AFA Policy Forum

Brig. Gen. David A. Deptula
Director, Air Force QDR
AFA Convention
Washington, DC
September 13, 2000

Quadrennial Defense Review

It is a pleasure to be here today to talk about the Air Force’s flight plan that we are putting together that will take us through this Quadrennial Defense Review and hopefully have us arise on target about one year from now.

What I’d like to do is take you through a little bit of background behind what the QDR is all about, what our timeline is, and then we’ll go through the Air Force’s initial objectives, our themes and our approach. I promise there will be plenty of time near the end when we can get into questions and talk about whatever each of you would like to address.

Many of you are familiar with the origins of the QDR. It is essentially a product of the Congress and was specifically authorized in the Defense Authorization Act for FY 2000. It is the object and responsibility of the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Some folks think that the Joint Chiefs are involved in the process and they are, but not in running the Quadrennial Defense Review. They participate in conjunction with the goals and objectives that are outlined by the Secretary of Defense.

This particular year, this is the second QDR, is a little bit different from the first one that was run in 1997. There is a portion of the language that directs the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to prepare and submit an assessment of the review and an assessment of the risks associated with that review simultaneous with or in parallel with execution of the QDR. This is not unlike what the function of the National Defense Panel was in 1997. Some of you that follow this kind of detail also might be aware of the fact that the Senate has actually called for the establishment of a National Defense Panel this time around. This was in their authorization language for ‘01, however the House did not and the resolution of that is ongoing right now. We’ll find out from the conference whether in fact we are going to have another National Defense Panel or not.

The Congress was very specific about what will be addressed in the QDR. Thirteen specific questions, if you will, ranging all the way from the establishment of the type of strategy and force structure elements all the way down to the anticipated effect of technologies over the next 20 years and how those will affect what kind of strategy we elect to pursue and what kind of force structures we might want to develop.

This is a macro-level look at the timeline and where we are located right now today. About in the middle of our preparation phase, probably the most significant activity about to occur is the dynamic commitment series of exercises. They are not war games per se in the context of forces are actually played or executed, but what the dynamic commitment series undertakes is a look at [this time around we’ve got 61 vignettes or examples] how U.S. military forces across the board might be used in the future using the POM forces.

And what will be done is events --engagement events for the military will be generated at the rate of two per quarter and then over the next six years. We will see whether the POM force can really handle the amount of activity that is inserted through these random generated external engagement events. This will provide a baseline for where we stand in our ability to meet the demands of our national security strategy of engagement and then we’ll takeoff from there.

The first game for exercise purposes occurs at the end of September. The game of record will occur at the end of October and then there is another game at the three-star level that is an excursions game which is played in January.

The QDR itself actually kicks off with the inauguration of the President. One of the things I might point out, and many of you have heard discussed, is the importance of making this QDR a strategy-driven exercise as opposed to a budget-driven exercise. All of the military services are hopeful that will occur, however there are some obstacles in the path to doing that.

The new President has 150 days after the inauguration to establish a new National Security Strategy. The due date for a new national security strategy falls about mid-way into the execution period for the QDR. That is going to be a challenge and you might also observe that the ‘02 budget is at the front-end of the QDR execution period. That is going to pose another challenge. The bottom line with all of this stuff, and I think all the services are doing this, is trying to get up to speed relatively quick and early to be able to have some decisions that might be required earlier rather than later in the process.

What I am going to do now is go into for you an overview of what the Air Force’s macro-level objectives are and then we’ll drill down a little bit and talk about themes that you’ll see emerging and then talk about our approach as we go through the execution period. Obviously, what we’d like to do is position the Air Force to obtain the resources necessary to meet the nation’s demands for aerospace power. As we go along, we like to view the QDR [or at least I like to view the QDR] in a fashion analogous to an operational readiness inspection. It is sort of forced upon us, but yet it is an opportunity for us to articulate and demonstrate for the nation the kinds of things that aerospace power and the Air Force is capable of delivering. The bottom line is we want to do the right thing for the nation. I would also tell you that is probably the ultimate goal of what each of the other services want to do as well during this QDR. You will see initially a different approach with respect to the way the last QDR was run.

