Air Force Association Issue Briefing
January 13, 2000
AFA Headquarters, Arlington, VA
"Air Force Research and Development:
An Uncertain Future?"
Panelists:
Gen. Lawrence A. Skantze, USAF (Ret.)
Former commander, Air Force Systems Command
Gen. John Michael Loh, USAF (Ret.)
Former commander, Air Combat Command
AFA Executive Director and Moderator:
John A. Shaud
AFA National President:
Thomas J. McKee
Both panelists are members of the Air Force
Association’s Science and Technology Committee. They
addressed the findings of an AFA Special Report being
released by the Committee, titled "Shortchanging the
Future: Air Force Research and Development Demands
Investment."
General Shaud: Welcome to this AFA Issue
Briefing. Today’s subject is a report from the S&T
[Science & Technology] Committee, one of the prestigious
committees of the Air Force Association. To welcome you
here on behalf of AFA, let me introduce our national
president, Tom McKee.
Tom McKee: Thank you and good morning. I, too,
want to extend my welcome to all of you. This is our
very first issue briefing for the 21st
century. I remember several decades ago a movie called
2001: A Space Odyssey. When I saw that movie, I
thought, "Gee, that is fantastic stuff, but that is so
far off in the 21st century, I can’t really
relate to it." Well, here we are in the 21st
century, and what better topic to discuss in our first
issue briefing than science and technology.
The Air Force Association
has always been a strong advocate for science and
technology, and we realize its importance to our
national defense. We exercise our independent voice to
strengthen our United States Air Force, and we realize
that without increasing the top line of the defense
budget, that our Air Force would be constrained in its
ability to perform its mission. The Air Force
Association continues to encourage the administration
and Congress to increase the top line of the defense
budget so that the men and women serving in our Air
Force can do the mission that they’ve been directed to
do.
We are pleased to note that
Secretary [of the Air Force F. Whitten] Peters and Chief
of Staff General Michael E. Ryan are very supportive of
the needs of science and technology for aerospace power.
We are truly grateful to
our own Science and Technology Committee. We have 13
members on the Science and Technology Committee. They
are an advisory committee to the national president of
AFA, and it gives AFA the credibility to continue to
promote a strong aerospace power in assuring America’s
aerospace excellence.
We are thankful to General
Larry Skantze for chairing the committee and General
Mike Loh, who is serving on the panel this morning. We
are also pleased that we have a couple of other members
of the committee — Jack Welch and Marty Faga — sitting
here in the second row, and we thank you gentlemen for
your participation. We thank all four of you and the
other members of the committee for allowing AFA to be so
strong in its voice because it is your commitment that
has helped our mission immensely.
Now let’s get started. I’ll
turn it back to our executive director, John Shaud.
Thank you very much.
John Shaud: The rules of engagement this
morning. You will suffer through a brief introduction by
me of our panel who needs no introduction. But I am
going to do it anyway. They will then present
individually. Then we’ll open it to Q&A. I will attempt
to orchestrate the questions and answers from up here.
Let me talk about the two
presenters this morning. They have a remarkable
similarity of background. They are both engineers,
products of an academy. They both went on to become the
vice chief of staff of our United States Air Force, and
then went on to major air command. General Skantze at
Air Force Systems Command and General Loh at Tactical
Air Command, now known as Air Combat Command. They
obviously have more than a passing acquaintance with Air
Force R&D [Research & Development]. General Skantze, as
the commander of Air Force Systems Command, and General
Loh has logged more than a few hours in Air Force
Systems Command and was at one time the commander of the
Aeronautical Systems Division at Wright-Patterson [Air
Force Base] before he came here to be our vice chief and
then commander down at Langley. With that as
introduction, Larry and Mike, let me turn it over to
you.
General Skantze: As John pointed out, the
purpose of the S&T Committee is to look at the health of
Air Force S&T and make judgments and comments on the
state of that health. As you can see from the inside of
your report, we had a very prestigious committee. In
addition to the four gentlemen that John Shaud
mentioned, you’ll find that there is a distinguished
group of people who exhibit not only a significant
background in R&D and S&T, but also a real depth and
understanding. In my judgment, that lent a credible base
to the comments we made.
