>General Kevin Chilton
Commander, Air Force Space Command
AFA National Symposium on Space
Los Angeles, CA
November 17, 2006

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>Moderator: Our first speaker is responsible for the development, the acquisition and the operation of the Air Force’s space and missile systems. He oversees a global network of satellite command and control, communications, missile warning, and launch facilities and he ensures the combat readiness of America’s intercontinental ballistic missile force. He leads more than 39,700 space professionals who provide combat forces and capabilities to North American Aerospace Defense Command and the US Strategic Command.

>Prior to assuming his current position he was the Commander of 8th Air Force and the Joint Functional Component Commander for Space and Global Strike, US Strategic Command. He has also flown on three space shuttle missions and has served as the Deputy Program Manager for Operations for the International Space Station Program.

>Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the Commander of the Air Force Space command, General Kevin Chilton.

>General Chilton: Thank you very much for putting on this great venue for us all to be at today. This is my first time coming to the AFA convention in Los Angeles. In fact the last time I was in this hotel, I was telling somebody earlier, was in 1984 and I was a student at Air Force Test Pilot School. We came down here for the SETP Symposium, Society of Experimental Test Pilots.

>It’s really a pleasure for me to be here because this is home for me. My birth place, Los Angeles. It’s good to hear there are ROTC cadets here from Loyola Marymount. I grew up about five blocks from Loyola Marymount, so that’s home for me. Westchester and El Segundo and aviation and the space business is what I grew up in and around.

>It’s also great because it’s really the birth place of Air Force Space Command, the space industry that we have today, over there at a little schoolhouse in Englewood, California where Benny Schriever and his schoolhouse gang kind of got things started.

>I like the motto and the vision we have for this conference, Looking To The Future, but I think it’s also important before we look ahead to kind of reflect back on where we came from, what our roots are.

>Right after World War II we entered into a time of great debate, I’d say, on how we would go about getting into space in this country, in the military sense. We had some visionaries out there like Hap Arnold, Benny Schriever, who said we in the Air Force ought to be moving off in the direction of doing that mission area, and the key to that was going to be a big investment in science and technology, and not only in things, but in human capital, to be able to go and do that.

>My sense is we entered into a period of time where there were roles and missions discussions going on, as there always are, between the services, and in the ‘50s we spent a little more time arguing about who was going to be the lead service to go into space than we did keeping our eye on the ball, and as a result when I believe we were the first ones who could have been the first ones to launch a satellite into space we watched Sputnik fly overhead. That sure got our attention.

>At the time, too, we were motivated not only to put something in orbit, but we were motivated to be able to launch something across the oceans at our adversary, at the Soviet Union. We were afraid of a bomber gap in those days. We were afraid of a missile gap that developed after that. We flat didn’t have the intelligence that we needed to assess how much we needed, what kind of equipment we needed, and how we needed to be postured to counter this adversary who we feared would blackmail us and expand their empire.

>One of our big drivers was intelligence and the lack of getting that and how best could we do that. Some visionary folks back then in the ‘50s were thinking about how they could put platforms in orbit to reconnoiter our adversary in denied airspace.

>We also were worried, as I mentioned, about ballistic missiles. We saw a synergy I think in our Air Force, Benny Schriever did, in developing the ballistic missiles that could both deter our adversaries but also serve dual purposes and carry these new types of capabilities into orbit, whether they be reconnaissance platforms, communications platforms, or the weather platforms we have today. It’s an exciting time.

>At the same time, I think it’s important to note, we were taking airplanes from .8 mach to 2.5 mach in the 1950s. The folks who were doing that technology and who were leading the cutting edge development there, those test programs, those developmental programs, were really not only sharpening their pencils and their minds on how to do that, they were sharpening their pencils and their minds and their slide rules on how to build the rockets in the 1960s.

>So Sputnik was kind of a wakeup call for us. The ‘60s I would say were probably dominated by the manned space flight program and the race to the moon. I think we can be proud in the Air Force to know that John Glenn rode on an Atlas, and the Gemini program rode on the Titan – programs developed by the United States Air Force for intercontinental ballistic missiles but also dual use and were modified to support the manned space flight program, and really the Titan/Gemini program was the key technology demonstrator or breakthrough that enabled us to do orbital rendezvous,adjust orbits, all the things we really needed to be able to do in the Apollo program to go to the moon. The Air Force played an enormous role in that race, which was a political race. It was a Cold War mission. It was a Cold War battle won and fought by the United States of America.

