General Lance W. Lord
Commander, Air Force Space Command
Air Warfare Symposium - Orlando
February 17, 2005
General Lord: Thank you very much. It's great to have the sharks from the 45th Space Wing with us here today. [Applause]
Let me talk a little bit about those folks. I think General Handy certainly knows this and certainly we heard those words from the State of Florida. The 45th Space Wing, with a hurricane bearing down on Patrick Air Force Base, had a satellite on the launch standing ready to go 48 hours out. We had to decide, are we going to put this satellite away and hide it from the hurricane or are we going to put it where it belongs and that's in orbit? They put it in orbit 48 hours before the hurricane. They launched that satellite, got that thing in orbit, and then packed up their families and moved out of town. So congratulations to the 45th. They're a great operation. [Applause]
But as the Chief said early on, we've got people all over our Air Force that do great things all the time. We've got one here I'd like to recognize. Tech Sergeant Marco Mendez. Where's Marco? Marco, why don't you stand up? Why don't you come over here so people can look at you? [Laughter] Why don't you come up here with me? After my visual makeover, even I can see you here… [Laughter]
Marco's a contracting professional from the 45th Contracting Squadron. He's been deployed four times in the last three years. He's been to Tallil Air Base, worked hard, seven days a week. He was only working half days, you know, from 7:00 in the morning until 7:00 at night. He was also working at night on the Honor Guard the whole time he was over there. He did 700 contracts, $15 million, worked with the Iraqi government, made sure that our people got what they needed when they needed it, and he's taken that kind of operation wherever he goes. Marco's just like everybody else in this business, but Marco's one that came back and is doing great things. So thank you very much, Marco. [Applause]
As the Chief said, they're all over our Air Force. We're so delighted to be able to have the honor to work and serve with great people like the sharks of the 45th and the Marco Mendez's of our United States Air Force.
The Chief was talking a little bit about my visual acuity. Now I want to tell you about how this all went down. I had to have permission to get lasik surgery. Even as a four star general, I had to get my form signed. It says right at the bottom, “who's your commander?” I’m somebody that's hopelessly nearsighted, 2400 uncorrected, as long as I've been in the Air Force. But the only thing that was crystal clear early on to me was that beauty that walked into my life, and Becky Lord's somewhere in this room, but I could see her great beauty before and after surgery. There's Becky right there who's redefining in our family what it means to be a warrior. So thanks, Becky, for being here today. [Applause]
But I'm on the phone, trying to track the Chief down to get permission to have my surgery, and he was on board an airplane. We got through. I talked to Betty on the airplane and I said, “can I talk to the Chief?” I said I need permission to have a surgical operation.
So I got the Chief on the phone and I said, “Chief, this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to have lasik eye surgery,” and I explained all the puts and takes. He said, “your eyes are okay, but don't let them mess with your brain.” [Laughter] So I got approval from the Chief. I can see too much now. [Laughter]
It's a delight to be with you and spend just a few minutes talking about what we're doing in this business. Part of my makeover was something that John Handy and I experienced a couple of weeks ago. One of the things we had to do, and John's going to have to back me up on this, is to learn how to express our emotions openly to those who work with us and those who work for us. So John, help me out here. But I can tell you, Chief, on behalf of everybody in this room, we love you. We really do. So thanks, Chief. [Laughter] [Applause].
Did that hurt, John? It didn't hurt me as much as I thought it might. [Laughter]
Since we met last year with the AFA and their great industry partners, what I wanted to do is give you a quick rundown on what's going on.
The Chief talked about effects. It's not about the medium, it's about generating the effects that are important for joint warfighting. That's why we do what we do. Also we've got this fundamental mission we're doing north of Interstate 80, about 10,000 people in our command doing that every day. Lastly is, we've got to get to that medium like the sharks of the 45th, work hard to make sure we've got access to space.
