AFA Policy Forum

Lieutenant General Ronald E. Keys
Deputy Chief of Staff for Air and Space Operations
Headquarters, United States Air Force
Air Warfare Symposium - Orlando
February 18, 2005

General Keys: Unlike General Lord, I have to put glasses on just to think. For all you in the second row, you can step away from the pencils and the question pads, too. [Laughter]

It's always nice to be in an audience where you can speak and you've got the entire Air Staff lined up listening. But I look forward to this event every year because it's an opportunity to get out of Washington and to come down and see the possibilities for the future and that's really what we focus on a lot in the XO. Discuss some of the emerging issues, how we see them, and talk to some talented industry leaders on what's going on on the outside. And of course just to be here with the strong supporters of our United States Air Force.

Today I want to frame three things for you. What is this thing called ‘interdependence’? Since this is all about forging the interdependent joint force, what is this thing called ‘interdependence’? I’ll give you a quick synopsis of what this means based on what I'm going to demand of you when it comes to interdependence. Then, finally, I’ll give you just a small window into what this great Air Force is doing today.

These are tough times. They're busy times. Our operations tempo is at a sustained high. Recapitalization is an imperative. Budgets are tight. There are plenty of adversaries around the world that are still not dissuaded. This puts us in a familiar quandary. We don't know when and we don't know where and we may not even know what, but we have to be ready with a portfolio capability across a wide range of effects. That means we need to develop a balanced portfolio. We need a flexible, adaptable portfolio. And we need to make some hard decisions.

People always ask me, “well what do you have too much of and what do you need more of?” Let me give you a news flash. I've got too much of not enough. That's my problem.

For starters, we don't have all we need of anything, so the trick is balance. Systems of systems, joint systems of systems, and now joint interdependent systems. The calculus is simple. Where am I taking more risk than is wise, and where am I not taking as much risk as I might? Running the numbers is the hard part, and when we run the numbers we have to balance the portfolio in terms of leverage, in terms of risk and in terms of transformation. We've got to do the job today, but we can't not be able to do the job tomorrow. And more of one means less of another.

To make it harder, the choices are not between good and evil. The choices are between bad and worse. There is no low hanging fruit. All the fruit's up in the top of the tree. The herd's already been thinned. We're going to have to start shooting thoroughbreds in order to save the rest of the herd. That is a very tough decision that has to be made. Things that work, we're going to have to walk away from, so we can keep the larger things that work for today in the future.

So as we try to balance risk, we're going to have to spend more time divining the difference between robust and redundant. We can't afford a single point failure, but we can't afford the expense of tri-redundancy everywhere either. Everybody wants to have something just in case, but it's to the point where we almost can't have just in case. Nowhere do we buy risk down to zero any more. Everything is risky. We take risk where the results are not catastrophic and buy down risk where the result is catastrophic, but at the expense of something else.

We also have to balance capabilities and gaps in a finer sense. Look closer at the transformational capabilities we require, and decide what do we have that's good enough and we're going to live with that in order to jump to the next level. I can't afford to get four percent better any more. That will frustrate some of you as you come to me with something that's good and it works, but it doesn't give me the leverage that I need. I don't need four percent, I need 24 percent better.

Said another way, what grain of snow dislodged starts that avalanche? What added calorie of heat causes that vessel to burst into boil? What's the fundamental capability that transforms the way we or our adversary goes to war? What fundamental change puts me out of business?

In the leadership studies, there's an analogy that talks about lions and gophers and zebras. It talks about how lions as a rule don't hunt gophers because the act of hunting gophers causes so many calories to be expended that when you finally get one you're falling behind. So lions hunt zebras. In a leadership sense, that's what we're looking for. We're looking for zebras. We cannot pursue the gophers any longer.

Look at the audience smile and slow down. Griss put that in my speech there. [Laughter]

Meanwhile there's another balance that we have to maintain. We have to balance capability with capacity. It doesn't do us any good to buy one infinitely capable aircraft if we have to be in two places at the same time. Balance again.