>We also thought about in those days putting military men in space – the dinosaur program, the MOL(Manned Orbiting Laboratory) program in the 1960s came, got to the drawing board, some hardware was built in MOL, but we decided not to go that way because the vision of launching a program called Corona came to reality in that decade. After, I think it’s important to always recall, 13 consecutive failures. Talk about persistence. And talk about focus and a clear understanding by the leadership of this country of the need for that capability and the determination that we were going to make it work and what a successful program that turned out to be. It turned us away from looking at manned space flight for doing that mission. Our adversaries didn’t, by the way. They went off and did to manned reconnaissance in the 1970s and the 1980s called the Salyut program.

>So the ‘60s were really an amazing time in my mind as far as space capability. Then we rolled into the 1970s and we started seeing things develop that we still have today. The Discus program, the DSP program, early NAVSTAR work was being done in the 1970s, our Minuteman 3s replaced our liquid fueled rockets in the missile field to provide our strategic deterrent. Another very exciting time in our history.

>But something wasn’t quite right in the way we were doing the space business vis-à-vis the rest of the Air Force. I have to be careful here, because a lot of people say the problem with the space business in the Air Force at the time was that it wasn’t operational. I think that’s offensive to the people who were doing this kind of work starting back in the ‘50s all the way through the ‘60s and the ‘70s. They were very operationally focused. They were very focused on getting the job done, on getting the birds off the pad and getting the capabilities in orbit and making sure they worked. But it’s true, we were not organized in space as we were in the rest of the Air Force. We didn’t have a major command. Probably the biggest thing in the early ‘80s was 1982, the birth of this great command we call Air Force Space Command, and the normalization of the organization into a fashion that would, I argue, would permit us to better integrate space into air capabilities and the things that we enjoy today.

>So 25 years ago coming up in ’07, not only will the Air Force celebrate it’s 60th anniversary, but Air Force Space Command is going to celebrate its diamond anniversary, not an insignificant thing. In the scope of everything we’re a pretty young command.

>Like a new organization, it takes time for it to mature and achieve its goals, so I would say the ‘80s were a time period of maturation for us.

>The early 1990s, I think a couple of significant things happened. Desert Storm. I would argue this was probably our first opportunity to show the integration of air and space in a fight. General Chuck Horner was the CFAC, commander of all air forces and space forces – air forces at the time. We didn’t have that concept then – for the Joint Force Commander, for General Schwarzkopf. If you’ll recall, after that war in spite of how successful it was, General Horner complained about the lack of air and space integration. This was the first war that we had fought with GPS in hand. The Army went across on their big left hook across the open, unmarked deserts of southern Iraq into Kuwait and knew where they were and were able to coordinate their attacks because of GPS. That was new.

>Communications satellites. I remember General Radike telling me when he went over there to set up the CAOC (Combined Air Operations Center) for that fight. They had the equivalent of one T-1 line coming into the theater. Comm was a precious commodity and they had to start adjusting satellites and renting transponders and bringing up the bandwidth. We were so desperate for bandwidth in those times when the Air Tasking Order (ATO) was printed out, which had to come out every day to tell every Air Force and Navy aircraft where to go, what targets to hit, what weapons to carry, at what time – had to be faxed and printed and flown around the theater. Carrier On-board Delivery Systems (CODs) had to fly them out to the carriers to deliver them to the carrier pilots so they could read the order for the next day. That’s how limited we were in over the horizon com bandwidth in that fight.

>I had a guy tell me a story the other day, I forget the base he was at in Saudi Arabia, but they had to go down to a local Baskin Robbins and get the ATO off a fax machine there. A classified ATO off a fax machine in a Baskin Robbins so they could take it back and figure out what ordnance to load on their airplanes and what targets they were going to hit the next day. That’s how strapped we were.