Now, in general, as you can
find in the report, the major concerns we felt resulted
from the trends in Air Force S&T funding, which went
from a high of 2.72 percent of the Air Force budget in
1993 down to 1.72 percent projected for 2000. In fiscal
year 1990, the Air Force had the highest S&T investment,
more than the other two services, more than DARPA. In
2000, the Air Force has the lowest S&T investment of the
other two services and the highest S&T investment is
DARPA.
What we discovered in
looking at the issue was that the process of advocating
and defending and supporting S&T was very weak, weak in
the sense that you have a major general who runs the Air
Force labs, and he essentially puts together the basic
S&T budget. But as it comes up through the system from
there, you do not find what I would call card-carrying
R&D/S&T advocates at the highest level. Part of that
reason is that we no longer have an Air Force Systems
Command, where you had an institution that fought for
and worked for R&D and S&T. I am not being critical of
the fact that you had the merger [of Air Force Systems
Command and Air Force Logistics Command into Air Force
Materiel Command]. I’m saying one of the unintended
consequences was that when you try to defend an S&T
budget at the highest levels, you do not have strong
advocacy based on people who served in that functional
area.
We have reason to believe
that the Air Force, as we’ve gone through this process
with the committee, has recognized that the process is
not satisfactory, and there is an effort underway with
the SAB [Scientific Advisory Board] and the Summer Study
to revise that process so that when the S&T budget is
deliberated at the highest levels it will have a more
balanced approach in terms of what needs to be done. The
other thing that we discovered in the process was that
S&T, as you know, in and of its nature, ought to
maintain the balance between what is done in the short
term to support the war fighter and what is done in the
long term, looking out ahead and exploring uncertainties
— technologies that may have high payoff.
When you live in a budget
environment that the Air Force and the other services
are in today, your focus becomes more and more short
term. Your vision becomes limited to, in some cases,
weeks, as opposed to months or years, and so relevance
of S&T expenditures tends to be skewed toward what would
work in the near term, what would support the war
fighter in the near term. The idea of pursuing things on
a probable basis for the future, with an uncertain
outcome, tends to get less and less support. We believe
that you have to have in the system a balance between
the things you do in S&T that are relevant and the
things that you do to explore the future.
For example, if you look at
the status of the Airborne Laser at this point in time,
if back in the sixties and the seventies we had not put
money into things like algorithmic jitter to be able to
compensate for atmospheric defraction — and it took a
long time to find a way to do that — if we hadn’t
invested that money, which didn’t have a near-term
payoff and which was very uncertain from a risk
standpoint, if we had not done those things, in addition
to the airborne laser lab, we would not have seen the
Airborne Laser program where it is today. The relevance
needs to be balanced against the look to the future.
The other thing is that it
is very interesting to note that if you look at all the
members of the committee, we all have roots back in the
Air Force when, frankly, we had bigger budgets, but at
the same time we had a very strong R&D institutional
community and people who understood the importance of
S&T and how you should move forward. To some extent we
are reflecting the fact that those roots have atrophied.
You don’t see them today. The consequence of the merger
between AFSC and AFLC has some unintended consequences,
one of which is that you can’t find the strength of
people who have grown up in the R&D/S&T institution.
That institution per se no longer exists, and it is
difficult to find people who have grown up in that and
are still around. It has really atrophied.
We have some indication
from the Air Force - I know that John [Shaud] has been
over there and has talked to the Secretary and the Chief
- I think they understand the sense of the report. They
have indicated that they are going to re-look at how
they do some of the budgeting as well as the process
itself, and we would hope to see some changes. We
recognize that the Air Force budgets are tight. We
recognize that the defense of the military budgets in a
"non-threatening environment" is very difficult. But
those are things you’ve got to wrestle with.
For example, three heads of
household might make a thousand dollars a month. Their
look to the future investment might differ. One might
say, I’m not going to invest anything. Another might
say, I’ll invest $50 a month. Another $100. That is the
kind of thing that the Air Force has to face up to. What
is the real investment that you ought to make within the
budget that you’ve got. You just can’t count on getting
plus-ups to correct the problem.
The last point I would like
to mention, which I think is very important, is, if you
look at the globalization of technology, of industry, of
mergers and acquisitions, technology is defusing
throughout the international world. You can’t count on
the technology you have not being understood. I don’t
care whether it is propulsion or stealth or radar or GPS
[Global Positioning System] or anything you want. The
way we are going to stay ahead is by pushing technology
in the S&T arena where we are constantly pushing the
boundaries and the state of the art to the future. To
the extent that we stay ahead of the rest of the world,
we are going to be able to satisfy our needs militarily
in the future. Because the technology we have today is
just dispersing right and left into the international
world.