That underpins what Secretary Teets wants to do. That underpins what our Chief said in terms of integrating these effects, because our Chief understands and the rest of our four star colleagues and the rest of our United States Air Force I know understand that space is not necessarily the birthright of the United States Air Force, but it can be our legacy if we work hard to integrate the effects from the medium of space in a way that supports the joint warfighting capabilities of our country. That's what we're doing. That's why we're part of the team. That's why we work hard every day.
I'm going to tell you a little bit about this mission that the Chief put us on a year ago this month here in Florida to take a look at Joint Warfighting Space. Let's look at ways we can really enhance the effects we can generate from the medium of space. Then we came back to him and said, “we think we've got some ideas there, but we also want to look at this area called near space because I think there's some potential there as well.” So that's what we've been doing and I'm going to show you a few things that may be new to you but will be good ideas for this environment. We'll quickly go through this and have time for one or two Q&A's and get you out of here in time to hit the buffet line and have a drink if you need to.
This is going to give us some dedicated space forces, things that we can use to support expeditionary operations, under the control of the Joint Forces Commander. We want to have responsive launch, like the Chief said. Then the integrated effects. We want Joint Warfighting Space to be employed like any other theater asset. That's near space and orbital space. We think there's some benefit in working these two parts of the medium.
So what are we doing now to answer the Chief's questions? He said to us, “now you take a look as you get your team together. Get Air Combat Command, get the Space Warfare Center, get the Air Warfare Center, get the people from Materiel Command, get the labs together and think about this, but don't think about it in terms of the medium, think about it, how can you use this medium to create the effects that would be useful for a joint forces commander in the early phases of conflict? What are the things we can do to help integrate?”
So we put our team together, we started developing our concept of operations, we visited all the combatant commanders to say, “what do you really need out of these kind of environments?” And we've also started some near space demonstrations. I'll show you a little bit about those. I think we've had some initial successes to think that there may be some real nuggets here that we can use in the future. We've got some things we're working on in operationally responsive space. This is a launch part of it. You've got to have a range if you're going to be in the quick launch business. We've even looked at the C-17 as a potential launch platform. After you drop the rocket out of the back of the C-17. So you can recover your first stage, which is the C-17. [Laughter] And then tactical satellites and Joint Warfighting Space demonstrations. These are really going to help us answer the Chief's questions and make sure that we're able to validate the concept of operations and the ideas we think are useful.
What are we talking about here in terms of near space? We think we can get some of these effects and these characteristics out of an airspace. This is where we live as terrestrials, that's where Mr. Teets and I do a lot of work along with our teams up here in space, but we think is a great place to operate and you can get some desired effects.
Now somebody said, “what about Airship One?” Burt Rutan and his group. Well, he came up here and touched and kind of went back down through that. It takes a little more energy to get up here and into orbit. So we think there's a whole lot of possibilities for operating in this medium.
So far we've done some near space demonstrations. We've been operating in the medium. We've worked, back in November, with the folks at Fort Carson. We did another successful demonstration, I'll show you a picture of some of those things in just a minute. Two flights in December. We think we've got a good close air support mission using both ground-to-air and air-to-ground communications that we can do in the medium of near space. We've got some more things for next week, some more test flights in this area.
I've just taken $3 million of our dollars out of our operations funds and transferred them to the Space Warfare Center to help us develop what might be a residual theater capability with balloons to be used and communications in support that we can have residual theater capabilities. This is going to be a Total Force program. We think this is an ideal mission that we can have Guard and Reserve actively working side by side helping each other in this medium. Tremendous potential for the future.
Weather balloons. As the Chief said, these are not really pretty things, but you can use a balloon like this. The concept has already been validated by industry in Texas. Some of the oilfields of Texas are monitored, the telemetry from the oil wells are monitored by balloons that are launched and float over the fields and measure and connect up with the telemetry and report that back to the station and record it. Then the payload, the recorder and the transmitter, once the balloon is out of service, is dropped. And on the plaque that goes with the payload it says, “please return this to the company and you'll get a free case of Lone Star.” [Laughter] A very successful way to get the packs back. [Laughter] This is a true story about how that's operating.