The point of all my talk about balance is balance is the thing that has driven us to go beyond just fighting joint or fighting together. We now fight in a totally more refined manner together because not only does it work in an interoperability sense, but we're fighting together because we need each other. We simply can't fight apart, nor can we afford to fight apart. That's the concept of ‘joint interdependence’ which is the theme of this AFA event.

Ironically, when our joint partners started talking about the concept of interdependence, we kind of shrugged. The Air Force has been doing interdependence at least on one side of the street for a long time, providing capability to the joint warfighter and our service comrades that they don't have from any other source. The Air Force has long been the joint and coalition culture service. If you're the joint warfighter and you want close air support, you get it from Air Force attack aircraft. You want gas, you get it from Air Force tanker aircraft. You want airlift, you come to me. When you want intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, you get it from Air Force ISR aircraft, not to mention UAVs like Predator and Global Hawk. And oh, by the way, the control nets and communications and GPS you require rides on my satellites.

Now transforming to a truly interdependent force also requires cooperation. For example, every 500 pound bomb that the Air Force takes deep, the Army doesn't have to transport an artillery shell 500 miles. They don't have to guard the ammo truck, fix the ammo truck, feed the drive, guard the driver, turn the truck around, gas it up and send it back to get more ammo. But I have to be there when the Army needs that JDAM. That means collaborative planning, interoperable communications, and integrated training to forge that interdependent force.

But now interdependence is beginning to cut both ways. Before, the Air Force was more or less free goods to the joint force because our base was safe in a rear area, in friendly territory. Now there may not be a rear area. The Air Force base could be in enemy territory. In fact at Bilad we're taking between 30 and 50 rockets and mortars and attacks per month. So I'm going to need some capability that's not resident in the Air Force to protect the base while I generate air power.

So here's the emerging difference. Interoperability is all about what capabilities I have that can make your operations better. Interdependence is all about what you need done that you can't live without, where my capability is the only capability you have. That's where we get into the scary stuff.

As we move toward interoperability, let me give you some examples of things we've been doing. We've got about 70 C-130s in theater and we're flying sorties today to keep missions out of the Sunni Triangle, out of the triangle of death on the ground. That's an easy thing to say, but a hard thing to do because it requires that cooperative interdependence to know where the stuff is, where it has to go. It requires us then to look at routes that are not as efficient as we might like them to be in order to get to the other side of the curve on effectiveness.

We're also doing I think about eight reach-back sorties a day. I characterize them as reach-back sorties, with C-17s which we've cooperatively got together and actually packed the stuff back here so that it's ready to land and be delivered to the end user without having to stop at an intermediate stop, be broken apart, put on trucks, and be driven out on the dangerous roads. So there's a lot more to interdependence than just saying, “Oh, yeah, we provide.” It has to be a totally integrated and interdependent collaborative planning.

We're doing cooperative ISR and defensive operations between the Air Force and the Army at Bilad in Iraq, to defend a base and go after mortar-firing terrorists. We've got Air Force and Army folks inside the fence sitting together in a joint defense operations center coordinating fires to help us protect the base from terrorists. That's interdependence again.

And of course we're not walking away from the traditional interdependent operations—B-1s and F-16s and CAS orbits awaiting the call to strike when and where the Army or the Marines ashore need them. Predator with Rover and Rover on targeting pods connected with SOF teams and Army patrols that depend on Predator as their eyes.

As the Army continues to operationalize their Future Combat Systems, we need to figure out answers to other interdependent questions like how do we get people into the area where the FCS will be operating? How do we supply those people? How do we coordinate and provide the long-range precision fires they will need? To become light, lean and lethal they must become interdependent on other people to give them what they need to stay alive.

