AFA Policy Forum

General John P. Jumper
Chief of Staff, USAF
Air Warfare Symposium – Orlando
February 12, 2004

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The Honorable James G. Roche: It's now my sincere privilege to turn the podium over to a great American patriot, the Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force and my good friend and partner, General John Jumper. He will really stir you up and get this AFA Symposium off the ground, but I'll be back to join with John to take your questions.

Thank you very much. General Jumper, please…

General John P. Jumper: Thanks, boss. It is great to be here and to be here in the presence of our distinguished present and past leaders. It's especially good to see the crop of guys that taught all of us here in the front row -- General Joe Ashy, General Jimmy Adams, Jack Gregory and Chuck Horner, along with our colleagues Fig Newton and Tony Robertson. And the boss is right. It's those guys who brought us the force that we have today. It's those guys who put the force in the air that did so well in the skies over Iraq. To them, let me do it one more time. We owe them a great debt of gratitude. Thank you, guys.

I'd also like to echo the boss' praise of the Air Force Association. It has been extraordinary over the last few years to watch the way the Air Force Association has been able to help us put forward our themes of integration, to do the analysis of the conflicts and the contingency operations we've been a part of, and to do it in an objective way that gets the message of air and space power out to the rest of the world. Thank you John, Pete-O, Pat, and all the rest of the leadership of the Air Force Association. Thank you very much.

What an Air Force it is. Saddam Hussein buried his airplanes in the dirt rather than come up and face the air power of this nation. That's a fair amount of respect, gang, and we're not going to let it wane. We're going to make it better. That's what the boss is talking about and I'm here to talk a little bit more about it.

This time last year we were on the brink of a war that we really couldn't characterize very well. We didn't know what to expect. We went through that war while continuing operations in the Balkans and many other places such as Liberia and the Horn of Africa. In all those conflicts, we've taken lessons forward as we did from Desert Storm and from Operation Allied Force and the many contingency operations we were a part of during the decade of the '90s.

We've learned the value of things such as networking, and we got to play them out in Operation Iraqi Freedom, during the dust storm in particular. Lance Lord's satellites told us exactly when the dust storm was going to arrive, exactly how long it would last, and provided time for us to completely redo the air tasking order, and to put in the skies over Iraq the sensors we needed—the Joint Stars, the Rivet Joint, the Global Hawk, and the kinetic forces we needed to deal with the situation.

When the dust storm arrived, as reported by the guys on the ground, you couldn't see your hand in front of your face, but the Joint Stars was tracking the Iraqi forces coming south out of Baghdad attempting to reinforce the Medina Division. The boss and I got interviewed several times during that period of time and the theme was “uh oh, the dust storm has hit, there's a strategic pause, the plan is falling apart.” I remember answering at one time, "I'd like to interview the commander of the Medina Division right now who is getting his butt kicked, to see if he knows exactly when that pause took place, because I don't think he noticed any pause." [Laughter]

As the boss said, we saw the value of that networking. Now, that networking was crude. It was machine-to-machine interfaces, but it was crude. Our kids did it on the chat networks at the speed of typing, not the speed of light. But they put together the information they needed to make sure that the Rivet Joint that picked up the cue was passing it off to the Joint Stars and the Joint Stars was getting to the Global Hawk, which got the precise coordinates to the bombers, and they were doing that all in a way that got the job done, but not in the way that we need to do it. We saw that value and we learned from it.

As the boss said, we saw the value of working with the people on the ground from Operation Anaconda and Operation Enduring Freedom. We saw that we had not done the planning right in Anaconda. We had not gotten the United States Army, the United States Air Force, the Joint Force Land Component Commander, the Joint Force air Component Commander together at the right level to do the detailed planning needed to make sure the resources were there when that operation kicked off.