We are pleased the report
has raised substantial issues, that it is factual in its
content and that we have not invoked unjustified
opinions. With that as my introduction, Mike, I turn it
over to you.
General Loh: Thank you, General Skantze. Good
morning. General Skantze has given you the numbers. He
mentioned them very briefly at the beginning, describing
the reductions in the Air Force science and technology
funding during the decade of the 1990s. Just to repeat
briefly, as a percent of the Air Force budget, science
and technology has decreased from a high of about 2½
percent in the early 1990s to 1.7 percent this year. And
in the Air Force’s budget out to 2005, down to 1.65
percent. As he mentioned, the Air Force has gone from
first to last among the services in S&T funding. And if
you have your report, you can see that chart on page 16
- in 1989 and 1990, the Air Force was significantly
ahead of the Army and the Navy in S&T funding and now in
2000, the Air Force is last. The Army spends more on S&T
than the Air Force this year.
The downslope in S&T is
troublesome, to me and to the Committee, because among
all of the services, the Air Force achieves its core
competencies and its mission capability from advanced
technology, not from manpower and mass as the other
services do. Advanced technology is the backbone and the
mother lode of the Air Force. The time span from
investing in S&T, as the report notes, to pay off
operationally, is about 15 to 20 years. The investments
we made in the late sixties and early seventies have
paid off handsomely, for example, in the Gulf War. I’d
like to put this in operational terms because that is
where the rubber really meets the ramp, operationally
for the product of S&T. That investment in S&T back in
the early 1970s has changed the way our nation’s leaders
think about war. It has changed the way we go to war and
it has changed the standard of success for war.
But, with the decline of
Air Force S&T in the past 10 years, the Air Force, as
the report says, may be unable to continue to apply
technology to the art of war, to repeat the lessons of
the past generation of technical innovation.
Again, from an operational
viewpoint, there have been a lot of technologies, but
let me just mention four technologies in which the Air
Force invested heavily in the 1970s in S&T which paid
off handsomely in the Gulf War and again in the Balkans.
These are the sensor technologies of radar and infrared,
particularly to revolutionize wide-area detection,
wide-area tracking, and weapons guidance. Materials
technology and measurement technology to revolutionize
our concept of survivability through stealth. Propulsion
technologies for the engines which power our current and
our upcoming generation of combat aircraft. And the
technologies of laser and global positioning which have
enabled our precision weapons delivery. Just think about
it: These four sets of technologies, sensors as
reflected in systems like Joint STARS [Joint
Surveillance Target Attack Radar System] and AWACS
[Airborne Warning and Control System] and LANTIRN
[Low-Altitude Navigation and Targeting Infrared for
Night], materials in systems like the F-117 and the B-2
and now the F-22, propulsion in the Integrated High
Performance Turbine Engine Technology Program [IHPTET],
and precision targeting and lasers and global
positioning - they’ve actually revolutionized the way we
now approach and wage war compared to the old NATO or
Warsaw Pact paradigm.
If you just recall the
years of Vietnam and just after Vietnam when we were
sized and prepared to fight the Warsaw Pact, we had no
stealth aircraft, no precision munitions, no
air-to-ground wide-area surveillance, a very few AWACS,
and engine durability measured in tens of hours, not
thousands of hours as they are today. And the tactics of
massive attacks with high expected attrition. Again,
recall back in the seventies and eighties. Our
operations and attrition models cranked out sortie loss
rates of four to six losses per 100 sorties flown
against Warsaw Pact defenses, and ground combat losses
in the 30-day war were counted in the tens of thousands.
You only have to go back to early 1991 to hear the
members of Congress talking about thousands of body bags
if we went to war against Iraq in the Gulf. But today
and now, our expectations, and the new standard out of
the Gulf War and out of Kosovo, are quite different.
They are that we are expected to win quickly and
decisively with very few casualties and with
overwhelming combat power, even against Warsaw Pact-like
air defenses.
What has happened to cause
this revolutionary change in our approach to and our
expectations from current and future conflict? The
answer is our commitment to a healthy, vigorous, robust
Air Force science and technology/research and
development program in the seventies and the eighties.
