AFA Policy Forum

The Honorable F. Whitten Peters
Secretary of the Air Force
Air Force Association Convention
Luncheon Keynote Address

September 15, 1999

"Luncheon Keynote Address"

Yesterday, Mike Ryan described to you our tremendous successes in the skies over Kosovo and Serbia. The war in Kosovo proved that many of the concepts that are central to our vision of an Expeditionary Aerospace Force in the 21^st century work in the way we hoped they would.

For example, we deployed over 20 expeditionary bases. The effort was so smoothly executed that it deserved no mention when the Joint Staff briefed a summary of lessons learned several weeks ago.

We used our communications network to reach back to the United States for intelligence and logistics support. Reach-back operations, though somewhat new to us, were handled so easily that they appeared to be second nature. Intelligence information often made the round trip from Kosovo to the United States and back to theater in finished form in 10 minutes or less.

We integrated UAVs into our strike forces for the first time and for the first time used UAV-based sensors to generate targets for our forces.

We showed that the B-2 could not only fly in the rain, but that it could drop bombs through the rain, through the clouds and in complete darkness, with tremendous precision.

We showed that our new satellite-guided weapons, JDAM and JSOW, work.

We showed that our logistics systems worked. Our depots surged, our contractors surged, and spare parts were delivered from our depots to the theater of operations, often by commercial two-day service! Even in the mud of Tirana, satellite communications terminals provided classified and unclassified Internet services from users in the field to and from supply centers in Europe and the United States. Equally important, SATCOMs also provided e-mail to and from families and deployed forces.

We showed that our aging fleet could operate with mission capable rates of 85 percent and greater, when spare parts and experienced maintainers are brought together, even in expeditionary conditions.

We generated 38,000 sorties without a single casualty. That is a remarkable record.

Today, we are without a doubt the most capable Air Force the world has ever seen.

But today I want to talk about the future, about what I think is the central question that Mike Ryan and I face: Can we sustain this superb force in the face of the highest peacetime OPTEMPO in the history of the Air Force and the best economy we’ve had in the United States for at least several generations? I think we can, but if we are to do so, we must continue to work the fundamentals we’ve been working since we became a team in the Fall of 1997.

There are several key tasks that I’d like to talk to you about today and give you a report card as I stand on the threshold of being the real Secretary and have the real Under Secretary, Carole Dibattiste, on board to help me as well.

Back in February we talked about people, readiness, modernization, and infrastructure. I will tell you it has been a banner year in each of those areas. But we must do more. We must continue these positive trends.

Let me tell you a little bit about where I think we are going to go as well as what we’ve done.

First, with regard to our people, we have begun to fix pay and retirement benefits but we still must create predictability and stability for our people and their families. We must make TRICARE more user friendly. Most importantly, we must integrate all of our stove-piped forces into a single aerospace force that draws on the strengths of all of our skills and all of our forces, whether those forces operate missiles from below the ground, fly aircraft above the ground, or work on the ground to operate and maintain our satellites and UAVs. It is essential that we draw from the talent of all of our men and women as we support our operations through the myriad of tasks that must be done each day if — with seeming ease — we are to get weapons on target or humanitarian supplies out to the world.

We also must work on readiness. We have worked hard to fix the spare parts problem, but that is a problem that will continue for decade after decade as our aircraft age, and it is one we must address more fundamentally than simply fixing each part as it breaks.

We must modernize. We need to replace and revitalize our systems. And as part of this, we must refocus our space operations to take advantage of commercial space systems, which are only now appearing.

Finally, we need to pay attention to our infrastructure. Our first job must be harvesting the predicted savings made possible by BRAC. But we must also work hard to build the facilities that mean so much to quality of life for our people: modern housing and dormitories, and fitness and child development centers.

The key to much of this is obviously to increase the Air Force budget, and AFA has been at the forefront of helping us do that. Thanks to the hard work of people like AFA and lots of people in DoD and on Capitol Hill, the fiscal year that starts in two weeks will be the first year of the first sustained DoD and Air Force budget increases in 14 years.

Could we use more money? Sure, who couldn’t? But can we work with what we’ve got? Absolutely. As we think about the challenges ahead, let us also take stock of what we’ve been able to achieve within our current budgets.

Let me go back to people for a moment. Today our men and women are expected to leave home and family for extended periods each and every year to support our national security interests overseas. Our metrics say that 90 days deployed for contingency operations is a routine load. But that is one day out of four deployed, and it does not count deployments required for training and other support commitments. That is a tremendous load on Air Force men and women and their families, and one that we’ve got to stabilize and reduce. On the other hand, our surveys show that men and women who join the Air Force not only expect to be deployed some of the time but in fact relish the opportunity to be part of real-world operations — to make a contribution to this Nation and to world peace.