Interdependence doesn't have anything to do with the specious argument about simultaneous or sequential. You do what you need to do when you need to do it. Either type of operation can be interdependent. The F/A-22 can kick down the door for the C-17 to come in and para-drop Army troops into enemy held territory. That's sequential. Yet interdependent ops, where the C-17 is escorted and CAS is supplied by the Raptor, that's simultaneous. But who cares? Likewise, the A/C-130 gunship that can orbit overhead providing fires for a Navy SEAL team on the ground. That's simultaneous but interdependent operations. You do what you've got to do when you've got to do it.

A little bit about interdependence in the coalition. We hear a lot of talk about coalition operations, that we're too far ahead of everybody to use a coalition because others can't keep up. I'll tell you, the coalition partners are keeping up. The fact is the Air Force is interoperable with many of our allies. We're doing it today in Iraq, Afghanistan, Thailand, and Indonesia, just to name a few. But it's not all on or off. As we develop these coalitions to do we don't know what that we don't know where that we don't know when, it's a continuum of de-confliction, interoperability and interdependence. We'll be interdependent on those that we can be, interoperable with our C2 data, our command and control with others. And where we can't be interoperable, we'll use our tactics, techniques and procedures to make sure that we're de-conflicted, but still pursuing the same mission. So that's the subtle difference between interoperable and interdependent. Interoperable says you can, interdependence says you must.

Now what capabilities will you expect us to demand and what will I demand of you? I'll give you a few to think about.

One is we've got to get to this thing called the compatible open architecture. I've got to be able to truly plug and play and it's got to plug and play better than Microsoft. It's actually got to plug, boot up, recognize, and it works. So compatible architectures. That's been the direction that XI and Tom Huff has been going for as long as he's been in XI. It's to fight that fight in the joint arena to make sure everyone understands that the constellation net, the force net, and the land nets all have to talk to each other. We've got to be able—because we don't know what size force we're going in—to plug into the Navy net. My things will have to plug in and work on the Army net as my TACPs are out there on the forward edge of the battle. So compatible open architectures. So don't bring me stuff that's not compatible because I'm not going to be happy.

Web-based, self-forming, self-healing, IP addressable networks. Starbucks in the morning. You walk in there. You've got your laptop. You open that beauty up, boot it up, it recognizes that you're paid up, it lets you on the net, you check all your stock quotes, and you have your triple venti hazelnut latte skim. [Laughter] You turn off your laptop, you walk out of there, the network doesn't dissolve, and everyone else is still on the network. Self-forming, self-healing, IP addressable. We want to do the same thing as I roll up in my F-15E. It knows who I am, it knows what my mission is, it knows what my weapons are, and now I start getting my assignment.

Collaborative tools are going to become more and more important. It's going to be largely a space operation, but we’ve got to be able to plan together. You've got to be in there the first second of the first hour of the first day. We cannot afford to do things like we did it in Operation Anaconda. We cannot get something started and I get a call at 11:00 o'clock at night to go some place I cannot even pronounce with airplanes that are not loaded and crews that are in bed. We have got to be collaboratively in this from the get-go.

Predictive tools. I've got to start moving to the process of confirmation, not discover, or I'm never going to get a handle on this thing, this low density, high demand, ISR assets. Everybody wants to know everything about everything, and the way we go about it is that every pixel of the earth out there is equally capable of having what I call the “Eureka Bite.” That can't be right. With predictive battlespace analysis we’ve got to be able to shape the battlefield for our sensors so we're not just looking, we're actually sensing. We're confirming what we know has to be there somewhere.

We want to catch the bank robber before he robs the bank. And not only do we want to catch him before he robs the bank. We're going to catch him because we're going to so shape his understanding of the situation that he's going to try to rob the bank at which we're waiting for him. We need predictive tools to do that and we're just in the grammar grades at being able to do that.

Machine-to-machine conversations and fusions. I need Howell to do the stubby pencil work—making the lists, adding two and two. I need the machines to do that. I need the machines to pass that to each other and what I want is not even decision quality information, I want decision ready. I want it displayed the way I understand it so I can say, “yeah, do it. Move the orbit. Shoot the guy.”