>So General Horner came back and complained bitterly about this fight. What did the Air Force say? Okay, smart guy, we’re going to make you a four star and in charge of Air Force Space Command. Go figure out how to integrate it better. I’m sure General Horner would have said I don’t know anything about space, and I’m sure the answer was, perfect. [Laughter]. You’ll go in there and ask all the why questions and will also drag some pilots in there and grab some space experts together and make things happen.

>We started to do that and we started to try to bring air and space requirements, integration, closer together during that time period. I think the success of that is best demonstrated by less than a decade later when you look at our operations in Bosnia and in Kosovo and you see U2s flying over that theater sending signals intelligence and radar imagery information through satellites back to people sitting on the ground at Beale Air Force Base who are in real time adjusting where those pictures are being taken and tuning the signals intelligence and in real time telling the pilot to adjust his course, all through satellite communications and bandwidth transmissions that we couldn’t have imagined being in place and utilized in 1991.

>We think about in Bosnia and in Kosovo the dramatic impact that the JDAM (Joint Direct Attack Munition) weapon had as it was birthed there, and first used in combat. Another result of the integration of Airmen and space-smart folks thinking together on how they could integrate those two systems better to fight.

>So I think the 1990s were really a pivotal time period and a real maturation of Air Force Space Command, and more importantly, a maturation of the United States Air Force on how we integrated air and space together.

>Another significant thing happened then that is impacting us today, I would argue. It was a great victory. It was the end of the Cold War. Prior to the end of the Cold War there were two big dogs in space – us and the Soviets. It had been that way since Sputnik and Explorer. We worried about each other’s up there. We worried about what they might do to our capabilities in space and vice versa. We worried so much we had a lot of folks in this country focused in the intel community, paying attention to Soviet capabilities. We were collecting on them, on their space capabilities, we were analyzing their space capabilities. In those days they didn’t tell us when they were going to launch or what they were going to launch. We paid very close attention and tried to learn what those things were. What they were capable of, where they were, what their intent was.

>We worried about ASATS (anti-satellite system). They had developed a co-orbital ASAT. We worried about that. How would we defeat that? How would we defend against that? We had a large infrastructure in place paying attention to Soviet space capabilities and that threat.

>When the war ended, what happened? The threat went away. That infrastructure collapsed in a large part. And I think appropriately we took our focus off that and decreased, as we downsized the Air Force and the Army, the Navy, everybody after the end of the Cold War, one of the areas we took large reductions in is keeping our eye on the ball and what was going on in space. The threat had gone away in the 1990s.

>Now you roll the clock forward to the end of the ‘90s and to this decade, this century, and what do we see? No longer are there just two countries out there with the capability to put things in orbit, there’s ten that have or can orbit satellites. There are dozens of countries who own or operate satellites in orbit. In 1957, is that when Sputnik flew? I’m testing my memory. There was one piece of orbital debris up there. Fourteen thousand objects are tracked by Air Force Space Command in space today – some working satellites, some spent rocket bodies, some debris, some things we don’t know maybe exactly what they are. It’s a different landscape today. When you add the capabilities of other countries on top of the other significant thing that happened in the ‘90s which was our integration and now, I would argue, reliance on space in the way we fight, you open up a great opportunity for a vulnerability to be exploited in the way we do business.

>We are at a time now, I would argue, a turning point in history, where it’s time for us to turn back the clock to the late 1980s and resurrect the focus that we had then not only in intelligence but in surveillance and development of space situational awareness and in command and control of the assets we have in space today. It’s not only a military issue. If you stop and look at recent estimates of how big space is as a business globally, it’s estimated it’s a $200 billion business. So there are other incentives to understand what’s going on in the space environment and to make sure like the seas of the world, it is an open and navigable environment for all peaceful and peace-loving peoples who would want to use it for peaceful reasons.

>As I said before, I believe our future adversaries understand our dependence on space and the way we fight. Certainly the world understands in the economic sense the global dependence on space in the way our economies run. That’s particularly true for free world economies like the United States of America.