Because of our investment in materials for stealth, the
IHPTET program, again, this Integrated High Performance
Turbine Engine Technology program for engines, radar and
IR [infrared] technologies for sensors and weapons, and
lasers and satellite positioning technology for
precision weapons accuracy, we have changed the American
way of war and the expectations of our national leaders
about the duration and casualties in future wars, all to
the better.
A popular theme these days
is that military S&T is not necessary because the
private sector will invest and power the S&T engine, and
that the private sector can produce products faster and
better than the military RD&A [Research, Development and
Acquisition] process. The advances in micro-electronics
and commercial telecommunications are often cited to
support this theme, and, unfortunately, I have heard
them used by DoD [Department of Defense] budget cutters
as justification for reducing defense science and
technology.
In fact, other than these
two areas of technology, micro-electronics and
telecommunications and the software associated with
them, I find it hard to discover another technical area
with military significance where the private sector is
willing to undertake the investment to bring technology
from birth to maturity. Even in the two technical areas
that I cited, they are now depending more on coalitions
of industrial ventures, including the federal
government, to raise money for new ventures, even in
telecommunications and micro-electronics.
But in all other areas of
technology leadership necessary for the Air Force
missions, such as lasers, imaging technology, turbo and
rocket propulsion, stealth, directed energy,
aerodynamics and guidance, to name just a few, DoD
funding for science and technology is essential to
create the critical mass necessary to enable that
technology. For those applications with a purely
uniquely military application, such as nuclear
technology, DoD S&T funding is the only source to
advance the state of the art and stay ahead of our
competitors.
I strongly support the Air
Force Association’s initiative to make growth in S&T
funding a priority issue. In consonance with the
recommendations of the report here, I recommend that the
Air Force be allowed to increase its overall budget, so
that S&T reaches and remains at about two percent, where
it traditionally has been to produce the payoffs that I
cited in these remarks, about two percent of overall
total obligational authority and that the Air Force, as
General Skantze said, set goals in broad technical areas
for both near- and far-term S&T investment, and that the
Air Force seek more opportunities for partnering with
NASA [National Aeronautics and Space Administration] and
DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] to
leverage the S&T budget, all of which are included in
the recommendations of the report.
The Air Force has always
been the leader in bringing technology to smart
applications for combat capability and global power
projection. The Air Force legacy over the past half
century has been due primarily to visionary leaders who
committed to and stayed the course with a robust S&T
investment, year after year after year. Now, at a time
when the Air Force has recently demonstrated its
leadership in changing the character of warfare and its
ability to project power with unprecedented efficiency
in dollars and lives, it is not the time to cut back in
the investment in S&T that has enabled these remarkable
changes. I recommend that you read the report and heed
it. That concludes my remarks. General Skantze and I are
ready for questions after General Shaud orchestrates
them.
Question: General Skantze, you said one of the
problems was that technology is defusing throughout the
world and you used the word dispersion. You implied that
one of the reasons for that was mergers and
acquisitions. Could you elaborate on that a little bit?
General Skantze: I think that with the impetus
of the Internet and the international joint ventures and
some acquisitions in aerospace companies in particular,
the technology as we know it today is not going to be
anything we can hold to our own. I think it will
naturally disperse, and that includes radar, stealth,
propulsion - and all that will disperse. The obvious way
you stay ahead is continue a robust investment in S&T
and continue to push the state of the art and the
barriers to create technology leverage that will still
keep you on the forefront of military preparedness.
Question: What kind of opportunities are there
for us to do joint R&D to break down the barriers? A lot
of the 6.1 type technologies [basic research] seem to be
common to many of the services. Obviously, the Air Force
has to fly airplanes, and aerodynamics might be unique,
but there must be a lot of these that are overlaps.
General Skantze: There is a mechanism that the
service R&D chiefs use to rationalize their budgets and
the activities every year. I know it is done vigorously.
How successful it is, I am uncertain.
General Loh: It is a good point. I know there
is an effort to try and avoid duplication in S&T. I
think in some areas, if you look at the services, they
do develop expertise in different areas. The Air Force
in propulsion, for example, and lasers. The Army has
done a lot of work in infrared and night vision
capability. But probably more needs to be done, and this
mechanism needs to be strengthened to avoid duplication.
And again, as I mentioned, to continue to leverage the
S&T budget not just among the services, but among the
services and NASA and DARPA.
