General John P. Jumper
Air Force Chief of Staff
Air Force Association National Convention
Washington, D.C.
September 17, 2002
Luncheon in Honor of the Chief of Staff Remarks

What a pleasure to be here today and to share this podium with so many distinguished leaders, our commanders of our major commands who are doing an absolutely outstanding job out there helping us pull together this vision for our Air Force that I hope to talk about today. Fourteenth Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force, Chief Gerald Murray, what a superb start he’s gotten off to and what a great job you did last night as Master of Ceremonies. I see many distinguished faces out there. One I’d like to acknowledge in particular is General John Shaud, who served for seven magnificent years as the AFA executive director. John, nobody can take your place and we all are grateful for all you’ve done for our Air Force.

Now, that nobody who can take his place is named Don Petersen. [Laughter] And if there is anybody who could replace General Shaud, it is Peeto. I tell you, I couldn’t be more delighted to see Peeto in the chair. Peeto, you and Gail are going to make a wonderful team for our Air Force Association. Congratulations.

My boss, Secretary of the Air Force, Jim Roche, what a superb team I am privileged to be a part of between Jim Roche and Pete Teets and Doc Foglesong and myself. I tell you, the Air Force is absolutely blessed to have a secretary who is active and interested in the education of all of our airmen, whether it is the Air Force Academy or the Air Force Institute of Technology or Air University in all modes of professional military education. The secretary’s initiative has several of our enlisted members beginning this month at the Air Force Institute of Technology to earn their masters degrees – not to become officers, but to advance their skills as NCOs.

We have a boss that cares about our families. His experience in command and in leadership positions after 23 years in the Navy makes him superbly qualified to understand our war fighting needs and the needs of our troops out there to support our people and our platforms. So, boss, thanks for all you do for us.

These winners on the stage today just epitomize what many of us have the privilege of going out there and seeing day in and day out on the flight lines and on our bases throughout our United States Air Force, both at home and deployed. What a privilege it is for me to be able to come here and see these outstanding contributors, again, our thanks to the Air Force Association for recognizing them for all that they do.

The theme for this year is appropriate: Global War on Terrorism: The Air Force Responds." And respond we did. Whether it was active or the Guard or the Reserve or our civilian force. I’ve said it many times but I’ve been doing this now for 36 years and every time we have a crisis, I go out and I walk the flight lines of our Air Force throughout the world, wherever we are deployed and I never cease to be amazed at what I see. I get surprised every single time, at the dedication and the commitment, the patriotism, the sacrifices of our airmen who give of themselves. Is there any doubt we are the greatest Air Force in the world?

We perform brilliantly, the United States Air Force, not by ourselves, through Noble Eagle and Enduring Freedom, we don’t fight alone. In this case, we’ve fought, of course, alongside the other services as we always do, in a coalition as we have done for the last several years. But the war on terrorism has brought in other agencies of our government. It has highlighted some very special capabilities of our Air Force, from the very first moment, the first responders in this crisis, were F-16s from the North Dakota Air National Guard, scrambling from Langley Air Force Base and F-15s from the Massachusetts Air National Guard to respond to these crisis. Since that day, more than 24,000 sorties – twenty-four thousand sorties – have been flown between our fighters and our tankers and our airlifters in support of keeping the skies over America free and clear.

I receive emails every week from ordinary citizens out there who find my email address and just say, well I won’t tell you all they say, but the main message is, "I saw your airplanes today up over Denver or up over Chicago. Thank you." And who is doing this? Of course, everybody is doing it, but it is 80 percent Air National Guard.

In Operation Enduring Freedom, it has again been a Total Force effort. From the very first night, C-17s flying high altitude operations were dropping humanitarian supplies to starving refugees on the ground. Our airlifters were soon putting the Marines into Camp Rhino. More than 400 Marines, it was the deepest land insertion in the history of the United States Marine Corps by our airlifters who had to spiral down through bad weather and land on unprepared strips in the middle of the night doing the nation’s work, delivering the Marines where they needed to be. Air-land, air-drop, night vision goggles. Theses used to be the things that we associated only with special operations. Now they are common place. Our airlifters are heroes.

The B-2s, taking off from Nob Noster, Missouri, flying 40 hours, seven air-refuelings. Our B-1s and our B-52s out at Diego Garcia, flying 15-20 hours on each mission. Able to respond at time-critical targeting in a way that was never envisioned by Curtis LeMay when he brought the B-52 into service during the Eisenhower Administration. Our bomber pilots are heroes.