But we didn't hide from it, we didn't make excuses. We tried not to point fingers, although there was some fingerpointing done. What we did was get the senior leadership of the Air Force and the Army together and we laid it all out on the table. What do we need to do better? How did we screw this up? What we decided was, over the generations since Vietnam, we had not done ourselves the service we need to do to make sure that we understand thoroughly the way each other goes to war.

Generations of people at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin who watched airplanes overhead because at Nellis Air Force Base every day of the year we put close air support into Fort Irwin. They watched airplanes for years appear to support, but because they want to make sure that the ratios between the opposing forces on the ground—enemy forces on the ground and maneuver elements of the Army units being tested in the right ratio—air power was never allowed to have an effect on the opposing force, on the Red forces. So generations of Army officers, what they learned was that they can look up and see the airplanes, but they never do anything good for me. We're going to fix that. We're going to exercise our air and ground together in ways that assure that our Army leaders understand they know what air and space power can do for them.

We've had some painful times in the last year and a half as we've tried to shift our thinking away from program- and platform-centric thinking into effects-based thinking. We've tried to get away from the notion that we're going to start with a bumper sticker like ‘Global Vigilance Reach and Power,’ which is always good, but the next guy through the door is the guy who's going to tell you what to buy to give you that. Well, there's hardly anything I've seen that doesn't contribute in some way to global vigilance reach and power. What we had failed to do was write down the concepts of operations that guide our thinking about how we're going to fight before we start deciding what we're going to buy to fight with.

And to try and get our thinking shifted has been difficult. We started with a new series of meetings that we call the Capabilities Review and Risk Assessment, the CRAR process, where we try to define exactly what effects and capabilities we need to be looking for before we decide which programs we're going to make fit those capabilities. With the indulgence and patience of my colleagues up here on the front row, we came together in Washington several times for aborted attempts to try to put some intellectual rigor into such a process.

Finally, we've got a formula that works and it's paying off large for us. When we bring our processes and programs to the third floor for debate we can tie them to operational results. From this painful birth I think we have a process now where we can talk about the concept of operations, talk about how we're going to fight, how we're going to hook in with our sister services, how we're going to hook in with command and control above us and below us, and how we're going to make a transition to going after programs that work to make those effects happen.

The boss gave the example of some of the things we're going to do in close air support. Again, emphasizing his point, and remembering that close air support is not just the thing that's down there close to the ground. It's not just the A-10 or the fighter forces. It is now the B-52 from 39,000 feet with a precisely guided GPS bomb, in many cases more accurate than some of the weapons that can be delivered by other means. It's the sergeant on the ground with the laser designator that can get those precise coordinates up to that bomber or into that cockpit and do it in a timely manner. There are now multiple ways to do that mission of close air support.

But you know this Air Force that we built over the last few years fits very well into our strategy. What we've been trying to do is take this Air Force that we built and articulate it in the joint world with joint ConOps. If we think writing ConOps for the business that we understand well was difficult, it has been most difficult to try and write joint ConOps in the joint world in the Pentagon. But there are several elements that we're pressing forward on to make this happen.

We're trying to work the problem of high demand/low density assets. Not by just going and buying more platforms, but by making sure that we have proper control over the appetite for those platforms. We're trying to work in the Joint Staff a joint presence policy that tasks us a year in advance for those things that the regional commanders are going to want as far as contingency operations, deterrent operations, engagement operations, training and exercises so that we can plan in our Air Expeditionary Force to do that properly.

Our Air Expeditionary Force fits well into this process. Our AEFs have paid off. At a time when we had more than 600,000 people in our Air Force back in 1988, only 80,000 of those were then coded for what we called then ‘mobility.’ Those are the troops that we planned to go fight the Cold War. Now we have a force of 359,000 and more than 270,000 of those are in our AEF buckets.

To fight Operation Iraqi Freedom, we called forward eight of our ten AEF force packages. As we reconstitute we've taken the residuals, made two Air Expeditionary Force packages that will carry us back into our 90 day rotations that will begin next month.

During Operation Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom we opened 36 bases around the world. Today we are operating from 14 bases around the world. At the height of the conflict we didn't have one tent left in the Air Force.