Question: Could you talk about the
implications of your findings on people? You mentioned
technologies, but I see in there [the report] that there
is a reduction of education of officers at AFIT [Air
Force Institute of Technology]. Does this mean we are
going to lose the people who can do the technologies of
the future?
General Skantze: I think the numbers of people
who are experienced and skilled in research and
development in the S&T area are slowly atrophying. There
are other cuts that have been laid in for the next
budget at the laboratories that will diminish the
numbers. There isn’t an institutional white knight, so
to speak, who can fight this trend or can stand up and
have it mitigated. It think we are losing slowly those
kinds of people. The smart people in the Air Force,
particularly in the blue suits, who are career-minded,
are going to look real long and hard as to whether they
ought to stay in that part of the business or get out
and get into logistics or operations where their futures
are a lot brighter.
Question: As you know, last year Congress
stepped in and tried to help the Air Force by increasing
significantly the S&T budget where we thought it needed
to be increased, those of us who work with Congress
every day. As you know, Congressman Tony Hall has
applauded this study - he has a note back there. I
assure you that at least the congressional delegation
supports Wright-Patterson, as you know General Skantze,
because we were able to save AFIT. I assure you Congress
will step in again. But are your figures based upon the
request from the Air Force or what happened following
the budget?
General Skantze: They are the request from the
Air Force. I don’t think we’ve seen what is happening
with the ‘01 budget.
Question: There was a substantial increase in
the top line for Air Force S&T, though it was not
necessarily in the areas that the Air Force had wanted
it to be.
General Skantze: I think if that was R&D and
S&T. I am sure the bulk of it went to R&D and not S&T.
Question: Given the emphasis that has been put
on ballistic missile defense over the last couple of
decades, do you see that that focus on a certain
institution and a certain area has paid off the
dividends that it should, and have we been able to
benefit from any of the investment that has gone there
in the past?
General Skantze: I think the BMDO [Ballistic
Missile Defenses Organization] program is still
painfully working its way to success. The plus-ups have
been significant, and I think it was announced that the
president would put one-plus billion more into the
national missile defense. We’ve had a few successes but
I don’t think we are anywhere near seeing the payoff
either to the atmospheric missiles or the exo-atmospheric
missiles.
General Loh: My only comment is that this
whole business of science and technology, in my
experience, if you want a high payoff, it takes a
considerable investment and a long period of time to
mature these technologies. If you try to rush it, you
sometimes fail, and that gives that technology a bad
name, maybe. I just recall reading part of General
[Larry] Welch’s recent report about the maturity of the
national missile defense technologies and their
readiness for deployment, which was somewhat negative, I
think, but it was very realistic. This is hard stuff. It
needs to wait until you can reduce the risk and
understand the cost sufficiently well, of these
technologies, before you make a decision to field them.
Otherwise, they get a bad reputation, and they become
political footballs. That is my only comment.
Question: General Skantze, there is an
extraordinary amount of discretionary investment, of
wealth, lying around by way of venture capitalists and
so forth. Did the committee consider any mechanisms
whereby you might formalize some collaboration with the
venture capitalists of the world?
General Skantze: If you can find any venture
capitalists who are willing to invest in Air Force S&T,
I’d sure like to meet them. The problem is that, as the
service’s S&T budget goes down and as you give up
funding certain technologies, industry is very sensitive
to that. And if the technology they have invested money
in is purely for the military, they are going to stop
investing money. They are going to invest money in
things that have payoff for them. I would say it would
be hard to find venture capitalists who would be
interested in Air Force S&T.
General Loh: I recall my comments about the
willingness of the private sector to take on high-risk
developments. I recall in the past few years there was a
lot of excitement about the private sector being able to
find a cheap way to orbit. Easy access to space, going
from about $10,000 a pound to $1,000 a pound. You had
all these venture capitalists pushing money into the
space assets of the world and all these great ideas
where we were going to get two or three stages into
orbit. I don’t see many of them hanging around much any
more. Because, this is hard to do. It is very hard to
get cheap access to space. The Air Force has an X-33
program. DoD has an X-33 program. My point is that to
create a critical mass for some of these high-payoff
areas requires federal support, DoD support for military
S&T. If it is these high-risk areas, like cheap access
to space, it is becoming increasingly more difficult to
find those venture capitalists.