F-15s and F-16s, out of Kuwait, 15-hour missions to bring their special capabilities to the fight over Afghanistan. Not once, not twice, but routinely. They make it happen. Our crews out of Kuwait who fly these missions are also heroes.

Close air support, kids on the ground, riding around on the horse, using GPS-guided weapons, things that this time, a year and a half ago we hadn’t even thought of yet. Our special operators are certainly heroes.

Over 52,000 sorties including more than 13,000 tanker sorties, 26,000 airlift sorties. Again, a Total Force effort. And who can forget the thing that makes us the global power that we are, are our tankers. Tens of thousands of tanker sorties to get us where we need to be and it is routine, it is common place, people take it for granted, but we are the only Air Force in the world that can do it. Our tanker force are a group of heroes.

In the CAOC, Chuck Wald put this CAOC together at the last minute. We’ve been working on it for awhile but it all came together, the Air Operations Center that is the most modern in the world. It fully integrates our space warriors and our information warriors, unsung heroes, our space warriors that make sure that the GPS is tuned up when we need it to be tuned up. The satellites are where we need them, when we need them. And countless other things in the space and information warfare business that we can’t even talk about. They sit out there in their command center and they quietly make it happen. Our space and information warriors are heroes.

There is a lot of talk about transformation out there today and the power of transformation I think are truly in transformational ideas. It is not just all about technology; it is about relationships. It is about the commitment of our people to do things in new and different ways. But you know we’ve been transforming in our Air Force since 1989, since the Wall came done. Since that time, we’ve watched the Cold War disappear and be replaced by a war that has made more demands on our Air Force. As we watched our resources dwindle by some 40 percent.

...The AEF construct put predictability into the lives of our people, so they know when they’d know when they were going and they’d know when they were coming home. AEF One was to Bahrain. At that time, we had 80,000 people out of 400,000 on active duty that were on what we called "mobility orders." Today we have 247,000 out of 358,000 on active duty and then thousands and thousands more in the Guard and Reserve that are in the queue for our Air Expeditionary Forces.

We haven’t got them packaged right yet. And there are still a few bumps. But the point is that the AEF today is our Air Force. We went a long for years letting contingency operations float on top of everything else that we did. It has taken a long time for the cultural change that is required to figure out that the AEF is what we are. When operations like Enduring Freedom and Noble Eagle come along, we do it out of the AEF, not in addition to the AEF. And only in this way will we be able to get everybody tuned in to the rhythm of the Air Expeditionary Force. To change our assignment policies so that we are assigned in the rhythm of the Air Expeditionary Force. To change our PME so that we go to school in the rhythm of the Air Expeditionary Force. At this CORONA, in two weeks from now, we will formulate policies that will put many of these actions into effect.

People on the Air Staff will be in the Air Expeditionary Force. You will come to the Pentagon and your little welcome folder will say, hello, welcome to the Pentagon, you are in AEF Six. Your work up period is such and such a time and you will be vulnerable to deploy during this period of time. And you will be teamed up with other like skills in teams that deploy together and you will go off and train during the work up period for that. With any luck, people on the staffs won’t need to be called, but when we have an extraordinary operation like Noble Eagle, they will be called. And we’ll go deep into the buckets before we go forward to pull from ones that are scheduled to deploy in the future. Another change to the way we will do our business.

We are also transforming the way we think. In effects based planning and programming. You know, General Dugan used to say it best, "We are all heavy equipment operators." And we love our platforms and our programs. And you know, when you are a captain, that is great. I want that captain to be a zealot. I had a little bit of that problem myself. Some say I am not cured. But I want that captain to believe that there is nothing out there in the universe that can beat him in his F-15 or his F-16 or out-perform that C-17 or that B-52. That is what we want.

But when we get up to here in the planning and programming business, we’ve got to start thinking about effects. We’ve got to think about how these things come together to produce a greater good. But we are victims of our own habits. We like to talk much – we talk first about what we are going to go buy to fight the war with before we decide how we are going to go fight the war.

We are focused always on programs, always on platforms. We are going to change that. So that the first thing we talk about is the concept of operations. How we fight. Not only with ourselves but how we fight with the other services, how we join with the other services, with coalition partners. And we are going to give the money to the CONOPS people. And the programs will have to fit, into the CONOPS.