Today, we flew 160 sorties over Iraq. We flew about 60 sorties over Afghanistan. We are still engaged. We still have a large portion of our support forces deployed working in the AOR as we sit here today.

One of the things that the Secretary of Defense has told us to do is to work this notion of Standing Joint Force Headquarters. One of the initiatives that we rolled out to deal with that is the Future Force Structure. The Future Force Structure is a structure that's designed to put our numbered air forces directly in the planning processes of the Joint Force Commanders on a daily basis. To use our AOC weapons system, to network and set those up around the world 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to network them and have them in close coordination daily, working with also the 14th Air Force, space capabilities, and the 8th Air Force information warfare capabilities. They would be set up so that when we deploy forces in the Air Expeditionary Force, it would be these AOCs that monitor the deployment of the Air Expeditionary Forces into an AOR just like they would if they were in combat. They would be connected down to the wing level to monitor training, right down to the squadron level, would use the software and the work stations that they use in combat, so that we don't have to set our combat command and control systems aside until the time that we go to war. We're practicing with them every single day. In the new structure, the units that now report to numbered air forces would report directly to the major commands so that the numbered air forces could concentrate solely on their wartime missions.

In the lessons that we have learned from our ConOps and our analysis products, we have learned that it will be the E-10A that will be a lynch pin to be able to be able to put together the command and control and the battle management that will link to these operation centers to get rapid decisions in the machine-to-machine and the global networking interfaces. We will into the future make this AOC weapon system smaller and lighter, until we get to the point that we've articulated before where when you deploy an AOC it's a bunch of people getting on an airliner with a laptop tucked under their arm. They can go set up virtually anywhere.

I applaud the efforts of the companies represented here today because virtually every company that I have visited has made an integration center. The boss and I have been out to see almost all of them where they focus on this problem of integration. I think it has caught on well and properly that this horizontal integration, this notion of horizontal integration, of manned, unmanned and space platforms, is going to be a great leveraging capability that we need to pursue and I thank you for the work that you've done on that.

Along with this integration, we are introducing the notion of how we do this better in space with a program we call Joint Warfighting Space. This gets to the idea that military organizations with military space capability, rapidly launchable rockets with payloads that are probably microsats—but other payloads as well—standing by and ready to launch with a focus on a specific area of operations for communications and other sensors, and networked properly with national security space, will continue to leverage our space capabilities and our command of the high ground to the advantage of the joint force commander at the operational and tactical level of war.

This will operationalize space power with features we value most in military organizations: speed and responsiveness. This responsiveness to the Joint Force Commander I think will be leveraged even further as we network this with platforms like the E-10A and with capabilities like our Air Operations Center weapon systems. Oriented to the AOR, oriented to the tactical and the operational level, and networked with UAVs, E-10s, national security space. I think it's a powerful combination and a combination that we need to work on starting in the '06 POM.

That won't happen overnight. This will unfold over a period of time in the normal programming and budgeting process, in the analysis of alternatives, and in this particular case we want to take a very special look at a kinetic capability also on these rapidly launchable rockets. This conventional kinetic capability would be focused on our attempt to get warheads on targets halfway around the world in minutes or hours rather than days or weeks. This will take some time, this will take some development, but this is where we intend to go.

It blends with our next series of objectives that have to do with long range strike. Ron Keys, the Air Force XO, brought together a series of 34 studies that have been going on out there talking about long range strike. We need to resolve the product of those studies to understand whether we're going to go with a manned or an unmanned platform, whether this is a replacement bomber, or whether it goes through or from space, and these are all dependent on how we think these technologies can mature and when they mature. But it adds to our existing portfolio of bombers. Secretary Roche is always talking about portfolios and the power of having options and portfolios.