Speed is life. I've grown up over 30 years. Speed is life. Well, speed is still life in the information game. It's time sensitive targeting of the information that I have to have, and I've got to get it to the guy or the gal who's going to work on it.

Embedded training and distributed mission operations. On one level I don't want to have to do training so stop bringing me stuff that I have to stand up a training course to learn how to use it. I've got all these kids sitting all through this audience here that grew up in the internet generation and they know that when they click on a file there's a certain number of things that are going to drop down on the menu. So when you bring me something that's software, when you click on a file make it just like when you click on Internet Explorer. When I click on Edit, I want the same stuff. When I click on View, I want the same stuff. None of us will buy a program commercially and put it on our home computer and ever look at the instruction manual. Many of you probably don't know that the thing even comes with an instruction manual. It's just padding. You put it on the machine, you boot it up, and you roll. You learn on the fly. We have got to get to that.

On the other end, distributed mission operations. When I buy stuff I'm going to ask the hard question. Will this plug into my distributed mission operation net? Will this plug into my virtual training net? Because if it won't then I'm starting not to be interested in having this. It's got to be compatible with that training net because that training net is going to allow me to do those complex kinds of things that an interdependent joint force absolutely has to have.

Then systems of systems. I need to be able to leverage my force by plugging it in wherever it has to plug in. I'm not interested in paying to solve all the problem myself. I am interested in paying enough to make sure that I can leverage what's out there from my other service comrades to make sure that I have the capability that I have to have.

The end point is what I'm trying to establish. It’s global vision, global reach, and global power. If I see it I can understand it, if I can understand it I can affect it. Responsive, persistent and interdependent.

What I've just given you is sort of an academic explanation. My academic explanation of what interdependence is, but let me talk to you a little bit about what the Air Force is doing right now, presuming that I haven't gotten too far off track here.

Two hours and 14 minutes ago, Starship 17, an Air Force Special Operations MC-130H combat Talon, started its approach to an unimproved landing zone in Iraq to infiltrate 7,000 pounds of equipment and 22 passengers to a Special Forces unit who went into direct action to capture or kill a suspected al-Qaeda leader.

About an hour ago, Rider 72, a two-ship of MH-53 Pave Low helicopters, moved a second coalition Special Ops team into a landing zone near Fallujah to assault a suspected al-Qaeda safehouse.

While those missions were ongoing, they were covered by Python 34, an AC-130 gunship. Python will be airborne seven hours, refuel two times, and support two different missions before they land later.

Bravo crew of the 2nd Space Operations Squadron just came on duty at Schriever Air Force Base, Colorado. 2nd Lieutenant Angelo Fernandez and Airman First Class Nicholas Arndt minutes ago sent navigation messages through the dedicated Global Positioning System command and control network to Global Positioning Satellites 38 and 51 going into the theater. They'll do that about 25 times while we're here, juggling contacts with 30 satellites through sites in four countries. Not only does that mean our forces have pinpoint accuracy as they go into harm's way, but those of you who use pagers and ATMs can thank Angelo and Nick that they work. They're part of your independent force.

Seven minutes ago, the maintainers from the 60th Aircraft Maintenance Squadron at Travis Air Force Base began their rounds to ready C-5 Galaxy and KC-10 extender aircraft for the morning go, to fly critical cargo to Guam.

By remote control from Nellis Air Force Base, Air Force Reserve pilot Lieutenant Colonel Agent Breeden is presently flying Deadly 33, a Predator unmanned aerial vehicle, over a road near Bilad, Iraq, as his sensor operator, Master Sergeant Spinal Tapp, scans the road for insurgents. These are real names. [Laughter]

Master Sergeant Spinal Tapp scans the road for insurgents, attempting to bury roadside bombs. Having already received proper authorization to strike should they find bad guys, the Nevada operator will command the Predator via satellite to fire its Hellfire missiles at the insurgents.