Duncan McNabb and others are frantically trying to figure out how the hell we are going to do this. But that is what we are going to do. It produces a profound change. Let me give you an example. The example I always use is Link 16. Under the old concept, you take a system like the Link 16 which is a data link message format that links multiple airplanes in the sky and what you did was make it the responsibility of each platform program office to put Link 16 in that platform whenever they got around to it. It competed with the newest software upgrade or the newest engine upgrade or fixing the crack in the bulk head or the tail on the F-15. The answer to, when are we going to have Link 16 throughout our Air Force?, was...never. Because nobody was in charge of making it happen.

When you give the money to the CONOPS guy and his biggest problem is getting target-quality data to airplanes enroute to targets, guess what shoots up to number one? Data links. Effects-based thinking, CONOPS in the lead. We are going to write concepts of operations for a series of task forces. These task forces will describe the most difficult things that we think we are going to be asked to do. Many of you have heard me brief the global strike task force, which is the first one fo CONOPS that we wrote. It is the task force that addresses itself to the anti-access problem. But the global strike task force, the global mobility task force, the global response task force, the space C4ISR task force, nuclear response and homeland defense task forces, all overlap by about 70 or 80 percent. They require about the same things with some specialization.

But what is true is that most of the CONOPS call on the capability to penetrate deep behind enemy lines, to engage the next generation of air-to-air and surface-to-air threats and to support friendly forces against mobile targets. Or to engage anti-access targets such as cruise or tactical ballistic missiles. These capabilities we will deliver in an airplane we call the Raptor.

Now, much has been said about the name of the Raptor, the F-22 or is it now the F/A-22? It is true. Secretary Roche and I have decided to adopt the name F/A-22 and use F/A as a prefix to emphasize the multiple roles and many dimensions of the Raptor, which by the way, Secretary Roche reminds me that the Raptor feeds on prey, both taking it from the sky and from the surface. Indeed, the Raptor’s most significant contributions over the next 30 years will be its attack role against targets protected by the most lethal missile systems, the next two generations of surface-to-air missiles – the SA-10s, 12s, 20s, which are already fielded and the SA-200s and 400, which are being tested now. It will enable our other stealth assets to operate 24-hours a day and it will sanitize supply corridors for airlift aircraft to resupply ground forces deployed in the Army’s new brigade combat team and objective force concepts. Its sensors will provide valuable information regarding precise target location and characteristics into a common network for all to use, both air, land and sea. In short, it will be its own intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance platform. It will be the only system able to reliably engage cruise missiles and it will be delivered to replace fighters that have been in active service longer than any fighter the Air Force has ever had in its inventory. And it will deploy with a fraction of the logistic footprint and manpower required to sustain our current 25-year-old platforms. We believe, the combination of these capabilities is transformational by any definition and we believe this transformational weapon should be called the F/A-22.

Many people have asked me about this FB-22. What is this FB-22? The FB-22 is a concept. Secretary Roche is the father of this concept and we have a model of this concept on his desk. It looks very much like an F-22. It takes advantage of all of the development work that has been done on the F/A-22. It is two seats. It is a bit larger. It retains all of its super cruise characteristics. It is not quite as high G as the F/A-22 but it is still a maneuverable airplane. And where the F/A-22 will carry eight small diameter bombs internally, the FB-22 would carry 30 small diameter bombs internally with a range approximately two and a half times that of the F/A-22. It is a concept and we have it on the shelf for future consideration.

What do you do with all of this? You get all of this knowledge. You get these great platforms that can go into combat. How do you employ them? Well, the answer to that is with our space and C4ISR task force concept, fully integrated, manned, unmanned and space, anchored in a new platform we call the multi-sensor command-and-control aircraft. Again, we have experiments going on with a program called Paul Revere with Lincoln Labs that are developing the command-and-control piece of this thing that will go in the back. And the platform itself will have sensors that will be the next generation of the Joint STARS, the ground moving target radar system, and will also be able to control Global Hawks and other unmanned air vehicles from this aircraft. And will talk seamless and be integrated digitally with satellites so that we can get to this vision that the sum of the wisdom of our ISR, our intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance ends up in cursor over the target rather than a message to a tribal representative sitting behind a work station. We have the information technology to do this. It is now time to do this. It is time to step out with this and we are going to do it.