>I’ve talked about the Cold War architecture that we had and how robust it was as compared to today or more focused it was as compared to today. I would argue it is not enough to go back to the Cold War architecture that we had. In fact during that time period when it came to missile launches from a foreign country, the key and important question that had to be answered in short order inside Cheyenne Mountain was, is this a ballistic launch or is it a space launch? If it was a ballistic launch, the next question was, where’s it headed? Then the next question was, when’s it going to get there? That set off a string of events that had to do with our whole deterrent posture and our reaction to such a potential attack on the United States of America.

>But if the answer to the first question was it’s a space launch, not a ballistic missile launch, the tendency was to relax, it wasn’t coming out way. We’ll figure out in a little while what it is and what its purpose is.

>I would argue today we can no longer relax when the answer is it’s a space launch. In fact that’s the time to crank up our attention on what that vehicle is. What is it? Where is it? What are its capabilities? And ultimately, as any intel organization would strive to provide the commander, an estimate of the adversary’s intent. What do they intend to use this vehicle for? That is a key, key question and a hard one to answer, particularly a hard one to answer if you don’t have the right focus on the domain that you’re looking at.

>Space situational awareness, the need to not only be able to catalog but understand what is up there, to understand when a satellite maneuvers, to understand when something is deployed off a satellite or a bus, whether it be large or small, to understand if something calves off something else up there. To be able to track that and determine its purpose and intent is where we need to be in the future. I would argue it’s where we need to be today.

>Once you have that situational awareness which is fundamental to operations in any domain, whether it be land, sea, air or space, the next thing that you need in the military is an ability to command and control your forces. Your people and your people who command and control what you have in operating in that domain. That is so important.

>General Ashey said you can be a commander, he told me once, but if you can’t talk to your folks and tell them what to do all you’re commanding is that desk you’re sitting at. Communications and links. Being able to share a common operating picture amongst the team so everybody knows what the situation, the domain is. Being able to strategic, plan, have plans on the shelf on how you’re going to react, and how you’re going to be able to order them to be executed and delta them throughout the time of a crisis or conflict is absolutely fundamental to command and control, and it’s time we started making the appropriate investments in space command and control.

>We in the Air Force have done a great job over the last five years investing in our command and control capability for support to the regional combatant commanders. Our AOCs around the world now are the envy of every other service. The United States Navy was actually off building an AOC concept for two afloat AOCs, and after several years of looking at this and looking at the bandwidth constrictions on their ships and all the other issues that make it difficult to do this mission from a ship, they said Air Force, you’ve got it. We are the envy of the other services on our Command and control capability in our Falconer Air Operation Centers around the world. It’s time for us to be the envy of everybody in the 14th Air Force AOC in the capabilities that General Shelton has out there that he presents to the STRATCOM commander, to the Joint Space Operations Center who fights the domain in space for the United States of America. It’s time for us to have a world class AOC that does that mission under the command of General Shelton.

>That kind of brings us up to today. I wanted to talk a little bit about looking to the future. When I look to the future in this command, I look to the future in this business, I see a bright future. And more importantly, I see an exciting future and one that makes me wish I could turn the clock back and be a second lieutenant again and join the fight at this stage because things are happening fast, they’re changing quickly, and the capabilities and the missions we’re doing and will do in the future are going to be incredibly exciting for our young folks that are coming on board in this command.

>We have a focus in our Air Force today, the Chief of Staff has, on three main things. One is to win the right we’re in now, and none of us would argue with that. We’re at war. It’s not a war on terror, we all know that. It’s an ideological war and it’s a war for the survival of our way of life. This is one we will not lose. We cannot afford to lose.

>The second focus the Chief has is on the people in our Air Force.

>The third is on recapitalization. This is the command to be coming into for recapitalization because there is not a single constellation in Air Force Space Command we are not recapitalizing today. Every single thing we do we are recapitalizing, whether it be ICBMs, ground stations, GPS, Discus, weather satellite, early warning. We’ve got SBIRS coming on board, we’ve got wideband gap-filler satellite coming on board, Winebat global satellite communications system coming on board, advanced EHF coming on board, GPS-2RM-2F coming up, GPS-2 is on the drawing board. We’re building brand new Minuteman 3’s essentially out there, repouring all the stages, new guidance kits on them, new upper stages, new reentry vehicles. Putting a lot of money into the launch facilities throughout the command. We are doing it all in Air Force Space Command. This is an exiting time to be part of that. We’re not on the Hill arguing whether or not we need a new this or new that, everybody understands we need a new this or new that. We’re just arguing about how best to go about doing it.