In about 12 minutes you can see the afterburner glow in the night darkness as Red Hawk 71 and Beaver 81, two flights of Air National Guard F-15A Eagles, take off from Pielavar Air Base in Singapore to sharpen their night air-to-air combat skill in engagements above the South China Sea in an exercise there.

About five minutes from now, 150 Air Force truck drivers and security forces troops who have recently graduated from the Air Force Basic Combat Course at Camp Bullis, Texas, will complete the Army's power projection course at Fort Hood and board Reach 47, the commercial 747 which will fly them to Iraq to provide line haul truck convoy operations, filling a critical Army shortfall.

As we sit here, intelligence analysts with the Nevada Air National Guard in Reno process pictures from an RQ4A Global Hawk flying over Iraq to support the Army 3rd Infantry Division searching for suspected terrorists.

Citizen soldiers remain on alert at the 127th Wing in Mount Clemens, Michigan, and 15 other Air National Guard bases in the U.S., ready to launch F-16 fighter aircraft at a moment's notice in support of homeland defense under Operation Noble Eagle.

Thirty minutes ago, Reserve and active duty Air Force fighter crews began suiting up to fly air patrols over cities like Chicago and Los Angeles, keeping the air defense system honed and responsive.

Within the next 15 minutes, Killer 21, an F/A-22 Raptor, is landing at Tyndall Air Force Base at the hands of Lieutenant Colonel BamBam Stapleton, after another successful mission training new Raptor pilots.

It's after 11:00 p.m. in Korea as Blade 33 and 34, a pair of F-15Cs from Alaska, patrol the dark skies. And Data 71, a U-2, is descending from above 70,000 feet to land after a six-hour mission near the demilitarized zone reconning targets in the North.

It's been Saturday in Christchurch, New Zealand for over two hours as Congo 61, a C-17 Globemaster, lands with cargo and passengers headed for the South Pole.

Fueler 25 and 26, two USAFE KC-135s strata tankers have departed Incirlik, Turkey Air Force Base to refuel numerous C-17s as they transition across the long haul to the Black Sea in support of Operation Enduring Freedom.

Havoc 61 and 62, a flight of two B-52s deployed to Anderson Air Force Base, Guam, are currently air-refueling with Roving 20, a KC-135 also deployed to Guam. The buffs are en-route to the Korean Peninsula where they'll practice close air support and fighter intercept tactics. Eleven hours from now, they'll land back at Guam where they started.

One hour from now, a Kilo crew will come in from the nine degree below zero North Dakota winter to conduct shift change in the missile alert facility Kilo 01 near Minot. The missile combat crew will pull nuclear alert for the next 24 hours.

Viper 22 and 23 took off from Zaragosa about 50 minutes ago en-route to Bardanas Range. Each F-16C is armed with four GBU laser-guided bombs. In the cockpit of Viper 23 is Lieutenant Weasel Lockett. She'll be preparing for her upcoming deployment to provide close air support in Iraq by dropping her first precision-guided munitions.

Right now across America, USAF air surveillance teams in darkened air defense sectors code named Oak Grove and Huntress and Big Foot are scanning America's skies.

Fever 31, a C-130 Hercules, is airborne flying a Coronet Oak airlift mission into Colombia to resupply the embassy.

Fifteen minutes ago, Sentry 61, an E-3, declared on-station in orbit; and Budge 01, a flight of four F-15Cs, have just checked in with Dragnet, their back-end crew.

29,243 of America's Air Force sons and daughters are away from home tonight, most in harm's way. In addition, there are American Air Force aircraft operating in every time zone of the world right now and they are every single day of the year.