We are also bringing to maturity the CONOPS for the global mobility task force. It will be focused on training the disciplines of our expeditionary air force. It will include the disciplines of humanitarian relief operations and non-combatant evacuation operations, the part that the Air Force will play in that, something that AMC does very well today. But it will also look at the disciplines of bedding down forces. And will provide a Red Flag-environment for our support organizations so that they may learn the skills associated with running large tent cities. There is a lot of work to do on the global mobility task force but we will also include support for those new Army concepts I talked about earlier and other battlefield requirements that are emerging, such as precision air drops, where you’ll have to, in a very precise way, be able to resupply troops that are deployed.

But in their role in developing our expeditionary capability, we hope to fully exploit another new concept that is out in the field today, called the combat wing organization. Let me tell you about the combat wing organization. It is fun for me to go off and the Secretary to go off to speeches at some of our PMEs and some of our war college and command-and-staff schools. The Secretary recently got a question from somebody at ACSC that suggested that perhaps the chief of staff of the Air Force had been captured by the maintenance people in this new combat wing organization. The Secretary assured them that no, this chief can have ideas of his own. And this is one of them.

Let me explain to you the rationale behind the new combat wing organization. First, the Ops Group Commander. The Ops Group Commander should be the role model for the squadrons that work in the operations group. The Squadron Commanders should be the most highly skilled pilots in the squadron and they should be prepared to lead their squadrons into combat on the first night. You’ve heard me say many times that the two hardest things we do in our Air Force is fly and fix airplanes. Actually, since I’ve been down to the Cape and watched them launched a Titan, launch to fly, fix and launch because that is seriously hard work to get one of those big things off the launch pad and there is serious large pieces of metal that go into making that happen – so my hat is off to the launchers as well.

We want those Squadron Commanders to be the epitome of leadership in the air. When I fire an Ops Group Commander or a Squadron Commander it is probably going to be for an infraction in the air and that is where he better have his office. That is the way I look at it.

When the young maintenance officers look up into the wing organization, what do they see today? They see a logistics group commander but if you want to be a logistics group commander, you have got to stop maintaining airplanes and go do something else so you can qualify to have that job and then when you get that job, you’ve got to go by your leave to the Ops Group Commander for permission to go out to the flight line to be around the airplanes you loved in the first place. I want the young maintenance officers to look up in the wing organization and say, I want to be just like that guy, like the pilots look up and say, I want to be just like the Ops Group Commander or my Squadron Commanders.

Many of you have heard me talk before about Colonel Tommy Richardson. Colonel Tommy Richardson was promoted – was a maintenance officer. He was promoted every grade early – major, lieutenant colonel, and colonel. He turned down going to senior service school so he could continue to be a DCM in the old Tactical Air Command. He spent his life on the flight line. You never found him behind his desk. If you wanted to find Tommy Richardson, you went out and looked for his truck driving around. And that is how I learned maintenance – I got in the truck with Tommy Richardson. I usually had to kick out a couple of lieutenants who were being mentored. But I did that, and Tommy Richardson could spot the slightest infraction to maintenance disciplines from two rows a way. And woe be tie the young crew chief who had to stand in front of Colonel Richardson’s desk and explain the slightest infraction in maintenance discipline. I want Tommy Richardson to run the maintenance organizations in our United States Air Force, especially as our systems get older and more difficult to maintain.

It has got nothing to do with the quality of our Squadron Commanders or Ops Group Commanders. But no matter how good they are, no Ops Group Commander will be as good at commanding maintenance as Tommy Richardson was who spent 24 years doing it. I want the Ops Group Commander to spend his 24 years learning how to fight in the air. Or the functional equivalent in the other kinds of wings that we have out there in our Air Force today.

But the hardest part is going to be the Mission Support Commander. Because in this Expeditionary Air Force, we have not built a person who knows how to start with crisis actions. As a matter of fact, you all have seen it before. You get the 9/11 call – we are about to deploy some elements of this wing. You go down to the wing command post and you find a long, unruly line behind the one senior airman we’ve taught to use the JOPES system, this is the joint deployment system, because it is user unfriendly and very difficult to use. Somebody has got to understand that. Somebody has got to understand loading the airplane, in transit visibility, how to bed them down at the far end, how to set up the tent city, where to put the munitions. We have a little bit of that in many of the skills throughout our Air Force but we don’t have them all. We are going to build it all. And no matter which mission support group you command in our Air Force, if it is space, if it is mobility, if it is a an air combat command, you are going to be qualified to go off in a major operation and command a tent city. And we are going to employ the help of Air Mobility Command to go up to their Phoenix Readiness which we will rename into a flag operation of some type and train our support commanders to do those jobs.