My compatriots from the other services and all the service chiefs and leadership are in agreement that we need to work together to ensure that the overall defense requirements of the nation are met and that each and every one of the services brings unique contributions to the security equation, and then we would like to see the resource of that increased for everybody. That is going to be our going in position and we will be able to maintain that throughout. With that said, let me give you a little insight into some of our themes and what we are going to be emphasizing as the QDR unfolds.

First one and perhaps the most important is our ability to articulate and explain to the nation what the demand for aerospace power is. One of the things that we want to be able make sure people are aware of is that our legacy warfighting constructs have changed. Aerospace power brings today capabilities to this nation that we’ve never had before. Ergo, we can do some things differently in the conduct of warfare and the execution of our engagement strategy, things like operating air exclusion zones that we didn’t even imagine 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago.

What we need to do as we proceed through the resource allocation decision making process is not automatically default to concepts of operations about how we employed combat forces in the past. We have to consider new methodologies, new ways of doing business, new concepts of operation such as rapid decisive halt, using effects based operations to coerce or compel an adversary to accede to the demands of a friendly coalition, new concepts of anti-access. Strategies like the global reconnaissance strike concept and ensure that these kinds of concepts of operation are part of the defense equation when we talk about where we ought to put our money to invest in the future.

Along that line, you will see us articulate the fact that the United States Air Force is leading what has become known as the Revolution in Military Affairs and is conducting transformation activities to continue that lead as we move into the future. The term Revolution in Military Affairs wasn’t used a whole lot before the Gulf War. One of the reasons is that the Gulf War evidenced the manifestation of the Revolution in Military Affairs. If you take a look at the definition of RMA in conjunction with transformation, what you see is three critical elements: the use of new and evolving technologies that enable innovative concepts of operations and then the organizational piece that goes along with that of an institution being able to change its organizations to adapt to the innovative concepts of operations with the resulting technology. We saw that during the Gulf War. We used innovative technologies of stealth and precision in conjunction with an effects-based targeting methodology that allowed us to apply force simultaneous across the breadth and depth of an entire theater in 24 hours. We had an impact on more targets in one day, than we did in the years 1942 and 1943 combined in World War II and that is incredible. I would tell you that we have moved ahead since the Gulf War era.

If you take a look at those technologies and what they enabled, they allowed us to conduct this new concept of operations known as parallel warfare, the application of simultaneous force. After the Gulf War, what did we do? We came back and we changed our Air Force organization. We took TAC and we took Strategic Air Command and merged those together into Air Combat Command emphasizing the fact that there is really no such thing as a strategic aircraft or a tactical aircraft . Aircraft are aircraft and weapon systems are weapon systems, precision engagement systems ought to be used as precision engagement systems regardless of the platform because it is not the platform that is tactical or strategic. It is how they are used and the effects they will achieve that are tactical or strategic. So, we did that after the Gulf War. That is the definition of transformation.

As we moved into the 1990s, and we began to garner experience with this National Security Strategy of engagement, we began to realize that the way we were constructed organizationally worked very well for 40 plus years for our grand national strategy of containment, wasn’t working so great when engagement became the chief item on our plate. We had to change the way we were organized in order to spread the demands, the tasking across the force and be able to incorporate all the elements of our Air Force to meet the demands of the engagement strategy, ergo, the Expeditionary Aerospace Force construct with the resulting AEF construct for our forces. And that is where we are today.

So, we are leading the transformation process. We are in the process of conducting transformation today with our aerospace integration efforts as we move to the future and we begin to capitalize on those systems and technologies that are emerging in the space realm that will allow us to become even more capable than we have in the past. In fact, the Chief likes to make and I like to emphasize that transformation is not an end state. Transformation is an ongoing process. It is something that the Air Force is becoming known for since its inception and we are continuing along that path today.