>That gets into the acquisition side. We have this burden to bear, all of us in this room, all of us in the Air Force, and our industry partners. That is this last five or seven years, the end of the 1990s in particular, and where we went I’d say a little off course in the way we do the acquisition business. And I do not point fingers at industry, I do not point fingers at individuals, I do not point fingers at any organization. It was a team failure. We succeed as a team, a government industry team, but we fail as a government industry team. And we had some tough times, obviously by Nunn/McCurdy breaches, et cetera, et cetera.

>Again, I’m excited about the future. I think we have the right focus back. I think we have the right understandings of roles and missions on those teams. I think we have the right approach, the block approach, on how we develop systems. I think we’re refocused on fundamentals of blocking and tackling and program management and the clear understanding that successful program management starts and stops with one thing and that’s leadership. We’ve got some great leaders running our programs and great industry leaders teaming with them today. That’s the success, in my view, that’s going to tee us up for the future and make our acquisition programs that are on the drawing boards come true. We cannot fail in this. In fact it’s kind of like you built 100 bridges but one odd whatever, and you’re not known as a bridge builder any more. That’s the burden we’re suffering today. People are bringing up history. We’ve got to refocus them on today and what we’re doing tomorrow. We’re doing great things in our acquisition teams, but we cannot fail here. We’ve got to produce the capabilities we need for the future on time and on cost. We’ve got to keep our eye on the ball. We know there will be engineering issues, there always are technical and engineering challenges. If there weren’t, we wouldn’t be pushing the edge of the envelope and that’s what we need to do to stay ahead of our adversaries. But when they come up, it’s time to roll up our sleeves and put the appropriate resources on that so we get the programs, we work through the issues, and we get the programs out the door on time and get the capabilities out to the warfighter on time.

>WE can’t do this in this command, this team can’t do it, and I mean team – industry and Air Force – cannot do it if we don’t have the right talent on board the team for the future. That holds true for acquisition and it holds true for operations in the future. I believe our operations in the future will get ever more technical in the requirement for their operators.

>We’re moving into an era where we’ll have satellites with taskable sensors on board, SBIRS, space radar. We just demonstrated XSS-11 and saw opportunities that might provide in maneuvering a satellite on orbit that can image other, image the bus that took it up to orbit. These things take a little more sophisticated approach than classically we have needed in the past for our operators. So we’ll need more talent in the pool in the future. This is a tough challenge for us because everybody needs more engineering talent and science talent.

>There’s an estimate, we’re about 5,000 people short in industry for the talent that we need coming out of our universities today.

>I for one want to draw on, and I’m glad we’re here in LA for this symposium, I want to draw on the youth of the LA basin. As I said, this is my home. I went to the Air Force Academy, but my buddies went to UCI, UCLA, USC, San Luis Obispo, Loyola, Long Beach State. All of them have good engineering programs. I want the youth coming out of those programs to come work for Air Force Space Command. I want them to stay in this basin. I grew up out here, I know what it’s about. You want a job that pays you enough to be able to go to the beach every day still. [Laughter]. Who doesn’t want to live in LA? Particularly if you’re from this part of the world. You want to stay here and live here, and you want to be doing something exciting. And if you studied engineering in school, you studied astro or aero or EE, you didn’t do it just to get through school. Heck, if you just wanted to graduate you’d have picked something else. Those are tough majors. You want to go off and apply those majors. I want you to stay here in Southern California and apply them at SMC working for General Mike Hamil. I want to bring people into this. I don’t care whether you’re a civil servant or a lieutenant. I think there is a pool of talent in the LA Basin that is untapped, or goes off and looks other places.

>People say people don’t want to stay here because it costs too much. Not true, if you were born here. You want to stay here. This is the end of the world if you were born here, I know. When I went to the Air Force Academy I was surprised that there were kids from Texas there. [Laughter]. In fact half the people there were from Texas. That really surprised me. Isn’t everybody from LA? [Laughter]. That’s the perspective you have when you grow up in your home town. We’ve got some great talent out here that I think we need to work really hard and focus on through educational programs, through recruiting programs, the AFA can be a big help here in bringing that talent into Air Force Space Command.