When I say we are going to be an Expeditionary Air Force, I am going to take it seriously. These are the people who are going to help us do it.

Who does all of this? Who puts together the technology? Who is the kid on the ground talking to the B-52? Who are the kids in the B-52 that are turning a conversation with a special operator into bombs on target? Who are these people?

Many of them sit before me today. They are up here on this stage. These people of ours who make us the greatest Air Force in the world. Let me tell you about some of them.

Many of you have heard me tell it before. Going off to Lackland Air Force Base and you see every Friday afternoon they graduate another thousand young airmen into our Air Force and you see the same scene every time – some mother standing in front of a newly minted airman in a brand new blue suit shaking his mother saying, "yes, Mom, it is me." They don’t recognize the kid they sent off six weeks ago. The dad is saying, no, it can’t be my kid. He’s saying sir and ma’am, that ain’t my kid. My kid had some many piercings, it looked like he fell down the stairs with his tackle box in his hand.

And you go talk to these kids, you shake their hands, you say, tell me about yourself. Are you proud? And they’ll tell you, "oh yes, Sir. This is the first time somebody has ever told me that I accomplished something. This is the first time anybody has been proud of me, has congratulated me." And in some cases you’ll hear, "Sir, the Air Force has saved my life. I was on a downhill spiral and somebody took me by the ear lobe and shoved me toward the Air Force and it saved my life." You hear all kinds of stories, stories that many of us can’t even begin to associate with, but you show them a little bit of pride and a little bit of leadership and then human nature takes over and there is no turning back. And you turn into these great airmen we see out on our flight lines today. Young captain, Air National Guard, civil engineer on the flight line building a ramp, the biggest ramp I ever saw, biggest ramp he ever saw. He works for a highway department somewhere out here in America. He says, "Sir, I’m not leaving until this is finished." This kid is proud. This is the biggest project he’s ever been on and he’s in charge of it.

Young Staff Sergeant Linehart, our special operator, you’ve heard me talk about him before. On the ground, he is the guy on the horse with the wooden saddle. He asked for a leather saddle and some oats for the main horse and some Vaseline for his butt because we never taught him to ride the horse. And he’s got that laptop and that tripod with a laser goggles on it hooked up to this B-52 and the guy’s in the B-52 were putting coordinates in and dropping JDAM bombs to within 800 meters of the friendly forces on the ground. Who does this? It is our great airmen who understand the systems and are willing to figure out what it takes to get this job done. This is what I call transformation. This is about people.

Last Friday, the Secretary and I were at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico and we presented the Air Force Cross to Teresa Cunningham who is the wife of Senior Airman Cunningham who was killed on Roberts Ridge in Afghanistan. There were thousands of people there from all of the services and you talk to the Army guys who were on the helicopter with our three airmen who were on that same helicopter and the Army guys couldn’t say enough about our hero airmen, especially Airman Cunningham. As the helicopter approached the landing zone, it was shot down, Airman Cunningham was tending to the wounded, got them all out to a safe place, that place came under fire, he moved them all again and in the process, he was wounded twice and eventually mortally wounded. And as he succumbed to his wounds he was telling the people around him how to minister to those who were still wounded. His wife is named Teresa. They were stationed at Moody Air Force Base in Georgia and his wife goes to Valdosta State College and she is in ROTC and she was a recent outstanding graduate of ROTC summer camp. The President was there to shake her hand and congratulate her. I sat beside her on this stage on Friday as we recognized her husband, she also has two small daughters. She is going to come into our Air Force.

So when the world calls, when the nation calls, the Air Force will be there. It will be there to dominate in air and in space. Will be ready, with the skills to find, fix, track, target, engage and assess anything of significance on the face of the earth to track down terrorists, one at a time, if that is required. Will be there on the ground beside our soldiers on the ground to bring them the support that they need. And will be there for each other, just like Senior Airman Cunningham to keep ours, the best led, and the best trained Air Force on the face of the earth.

God bless each and every one of you and God bless our United States of America.