Foundation Forum

The Honorable F. Whitten Peters
Acting Secretary of the Air Force
AFA National Convention and Symposium

September 15, 1998

"The International Dimension of Aerospace Power"

I want to congratulate Doyle Larson on an outstanding tour of duty as the Air Force Association president. Doyle, you have done a terrific job of making the American public aware of the potential of aerospace power and of the strengths of our U.S. Air Force. Of course, Keiko the whale just recently did the same thing -- so, Doyle, I think we can say with confidence that you have done a "whale of a job!"

I also want to thank all of you in the audience for your strong support of our Air Force. The AFA has done it all. From showcasing the best and brightest of our young men and women, to bringing education to our airmen and their family members, to representing the Air Force position on Capitol Hill, to providing wise counsel to myself and (Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Michael E.) Ryan. The Air Force owes all of you a great debt, and we are profoundly thankful for your support.

The theme of this year’s conference is "Aerospace Power: The International Dimension." I would have put "dimension" in the plural, because our Air Force works in multiple dimensions, across the full spectrum of international affairs.

The Air Force, for example, has been at the forefront of equipping and training the world’s air forces. If you visit the 162nd Fighter Wing at (Davis Monthan AFB in) Tucson, Ariz., our training bases at Luke (AFB, Ariz.,) Cannon (AFB, N.M.,) and Holloman (AFB, N.M.,) or Sheppard (AFB, Texas,) where we conduct Europe-NATO joint pilot training, you will see Air Force pilots and support people working with our allies and coalition partners. If you go to Lackland AFB, Texas, you will see Air Force men and women teaching the airmen of Latin America. If you go to Maxwell AFB, Ala., you will see international students in most of our advanced airpower courses. If you go to many of our major command competitions and "flag" exercises, you will see foreign air crews working hand-in-hand with our Air Force, as I observed at Air Mobility Command’s Rodeo earlier this year. And, in the past few years, our airmen -- active, Guard and Reserve -- have reached out to our newest allies in NATO and in the Partnership for Peace countries through exercises and other training events.

It is not bragging to say that the Air Force has become the world’s "center of excellence" for aerospace training as it trains more foreign students from more countries than anyone else does. On average, we annually train more than 800 international aviators and 3,800 foreign airmen in many support programs.

On the equipment front, we are just as busy as Bob Bauerlein of my International Affairs Office reminds me whenever he's in Washington, which is not often. You can find him and his staff crisscrossing the globe to facilitate the sale of U.S. equipment to our allies. In the last year alone, he has delivered Airborne Warning and Control Systems or AWACs, to Japan; leased F-16s to Jordan, Bahrain and Egypt; and sold F-16s to Singapore. Overall last year, the Air Force participated in about $260 million in foreign training programs and $5.6 billion of foreign military sales.

I can think of no stronger foundation on which to build the international dimension of aerospace power than the bonds of common equipment and common training which bring airmen together as airmen, regardless of their country of origin.

Aerospace power also plays a key role in shaping and responding to international events. In most of these events, the Air Force is the first force, bringing all others to the fight. Indeed, when forces absolutely, positively have to be somewhere overnight, America usually relies on airpower, and its primary attributes -- global, rapid responsiveness.

During the past year, our people -- active, Guard and Reserve -- have played a major role in scores of international deployments, multinational exercises, real-world crises, and smaller scale "pop-up" contingencies. Whether its been firefighting in Indonesia, relieving starvation in Somalia, hauling life-sustaining water to Rwanda or delivering relief supplies to places too numerous to count, there can be no doubt that the United States has the world’s premier aerospace assets.

Time and time again, the National Command Authority has asked aerospace power to further our nation’s vital interests and our bedrock values of freedom and self-determination across the globe. And for more than 50 years, our Air Force has successfully answered those calls -- from Berlin to Bosnia, from MiG Alley to Baghdad and at a host of unlikely places in between.

Our capacity to rapidly project power over long distances has been a godsend to our allies, and has struck fear in the hearts of our adversaries. But the international dimension of air power goes well beyond "bombs on target." Indeed, in this post-Cold War era, American and coalition air power is more often unleashed for humanitarian missions than for precision attack.

Because we employ aerospace power to relieve suffering, restore human dignity, liberate oppressed people and restore hope, the United States stands with our allies to champion the moral imperative on the world’s stage. Two examples stand out from, among countless others, to quietly reaffirm this point.

• First, even as we remember this year, the 50th Anniversary of the Berlin Airlift, we should keep in mind that Operation Provide Promise, the international humanitarian airlift to Sarajevo, quietly broke the Berlin Airlift’s record for duration. Over the course of 31/2 years, 21 nations delivered more than 160,000 tons of supplies to the citizens of Sarajevo, paving the way for the arduous journey toward what we hope will be a lasting peace.
• Second, American and coalition air power is frequently dispatched to rescue civilians from harm’s way in so-called noncombatant evacuation operations, or "NEOs. " Just a year ago, an MC-130 Combat Talon from the 352nd Special Operations Group at Royal Air Force Mildenhall, England, conducted a particularly difficult NEO operation into the Congo and in the process won the MacKay Trophy, awarded to the Air Force’s most meritorious flight of the year.