I have seen that with my own eyes in the mud of Tirana and in the tent cities of Southwest Asia and Bosnia. Our men and women are out doing the mission and taking satisfaction in the good they are doing. Men and women join the Air Force for many reasons, but one of the most important ones is the desire to perform public service. When you are in Bosnia and you see the electricity coming back on, you see the trams running again, you see people returning to work in a war-torn country, that is great satisfaction to our men and women and it keeps them in the Air Force.

Of course, you can have too much of a good thing. We will never fix our retention problems until we can guarantee each and every one of our men and women a reasonable quality of life during peacetime. They should be able to raise a family, participate in community affairs, pursue additional education; in short, they should be able to have a personal life. That is really what EAF is about — providing a personal life for our people by stabilizing and regularizing deployments for contingency operations.

EAF, as I’ve said to many people, is not just one event. It is not something that happens in two weeks when the first AEFs roll out. It is a major journey for the Air Force. It is a completely different way of looking at how we do our business. We are going into EAF for two reasons. First, to make sure the Nation has ready, trained aerospace forces and second, to ensure that our people get relief from today’s OPTEMPO even in a turbulent world.

AEF number one rolls out in two weeks. Will it be pretty? I bet it won’t be. Will it bring instant relief? Absolutely not. Will it ultimately work? I think it will. The best evidence of this so far is the fact that when the bombs stopped dropping in Kosovo, everybody came home. Everybody came home. That is very different than in Southwest Asia. That is very different from earlier contingency operations. As Mike Ryan said yesterday, over the last decade and particularly over the last five years, we have shown our Nation’s leaders that we can get to the fight quickly and that there is no reason to keep us deployed when we are not needed. That is a critical fact for the 21^st century Air Force. If we cannot keep the CINCs and our national command authorities happy with us and happy with our ability to get out of town fast, we are never going to solve the OPTEMPO problem because we will be deployed all over the world. So our quick return from Kosovo operations is really good news.

To keep our people in uniform we have to do a couple of other novel things. We have to pay them fairly. We’ve made a very good start on that with the 4.8 percent pay raise. It is not perfect, but it is a step forward on equalizing some of our pay with some of the equivalent civilian specialties. More importantly, we have brought back 50 percent retirement.

But we still need to do more to get people into our deployment base because we continue to do too much with too few. As I’ve said many times, our too few people are spread over way too many bases to be effective and efficient. So we are doing some work on that as well. We’ve spent a lot of time over the last two years looking at re-engineering and competitive sourcing. These are difficult actions for the people who do them. They are hard for our people because sometimes they lose their jobs. But they are essential if we are going to bring the Air Force into the 21^st century because we must free up military slots and transfer them into the deployment base. Between the time we started this increased effort two years ago and today we have found 2,700 active duty slots which we will move from the tail to the tooth to cut OPTEMPO in FY2000. We must and will continue to look for more ways to reengineer our operations to free up manpower for deployed operations.

By the end of the month, we also will have recruited almost 700 prior active duty recruits. This is important for two reasons. First, because we are short on skills. We have allowed a lot of our talent to go out the door. We’ve not been able to keep our people because our pay and benefits have not been competitive. But as these prior service recruits will tell you, there are other considerations. Two years ago we were able to bring back fewer than 100 people. This year by setting some goals and by looking harder, we found there are people who have been in the Air Force who still cherish the teamwork, the camaraderie and the public service offered by an Air Force career, and have found that a big paycheck is not all there is too life. We have brought back some of the hardest working people we have, like AWACS crewmembers. We’ve brought back mechanics. We’ve brought back intelligence NCOs. We’ve brought back some of our most critical skills and everyone we bring back saves us five or six years of training and experiencing.

This is one of our best news stories. We are now competing very well with civilian industry and are getting back some of our most critically skilled people.

Another good news story is that pilots are opting to stay with us about 43 percent of the time at this point. That sounds like a low number, but when you realize that around 50 percent retention has traditionally been viewed as a stable situation, we are getting back on track. If you look at the statistics of one year ago, that number was in the high 20 percents. Again, we are beginning to make progress.

Unfortunately, we are going to end the year about ten thousand men and women short. This situation arose because both retention and recruiting are down. For the first time in 20 years we will miss our recruiting goals. In part this occurred because we allowed our recruiter manning to drop from an authorized 1,200 slots down to about 800. In part it is because we stopped advertising. But over the last year, we’ve turned that around. With the help of Congress, and with some hard budget choices, we are bringing the recruiters back. We will be back up to full strength about March of next year. I looked at some numbers last night and it appears that each recruiter consistently brings in about 30 recruits. We are adding about 200 recruiters this year. We have budgeted for 300 more recruiters in FY01. That increase should ultimately bring the force back to full strength.