I just got to fly the most modified B-1 with the block E upgrades here about three weeks ago at Dyess. We have done amazing things with that airplane. Integrating the GPS capabilities with the ground moving target indicator radar and being able to improve the situation awareness inside the airplane. But we have a long way to go. There are other things we still need to do to that airplane for it to realize its full potential. As we bring JASM and other standoff capabilities to the B-1 it will continue to play first string in the contingencies we look at in the future.

The same with the B-52. It has standoff capability, plus once we have air superiority along with the B-1 it is able to go in deep—as it did in Operation Iraqi Freedom—and take care of a large part of the target set, while reserving the B-2 for those most difficult missions where penetration is required, and as many of you know, we tested a bomb rack on a B-2 just a few months ago that dropped 80 individually-guided 500 pound GPS bombs from a single B-2. That capability is leveraging and will help us deal even better with the fixed target sets that are out there as part of the war plan.

But we have to consider the portfolio and what needs to be done. One of the elements of deep strike is the fact that if you have ground forces on the ground deep behind enemy lines as the new Army brigade combat team ConOp says it will, then you need to have something close, overhead, and within one time of flight of the problem areas you have to deal with. In this case, we look at a bridging capability between where we are now with our portfolio of bombers and what we might need to help us penetrate with a significant bomb load in those situations.

There are competing technologies, but one answer to this might be a regional bomber of the type that we would evolve from the F/A-22 called the F/B-22. The F/B-22 would carry some 30-plus small diameter bombs, have a range of about 1600 miles, and be able to persist behind enemy lines and penetrate with some element of supercruise and still some element of maneuverability and the ability to protect itself. This will be a part of the look that we will do in the very near future as we look at our options and our timetables for long range strike.

Finally, let me touch quickly on the things that are most important to Secretary Roche and I and that's our people.

As we came off of stop loss last summer, we were looking very closely at what the result would be. In the Air Force today we are at high levels, meeting or exceeding all of our goals in retention; meeting or exceeding all of our goals in recruiting. By the time we ended the last fiscal year, we already had 43 percent of our recruiting goals in the bank for this fiscal year.

People are worried about the global war on terrorism. They are excited about the mission of our Air Force. They are coming into our Air Force and they are staying with our Air Force and I couldn't be more proud to see those results.

I'm also very proud of the relationship we have with the Air National Guard and the Air Force Reserve and their help in helping us shape our force in new and different ways. Danny James and Jimmy Sherrard have done yeoman's work in helping us lead the thinking in how we reshape our force. We've seen innovations such as the California-Nevada Air National Guard coming together to go over and augment the Predator operation at Indian Springs in Nevada. We've seen the growth of the blended wings, the JSTARS unit that has Air National Guard and the active duty serving together in the same unit. We begin to see the benefits of having Air National Guard, members of the active unit that are robust and can surge to increase crew ratios and increase the availability of platforms engaged in combat, either through volunteerism or through mobilization.

We're going to take those benefits and do what we can, reasonably can, to move those benefits into other platforms such as the fighter world. We have lessons that we continue to learn and we take benefit from the great proportion of Guard and Reserve people that we have in our airlift and our tanker forces that have worked for a long time and continue to be the keystone to our global power.

We have some problems as well. We have a force that we read in Air Force Times is about 16,000 people too large and it's worth taking a minute to explain that.

The fact is that we are 16,000 over what's called our authorized end strength, and we have been for some period of time. There's a bunch of reasons for that. The cuts that we were taking in the 1990s, we didn't take all of those cuts that we were supposed to take. We got away with it because the world was a busy place. While we have 16,000 people over our end strength, we're still suffering chronic shortages in other career fields. So as we adjust this force, we're going to take from those 16,000 and go fill those chronic shortages and we're going to bolster the training needed to get them there, and we're going to look at reasonable ways to size our force while taking full advantage of everybody who wants to serve. It is our intention that we do not want to make anybody leave the Air Force that does not want to leave, but instead offer alternatives to service and force shaping options that get the force that we have—that’s so dedicated and performing so superbly—over into our chronic shortages.

