AFA Policy Forum

Honorable F. Whitten Peters, 
Secretary of the Air Force
AFA Convention
Washington DC
September 13, 2000
Secretary of Air Force Luncheon

As the Chief said yesterday, the Air Force is one family and Air Force Association is a very important part of it. When it comes to support of our men and women, no one comes close to the Air Force Association.

I suspect this will be my last opportunity to address this great convention while I am serving as Secretary of the Air Force. I want you to know that I consider myself extraordinarily privileged to have been allowed to serve for three years at the top of the not only best aerospace force, but I think, the best darn fighting force the world has ever known.

I have now gone through two confirmations in my Air Force career. I still can’t help thinking that there must have been some mistake. As my now-departed mother used to say, "Honorable, when did he become honorable?"

I will not tell you that I have loved every minute of this job. There have been a few encounters with the depot caucus that probably were not the best part of my life, but I will tell you that it has been darn close.

I am particularly proud of the team of civilians and general officers that Mike Ryan and I have welded together. I think we have come closer than any top two to unifying the Air Force and forging a consensus on how it should move into the future. It is also an exceptional honor to be part of a team that truly believes in service, honor and excellence.

Today, I want to talk about readiness challenges. Those which the chief and I faced in 1997 when we came aboard and those that lie ahead.

To understand where we are today, I think you have to understand how we got here. As you all recall, shortly after Desert Storm, how Soviet foes practically melted before our eyes, like the wicked witch in the Wizard of Oz. This left us with a historic opportunity to reclaim some of the enormous budgets that fueled our defenses during the Cold War. The so-called peace dividend was born. President Bush, President Clinton and successive Congresses, Democratic and Republican all approved steep declines in Defense spending in an effort to cut the massive budget deficits that were plaguing the country a mere decade ago.

Overall, the budgets for DoD and for the Air Force were dropped by about 40 percent and the Air Force and its sister services began a massive draw down of about 40 percent of the force. That reduction did not happen over night. In late 1997 when I was confirmed as the under secretary, active duty men and women were still being offered early retirements and some of the restructuring continues in the medical career fields, even today.

While these cuts were the right thing to do, they created real turmoil across all of the services and released an enormous amount of talent and experience. In our desire in the Air Force to be human, we made these cuts primarily with voluntary retirements and discharges as opposed to outright layoffs. As a result, we ended up with some serious personnel imbalances. In the final analysis, this was clearly the right thing to do from a humane perspective, but it did leave broken glass that we are still fixing today.

Today in the Air Force, for example, we still have broken career fields that span the gamut from security forces to crew chiefs to public affairs and pilots. In the mid-1990s since we had excess pilots, we cut new pilot production for the active force to 550 pilots per year when the long-term study state requirement – we knew then, we know today – is about 1100 a year.

And, of course, we did not put a whole lot of emphasis on recruiting and retention in the early 1990s because we had excess personnel. At the same time, living off Cold War inventories, we dramatically reduced the number of spare parts we were buying and converted from three level to two level maintenance. Again, these were absolutely the right things to do conceptually, but viewed with 20/20 hindsight, there were many slips in execution. This is not a criticism of those who managed the draw down, just a reminder that managing draw downs is really hard work and that we are all human.

The desire for a peace dividend also fueled a series of base closure rounds, ending in 1995. Directly relevant to readiness were the closures of two of the five Air Force maintenance depots. Closing a depot is a major effort. Just ask any one who has tried to do it. The work of closing a depot does not go away – it must be moved.

Almost immediately following announcement of these closures, there was turmoil among our work forces – those who could find other jobs took those jobs whether than waiting through the five-year inevitable process. We started the actually moves in 1997 and they continue even as we speak and will continue from months to years beyond today. Moving industrial equipment and even whole assembly lines across the country is not easy work. Indeed, the most serious aircraft readiness problems we had last year were caused not by lack of funds, but by inability to move depot production lines quickly into operation. There are lots of reasons why this happened, but one problem is our inability to hire skilled manpower at the receiving depots because labor is so short in this great economy. Today we are still hundreds of people short at two of our depots.

We also need to recall the bipartisan balanced budget acts, which put DoD topline at just under $260 billion, about $20 billion below what it is today. While all of this was going on, we executed the steps needed to reap the peace dividend and we were supporting combat operations over Northern and Southern Watch, flying missions over Bosnia, fighting a major theater war in the skies over Serbia and supporting important operations other than war around the globe.