In that mission, a fully loaded C-130 took more than 21 hours and three air refuelings to bring a special operations crew from north of London into the jaws of civil war in the Congo to rescue 56 people -- 30 Americans, 26 foreign nationals and one dog held in the arms of a young boy. Arriving on the scene after flying 15 hours, this team flew low down a riverbed, below the airport to duck gunfire, rising to the level of the field at the last moment to land on the open-half of an airstrip under siege. Tasked to rescue 40 passengers, this crew worked with the French defenders at the airport to board 16 additional people, leaving no one behind. With no shots being fired, the interests of the United States and our allies had been protected.

Our participation in a wide array of humanitarian missions brings to mind Gen. Curtis LeMay’s famous Berlin Airlift quote, "The Air Force can deliver anything."

Current Air Force Issues: Readiness, Retention and Management Reforms

The linchpin to the effectiveness of aerospace power in the international environment is readiness. However, the cost of being heavily involved in a wide array of international operations is felt on our people and their equipment, every day.

General Ryan spoke to you about our heavy operations tempo, which has adversely impacted both quality of life and retention rates. We believe we have a plan in the expeditionary aerospace force reorganization that will mitigate optempo, and are moving quickly to put that plan into effect. On the other hand, our policy of international engagement has a heavy and unsustainable impact on our equipment and costs of our operations, and we do not yet have a viable plan for dealing with that.

As Mike Ryan will tell the president, we are ready today, but our current pace of operations is not sustainable. In a nutshell, the Air Force is caught between a flat budget top line and increasing costs of operations. In the past, and today, we have tried to squeeze more money for current operations out of that top line by reducing the force and scrimping on modernization, military construction, real property maintenance, and investment in research and development. In the process, we have begun to mortgage our future, and we definitely have slowed the pace of quality of life improvements.

This strategy is no longer viable. Let me tell you why:

First, with the exception of domestic base infrastructure, we have finished our downsizing.

• Personnel end strength has been reduced by more than 40 percent
• Major bases have been reduced by two-thirds overseas
• Purchases for aircraft replacement have been reduced by 77 percent
• Current existing aircraft inventories have been reduced by about 40 percent
• ICBMs have been reduced by 50 percent

The good news is we’ve realized savings quickly -- without additional base realignment and closures or BRACs.

The bad news is that we cannot go any further without another BRAC -- and indeed, we have learned that a BRAC will be essential to take down any further active flags to move modern equipment into the Guard and Reserve

Weapon System Readiness: Aircraft

Second, our aircraft are aging and getting harder to maintain.

The impact of aircraft procurement cutbacks is now coming home to roost. Next year, the average age of our aircraft will be 20 years old. Our youngest pilots will be barely older than their aircraft. Our first-term maintainers will be younger than their aircraft.

Aging equipment is more expensive to maintain. In very rough numbers, the cost of engine depot maintenance per flying hour is projected to increase 28 percent annually for the KC-135 and 21.7 percent annually for the F-16.

In spite of these rising costs, General Ryan and I have made a commitment to fully funding our flying hour program, which is key to our required high level of current readiness.

We are trying to press ahead with a modernization strategy, a "cluster strategy" to buy new systems when we can afford to do so. We're trying to preserve or enhance effectiveness of existing systems, but declining readiness has put great stress on this strategy. In short, without an increased budget, we may have to cut modernization programs to find the money to operate our force.

Weapon System Readiness: Spare Parts

Third, maintaining an adequate supply of spare parts is also a primary readiness concern.

For aging equipment, costs are rising. For example, unit level consumption costs per flying hour for the F-16 have increased 3.8 percent annually since 1995.

To keep spare parts available, we have added $300 to $500 million per year to spares and repairs accounts for the last several years.

Spare parts availability impacts Air Force readiness -- it’s a quality of life issue, too. It affects our people’s job satisfaction, which is a key factor in their decision to stay or go.

Fighter Mission Capable Rates

Fourth, the collision of an aging fleet with less than full funding for spares has had a predictable result -- overall mission capable rates are down 8.8 percent since the Gulf War.

Important caveat: Given tight budgetary constraints, we focus our resources where they are needed most -- in priority order:

1. Deployed front-line units, for example in Southwest Asia
2. Overseas in Europe and Pacific theaters
3. Continental United States units

   Example -- Mission capable rates for the F-15E in May 1998:

   100 percent in SWA; 85 percent in the Pacific;

   77 percent in Europe; 70 percent in Air Combat Command

It’s a delicate balance to maintain, and we have intentionally allowed a decrease here in the United States so that our front line units are at the highest readiness levels.

We’re OK in the short run, but can’t afford to operate this way without some relief over the long haul.