We have many other things underway in our Air Force. On the 7th of January, I got all the general officers in the Washington, D.C. area out to Bolling Air Force Base for the PT test. It was 20 degrees and 20 knots of wind. There wasn't insignificant whining—there was significant whining—but we did it any way. [Laughter] We all agreed that the people at Minot would have very little sympathy for us if we didn't get out there in the 20 degree weather at a time when they're out there in minus 20 degree weather.

We're about to issue a new set of fitness gear, workout gear, as part of the fitness program that will be coming on during the summer time. It's going to put the social aspects of fitness back into our Air Force where we exercise together as units and the statistics are already telling us the fitness center usage is up 35 percent, smoking is down considerably, and I think we're already seeing the fruits of our labor.

We are on a path to make sure that this force is fit to fight and we're putting this program in the command chains and not in the chains of the orderly room or the flight surgeon to make sure it happens properly. We're going on with that and it's going to make a big difference in our force. I'm getting some superb feedback.

I tell you every year and I'm going to report to you again this year, one of the great benefits that Secretary Roche and I have is to go out and to be able to visit these troops in the field during these crises. Our kids are absolutely magnificent. I tell them when I stand in front of them that they never cease to amaze me. I've been doing this now for 38 years. You go watch these youngsters in action and they are dedicated, they are patriotic, they want to serve, they are proud. And I'm so proud of them. We are all so proud of them. We do have the greatest Air Force on the planet.

This is a time where we need to pull all this stuff together. We are faced with an enemy with whom we have nothing in common, no room to negotiate. They've demonstrated the willingness to come over and kill our citizens. They killed 3,000 of our citizens on that day in September, but if it could have been 30,000 or 300,000 or three million they would have killed them, too, with little or no remorse.

You talk to the people who are dealing with prisoners down in Guantanamo and people who are captives down there say, “don't let me go because if you do I will kill you.” We should not lose sight of the importance of our mission. You've heard the President say it many times and I've heard him say it many times. One of the reasons we have stayed focused on this problem is because the President and the Secretary of Defense have allowed us to stay focused because they are focused. There's only one answer to this. We tracked Saddam Hussein down in a hole in the ground. That's where Osama bin Laden is, somewhere out there in a hole in the ground, and we're going to find him, too. And when we find him and his colleagues there's going to be one answer and one answer only. We're going to take them out.

I see that fire in the eyes of our airmen and our soldiers and our sailors and our marines out there when I go out there in the field. They also believe that.

So ladies and gentlemen, our task together is a tough one. We've got improvements we still have to make. We are so much better than we were and yet there's so much left to do. As the boss said, I hope nobody thinks that this team is out of energy because we're going to pursue these. We're going to get to where we need to be and we're going to continue to make this Air Force the very best Air Force there is.

God bless each and every one of you. God bless this great nation, the United States of America. Thank you all.

Donald L. Peterson (Moderator): Thank you both very much. I've got some questions here from the audience. First of all, the F-35. We're going to acquire somewhere around 1,700 or so, for our Air Force. What will be the mix of STOVAL and STAL?

Secretary Roche: We don't know. That's one of the things we're going to be asking Hal Hornburg to take a look at for us. He and a number of our senior colleagues are taking these mission areas, each of the four, and are going to elaborate on them. There is the sense we want to do this. We don't know what the trade is, just as we don't know exactly how many A-10s we want to modernize. There will be a combination of both the CTAL, the STOVAL. We'll take a look at the total number we were intending to buy. I think you know that we are due to take over the program here sometime between April/May. It was very clear that this is something that's very important. Both John and I have spent a great many hours trying to get ready for this. In the course of doing that, we recognized that if we unveiled this thought now then we would be credible when we said we're going to do whatever we can do to make this an effective program for the United States. And if the two of us say it's not going to work, believe me it's not going to work. But our sense is we want to give it a try and to work with the Marines, and then figure out what makes sense based on our concept of operations which is being developed.