All of these events caused considerable turmoil and I remember well coming into the Air Force as we were putting the budget together at the tail end of 1997 and going, "holy cow! There is a lot going on here and a lot of moving parts." But there were three key readiness issues we looked at then and I am happy to say all are in some stage of being fixed today.

First, we needed to raise retention of our skilled personnel. Here, there were three basic issues. Inadequate pay, Redux retirement; and overwork and family stress caused by too many unscheduled temporary duty assignments to contingency operations.

Second, we needed to find a fix for pilot shortages created by unprecedented levels of hiring among major airlines. And finally, we needed to fix mission capable rates. As you are well aware, we, and of course, you in AFA have been working all of these issues. Air Force leaders were part of the successful effort to halt the decline of the DoD budget and start it back up again. The additional $112 billion added in FY ‘00 – added by both the Administration, of course there were other adds by Congress as well – have been used to fund the largest pay raise in 20 years. The restoration of retirement benefits, planned additional pay increases in each year of the budget, increases in housing and bonus pay of all sorts, and many other increases in Quality of Life Programs.

To deal with the OPTEMPO problem, we have conceptualized and implemented the Expeditionary Aerospace Force, which is now deploying EAF’s 9 and 10, which are the last units in the first full 15 month rotation. The EAF strategy is a clear winner and it is already lowering OPTEMPO for much of the Air Force. Beyond EAF, we are working a series of policy and budget changes to get OPTEMPO relief across our total force.

We also have made significant progress in resolving the pilot shortage. I want to talk about this just a little bit. We have ramped pilot production back to 1100 active duty pilots per year, a total of around 1600 to 1700 and we have just reached that in the last few months. This was not easy. It required years to train additional instructor pilots, years to put additional training aircraft on line and a whole new way of using the Guard and Reserve to augment active duty instructor pilots. Even though we’ve reached the 1100 today, we really aren’t done because we’ve done this in a hurry and there are many other pieces that need to get done. For example, at the end of July, I went down to Valdosta to open the new under graduate pilot training group at Moody Air Force Base--a training group that actually won’t start seeing pilots for another six months to a year. But, before we can declare victory at places like Moody or indeed at our other training bases, we need to field the T-38C and the first units of the T-6 JPATS aircraft. These programs are in progress, but they are not here yet and more money will not appreciably accelerate them.

Our fixed to UPT is only a partial fix for the long term because what we actually need is not brand new pilots out of UPT, but a pilot force that has the experience levels required to be safe and to be effective. This has required an increase in active duty service commitments, additional training slots at follow-on training bases and careful management of experience levels in all of our flying units. As an example, in the last year alone, to meet the need for RTU spaces, we’ve added training units at Luke, Kelly and Springfield, Ohio by converting three F-16 units which used to be tactical units to the training role.

Finally, to keep experience levels up in our operational units, we have sought and received legislation to restructure the bonus program and we have increased pilot bonuses and pushed the pilot shortages onto the staffs. We are in turn fixing staff shortages by turning to recent retirees, now that Congress at our request, has removed restrictions on dual-compensation of retirees who take civil jobs.

The bottom line here is that the pilot shortage arose because we conducted a draw down just as all of the major airlines were increasing hiring. It will be fixed two years earlier than we originally planned because of a lot of very hard work by thousands of Air Force men and women coupled with legislative changes to the pilot bonus program and repeal of dual-compensation restrictions, all of which, I am happy to say, were supported by the Air Force – indeed, started by the Air Force and which enjoyed bipartisan support in the Administration and Congress.

On mission capable rate front, with the help of both the Administration and Congress, we have poured $2 billion into spare parts inventories and depot repairs. As the Chief mentioned yesterday, CANN rates are down and back-ordered spare parts are down by 50% against last year. The number of engines for which we lack the required war reserves are down from 11 to six. Of the remaining six, most have never been, and in fact will never be, at war readiness levels because of decisions made years ago to accept risk on those engine lines. Finally, in recent months, mission capable rates which bounce around an awful lot, do seem to be stabilizing and perhaps in some cases are actually increasing.

But no matter how many spare parts we buy, we still need capable airmen to install them in our aircraft and here we have reached another limiting factor--namely the shortage of 5-level maintenance workers. Again, money is not the issue, the issue is that it takes time to build experience. The training pipelines are full. We are aggressively hiring prior service recruits. We are using contractor field teams and the Vice Chief has just been tasked to pull together a plan to use the Guard and Reserve to augment the active duty maintenance force when appropriate.