Last, but by no means least, is the contribution of our Guard and Reserve. We have been getting voluntary participation rates that equal those at the time of the Gulf War. This is remarkable. Our typical aircrew today spends somewhere around 110 days working with us. Those may not be full days. They may be weekend days. But however you compute the time these folks work with us, it is an enormous commitment. Our support folks spend 60 to 70 days a year with us. These are phenomenal numbers.

Again, EAF is designed to ease the burden for our traditional Guard and Reserve members by giving them stability and predictability in scheduling. They will know a year in advance and, more importantly, their employers will know a year in advance, when deployments are going to be. They will be able to work those commitments with their employer to ease the burden on businesses. This is a serious and significant problem, to which EAF provides at least the beginning of a serious solution.

Let me switch topics for a moment and talk about readiness.

We all know that our missiles and aircraft are on average 20 years old this year and that the age of our forces, except for fighter forces, does not turn around in any foreseeable budget year. The fighters turn around only if we get F-22 and Joint Strike Fighter. For all other forces, our fleet will age about two thirds of a year for every year from now on. As planes get older, like all equipment, they break more often and need more parts. Unfortunately, back in the mid-1990s, we had a bit of a parts holiday. But starting in late 1997, with the help of Congress, we have moved spare parts funding from a low of 80% of the requirement in 1996 and 1997 to almost 130% of the requirement in 1999. This is a concerted effort to get parts back on the shelf. We will level out our parts at about 100% of the requirement for the rest of the FYDP. At the same time, we have moved depot maintenance funding from a low of 80% to 85% of the requirement in the mid-1990s back up to 95% this year and we will level off at 95% for the rest of the FYDP. By the way, we have traditionally viewed 95% of the computed requirement as full funding in the depot world.

One of the things we continue to find up on Capitol Hill — and indeed within our own force — is impatience about the fact that parts are not showing up the instance money is applied. But there is a problem preventing instantaneous conversion of money into spares, and it is called a great economy. It is hard to turn dollars into parts at the moment because our suppliers — and their suppliers — are already working at close to full capacity. It can take up to 24 months, therefore, to turn money into parts. But thanks to Air Force Materiel Command we are making real progress in cutting these times.

As a result, our not-mission-capable rates for supply have more or less leveled out, not just in Kosovo, not just in Southwest Asia, not just overseas, but even in Air Combat Command, here at home. Thanks to the very hard work of AFMC our spares kits are better filled today than they were at the beginning of Kosovo. Back orders are down about 30 percent. These are tremendous statistics because we all know that the availability of spare parts is a critical part of quality of life. If you can’t fly the mission because the plane is broken, you are not able to do what you joined the Air Force to do. Also, if you are canning parts, you are working three times as many hours as you need to because a part is not on the shelf.

We have gotten ourselves into a serious readiness and quality of life problem by underfunding spares, and we are determined to fix this problem. It is one that we are slowly but surely getting our arms around. Again, both in Kosovo and in Southwest Asia, what we have seen is that when you take the parts supply that we have and couple it with experienced maintainers, we are getting mission capable rates for our heritage aircraft up to and even over 85%, and indeed for newer aircraft like C-17, well into the 90% bracket. So while we have much more to do, we are making some real progress.

Modernization is also an important part of this. You cannot keep putting duct tape on C-130s forever. Modernization is a critical priority. So while some say that Mike [Ryan] and I are "monomaniacally-focused" on the F-22 — I’ve even been accused of changing my first initial to “F-22” — we are in fact working a lot of other programs. The C-17 is our largest single procurement program and it is working very well. Apparently some haven’t noticed that we also put a billion dollars into the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle, EELV. CV-22 will also be coming on the scene just around the corner. And, we are funding replacements and upgrades for every one of our existing satellite systems. We are also fixing the cockpits of every one of our heritage aircraft. We are also bringing a whole new generation of weapons to bear, not only buying new CALCMs but bringing on JDAM, JSOW, WCMD, and JASSM, and developing small smart bombs and LOCAAS, just to name a few. Goodness knows what else Dick Paul has out there in his laboratories!

In addition to that, we are funding UAVs. We have fielded the Predator. We are going to continue to field and improve Predator. We will begin building a Global Hawk fleet in FY01. Finally, we have put money into a combat UAV.

So, I beg to differ with the newspapers and some in Congress. We are not mono-maniacally focused on the F-22. But I will tell you that the F-22 is a critical enabler for everything else we are doing. You cannot put modern assets like JSTARS near a battlefield if an enemy aircraft can come up and shoot it down. That is one fundamental fact we have to deal with. The F-22 is the only platform we have for the threats of the next 25-30 years. That is why it is critical. It enables not only ground forces and Navy forces, but also our own high-value ISR assets, which were the key to the victory in Kosovo.