General Jumper: It's also important to note that the capabilities we would have with the STOVAL version of the airplane would give us access to many more runways than we find in these sorts of urban and contingency operations that we find ourselves in today. As a matter of fact I was in Bagram not long ago. My visit was long enough to tell me that we would have a very difficult time putting anything but A-10s in there with the current force that we have because of the condition of the airfield.

Moderator: Mr. Secretary, great vision on future capabilities in your talk. What legacy systems will we have to divest ourselves of in order to be able to afford that future?

Secretary Roche: We did a very successful thing with the B-1; in fact, so successful we're being asked to undo what we did. No good deed goes unpunished. It’s taking a look at a mission area and trying to consider the investments that we have to make in it to keep it as it is, or to retire part if it so that we can shift more quickly to a greatly improved residual which can then bridge to a larger force. We will take a look at each of these areas to do something like that. There are certain things we can't back off on.

For instance, you can't back off on Joint Stars in order to do E-10A because there just aren't enough Joint Stars. But you can look at some of the other forces and say we're consuming a lot of money. If we can take the talent and orient it towards a better legacy system, it will bridge us and then we can move to the new systems as fast as we can.

In the process of doing that, we probably will come upon other examples like the B-1 where by tailoring the weapons, changing how it's flown, using all three bomb bays, making sure that it has the right sorts of sensors on it that will be needed for the future; it will have a very effective life for a long time. We think the A-10 is another example where investing in the plane will give us a very, very good bridge and continue to build this portfolio.

Moderator: Chief, to support the jointness in the future are you comfortable that the U.S. Army and Air Force transformation issues are adequately integrated? For example, the Army's Future Combat System, which envisions UAVs and sensors and C4ISR links, etc.?

General Jumper: Quite frankly, I see a lot on brochures that we really haven't seen codified completely in what the Army is briefing, so I think there are many more unknowns than knowns there.

Certainly there is a place for a tactical UAV, and it's properly used by the Army forces. What we do with the Predator I think and the Global Hawk are different than that, but also available to ground forces when they need to do their job. But it's going to be I think a little bit longer before we really see what the future force in the Army is in detail. We just need to be ready for it and we know enough about the brigade combat team ConOps that they for certain envision working deeper behind enemy lines and causing us to have to completely re-look at the way we do business for them with regards to resupply and being able to respond to emergencies where they might be. So still a work in progress there.

Moderator: With the Navy E/A-6Bs going away and the Air Force acquiring an organic capability, who will be our headquarters champion for the electronic warfare capability?

General Jumper: I think you're looking at two champions right here. I don't know who else we need. [Laughter] If we need somebody else, let me know.

But one of the things that we clearly want to look at in the '06 POM is what to do to get ourselves into the stand-off jamming business.

What the Navy has with the F/A-18 Growler is going to replace the E-6, but what we find is—and this again is part of our analysis—is a growing need for adequate standoff jamming. So one of the options that we will take a strong look at is taking the B-52, and as you all know we have wing-tip fuel tanks on the B-52 that really don't carry fuel. They are there to stabilize the wing. But when you open one up you can build a small condominum.

What we want to be able to do is to pod a system that would work and be integrated with the airplane, but work in a way that didn't interfere with what the rest of the airplane can do. So it wouldn't be a dedicated capability, but it would be a capability that takes advantage of the superb range of that airplane to be able to stand off and provide jamming.

So it's this sort of thing that I think we need to do as we also figure out through the work that Hal Hornburg and others have done on defining exactly how to integrate other elements of information operations and information warfare to do the same job. And as we've said before, jamming is one way to help make sure we can penetrate warheads into target areas, but there are other ways as well and we've got to make sure they're all properly integrated.

Moderator: Regarding the lease acquisition of the KC-767 aircraft, when do you anticipate we'll be able to get through this and back to our tanker problem?