Again, all of these things are the right things to do, but all of them will take time. To add my voice to that of the Chief, we believe we have reversed the decline in readiness rates, but there is much more required to pull us out of the problems that were caused by the draw down of the 1990s.

That brings us to today.

For the past few weeks, military readiness has been the subject of considerable discussion, which I think is a very good thing. We who care so deeply about the security of our nation welcome the debate on national defense. But we should also be wary lest that debate become polarized along political lines for politics is a strong prism that can, and often does, bend facts from what you and I might call the straight truth.

Military readiness is not a Democratic issue and it is not a Republican issue. Military readiness is an American issue. It is an issue for every body in this room. We must also be aware of those who want to debate readiness solely by using statistics. We all know the old line about lies, damn lies and statistics. It applies in spades to this debate.

The truth is, that by selectively using the mountainous statistics that comes across my desk, I could prove just about anything anybody wants to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. But I submit to you by focusing on today’s statistics, we really will miss the point. To have a meaningful discourse on readiness, you need to answer questions like, ready for what? At what cost and how much risk are we willing to bear?

When you do that, you’ll find an Air Force that is strong and ready to respond to the missions it is likely to be asked to carry out. It is now and will continue to be the world’s premiere aerospace force. Dig still deeper and you’ll find an Air Force that has shed its Cold War organization and is evolving to face the kind of threats that will dominate the new century.

The undeniable truth is this: We are prepared today to fight and win against any enemy anywhere on the face of the globe.

How can I say this without looking at the statistics? I can say it because last year we really just cleaned up in Kosovo. Thirty-eight thousand sorties, two planes lost and nobody killed in action. That is pretty good results. But it is not just in Kosovo, it is every day in the skies over Iraq. It is in the faces of young men and women who work in our missile silos, many of whom have earned awards this week. It is on flight lines across the country and the world, in satellite control centers, and in the more than 60 countries where Air Force people are operating at this very moment. It is worth noting that even before all these budget increases kicked in, we were able to boost mission capable rates for our aircraft deployed in Kosovo operations to over 90 percent or better. That I think is not a level that we would ever intend to sustain for long periods of time, but it shows that we have great capability and depth and an ability to surge.

On the other hand, I’ve got to admit that by some standards, Air Force readiness is lower than during the Cold War. But it is about the same as it was today in the mid-1980s. For example, in May 1991, the Air Force aggregate mission capable rate was about 83 percent. That means 83 percent of our aircraft were ready to go on any given day at any given moment. Today that rate stands at 73 percent. That is not great. But it also is roughly the same as it was in the 1985 time period before we started getting lots of new equipment on board.

I would submit that these statistics don’t really provide meaningful information. There is no such thing as perfect or complete readiness. Issues arise constantly and your Air Force leadership has responded to them and will continue to respond to them by working the fundamentals for the long-term readiness of this splendid force. This is a process much more like turning a large ship, than maneuvering a fighter jet. It happens gradually and the results take time to appear.

If you ask me today whether the Air Force is ready, I can answer unequivocally, yes. There may be those who, armed with reams of data, will disagree with me, but I don’t think you’ll find Slobodan Milosovic or Saddam Hussein among them.

Then, what about the future?

We’ve talked about that a lot this week--the vision, the QDR. There are a number of vexing problems which will almost immediately face my successor. I am going to talk about several of them.

Most importantly, I think we as a nation need to determine what we want our military services to do. Again, the relevant questions for us all of us are:

What do we need to be ready for?

How much can we afford?

How much risk can we accept?

Only after the American people have answered those questions can we begin to work from strategy to task to build the force that will meet the needs of our nation.

Of course, in answering those questions we do not write on a blank slate. Certain key features of any future force stand out. Let me talk about several of those.

First, it is very clear that if you look at the plans for all of the services, we are going to be more expeditionary in the future than we have been in the past. Our nation’s interests are too far flung to forward position forces and in fact the trend has been to close overseas bases, not to expand them.

It follows that we must perfect the EAF. Expeditionary operations will be vital to the way we do business. Equally important, we can’t manage personnel tempo and war time training needs without a viable rotational force structure. And if we don’t manage personnel tempo we simply won’t have a force structure to manage for very long.