Many of you in town read the literature and have heard a lot postulated strategies that our adversaries might throw out there that would essentially throw chunks of sand into our deployment engine--anti-access strategies. The Air Force is developing not just systems, but concepts as well that will enable us to overcome and defeat these anti-access strategies and enable joint force entry into some of these situations. Stealth is key here, along with the concept of rapid introduction of Expeditionary Aerospace Forces in conjunctions with extended range operations provided by our bomber force, our stand off force, and granted we don’t have a monopoly on these kinds of systems. Which goes back to some of my comments in the beginning that we are not going alone in advocating some of these positions . The Navy will be a key element in our plan to defeat anti-access threats and the Army as well. There are some efforts ongoing right now in taking a look at formulating joint Aerospace Expeditionary Forces where we bring the Army on board and are able to move them rapidly into theater.

Aerospace integration: I won’t spend a lot of time belaboring this point because I think those of you who are members of the Air Force Association are very familiar with what we are trying to do here. The bottom line is, yes there are different ways that you can operate equipment in space versus in the atmosphere. However, for strategic operational level planning and application purposes, air and space is an indivisible medium. The best way that we can advantage the capabilities that are provided by systems that operate in space and in the air is to make sure that we don’t split up those two operating regimes and treat them as if they were as different as land and sea are. It is not unlike the analogy the way the Navy views operating on the surface of the oceans and underneath the oceans. They view that medium of the ocean as one continuous medium, but clearly, you’ve got to operate differently if you are underneath that stuff or if you are up above and you can breathe the air. We need to continue in our efforts to move out in this direction.

One of our challenges, quite frankly, is that we are under resourced. Space is expensive. We’ve got some great plans for moving into space. What is missing is the resources to fulfill those plans.

Future total force efficiencies: I don’t need to spend a whole lot of time talking to you all who know very well that the Air Force is the model service in the use of Guard and Reserve forces. Harken back to my experiences as Northern Watch commander. From the initiation of Northern Watch until I left as commander, fully 49 percent of all the units that participated were Guard or Reserve. I can tell you that, having flown over Northern Iraq, you couldn’t tell the difference between Guard or Reserve unit’s first day and an active duty unit’s last day in the AOR. That is how well prepared our Total Force folks are and it is a tribute to the preparation and the scale and the experience that those folks have.

It doesn’t mean we are standing still and resting on our laurels. We have organizations internal to the Air Force that are looking at future Total Force units in ways that we can further integrate Guard and Reserve units with active duty units and perhaps come up with a future Total Force unit that you have elements of all operating new weapon systems and old ones for that matter, too. Also operating space systems, F-22 and alike across the board. There is still a lot of work to be done here. As well as incorporating our contractor force and other civilians who operate as part of the Department of the Air Force in the Total Force picture.

Aging aircraft: this one is one that I don’t believe there is as much realization of the degree of the problem that exists out there as there is a problem. Let me give you a couple of numbers just for reference here. Our air breathing force, the F-15C force is approaching an average age of 20 years. Another little anecdote--in one of my last sortie about a year ago in Northern Watch, I am flying an aircraft that is provided by the 18^th Fighter Wing out of Kadena. It just so happens that this is the same aircraft that I had flown 20 years earlier as a new captain when that aircraft had about 20 hours on it. This time when I flew it, it had like 5500 hours on it. Coming out of the AOR to the tanker one day the emergency flight panel lit up with all kind of bizarre lights and I was scratching my head. What the heck is this? And as we go back and land it I came to find out that the wire bundle that runs from all the sensors up to the wiring panel--all that insulation around the individual wires over the 20 years had gotten brittle and fused together so you get a bunch of bogus lights. What happens is the airplane is out of commission for a period of time. So it is not just about modernizing the fleet because we like to have newer equipment to operate. It is about the impact of what happens as our fleet ages. And that is one of the consequences and one of the drivers to cause our mission capable rate to go down. It is currently about 10 percentage points less than it was at the beginning of the decade.