A seamless fit. You can use this kind of balloon and operate at that altitude—65,000 to 80,000 feet. We think it's got some good range and we did demonstrate that in January of '05. The Tactical Exploitation of the National Capabilities, Tin Cap, folks are helping us along with the combatant commanders and we think this has got some real importance.
Some of the things you can do with this sophisticated payload… This is just an example. I'm going to put these slides on the website after we're done if you want to take a closer look, but this shows you what you could have done in a permissive environment in Iraq by launching balloons every eight hours and letting them—because of the prevailing winds—float over territory, and you could have connectivity. And you're not spending millions of dollars for a satellite or a capability. It's thousands of dollars to do simple payloads.
A small footprint for manning. Expeditionary kinds of folks working together. Ideal missions for the future. Beyond line of sight communications. These kinds of things. Hand-launched balloons. You must let go of it. [Laughter]
It’s beyond line of sight. Here's kind of where the Arm PRC-0148, five to seven nautical miles, line of sight, when you're on the ground. Put that balloon up at about 65,000 feet and you can get that kind of relay and that kind of coverage with a balloon that would have some persistence over the theater and have your relay system up here.
Close air support. Today you've got your JTAC, your air controller, on the ground, and given the nine line message, he has to work that really hard right before the A-10 hits its target because of the line of sight problems you've got right now with operations. Now, we could really help that A-10 driver out to make sure that if we could get that message to him earlier on in the kill chain, he could really focus on the mission and be able to avoid any kind of a problem he or she flying that airplane might have on the ground if they're attacking a target. So we think this will work.
We did demonstrate already that you can extend that by using a dedicated payload that can get that nine line right straight from the JTAC out to the airplane miles before, hundreds of miles before he gets to the target. What we did is we took two of those PRC-148 radios and taped them together—one on transmit, one on receive—with duct tape. You're familiar with the concept, I'm sure. [Laughter] Duct taped together so that whatever it receives, it transmits. So if you transmit encrypted, it will transmit encrypted, so it works just like that. We were able to float that over and we actually did a demonstration with the JSTARS, the JTACs. We had F-16s and A-10s all receiving the communication relayed through our balloon process. So we think there's some real potential working in this environment.
Now there are things you can do later on we think by getting the right kind of payload and a glider underneath. What this $3 million glider does is actually brings a payload back to the point of origin. Once the balloon does its mission, eject the glider, the glider flies back to its point of origin. We're going to test that over the next couple of months and this is where we hope to have, when we go back to General Jumper and Secretary Teets, answers to the set of questions they gave us on really validating the ConOps. We think we'll be able to demonstrate that this will be a useful way to work with that technology.
This would be the way you could do that with a SIGINT in our communications mission to really give you continuous coverage. Two platforms airborne, launch every eight hours. We think you can do this with about 30 people and we're going to continue to validate. Working at about 68,000 feet. Depending on where you are and the time of the year, your winds are not that serious up at that altitude.
Joint Warfighting Space. We're getting ready to launch TacSat 1. Tactical Satellite 1 will be launched by Elan Musk of SpaceX here fairly soon. It will be worked with PACOM to deliver communications capability and work on the classified supernet as well. Operations into the theater. We've got that coordinated. This TacSat 1 launch by Elan Musk and SpaceX will be the first of our responsive space kinds of looks at quick deployment and things that can be useful for a theater kind of capability.
We're also looking at booster programs to get us that 1,000 pound to low earth orbit at about $5 million a launch. We've got four contractors working that. We've got money provided in the program. We're looking to energize the smaller payloads, with quicker access to complement air, land and sea and the other capabilities that exist in, as General Jumper talked about, the horizontal integration of land, air and sea systems that can work together across the media.
We think you could even look further for denied access areas and work hard in doing things in both a combination of Joint Warfighting Space, assets dedicated to theater, as well as larger airships that will complement each other and be able to do the kind of effects that we need to support a joint warfighting commander.