>The Los Angeles Basin should be a feeder for the talent that we need not only in Air Force Space Command but in industry for the future of our space program.

>I’ll tell you, with the things we’ve got coming – just look at the coming year. We’re going to be launching TacSats at the end of this year, and by ’08 we’ll have launched four new tac satellites, small satellites, with great experiments on board. We’re flying the first Delta 4 heavy with the last DSP satellite on board. Everybody in this room better be holding their breath that day and keeping their fingers crossed because that’s going to be a hugely important satellite to go up on a first-ever operational mission for that booster. That’s a sign of confidence, in my mind. Confidence that we have in this industry/government team that we can deliver on a first flight operational for that Delta 4 heavy, such an important payload.

>WGS is going to be going up. GPS-2R. It’s just an exciting time. On and on and on. Flying rockets.

>There’s only one thing better than watching them go and that’s sitting on top of them. [Laughter]. It is a great, exciting business to be in and we’ve got to get our youth excited about it and interested in joining this team. We need them. We’re going to need them for the next 20, 30, years to stay ahead. That’s where we need to be in space.

>Let me close with what my vision is for Air Force Space Command. I worked with our leadership team on this for quite a while because I’m not one of these visionary guys who goes up on top of the mountain and comes back down and says here it is. So I work closely with my leadership team and this is what we came up with.

>I know we’re the expertise, I know we’re the experts in Air Force Space Command, but I don’t believe we’re the acknowledged experts. So my vision for Air Force Space Command is that we become the acknowledged experts and leaders in fielding and launching and employing space power for the United States of America for the 21st Century. The key word in my mind is acknowledged. I think we are all that stuff today, but I don’t think we’re recognized as such. Some of that has to do with baggage, some of that has to do with other folks thinking they’re the experts in an area that we are the experts in. We need to assert that and make sure people understand that.

>My priorities, I have four of them. I want to preserve and expand our ability to deliver space effects. Preserve is a word we picked on purpose because there’s a bit of defense in that word. We want to make sure that what we have up there today is able to deliver in peace time and in war time. We don’t want to be static. We want to move the ball forward and expand our ability to deliver effects from space to support the COCOMs of the United States of America.

>Second, of all the balls that we juggle every day in Air Force Space Command, the one crystal one that we can never drop because it won’t bounce is the job that we have providing a safe and secure nuclear deterrent, strategic deterrent for the United States of America. We will not take our eye off that ball.

>Third, we need to have as a priority our focus on developing, fielding, and sustaining dominant space capabilities for the United States of America. We can’t take our eye off the acquisition/development side of this program again. As a team we have to deliver and deliver on time.

>My fourth priority is that we need to, as I said earlier, attract, develop and then retain people with the right expertise to meet the challenges of the 21st Century.

>That’s my vision for the command. Those are our priorities. That’s what we’re marching toward.

>As I said, I’m happy and pleased to be with you all here today. I’m excited for Air Force Space Command and I’m excited for our industry team that we partner with for the next 10, 20 years, this is going to be a great place to be.

>Thank you very much, everybody.

>[Applause].

>Moderator: Thanks very much, sir, for a good overview of where we are and where we’re heading. I’ve got some questions for you.

>One of then is, are there parallels in space to the useful coalition partnerships that we have with our US forces across the air domain? For example, opportunities to expand partnerships with Japan in missile warning and missile defense or other areas?

>General Chilton: There’s great opportunities and in fact we’re partnering today. We do the SkyNet satellite out of Schriever. We team with the UK. We have great partnerships with the Australians that we’ve had for a long period of time in working with them on space capabilities. We do shared early warning with our Japanese partners and other coalition partners around the world.

>For missile defense, I think that’s an obvious one. We share not only warning information but then we partner with the countries in their ability to defend themselves and with MD and US Army and that area for our missile defense area.

>So one of the areas that General Cartwright has talked about is the combatant commander in charge of space, his desire to increase coalition participation out at General Shelton’s operation at the JSPOC at Vandenberg Air Force Base.