Take a look at our tanker fleet. Today the average age of our tanker fleet is 38 years. If you look at the bomber force, we are looking at an average age of about 22 years. If you eliminate the B-2s and the young stuff, the average age of the B-52 force is 38 years and we are talking about operating those things until the 2030 time frame. No one has any idea of whether or not airplanes are going to be able to last 75 years or so. That would be like flying a Curtis jetty today. Absolutely incredible, so we need to put some attention and some dollars into recapitalization of the force because if we don’t, and we just continue on the path that we are, including our current modernization programs, we are going to fall off the edge of the cliff here. You get older and older and older and we get ourselves into one of these death spirals that one of the assistant secretaries talks about. It is going to cost more and more money to repair older and older stuff and we are going to have less and less stuff to operate.

With respect to space, we’ve done a pretty good job of bringing systems or planning for systems to come on board to replace the space systems that we currently have airborne. That is a resourcing problem. Those of you who are in town and follow defense issues are aware of the project for a new American Century report that came out. The principle author of that report made the comment that Air Force Space Command has got a great space master plan. The problem is, we don’t have enough money to execute it. I tell you folks, the solution isn’t to stand up another service. The solution is to fully resource the plan that many people acknowledge is a great plan on how to get to the future.

With respect to infrastructure, what we’ve been doing for the past several years is taking monies out of infrastructure to fund our O&M accounts and right now we sitting on a 250-year infrastructure recapitalization schedule. The industry standard is 50 years. So, we’ve got some huge challenges ahead in this particular area and quite frankly the only way to solve it is by getting the resources to get us out of this whole before we dig it any deeper.

What is our approach? Nothing really cosmic. Basically, it is simply a matter of demand and supply. What we are intending to do as this QDR unfolds is to illustrate the nation’s demand for aerospace power and then put together and design a balanced feature force, known as our vision force, which is ongoing right now. It is not a complete plan. The folks in XPX, our long-range planners are doing this. We then need to be able to show the gap and the differences between where we are today and where this vision force is going to be in the future and hopefully we’ll be able to make the case such that we will be able to reprioritize our current baseline budgets to put the resources into the POM to get us to the vision force.

In that decisions are made not to fully budget this vision force, we’ll have a construct established -- critical future capabilities. When we lay out this vision force, we are not doing in the context of just systems. We are doing it in the context of future capabilities. Using this construct we will be able to show folks that if they say no you are not going to get this amount of money because of that, we’ll be able to come back and say, okay, just recognize that you are not going to have this capability that you were counting or may not be counting on. Maybe we’ve got to go back and look at things different.

The way we will articulate these critical future capabilities is through our Air Force core competencies. I am not going to spend a whole lot of time here going through the core competencies. Those of you who have been around awhile are familiar with them. They originally came out in 1996 with General Fogleman’s Air Force vision statement Global Engagement. General Ryan has reiterated them in our latest vision statement, Global Vigilance, Reach and Power. The Air Force core competencies are also the way that the Air Force contributes to joint warfare and the joint fight. I can tell you that the Air Force has certainly committed to joint warfare. It is a wonderful way to go.

I am reminded again, I hate to be at the point that General Shaud was right being the commander of a joint combined task force. He said I might be able to do that in the future. I don’t know. That was the highlight of my career and I don’t think there is anything else I can aspire to that can be as much fun. But when you get ten thousand miles away from the Beltway and you get to work with folks from the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines in a coherent fashion, working to achieve a common military objective, there is no in-fighting. And it was a real privilege to be able to operate with those young men and women and we all brought together a coherent team.

Aerospace is not just unique to the Air Force, although that is our principle means of doing business. Each one of the services is investing in the aerospace power advantage and we can read what their degrees of investment. It simply doesn’t make sense to expose young men and women to hostile fire without first taking advantage of the benefits that aerospace power can bring to the fight in terms of some of those new concepts of operation that I talked about.

Bottom line is you hear lots and lots of folks talk about asymmetric advantage that our adversaries are going to use against us. Well guess what folks? America’s got an asymmetric advantage, too. It is our aerospace power. You can argue until the cow’s come home about the strategic implications and the manner in which the Kosovo air campaign was implemented, but you can’t argue about the fact that only the United States of America can bring to bear the kind of aerospace systems capabilities and trained personnel to do what we did there. We need to take advantage of our asymmetric advantage and fully fund America’s aerospace power force.