[Loud cough from the audience - and laughter]

Moderator: I didn't ask either one of you that. Okay, next question…

Secretary Roche: Like all good wine, in its own time. [Laughter]

All kidding aside, we very much support what the Secretary of Defense is doing right now. Remember, we always, and oftentimes this is forgotten, we have always been programming to begin in POM '06 with what was called KCX. We've never changed from that. We've just marched along. We had hoped to accelerate it by a couple of years because we felt this was a risk that ought to be addressed earlier, but if there had been a problem we made it very clear we would just revert to Plan A, the basic plan. So it's not a problem for us to stop, take a look. The world has gone on for a couple of years, there's more data. We have not had a greatly increased conflict, however we have sensitized everyone to the fact of “no tankers, no warfight.” And certainly between Afghanistan and Iraq that's become very, very clear.

So this will work itself out. We're quite content to work with the plan the Secretary has, take a look at the old program, take a look at the circumstances surrounding its negotiation, then at the right time move forward.

Moderator: In which mission area or new mission area do you see the greatest change occurring over the next five to ten years?

General Jumper: I think it's clearly been in the area of command and control and ISR integration with command and control. The space C4ISR ConOps I think has been the thing that's been the most difficult for us to write and put down on paper. If you see some of the work that Tom Hobbins is doing in integration, for instance, what a great team of people we have. We have some unbelievably talented people that we have put in a room and shoved pizza under the door for two years until they're able to wrestle to the ground the great mysteries of things like datalinks and how you do these self-forming, self-healing networks. We have wonderful people out there in our research and development world dealing with network technologies and domain integrations and concepts like that that have to come together to make this happen.

But in the networking business and the command and control business and getting the ISR to the right place at the right time, getting the integration done behind the dashboard … remember, we have this great organizing principle that we simply call cursor over the target, where the sum of the wisdom of the manned, unmanned and space platforms end up with a cursor over the target. That means the integration goes on behind the dashboard instead of in the pea-sized brain of the fighter pilot. [Laughter] If you can just grasp that principle, and I see some heads beginning to… [Laughter]

Moderator: Could you slow down a little bit, Chief?

General Jumper: There's some 20 watt bulbs out there. [Laughter] If we can grasp that principle, I think we will be getting toward the thing that's going to be the greatest leveraging capability that we've got going and that's what all of our analysis shows.

Moderator: If we do not get a defense supplemental appropriation at the end of the year, how do you see that impacting the Air Force budget for FY 05?

Secretary Roche: I think as the Secretary noted, we know how to handle this on the books. It’s complicated, but we're going to do what we have to do in order to make our mission, and cash flow ahead, and we will do that. You work the problem. We know how to work the problem. But we're not going to harm our people.

Moderator: General Jumper, as you look at the current tempo we're in, are you worried about a mass exodus of our troops? Especially of the Guard and Reserve?

General Jumper: We have had a chance to sample what that mass exodus might be. And remember that in our Guard and Reserve we have a great deal of forces that serve every single day on a volunteer basis. We get correspondence from employers all the time. I should take this opportunity to again thank the industry leaders out here in this audience.

I get great feedback on the employers and their sensitivity to the plight of their employees that they have let go to be activated and to serve, and we could not run our Air Force without that help. So my thanks to you and to all of you who in some cases go to great lengths to make sure that when an airman is activated they don't lose pay. Not all of us can do that, but some of them do. That is a great contribution that has gone largely unacknowledged. It's just as much service as those who put on the uniform, so thank you all for that.

But I haven't seen this big exodus. What I see out there is a whole lot of pride. “Sir, I'll stay as long as you need me.” As a matter of fact, “sir, could you talk to my employer so I can stay a little longer?”-sort of thing. No, we don't do that. But that's what I see out there.

Secretary Roche: Pete-O, we have, as of today, 2,900 volunteers. Not activated, but volunteers. We took the time to try to thank the employers by sending out the employer pin—based on the World War II symbol of employers who were contributing to the war in World War II—to thosecontributing to the war against terrorism by how they support our Guard and Reserve.

