Air Force. You may have seen it. You may have seen the P-51 or the F-86 flying with the F-15 or the F-16 or the A-10. And there's a young man in Nashville named O'Brien that wrote a stirring piece of music, and he wrote it for the Heritage Program. It was so good I asked him to come sing it for our tatoo last September.
Then I took this video that the Heritage Program had and I've monkeyed with it just a little bit to show our appreciation from our past and our present, recognizing those who came way before us and those who are with us today.
All I ask you to do when you watch the video, for you youngsters out there who don't recognize these people, all I ask is that you go find out who they are and learn something about them.
Let's roll the video. [Video shown]
General Hornburg: I'm glad you liked that. It makes my heart pound. And I think that's all the time that we had for questions for me. [Laughter]
Moderator: It was a great presentation, thank you, sir. We've been real busy, as you mentioned. How do you size up the reconstitution of our AEF schedule?
General Hornburg: For the most part, we're on schedule. We announced that we would reconstitute and be reconstituted by next month. For the most part, I think that's true, but we've had some changes in sea state that we did not foresee. For example, we have not been able to bring those 36 contingency bases down to where we thought we would be by now, so we're still running those bases.
We've also agreed to share the pain with our friends in the Army and we have a lot of security and transportation people over with them right now. So there are many career fields that clearly will not be able to be reconstituted. They still live in stress. That's going to continue for the foreseeable future.
But our fighters are back for the most part, they're trained. The bombers are only going through some upgrade training, and ISR is back except for Noble Eagle and what we're doing there and AWACS, minus what we have deployed overseas. So it is a good news story. We're on glide path, but we've had to level off in some areas.
Moderator: There’s been a lot of discussion about our B-1 and its performance and what's happening with the fleet. Could you give us your views on what you think we'll need in the long term from the B-1?
General Hornburg: If there's a story about someone kissing a frog and turning it into a princess, it ought to be called the B-1 story. From something that we absolutely wanted to divest ourselves of, to one of the most capable airplanes in the Air Force inventory, right now it's the B-1.
We believe that we need a few more B-1s to bring our total aircraft inventory up to a certain level so we have a certain number of sustainable combat coded airplanes, the training and the test airplanes and the attrition airplanes to go with it. We're negotiating with the Congress over what that number should be.
Our analysis shows that it ought to be about seven or maybe eight additional airplanes. The number we've been given is substantially higher than that. We've got to continue to work. But we do want to bring some back, we will bring some back, but I don't believe it's going to be possible to bring back as many as has been suggested.
Moderator: You were talking about the blended wings earlier and the potential growth in that area. Any particular weapon systems you see as good candidates for a blended wing?
General Hornburg: The 116th is already blended. We have also blended a Predator unit out at Nellis. We're looking to blend F/A-22 with Richmond and Langley, and that's only just the beginning.
We don't want to do it just to do it. We want to do it where it makes sense to do it, but those are just three examples of where I think it makes very good sense.
Moderator: We've done a lot since the 9/11 attacks to try to make our nation safer. Could you comment a little bit about detection, intel, and air power's role in keeping our CONUS safe?
General Hornburg: We're totally engaged thanks to the great contributions of the Guard and Reserve in Noble Eagle every day, and AWACS. Our detection capability is also augmented by better radars and more command and control lash-ups with the FAA and people on the ground. I still think that probably the best way to mitigate this is, as far as airplanes being taken over, is to do it on the ground, not in the air. When you do it in the air, the outcome is very chilling.
So I think we're getting better. We have a ways to go. I just visited the Southeast Air Defense Sector a couple of weeks ago along with 1st Air Force and General Craig McKinley down there and his people are doing everything that Ed Eberhart and I would ask them to do with respect to operationalizing Noble Eagle. And again, thanks to the Guard and Reserve for their great contribution.
Moderator: You provided an overview of Afghanistan and Iraq and the operations we are conducting there and we've seen a lot of firsts. Can you comment on a few firsts that you thought were really important for the Air Force in Iraq in particular? Weapons, tactics, etc.?
General Hornburg: Of course, we know the vignettes and the stories about CAS from 37,000 feet. We know that the expeditionary nature of our airmen now enables us to do things, to go with light and lethal fast Army units and be able to protect them as we have never been able to do before.
Our ISR is much better than it ever has been because it's better integrated. That kind of goes back to the command and control piece I was talking about.
But I'll tell you one thing that doesn't surprise me is just how good our airmen are. This was not the first time they've been brilliant, but they continue to be brilliant, they have their ears laid back, they want to serve, and they find relevance in what they do for their country.
I was having lunch a ways back with six retired chief master sergeants of the Air Force. We were talking about Generation X and Generation Y and these airmen that we're getting into Lackland basic military training. They come in all tattooed and pierced. They have no respect for anybody, no authority. They want your Lexus and my Lexus. They take their news in seven-second sound bytes. And how are we going to get on with people like these?
One said, “General Hornburg, I've been looking at airmen for 45 years and these are the best airmen we've ever had.” And they are.
Moderator: Finally, sir, we're looking at a rebalancing of our force—active, Guard and Reserve. What are your views on that? Will we see opportunities to improve our capability?
General Hornburg: I hope I answered that in the remarks I made, but we have got to modernize, we've got to sustain. For example, one thing I didn't talk about was radar modernization and pod modernization. We're interjecting capabilities now into our legacy force that give us the potential to operate like we've never operated before.
I was out flying a month or so ago, an F-15 ride at Nellis, and we went up to the ranges and we were netted, as I told you. So we knew what the other airplane was doing, even if it was out of sight. As we came back over with the sniper pod he said, “let me show you something you haven't seen before.” We're over Indian Springs and we're reading marquis signs on the strip. This is capability.
When it's netted and when we know what we're doing with the netting and when we figure out more concepts of operations and how the netting will enable the command and control system to work, then all the modernization going on in the Guard, Reserve and the active force all comes together in the hands of a competent JFACC and great things happen.
Moderator: Thank you very much, General Hornburg for a great overview of ACC and our airmen.
General Hornburg: Thank you.