At this moment we have aircraft on every continent in the world and have been on all seven continents since late October when the Air National Guard ski-equipped LC-130 Hercules aircraft began landing in Antarctica at South Pole Station delivering supplies for Operation Deep Freeze. We'll stay there until the end of this month when Ice 57, a C-17, will depart McMurdo. Two weeks ago, on 4 February, C-141, tail number 60152, departed McMurdo Station, marking the last time an Air Force C-141 will visit Antarctica as we retire them from our inventory.

The American flag flies on the tail of American Air Force aircraft in 152 countries right now. They are backed by the thousands of maintenance, security, and support people to make that happen. The sun never sets on your Air Force.

Seven days a week, 365 days a year, around the world. We see first, we understand first, we act first. That is global vision and global reach and global power, and that is the global joint interdependent force that we are forging.

I'm very proud to be here today. I'm representing this great Air Force and the people that make it great, and I thank you very much for listening to me.

Q: Our first question is from Master Sergeant Root Canal. He said—that's a real name… [Laughter]

How much progress have we made in predicting battlespace analysis and what kind of tools do you think will be available for our warfighters in the future?

General Keys: Well, we put millions of dollars into developing software products. We actually have a couple of systems downrange that we're using, trying to track the IEDs. These are programs that when you and I look at the intelligence, we don't see a pattern, but these software programs can look at information and data and develop a pattern that we don't see. So we've been moderately successful in developing a pattern of where the next IEDs are going to be laid down. We've got a long way to go on that, obviously. Part of it is until we get to the point that we can second-by-second machine-to-machine language fuse information and cross-reference information, it becomes very, very difficult.

I think we're probably about 6th or 7th grade. We'll have to get a PhD in this in order to make it all work, but we're on the road and we've convinced ourselves that this is a doable do. It's just a matter of we may not be quite smart enough and can't make the ones and zeros all rove where they need to rove right now.

Q: We know we're just beginning to get some Raptors into the operational units now at Langley, of course. Can you tell us if you anticipate any requirements for exceptions to our environmental regulations in order to train with the Raptor?

General Keys: We've been working this pretty hard, as you know, with the Base Realignment and Closure Commission. We've gone through a sort of a soup to nuts analysis of what do we really need in the Air Force. What kind of ranges, what size, at what speeds are we going to fly in them?

We believe that we've got the ranges we're going to need. I guess any time you do an environmental survey it's painful, but it won't be extremely painful to make this airplane operate the way we need it to operate.

Q: Referencing the E-10, if we can control a Predator from Nevada, why do we need to put a battle staff airborne in the E-10?

General Keys: Well, you can control them, but for example, we missed shooting down a MiG-25 during the war because of the latency in the system. We had the Hellfire-armed Predator up and the MiG-25 was coming in to intercept and we had him locked up, but by the time we had fired the missile, he had started his turn and so he broke lock. The reason was there's about a several second delay in the latency.

If I'm trying to do theater ballistic missile defense, if I'm trying to do cruise missile defense, if I'm trying to do those kinds of operations, I can't afford to have that sort of latency.

As I look at the E-10, if we have an E-10 a couple of years ago, the E-10 would have been the quarterback in the western desert and it would have had SOF commanders on board, and Army commanders on board and coalition commanders on board and it would have probably controlled a few UAVs itself and it would have done it in a real-time sort of manner.

I don't think we're to the point that from over 10,000 miles away I can do the real time kinds of things that I need to do that I will be able to do with the E-10.

Q: We know we're trying to work toward reducing the tempo on our resources, low density/high demand systems. Are we making progress there with cross-training and utilization?

General Keys: So far we've moved about 4,000 people and another 4,000 or 5,000 spaces which we're training people into. The problem is if you need an eight-year tech sergeant, it takes you eight years to get him. That's the sad fact. So as you grow this force, you can't grow it all with young Airmen, because you've got to grow this thing in a pyramid so you have the appropriate trainers and supervision.

We put $352 million into technology to offload some of the requirements for our security forces, which is an extremely stressed career field. So it takes time and we're making progress, but of course if you're on one of those extended tours down-range, the progress is going too slow. But we're committed to finally making it work.