>I think there are opportunities, I think we’re doing it today but I think there are other opportunities to work with our allies and coalition partners in the future.

>Moderator: Some years ago there was a push to integrate black and white space. Following Mr. Teats’ departure this integration was fractured. How would you characterize Air Force Space Command relations with the NRO, especially on space radar?

>General Chilton: First of all, I think we have very good relations with the NRO. Dr. Kerr and I talk regularly and we actually have forums where we meet together. There was the issue with, when we took the role as the head of the NRO away from the Executive Agent for Space who was also dual-hatted as the Under Secretary of the Air Force here a couple of years ago. In spite of that I think we continue to team together well. One area where we’re trying to move the ball forward is in our sharing of data between the NRO and Air Force Space Command or the JSPOC, the combatant commander in particular. If General Shelton is really going to command and control and understand the situation in space he needs to not only understand DoD assets, but other assets that belong to the United States of America. He also needs to understand where all the commercial satellites are and what their intents are. Then when you understand all of that, then you can start paying attention to the unknowns and the adversary up there.

>There’s a good understanding of that, and General Kehler can probably expand on this one in his remarks, between Dr. Kerr and the Air Force and the combatant commander, that it’s key for us to share data. When a combatant commander asks a question about defending satellites, US capabilities in space, he’s going to turn to General Shelton. General Shelton needs to have at his fingertips all US assets, an understanding of where all US assets are, what their status is, et cetera. I think we’re moving the ball forward in our partnership with the NRO.

>Now space radar is really not, in my view, an NRO/Air Force issue. It’s an intelligence versus Department of Defense issue. It’s really the ultimate customer issue there. In the past, assets that did reconnaissance from space, like Corona, were not controlled by combatant commanders. They were controlled by agencies who needed strategic intelligence. I think the tension at that level, once that is resolved, once we get past the fact that if we can really do this without anybody completely owning it, once we can get the data shared, and again I hope General Kehler talks a little bit about this in his remarks because this is his boss’ vision, if we can get this data shared and out so that it serves the intelligence community and the warfighter, the combatant commanders of the world, both regional and functional for space, then we can get past this ownership issue and get on with developing a space radar constellation which both communities desperately need.

>Moderator: Recently, I guess this fall, the President signed a new National Space Policy. Do you see, are there areas in there which may significantly change the path that we’re on right now?

>General Chilton: I don’t. You say the word significant. It was in a large part an extension of the 1996 policy, a clarification of it. So I didn’t see anything that was particularly significant in that policy that gave us either more authorities or direction one way or the other. I think we still have the same burdens that were put out there, and that was to make sure we are able to provide the capabilities this country needs, defend and preserve them, and if necessary at a time in a time of war to deny our adversaries the exploitation of those capabilities. The desire to partner with peace-loving countries in space, promote the peaceful utilization of space. So I didn’t see any large changes in the policy that would cause us to adjust fire in Air Force Space Command.

>Moderator: Finally, we’ve been talking about the way ahead and have seen a significant amount of change as we’ve worked through the last few years. Do you see us building the confidence between our operational forces and OSD carrying out this mission?

>General Chilton: I’m sorry, can you repeat that?

>Moderator: Do you see us building confidence now with OSD and others who complained or brought up issues as we went through the last four or five years in trying to get our systems --

>General Chilton: You mean with regard to acquisition?

>Moderator: Right.

>General Chilton: Yes. I think so. My sense is, all the feedback I’m getting from Capital Hill and also limited feedback from the third floor, and I’ll let others comment on that, is that they like the direction that Dr. Sega and General Hamil are taking us as far as our block approach to acquisition in the community. They like the focus that we put on this. I’m waiting for them to like it so much that they give authorities back to the Air Force where they rightly belong, and I’m confident that will happen in the coming year. I think it’s past time to do that. We’re ready to take those authorities back and execute these programs because I do believe we have the right side picture, and I believe we’re being recognized for that.

>Moderator: Thank you very much, sir, for a very interesting presentation, for bringing us up to speed, and most importantly for your leadership.

>General Chilton: My pleasure. Thanks, Peto.

>[Applause].

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