Moderator: Do you believe the role of the Air Force civilian employees and contract employees will increase in the AEFs in their deployments in the future?

General Jumper: I think, first of all, we have a large number of civilians that do deploy over in the AOR and do a variety of things, so they are already playing a part in our air expeditionary force structure.

In the force development that's going on in our civilian workforce, where we are taking formal steps to make sure that the opportunity to improve professional development and education are the same for our civilian workforce as they are for our enlisted and officer workforce, there are things that are underway and vigorously underway to make sure that happens.

So what I do see is our civilian workforce, Air Force civilians, becoming closer and closer and a bigger part of our daily activities, and certainly already we see some of that includes deployment to some locations.

Secretary Roche: We once a week get an update on the number of civilians who are in the AOR, both Air Force civilians and government civilians and contractors. We keep track. We remind the area commanders that our force there is our active force plus the civilians who are with them and those from companies who are helping our people in some of the complicated systems we use.

Moderator: What does the modeling and simulation community need to do to support the Air Force warfighter better?

General Jumper: Let me answer this. We need to listen carefully. We need to learn how to model command and control, to take the mystery out of it, so that we can see what happens when you change certain elements of it. So that we can see where the greatest leveraging capabilities are. We need to be able to model it so we can put it out in front in a test environment for people to see. So that's the biggest thing that I need right now out of our modeling and simulation community.

The other things we're doing are very exciting. Our distributed mission operations where we have ourselves networking our platforms out there in either a training environment or a virtual environment. We have virtual flags now where the platforms that are unavailable because they're deployed or otherwise not available are virtually put into scenarios as if they were there. It allows you to practice complex scenarios like combat search and rescue and time sensitive targeting that put the greatest demand on our decision making so that you can properly practice the decision making at the operational level of war, which is necessary to be able to employ the weapons at the tactical level of war. That is all ongoing. It's extremely exciting stuff and it will continue.

Moderator: How do distributed mission operations fit into the Battlefield Airman Project? How do you see it changing the focus of modeling and simulation investments in that area?

General Jumper: Again, in the notion of the ‘battlefield airman,’ the person who's actually on the ground with the forces on the ground, what do they need to know? They need to have the information that is overhead in the Predator. They need to be able to pull information off of a network. Again, many times in the training environment you're not going to have those platforms to actually bring to an exercise or to practice with.

So what this does is allows you to do all of the things which you would need to do in a real scenario by virtually inserting these things into the training environment.

Of course, it also will help us in the testing. You'll be able to get into that environment and just like modeling command and control, you'll be able to see what are the leveraging, high pay-off things that you can put into that network that yield you the greatest results? That's where we need to go.

Moderator: What do you see as our biggest challenge next year?

Secretary Roche: I think from my point of view the big challenge is focused thinking and committment. Not to be deterred by some of these challenges. We have to do more joint. And I think importantly, we must each and every day maintain faith with our airmen who are overseas and in the AOR, who are in our crews, flying our planes, doing the other things that make the Air Force work. If we will do the right thing and not worry about who's happy or unhappy, I think we will continue to have the most fantastic military machine in the history of the world.

Jumper: Mine is not nearly that good, but I do want to mention that one of the problems we all face and have always faced in our Air Force is that we make it look too easy. It's amazing to me how many people think there is nobody from the Air Force deployed right now, that we are not involved in the situation over there, when indeed we're working very hard every day to deal with the difficult problems that the soldiers and marines are facing on the ground, the ID problem and other problems that face them.

We've got to make sure that we do our very best to make sure that our contribution is noted and that we do stay visible to the decision makers so they think we are on the front line of these confrontations.

To make our case for the things that we want to do, we've got to be able to make the case that they are making a very, very big difference on the battlefield, which we all know they are.

Moderator: Mr. Secretary, Chief … thank you both very much for your great leadership of our airmen and our Air Force.