You can get a 91-minute revisit rate with five imaging microsats, if you will, in a magic orbit, a highly elliptical orbit. You can get that revisit, plus if you wanted to really focus on a particular area, this is just a candidate place to think about. You could have your initial stationary airships working together in an overall kind of concept. So we'll continue to validate these as we go.
We're going to press hard on the joint warfighting space demos, learn as we go, and use, as General Jumper talked about, the Predator model. Making sure that we can look and experiment and work and not fall into the old rut of the way we used to do business. Then when it makes sense we can turn these demos into weapon systems if we can prove that they had the desired effects. We're not going to do this if it doesn't get the effect that's useful for the future.
Of course, we have to do the vulnerability analyses and the studies that go with what it means to operate in this environment, how quickly we can get there, who can do this. There's lots of interest in both the Joint Warfighting Space and the near space, but we think you work them together. You get an integrated response for the future, so we're delighted to be involved in that and we look forward to continuing to update you as we go together.
It's going to take us a good military and industrial partner team to make this work, and we encourage you to let us know what you think as we look at these programs.
Thank you very much for your great attention. And last but not least, if you're not in space, you're not in the race. Thank you very much. [Laughter]
Q: As we look at C4ISR, regarding those who steal imagery, do you see movement to more motion imagery from space or near space?
General Lord: I think as we work hard with the systems that Secretary Teets has helped us with, motion imagery, working to support moving target, fixing and making the kill chain, trying to tie those links together as quickly as possible, we're going to dedicate our space efforts to make sure that we can work in that environment. That's exactly why we do what we do.
I wrote an article a couple of years ago for the Air Weapons Journal about space and the kill chain and how we can tie this together more quickly if we think from the beginning of integrating these assets. As General Jumper talks about with horizontal integration, taking the most that we can. I'm convinced that we'll continue to do that.
Q: Are there concerns already about vulnerability in near space? Is that part of our look as we exploit that area?
General Lord: Absolutely, and these came up in our early meetings with the Chief and the Secretary. Both Secretary Teets and the Chief said we need to be able to work these and understand, within the ConOps, if you're up at 65,000 feet what can come after you, how can you do this, what's the way to work this? So we've got to come back. We've got a vulnerability analysis that will be done next week. We're going to come back to General Jumper and Secretary Teets within the next 30 days and lay out what we know. We've got to, as we put this ConOps together, consider all those parts of it.
We love these gadgets and we tend to get in there and get excited about that and then they ask us the tough questions and we've got to go back and curb our enthusiasm and come back with the right answers. So that's where we are.
Q: You kind of touched on this briefly earlier ... Do you see a role for folks like Burt Rutan in this?
General Lord: I don't want to discount anybody that's involved in helping us work the medium. But it requires more energy to get in orbit than it does to touch the edge of the envelope and that escape velocity costs you a lot, so we're working hard to take advantage of that. We want them to all participate and we think that that will be useful for us.
Q: A large part of your responsibility is our ICBM fleet. Do you see the future of ICBMs being modified or a new buy of ICBMs?
General Lord: We're looking at an analysis of alternatives, what we call the land-based strategic deterrence analysis of alternatives. We want to look at the future. Minuteman as it exists, even with the new motors, will time out in 2018 and we think that there's probably ways to do this mission perhaps at a lesser manpower burden, both in terms of operations and security and we're going to look at a whole set of options for the future.
I think the quick reaction capability of a ballistic missile, conventional strike kind of capabilities, are important for us to think about. We ought to be able to offer a range of options that we'll have to choose from. Then whatever we pick it's got to earn its seat at the table. It's got to establish that this is a capability that we need for the future and we'll keep doing that. We're working hard to get the military utility analysis done and we're I think about four or five months away from finishing that.
Q: We talked a little bit earlier about the E-10. Do you see a competition here between Space-Based Radar and something like the E-10's mission?
General Lord: I'm convinced this country needs space radar. We need it for a whole lot of reasons. We want to have a capability to assess and look at just about everything everywhere all the time. I mean that's a pretty tough mission statement, but we need that persistent surveillance to help us do our mission. That gives us the capability to know what's going on so we can be there when we need to be there in denied areas and denied environments.