Question: I’d like to ratchet it down a little
bit. When you, General Loh, were down at Air Combat
Command, we had a strong development of the mission area
plan [MAP] process, the MAPs, and there was a feed of
the analysis from those MAPs into the product centers
with the encouragement of the out years. From a
pragmatic standpoint, given the situation we are in now,
what do you all think, what steps do you think could or
should be made to ratchet that process, strengthen that
process to force or to encourage the product centers to
look farther beyond in those out years? Most of the
stuff, at least many of us are seeing out of the MAJCOMs
[major commands] and those mission area plans are the
next five years, not the next 20 years. What are some of
the steps, if any, that could be or should be taken?
General Loh: I think General Skantze hit that
in that it requires strong leadership and advocacy on
the part of the Air Force, in this case, to insist that
you protect a certain level of S&T funding regardless of
all of the budget cutting that inevitably takes place.
That strong advocacy from the RD&A community, as General
Skantze mentioned, has not been able to have its voice
heard well enough. It lacks a strong constituency that I
think there once was in the Air Force. For example, back
when I was in the Pentagon facing these annual budget
battles, we used a rule of thumb of 2 percent of the Air
Force budget would be allocated to science and
technology, 6.1 [basic research] and 6.2 [applied
research] and 6.3A [technology demonstration]. When it
got down below 2 percent, you could hear the RD&A
community start to say, you can cut, but there has to be
a critical mass there. Two percent was about right. Now,
it is well under 2 percent and going further down, if
you look at the five-year Air Force budget. I think that
is not a bad rule of thumb. Maybe it is not 2 percent
precisely, but if you start getting down much lower than
that, and the trends continue to get worse, somebody
ought to get worried about that, whether you are an
advocate or not, particularly if you look at the payoffs
over the past 50 years for that level of S&T investment.
General Skantze: The MAP process is really not
a bad process. The problem is, it has a short-term
vision. The reason is, you know, if you go back to say,
1990, and excuse my bias, but we had an Air Force
Systems Command and the relationship between the user
and the developer was pull and push. We were in the
business of identifying and pushing technology, and the
user was in the business of pulling the technology he
thought would pay off. [More recently,] we sort of
developed a philosophy that said all wisdom resides with
the user. Every decision on technology will be made by
the user. And so, from the user’s perspective, he was
interested in the near term. He was willing to pull the
near term. The push disappeared. You lost the ability to
have a significant constituency that would push the
technology. As I say, the MAP process, if it had a
balance between pull and push, would answer the mail.
But we don’t have it.
General Shaud: We have two other distinguished
committee members that Tom had mentioned. Jack Welch or
Marty Faga, any comments you’d like to make overall on
the report or specifically anything that has come up so
far this morning.
Marty Faga: There was a point made in the
report, and I don’t think it was mentioned this morning,
and it really relates closely to what was just said that
the development process we used to have in the Air
Force, the development planning process, I think was
really vital. I had the opportunity to participate in
that as a young officer in the late sixties. It was a
very rich activity. I think it is one that we miss a
lot.
Jack Welch: I think that word "process" is
perhaps the most important one that we might talk about
because the process was well laid out. It had a push,
and it had a pull, and it also had a focus for far-term
capabilities as well as near-term capabilities. But the
engine of that process was S&T and the people in S&T.
They weren’t just S&T officers. They were full-fledged
Air Force officers. They carried across the board and
could bring the insights that could bring a definition
to what that military capability was and in fact what
the effects of it would be on a battle force. That is
the underpinning that you have to get across to the
researchers and all. A little statistic, I believe it is
still a fact, that the Air Force research lab has not
hired a researcher in nine years, since 1991. Time
doesn’t stop. We are all getting older.
Question: If you don’t get your budget
increase to get that percentage back up to 2 percent,
are there areas in the Air Force or Defense spending
overall you think could be cut back or reallocated into
S&T? I know there is always talk about combining test
ranges and test facilities as a way to leverage the
money.
General Skantze: I think that if the Air Force
could close some bases, it would help considerably.
General Loh: I don’t view this as a trade-off
— that if you restore additional S&T funding, that it
should come from other Air Force programs, either the
investment side of the Air Force — RD&A — or the
operations and maintenance side of the Air Force. I
think the Air Force has every right, based on its
performance, commitments and obligations over the past
few years to request additional funding for this. It
should not come at the expense of other programs.