Thanks very much for your very patient attention. I’ll be happy to take some questions in the group.

Q: How do you integrate Guard and Reserve units?

General Deptula: Each Guard and Reserve unit is associated with EAF one through ten. They know just like the active duty units do when they are going to show up in theater and now we are saying a 15-month planning schedule. It works out very well for them. One of the things they do that is a little bit different obviously than the active duty units is a unit will be assigned, for example, I’ve got a unit that comes over to Northern Watch from Des Moines, Iowa. Within the unit they will rotate out. The unit might be there for 90 days, but they’ll rotate players every--the minimum was every two weeks.

Q: How do you see the relationship between QDR and BRAC?

General Deptula: I think the DoD leadership is still very much in favor of having a BRAC. Just look at my numbers on infrastructure and where we are with it. We’ve got excess infrastructure. I am not telling you anything new, but we’ve come down in terms of forces about 40 percent since 1990. Our slight reduction in infrastructure has been on the order of about 20 percent. There are some excesses there. Specifically how BRAC might integrate with the QDR, I don’t have an answer for you. Quite frankly, where the QDR goes, how it is constructed, what it will consist of will very much depend upon what the next Administration wants to do when they come into office.

QDR is the product and the responsibility of OSD and from what I understand, there are folks out there that would like to see a small QDR and there are folks out there that would like to see that full-fledged review, a major aircraft review, a major sea and land system reviews. I am not trying to duck the question, but I just don’t know how a BRAC would interplay with the process.

Q: Comment on advancing the QDR timeline.

General Deptula: The QDR cells in each one of the services are prepared for that kind of an alternative if in fact is arises. But that of course will be determined by the incoming Administration, whomever that might be.

Q: Will the QDR address coalition efforts to reduce overall costs?

General Deptula: I would certainly hope so. Coalition operations are a key to how we leverage our engagement strategy in the future. Certainly from the Air Force perspective we think about coalition operations a lot because if you are going to be there, other than a long range capability, we rely on our regional allies. So that will certainly be a part of any going in position that the Air Force has. But again, the construct of how that will be articulated will be dependent upon the structure that OSD decides to use for the QDR analysis. Right now, the joint staff has put together a series of working groups to identify issues and the coalition process is part of that.

Q: Can you give us your budget numbers.

General Deptula: Numbers. We are going to the chief right now. Last week and this week, working with the Deputy Chief of Staff for Plans in fleshing out the specific numbers. I am not prepared to give you any specific numbers right now.

Q: Can you envision a national security strategy that would capitalize on the inherent benefits and enhanced capabilities that aerospace power brings to the nation and alternatively, is there a specific national security strategy that might also highlight the advantages of other modes of force employment?

General Deptula: The answer I would tell you is that in the Air Force, one of the key elements that we pride ourselves upon is our ability to be flexible and agile and adapt ourselves to any kind of national security strategy that the National Command Authority decides is appropriate for the United States to execute.

Q: Do you meet with your counterparts from the other services?

General Deptula: Next Monday, I am inviting them to my office for breakfast and talk about what is going on, what we can expect, how we need to proceed in the future. This isn’t the first time we’ve done this, by the way. We are doing this on a routine basis. Although, I would tell you that the agreed activity is going to step up here as soon as we find out who is coming on board.

Q: Do you know of a better way to do budgeting and QDR?

General Deptula: If I did, I would be a really popular guy. It is a challenge I think. And this is Dave Deptula personally speaking now. One of the challenges, quite frankly, is at a level above the individual services and that is the way business decisions are made with respect to allocating resources in the Defense Department. When did PPBS come on board as an overarching architecture for the distribution of resources? When Secretary McNamara came on board. Now, how many major business corporations are using a resource allocation process that is 40 years old? I don’t think Cisco does -- you picture your Fortune 500 corporation. It is going to be difficult to get through to get an end-game solution to the problem that you articulate.