Q: We're helping the Army with convoy operations as we mentioned yesterday. How are our Airmen doing in this role, and do you see other areas that we might be supporting the Army in?

General Keys: We are in a number of areas. At Camp Bucca, which is the old Abu Ghraib detainee operations, we've got almost 100 of our security force folks down there helping with that operation. That's not in our portfolio, either. We had to get them trained to go and do that.

As far as the combat operations and the escort operations, our folks are almost doing too well. As you would expect, our young, flat-bellied Air Force folks get out there in the middle of it and do a great job and then they start getting, they are the priority request. We want those guys to go haul our stuff because it gets to where we need it gotten.

I think that over the long haul what we've agreed to do is—because the Army is so stressed and because they're short—provide breathing space here as they modulize their Army. So I'm not keen for the long haul to be driving convoys because when they come back I've invested a lot of training in them. I've put them through a lot of risk, and when they come home I don't have any convoys that I drive around. So we're working through the point of when do we get to the point that now we go back to driving our pickup trucks instead of our six-by's with a 50 caliber gun ring on top.

Q: We're all interested, of course, in the Raptor coming on board as we talked about a little bit yesterday, but there is a lot of concern where we are right now with the reduction in the President's budget. How do you see that impacting us if we're unable to get that raised back to 381 as far as our operating force?

General Keys: We make our case and we either win or lose our case. If we win our case, then we go down a certain road with balancing our portfolio, and if we don't win the case then we've got to rebalance the portfolio. There's only so much air in the balloon. If it's not here, it will be over here.

And we have looked at a number of different configurations of our future force just to say, “If we had 800 of these and 200 of these,” “if we had 100 of these and 20 of these,” and run through some fairly rigorous analyses to say, “where's the sweet spot in this curve?” We believe that the sweet spot in the curve is 381, but if we can't afford 381 and there are other priorities, we understand that. Now our job is to balance that portfolio so we get the best combination of leverage and risk and transformation that we talked about.

Q: Does the Air Force have any interest in lighter-than-air heavy lift? DARPA's working on a project in that area, I think.

General Keys: I can see down the road that we may. I'm waiting to see how much heavy lift, lighter-than-air. I've heard people talk about well you make this magnificent Zeppelin and it goes out there and it carries a brigade at a time. That's pretty cool. Seven knots across or 20 knots across, direct delivery and everything, and all you do is keep the air in the bag and you're good to go. So I think as those technologies come on, we will look at those kinds of things. There's some attractiveness in these kind of ships. They're not, as I just sort of poked a little fun at them, as vulnerable as some people would seem to think, and they're a little harder to find than some people understand. So I think there's a possibility there.

Q: You touched just briefly in your speech on Operation Anaconda. After Anaconda, I know our Air Force and Army leadership got together. What were some of the outcomes from that and how do you see our joint warfighting improving over Anaconda?

General Keys: We all got together at Carlisle, the senior part of the Air Force, the senior part of the Army, and we picked at each others’ scabs. It was a fairly candid exchange of what in the hell are we trying to do here. It came down to the fact of understanding the ATO process and how long does it take targets, and do you have to have a target in order to get air, and how long does it take to get air, and air is different than artillery. And so there was a lot of back and forth on that. I think we're much stronger now.

We came out of that, and one of the things that we did when we came out of Anaconda was work on making sure we had proper communications gear with our folks so they could in fact do the things they needed to do. We developed the Air Coordination Element, the ACE, because what we found was that in certain large Army formations we didn't have the senior Air Force representation liaison there so that they could provide information on what was going on from the air side and what was going on on the ground side back to the CAOC, so we could rapidly start to plan and be ready for something like Anaconda.

So I think we've moved a long, long way. What we saw in Operation Iraqi Freedom was a direct result of some of the lessons that we learned out of Anaconda, so we turned those things fairly quickly. I think it's a testament to the flexibility of the folks that were involved.