Question: Earlier you mentioned that you
talked with some of the senior leadership of the Air
Force. What reactions are you really getting, and are
they going to do anything different or is this going to
wind up being one more press release and one more report
that goes on the shelf as far as they are concerned?
General Shaud: I think it is fair to say that
both the Chief and the Secretary, given the money, would
certainly support S&T. But the essence of the question
that is troublesome is, if you had to come up with an
offset, what would that offset be? And those offsets are
not available. That, in essence, fairly stated, is the
view of the Chief and Secretary.
Question: You’ve stated the need for an S&T
advocate at higher levels within the Air Force and that
that advocate was institutionally present before Systems
Command was merged. Do you have any specific
recommendations on organizational changes within the Air
Force to guarantee that there will always be a
high-level S&T advocate?
General Skantze: I think the changes, in terms
of organizational changes, are probably outside the
purview of what we are trying to do with the report. Our
hope is that the direction that was given to have the
SAB [Scientific Advisory Board] as well as the senior
Air Staff come up with a new process by which the S&T
budget is reviewed at the highest level in a balanced
way before decisions are made is the thing we would hope
to see rectified — the lack of support. I don’t think
anybody is going to walk back the merger. There are some
things you could do within the Air Force Materiel
Command, in my judgment, to raise the level of S&T
advocacy, but that issue is outside the purview of what
the report was intended to bring forth.
Question: The driver for the last 30 or 40
years on S&T was really what’s been a relatively focused
threat that the American public and Congress could
identify with. This will certainly help in focusing
these technologies. In the future, this focused threat
doesn’t seem — I’m wondering when the DoD community can
perhaps put a focus on what is this threat out there
which we are spending this money for?
General Loh: The threat is not measured in
terms of enemy military capabilities; it is measured in
terms of our ability to play away games efficiently and
win them by 99-0. It used to be that we were content
with 6 percent attrition. In the Cold War fight in a war
on the European land mass, you would lose 10-, 20-, 30-,
40,000 troops, 200 or 300 air planes the first day. This
was expected. As I said, based on our ability to project
power globally and win quickly and decisively with few
casualties, that is now the expectation. The threat is
not measured in enemy military capability. I think our
challenge in S&T is to be able to play away games and
win 99-0 quickly. That takes a lot of S&T. That is the
challenge. I hear this all the time - What is the
threat? What is the threat? As the super power, the
person that is expected to influence and control events
around the world, the nation, we’ve got to be able to
deal with these situations quickly and decisively, play
away games.
The Air Force plays away
games pretty well. I am not going to say anything else
in relative terms, but I think that is the challenge.
That is the threat. Do this efficiently, very
efficiently. We need more measures of efficiency. When
you take a B-2 and you drop 16 precision bombs on a
single mission and destroy 16 targets quickly and you
cost that out versus trying to do that any other way,
that is pretty efficient. That represents a significant
investment in S&T over the years — the B-2, the F-22,
the Joint STARS and all of that.
I think the challenge is
not to measure our capability in terms of some enemy
military threat, but to measure our ability to be
efficient and to respond to these commitments and
contingencies and obligations that we undertake very
efficiently, play away games, keep it quick, decisive,
and win 99-0. That is the challenge and that is a reason
for a robust science and technology budget.
General Skantze: Let me comment on that in a
different way. The military institution in a democratic
society is considerably at risk if you don’t have a
visible threat. During the Cold War, we knew what the
threat was, we knew what they had. We know what we had.
Other than being confrontational, it was also fairly
comfortable. We didn’t think either one of us was going
to go nuke [nuclear]. So it was a fairly comfortable
process. Now we are in a situation where we don’t have a
visible threat. And the trouble is, when you try and
maintain a military institution in that democratic
process, you are fighting the perception that, why are
we doing this, there is not threat.
If you take the F-22 as an
example, I would contend that the reason the F-22 is
important, by its nature, is it will guarantee you a
survivable, enduring air capability for 30 years. We are
keeping airplanes for 30 years. So you have to have a
capability that is enduring and will last through that
time frame.
What do you describe the
threat as? It is a contingency. War is a contingency,
and Congress doesn’t like to appropriate money for
contingencies. But if you take the recent budget
go-round on the F-22 where the deal that was cut wound
up with the Air Force having to find $500 million more
to fund those six airplanes, that immediately puts
additional pressure on the S&T budget, if they are going
to scarf some more off.