EAF is the solution to balancing three very hard requirements: peacetime operations; the need for training for wartime missions; and the need to continuously train our force which turns over about 10 percent every year relentlessly as we get those 34,000 young recruits in the door and roughly 6,000 officers, an equal number goes out the other end. The EAF is meeting these needs and the needs of our commanders and our people. And even the GAO, which is paid to dislike new ideas, recently said they like the EAF.

It is clear to me that expeditionary operations as planned by the Air Force and now is planned by our sister services, is going to require more strategic airlift. Today, we cannot meet the wartime requirements we already have without accepting risk--and we never could--and our future requirements are growing, we just don’t know how much yet. Unfortunately, we do not have an executable plan to meet those growing needs. The C-17 line is fully funded through 2002. After that, it is not. While we are working hard on an out-of-the-box plan to create a commercial market for C-17s, which might allow us to optimize the C-17 production line, while also providing surge capacity in the civilian sector. That plan is an excellent briefing, but not a reality. Similarly, the Senate is looking at an industrial fund for strategic airlift, but that plan is also, neither funded nor a reality. This is a high priority problem that needs a solution. Advanced procurement funds are going to be needed in the next year to year and a half.

Nuclear forces: an area in which we don’t think about much any more. It is clear to me that any future force is going to need a nuclear component. Our strategic nuclear forces are of immediate and enduring relevance to our national security and certainly to EAF. Until we develop another capability, our strategic nuclear forces are our national missile defense, as they have been for the past 50 years. They make our adversaries reluctant to use chemical and biological weapons.

Here again, we are in a predicament. Under START II, we would retire Peacekeeper and move its modern warheads to Minuteman. However, the law prohibits us from reducing our nuclear force to START II levels. The result has been a stand-off. We have not funded either the long-term sustainment or the removal of Peacekeeper. We are unable to pull warheads from Peacekeeper to replace aging warheads on Minuteman missiles--and if any of you think an aging aircraft problem is tough and expensive, wait until you see the bill for an aging warhead problem. The cost to extend the life of Minuteman warheads is roughly equal to the gross domestic product of the state of Texas, and the execution of such a program depends upon a very optimistic assumption that the nuclear industrial base exists to do the work in the first place.

Space: first the Air Force provides 90 percent of the national defense space budget and 95 percent of the people who do space work. From a fiscal standpoint, space is the only segment of the Air force budget that has increased in percentage terms during the massive drawdown.

This year, sustainment and modernization of space and missile forces will account for fully 31 percent of the Air Force’s modernization budget authority. Every major space system is being modernized and replaced and that is not true of our other aircraft systems, where we have no significant replacement programs on the books for our aging tankers, bomber and ISR aircraft. By 2005, 55 percent of our science and technology budget will be dedicated to space.

Today, we are taking concrete steps to integrate air and space into a seamless aerospace force for the 21^st century.

We are implementing a broad array of educational career path and educational initiatives designed to ensure our people understand the capabilities and limitations at their air, space and information systems.

Clearly, to drive an artificial wedge between air and space today, will almost certainly ensure that we exploit neither to its fullest extent tomorrow.

There are some funding challenges in space as they are across DoD and one of the biggest is satellite communications.

All of the services assume that the fundamental enabler for information and decision dominance will be the capability to move electrons from any point on, over or under the surface of the earth to any other point on, over or under the surface of the earth at any time in real time. We are all making an underlining assumption that communication networks, especially the SATCOM will be there to support us. But I believe that assumption is almost certainly faulty. Every time we try to look at this requirement, it appears it dwarfs what it is on the books in terms beating it.

As we field SATCOM-intensive systems like Global Hawk and the unmanned combat aerial vehicle, our existing transmission capabilities will be sorely tested. And even if these systems don’t saturate the network, the digital Army certainly will.

Several years ago, we assumed a robust constellation of commercial low and medium earth satellites would take up that slack. But that market place just has not materialized, it is always at least two years away. And it may never materialize because of the cost of data transmission by fiber optic cable that is going down exponentially every year.

In addition, even when we want to build more unique satellites, we will have to compete for spectrum, which is an increasingly scarce resource.

Again, we need a better plan here.

Information technology is another area with challenges. We need a better concept in the Air Force of how we should be using information technology and how we sustain it in the long run. For the last three years, I’ve watched as hackers got into our networks through holes in commercial software. I have seen bug fixes get distributed and employed and then the same problem happens again and again and again. The reason is simple--the fixes don’t stay in the software as it changes over time. I have audited and analyzed this to death. There is only one conclusion--we in the Air Force simply do not have the trained manpower required to administer the kluge of networks we try to operate today. We have way too many servers and server management is too manpower intensive. We need to consolidate the number of places where we try to administer our networks and we need to automated system security and systems administration.