The technology piece of this is going to be challenging. The real challenge, too, is also the capability to work together with our colleagues in the intelligence community and those in the warfighting community and get our requirements together and work that.
Now that's not easy. Secretary Teets, in a brilliant move, established a new program office in Washington, the Space Radar Program, and put Tom Sheridan, one of our absolute finest flag officers, in charge of that program. His job is going to be to deliver this and quickly demonstrate the capabilities that we think space radar will bring to us and unite this community.
Now these are tall orders, this is tough stuff. But I think Tom and his team, with the supervision of the Chief and certainly with Secretary Teets and others, is going to get a lot of guidance and a lot of insight into what he's doing. I think we'll be able to deliver this. It will be a complementary effect that will be revolutionary in this business.
What we've done is we shifted gears as a nation. It's hard sometimes for people to realize, but we're substituting precision application of capability with tremendous weapons effects for larger forces in some cases. Not all cases, but in many cases, and it puts less people in harm's way. You get the desired effect you need. You kill less of the enemy. You destroy the target and you achieve your objective. This will be enabled with space radar and persistent surveillance, and it's important.
Again, it's in space, of course, but it's not about the medium. It's about the effect that we can generate with those capabilities.
Q: You touched also on some initiatives for beginning to reduce the cost of operating in space. How do you see that impacting our programs downstream, in terms of the spiraling cost of systems?
General Lord: We've tried our darndest with Secretary Teets and others' help to control costs in our space procurement programs. If you recall, our number one goal is really to have absolute perfection if we can achieve it in system acquisition. That's going to be tough because we've got some very complex systems. We spend 80 percent of our dollars in the R&D phase as opposed to other systems and about 20 percent in operations and sustainment for the price of some of these systems. So we've got to have stable requirements, we've got to have great program managers and program leaders, we've got to have people that understand space acquisition and the Chief's decision this week at Corona to make sure that all our space inquisitors, those in the acquisition business, have an operational assignment first I think is a major, major breakthrough for us in that business. Chief, I compliment you, and Speedy, thanks for your support from the AFMC side to make that happen. We've made a big breakthrough for the future.
We're going to continue to work that hard and control our requirements, control the program baselines, give the program manager the margins they need to solve the unknown unknowns that come with some of these programs. We’ll be working with our industry partners, putting the first team on, making sure we've got the right kind of test and the right kind of requirements. This is a complex business, but it takes everybody in this room to make it happen.
Q: Tomorrow we're going to hear from STRATCOM, but as a component commander how do you see the components fitting in?
General Lord: I'm very pleased to be working with General Cartwright and Bruce Carlson. Working hard today with Bruce to make sure we can integrate the stuff that Bruce is going to do and bring it to bear right there in Omaha as he works with delivering those kind of capabilities. I think we've got what we need to integrate ISR, space. We’ve got directed forces to the ICBMs. That's not the same mission, but with the planning that General Cartwright's going to push out into the component here and the work with Bruce in Omaha, we've got I think, everything we need and probably a little bit more in some cases.
Q: In the last three years, U.S. military space launches have gone from near worst, in terms of getting the payloads airborne, to long-time orbits and the record that we're seeing right now. What are the key reasons you see for this turn-around and success?
General Lord: Doing the launch area broad review and having 40 successes in a row of these multi-million dollar payloads was not done by me, and it was not done by the folks in headquarters. It was done by the people out there in the 45th and the 30th and the great contractor teams working together, putting the government insight back into the programs, making sure that we had good program managers and good contractors delivering quality hardware, making sure the rocket was ready, and doing what we need to get to space.
Nobody wants to launch a bad rocket. Nobody's going to launch when the range is red. We're going to put it together. When we decide together as a group that it's time to go, we're confident that we've got the capability to put America's national security payloads in orbit, and it's the folks out there that are doing that job. We've got the world's best and we'll continue to prosper as a result of that.