Without that threat, the
things that the services fight for in the near term, if
they have to dig up more money to put into them, it
invariably will partially come out of the S&T budget.
So, absent that visible threat, there is more pressure
on S&T.
Question: A few minutes ago there was another
issue that was mentioned, and this is an FYI. The fact
that there has not been a scientist hired in the last
seven [nine] years is a very serious problem, and it is
in fact in line with where we see the budget problem,
those of us who are very involved with the Air Force. I
will mention that at AFRL [Air Force Research
Laboratory], since 1996, there has been a 14.4 percent
drop in personnel. As you probably know, Undersecretary
[of the Air Force Carol] DiBattiste and General [Lester]
Lyles, [Air Force vice chief of staff], are particularly
focused on that, and we are going to give them the
support in their outcome also. But it is as serious a
problem as the budget is.
Question: You’ve talked about organization and
process having changed and contributed to the demise of
the importance of science and technology. But over the
last decade, I’ve noticed a demise in the cultural
attitude of our service men and women [with respect] to
the importance of technology. When we turn back to
[being an] air expeditionary force and we recognize that
we had a cultural problem to get back to that realm of
being able to rapidly deploy, we incorporated it into
our professional education, into Squadron Officers
School and the war college, and so forth,-- instruction
that emphasizes that for officers. I wonder if the same
thing might not be necessary in science and technology
because, in talking to the officers who are doing
science and technology, there is a great demise of
morale. They feel they are held in very low regard by
their fellow officers in the United States Air Force. I
think that cultural attitude, even if you had the right
process, right organization, if the decision makers who
ultimately make the decisions have an attitude that this
isn’t important, and that is the way we are growing up
our people, we are never going to get there.
General Skantze: That was spoken by a
card-carrying R&D guy. Thank you.
Question: Prior to the Goldwater-Nichols Act,
there was an assistant secretary of the Air Force for
S&T and also a deputy chief of staff within the Air
Force for R&D or S&T. How influential were these
positions in advocating S&T? If they were influential,
do you think the Air Force should re-establish those
positions? As a final comment, I believe the Navy and
also the Army have retained such positions.
General Skantze: Before Goldwater-Nichols, we
also had Air Force Systems Command. You had a four-star
general who could go over to the Hill. He could go to
OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense]. He could
debate with the Chiefs, and he carried a lot of
leverage. I think that, as opposed to anything else, was
an enormous ability to advocate S&T. Goldwater-Nichols
really did something different, and that was to sort of
stove pipe the major programs to where the commanders
out in the field didn’t really have any responsibility
for them, but that is another issue.
General Loh: Let me just say one thing. One of
the unintended effects of Goldwater-Nichols has been the
fact that you don’t get officers any more who can
cross-fertilize between operations and RD&A. In order to
be a colonel or general officer in the operations career
field, you have to have a certain number of joint
assignments, you have to command a certain number of
elements and, therefore, you don’t have a chance to go
over and maybe run a program for a few years or maybe be
an RD&A officer. On the other hand, if you are an RD&A
guy, you’ve got to go to the schools and you’ve got to
get a masters degree in a technical area. You have to be
a program manager in order to advance to the rank of
colonel or above. So, we end up with, to use the term
again, a stove pipe of operators and a stove pipe of
RD&A guys and guess who is on top? I don’t want to use
myself as an example, but I have spent enough time on
both sides of the camp that the operators think I am an
R&D guy and the R&D guys think I am an operator, which
is probably a pretty good mix. But it certainly gave me
an appreciation for the total spectrum of what it takes
to create a strong military force and operate it and
keep it growing. But I don’t think you get that
perspective much any more because of this unintended
consequence.
Question: Do you think the battle labs offer
an opportunity for that kind of cross fertilization?
General Loh: For the short term, they offer
some quick solutions to do things with a common sense
approach. I don’t know if you are at all familiar with
the battle labs, but it is an opportunity to get
grass-roots ideas for improving capability that, through
tactics or new equipment, quickly and rapidly is tested
and put into the field. So it is good for that. It is a
terrific idea, and it is doing some good things. But it
is no substitute for long-term science and technology
investment. If anybody thinks that battle labs are going
to compensate for a healthy S&T budget, no way.
General Shaud: We appreciate you being here
this morning. The message is clear: AFA strongly
supports strong S&T, and our feeling is it is in the
best interest of our Air Force. Thank you very much.
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