Since early this summer, the chief and I have been pushing our network community to consolidate servers, establish centers of excellence for remote network administration, and set up think tanks with industry to look at long-term solutions for network security. But this is for sure a work in progress where we will see the first real fruits in Corona in early October.

There are two other critical issues as we think about decision dominance. The first is, we don’t even have many of our buildings wired to receive the Internet. It is hard to use the Internet for decision dominance if you can’t plug a computer in. We aren’t going to be able, in the current budget, to make that happen until 2007. Second, industry is developing IT solutions based on the assumption that band-width will be ubiquitous and essentially costless. Those assumptions may be true in industrialized nations but they certainly are not true in many places we operate including on all of our airborne systems. As we increasingly move to commercial solutions, we need to keep this fundamental problem in mind.

In the IT arena, we are moving fast, but we have really just begun the journey and it truly is a journey of a thousand miles, most of which is going to have to go on well into the next decade.

Not only does our infrastructure need work, so does our physical infrastructure. Our physical plant today is too costly to sustain and we have too much of it.

At its core, this is now a readiness and retention issue. We used to say, we worked on people, readiness, modernization and infrastructure. General Ryan and I have told the budget folks that is not the way anymore. Infrastructure is a people issue. It is a readiness issue, it is a modernization issue. We need to roll it into those categories. Our people understand this.

The quality of infrastructure sends a direct signal to them as to the real value we place on their service. They are smarter as a group as any you can find and they know, and they reason, "if it were that important, they would give me decent conditions in which to get the job done."

No one here is asking for luxury. All they want is dry floors, solid walls and roofs that don’t grow moss. That truly is not a luxury.

I know as you do that we need at least one more round of base closures, perhaps more. We simply have too many buildings, too many heating plants and too many runways. It is like working in a room for which the air is being slowly pumped. At first you may not even notice it, but sooner or later the lack of oxygen makes you woozy and it eventually kills you. This drain of resources by unneeded infrastructure is slowly asphyxiating us, making it impossible for us to do what we need to do on the bases we need to keep.

Recapitalization--a term which you will hear often as we go through the QDR. The money we use to fix everything from computers to automobiles goes up, year by year as equipment ages and as we need to introduce new technology. It continues to go at roughly 1.3 percent faster than inflation.

Medical expenses can also be expected to grow. We switched to Tricare and that gave us a one-time savings. But today we are now at the same medical inflation rate as the rest of the country.

We can’t solve all our problems by throwing money at them. But starving these problems, starving these issues is certainly not the way to go. As we stand today and look out over the next ten or 20 years, we will be increasingly robbing Peter to pay Peter, not Peter to pay Paul.

We are presented with some stark choices over the long-run and we need a national debate. We need to look at what we really want to do with Defense and how much we really want to pay. We can adjust our military strategy so we don’t look at a two major theater wars construct, but frankly the day-to-day work is almost as taxing.

We could reduce our global commitments, but that is much easier said than done. Or we can pay more for our defense. We have already started down this road and I certainly hope we continue.

I hope through the help of you at AFA, that we can build a dialog--an informed dialog, among our national leaders about the right course to chart for national defense.

In the end, this is a decision that all Americans must make because the money must come from other places – education, social security, medical care. It needs to be balanced with many other things, but it is a decision we need to make. Because, even if we don’t have this debate, we will have made a choice--we will have chosen by default to pay more for national defense while receiving less.

The bottom line is that we are ready today and with prudent planning, a lot of very strong management, and ultimately some traditional resources, we will remain ready for years to come. But we must address the issues.

Finally, in closing, let me add again my thanks to all of you here at AFA. It has been wonderful to have the opportunity to work with you and to be with many of you out in your home areas.

This job is undoubtedly the best I have ever had and is likely, I suspect, to be the best I ever will have. It is great to be able to come and address an audience like this and it is also great to go fly a U-2 or a B-2 and have the flexibility to talk on Capitol Hill, and fly at classified altitude and see what the world really looks like. It is even better, because of your advice and your friendship.

Thank you all for the thousand days of friendship you’ve given me. My time with you has truly been the highlight of my life.