In the infrastructure area, let me talk a little bit about BRAC. You know we still need another round of BRAC and I think ultimately we will get one. For now what we have to do is make sure we expertly complete the BRAC closures that have already been made. Last week I had an opportunity to give medals to the crew who did our depot competitions and who are working so hard to convert our Air Force from a five depot Air Force to a three depot Air Force. Some of the things they have done are truly remarkable. First, the depot competitions alone have directly saved $2.6 billion. That is a lot of money. We have cut capacity in our depots from 41.6 million hours annually to 25.4 million hours. The three remaining depots are already running at full capacity for the first time in human memory. For the first time in at least a decade, we have a surplus in the working capital funds rather than the deficit of up to around $500 million we’ve had for the last two years. That $500 million is now available to put against things like Global Hawk.

We have a lot more to do and clearly this is not anything other than a mixed news story. But as we talk about the challenges we face, we must also remember that we have made significant progress. We are making progress every day and certainly will be making not only progress but also history as AEFs one and two roll out in the next few weeks.

Finally, there are several cross cutting issues I want to talk about that are going to have to be addressed as we move to the 21^st century.

First, let me say how happy I am to learn that John Shaud is going to be with us to the 21^st century. I was afraid the Y2K bug was going to get him. We are happy to have John continue to be able to work with us. In addition to John Shaud — who I need to integrate very heavily into Air Force operations on Capitol Hill and elsewhere — we need to do integration of all of our systems and people. Mike Ryan and I call this Aerospace Integration. It is a vision. It is not today a reality but it is somewhere we absolutely must go.

If you look at what we did in Kosovo, we got some of the biggest bang for the buck by integrating our existing systems. For the first time ever, we were able to calculate the precise coordinates — latitude, longitude, and altitude — required by our satellite guided weapons for the targets that appeared in Predator’s video camera. To do this, we fused video off of Predator, shot through the sky to our satellites and then brought down to the ground in Italy, where some of our smartest computer people fused that video data with three dimensional terrain data coming off of national satellites. Once the coordinates were computed, they were sent back via satellite or radio link to the cockpits of aircraft that were flying over Kosovo and Serbia. All this processing and transmitting was typically done in less than a minute. That is what we can truly call “real-time targeting” and it is something we could not do even 12 months ago. The Predator targeting system shows the power of putting air, both manned and unmanned, and space together. That is the future.

Another great example. Our U-2s flying over Kosovo and Serbia sent their electro-optical and Signal Intelligence [SIGINT] take back to the United States. By reaching back to the United States, we are able to keep our very scarce linguist and photo interpreter resources sitting at home at NSA and Beale, where they have the specialized equipment required to turn raw intelligence into finished intelligence with speed and precision. By reaching back, we also keep more of our men and women home, away from the threat of terrorism and chemical and biological weapons. This is a very important development and, again, it comes alone from fusing lots of stovepipes: air, space, intelligence and lots of other folks from across the Air Force.

The other good news that came out of Kosovo is the fact that the men and women from the space and intelligence career fields who we are putting through our Weapons School are now some of the most sought-after people in our Air Operations Centers. As we work over the next few years to get our Air Operations Centers working like a weapon system, with proper training, certification, and management, it is clear to me that we will have to integrate many specialties into the command and control of aerospace forces.

But if we are to do that, we have to change the way we train, and one of the things we are working on very hard right now is doing precisely that. As I speak, we are starting the second full class of the Aerospace Basic Course down at Maxwell. We ran this experimentally about a year ago. The Aerospace Basic Course is intended to teach each one of our young officers, from every commissioning source, how manned and unmanned air systems and space systems are intended to work together and how we must create a systems of systems to bring aerospace power to the 21^st century.

At the same time, we are about to stand up Warrior Week as part of our basic military training. We have got to make sure that our young men and women come out of basic military training knowing how to put up tents, eat MREs, perform buddy care and first aid, and know how to protect themselves and how to protect their friends. We will be working into a week-long Warrior Week here over the next few months to make sure that all of our young enlisted men and women understand what it is like to be forward deployed and how to operate our systems that support forward deployments.

Finally, at the Air Force Academy this summer, the faculty has started something called Global Engagement, which is an effort to get each of the students, at the end of the first year, through an opportunity to build tents, to eat MREs, to work in an AOC, and to get some idea of what it takes to fuse air and space assets to run a modern campaign.

So our vision for the future is one of integration of both our systems and our people. We must use the best systems that we have available for each task, without regard to whether that system works in the air or in space, and fuse them into an integrated whole using the information systems that we are building today and tomorrow. In addition, we need to ensure that each of our men and women have an opportunity to understand how air and space systems fit together to do the mission we do here on earth today.

In conclusion, it is certainly a time of great challenge but it is also a time of great reward to be in the Air Force. Funding is tight, but it is up for the first time in 14 years. A number of new and rehabilitated systems are coming on line. The quality of the force is superb and is better than at any time in recent memory. And I think we have a real chance to build the 21^st century Air Force that we can all be proud of.