Enlisted Retention

We’re also concerned about the alarming negative trends in first- and second-term re-enlistment rates. The following examples illustrate the Air Force- wide problem:

F-15 avionics: Retention has dropped 39 percent over the last five years.

F-15 crew chiefs: Retention has dropped 24 percent over the last five years.

Air traffic control: Retention has dropped 36 percent over the last five years.

We've addressed this problem with increases in selective re-enlistment bonuses:

From 41 skills, $24 million in fiscal 1995

To 107 skills, $48 million this year

Recently, Secretary of Defense Bill Cohen was accompanied by General Ryan, Chief (Master Sergeant of the Air Force Eric W.) Benken, and myself on a readiness fact- finding trip to Moody AFB, Ga. During this trip, Secretary Cohen learned that our people are concerned about the "cornerstones of readiness": military and retirement pay, personnel tempo, housing, medical care and other quality of life benefits.

We need to respond to these legitimate concerns. And we are going the right way with approved pay raise of 3.6 percent for 1999 and a proposed one of 4.4 percent for 2000. Secretary Cohen has also started a review of the retirement system. But, even as we work these challenges to our readiness, and act to enhance quality of life issues, the fact of the matter remains, we can’t get where we need to be without internal savings from BRAC and Defense Reform Initiative and some added top line.

Future Vision

Even in the face of these challenges, as we look ahead, we are determined to build on the progress yielded by all our reforms currently underway and those, such as the expeditionary aerospace force, which be implemented in the near term.

In this regard, we just finished the second volume of the Air Force Strategic Plan. This volume provides the important linkage between Air Force goals, mission essential tasks and metrics for the near-term to include compliance with the Government Performance Results Act. The Air Force Strategic Plan has enormous potential to be the blueprint to move our technology and capabilities forward in a budget constrained environment. Designed to promote a common planning framework, we expect our strategic plan to:

• Implement the Air Force’s strategic vision
• Provide strategic direction and front-end guidance to Air Force planners
• Provide top-down guidance and alignment for Air Force planners worldwide

With two of its four volumes currently approved, the Air Force Strategic Plan will provide us with an overarching "systems of systems" framework to help us realize our vision of a seamless total aerospace force.

In thinking about how aerospace forces can impact warfare in the 21st century, we believe that the advantage accrues to the commander who has a smaller "footprint" in the battle space. That’s undoubtedly something Sun Tsu must have said at some point, but we haven’t found it yet!

This type of command and control capability provides our "small footprint" forces with the inherent ability to "reach back" to the CONUS for a wide array of expertise, to include logistics to intelligence support. The force- multiplier dimension of "reach back" is that we can apply our resources and brainpower back home -- working the problem around the clock -- while our forces concentrate on the tasks at hand in theater.

Our Air Force strategic plan also recognizes that we need to be a seamless, total aerospace force. This is especially true as we integrate forward and rear control centers with near-real time intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance information. Today, we use Space as a force multiplier with systems that enhance global navigation, like the familiar global positioning system. But we have barely scratched the surface. We need to remove any cultural and structural barriers that impede our ability to fully exploit the vertical dimension -- a dimension unique to air power of the past and aerospace power in the future. In the near future, our Aerospace Integration Task Force will produce an Aerospace Integration Plan that should address important components to enable our desired transformation to include:

• Theory and doctrine
• Equipping and resourcing strategies
• Education and training
• Organizational strategy

At the AFA’s Orlando Symposium last February, I discussed "do- able space" as one way to identify key technologies and capabilities that represent the first steps of our 21st century journey to space. A key facet of the do-able space concept, "partnering" is a way to pool resources to realize efficiencies as well as to benefit from the synergy of the partnership. Since that time, under the guidance of our Chief Scientist Dan Hastings, our Scientific Advisory Board’s summer study focused on three overarching areas impacting space operations:

• Enhanced effectiveness and survivability
• Enhanced efficiency
• Enhanced programs and practices

Within these three major areas, the Scientific Advisory Board produced 15 recommendations that we will take for action and additional study. I look forward to giving you an update on where we stand during my remarks at an Air Force Association event in the near future.

As we look ahead, the prospects for aerospace power to remain the strategic instrument of choice by our National Command Authority are very encouraging.

So, I’m optimistic about the future character of American aerospace power in international arena. Our men and women in uniform -- our "ambassadors in Air Force blue" will make our presence felt while protecting our vital interests. They will enhance American values of freedom, civilian control of military and self- determination through military-to-military contacts. They will reaffirm once again what (former Secretary of Defense) George C. Marshall believed, that the true secret of America’s strength is its "darn good kids."

Today’s "darn good kids" are patriotic. They are hard working. They enjoy teamwork and take pride in accomplishment. They want to put their skills to the purposes of our nation.

So, we need to roll up our sleeves and get to work for them. We need to continue to listen to their concerns, give them honest answers and ensure they are adequately compensated in terms of pay, benefits, health care -- you name it.

I am proud to be on the same team with these "darn good kids" -- and with each of you!