Thank you Tom (McKee) for that gracious introduction, it is a thrill to be here today to open what has become a window into the very heart and soul of our nation’s aerospace agenda.

… and good morning General Lyles, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen. It is a pleasure, and indeed an honor, to have the opportunity to be AFA’s last keynote speaker of this century.

The last of the century … think about it. At the beginning of this century a flying machine, much less aerospace power, was a crazy notion, an impossibility, a dream.

Although they had no way to anticipate it, what Wilbur and Orville Wright … a couple of bicycle mechanics … gave us back in 1903 was nothing less than the keys to our future.

… keys that opened the door for a generation of dreamers and thinkers like Billy Mitchell and Benny Foulois, Hap Arnold and Carl Spaatz, Claire Chennault and George Kenney … who handed on the keys to another generation of dreamers and thinkers like Curtis LeMay and Bill Momyer, John McConnell and John Ryan, and Charles Gabriel and Bill Creech … who handed on the keys to our generation of dreamers and thinkers … who now have the obligation to pass on the keys to the next generation …

… what a great century this has been!

So, as AFA’s last keynote speaker not only of this century but of this millennium, I’ve decided it’s appropriate to explore an important but often undervalued quadrant in our aerospace universe … keeping an eye on that sacred trust … passing on the keys to the next generation of airmen.

I consider this a sacred trust because, as Frederick the Great once wrote, “War is not an affair of chance. A great deal of knowledge, study, and meditation is necessary to conduct it well.” I couldn’t agree more, and I applaud the work of the Aerospace Education Foundation in their efforts to foster an aerospace culture. In the words of Louis Pasteur, “fortune favors the prepared mind.”

Fortune does … and airmen have come a long way since 1903. Yet, I think we still have a long way to go before we convincingly can say that we as airmen thoroughly understand war.

Having just completed what many have called “the most successful air campaign ever,” such a statement may seem a bit of heresy. So, let me explain.

I am convinced that the aerospace culture we’ve so carefully cultivated has not adequately prepared our airmen to conduct our wars of the future. Sun Tzu wrote that “speed is the essence of war.” The need to move and apply military force at a time and place of our choosing has been a consistent goal of America’s military leaders. Whether it’s providing relief supplies, employing Joint Direct Attack Munitions, or deploying the 82^nd Airborne, the advent of aerospace power accelerated the pace of military operations.

Joint Vision 2010 tells us that in the future “our forces will be able to sense dangers sooner … they will have increased awareness of the overall operational environment, including the situation of friendly forces, allowing them to make decisions more rapidly…” and they “… will have an enhanced ability to produce a range of desired effects by bringing together the proper mix of assets at the place and time most favorable to success.”

J. F. C. Fuller would have characterized this as “brain warfare,” or taking advantage of superior knowledge not accessible to an opponent.

And, whether we’re talking the high or low end of the conflict spectrum, our wars of the future will be driven by the time and space component of full spectrum dominance … and while we are on the right track … I’m not convinced we have arrived at our destination.

This conviction comes from experience. It comes from being ntimately involved in the conduct of war. It comes from being a student of war. It also comes from intuition.

Years ago, when we were lieutenants, there was ingrained in us a sense of how to employ the tools of our trade … we called this “air sense.” That situational awareness enabled us to think clearly about our aerospace universe … and it was cultivated at the unit level first as wingmen, then as flight leads.

Our “universe” was a two-ship or a four-ship formation. Our entire operational focus was a single line on an ATO … and years of practice helped us excel in this universe.

But, the situational awareness cultivated at the unit level can be crippling if airmen are not nurtured to think beyond a two-ship formation or a single line on an ATO.

Indeed, for airmen, understanding aerospace power means being able to grasp the very nuances of warfare at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels … having the mental agility to navigate freely between and amongst them, simultaneously … and then turning that knowledge into a solid campaign plan for the credible application of aerospace might. And in the not too distant future it will mean doing all of that on demand… real-time.

Imagine if you will the prospect that we face: the revolution in miniaturization is leading us to smaller smart bombs. With 200 or so of these small smart bombs on a B-2. On day one of a conflict, along with the 500 or so other traditional platforms… the JFACC sends in three B-2s to strike heavily defended, high priority targets. Suddenly the situation on the ground changes … and the JFACC has three B-2s ready to strike up to 600 targets … and the JFACC has to orchestrate and re-engineer the air effort … and he has less than two minutes to do it.

I have no doubt about the ability of American industry to provide the technological capacity for such a scenario. America’s aerospace industry has consistently produced solid, reliable weapon systems.

However, if we aren’t careful and deliberate with the treasure of talent we are currently raising we might find that when we need it most we may lack the cadre of airmen who have the training and the experience to operate in such an intense, dynamic environment…punctuated by fog and friction.

Napoléon offered us a keen insight into mastering the fog and friction of war. He said, “If I always appear prepared, it is because before entering an undertaking, I have meditated … and have foreseen what may occur. It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly what I should do in unexpected circumstances… it is thought and preparation.” Let me highlight what I consider the moral of his wisdom …it is not genius … it is preparation that wins in war.

This should be what you take away today … it is our responsibility to nurture in the next generation of airmen the ability to think and prepare for all dimensions of warfare, especially that brand of warfare that is punctuated by increased velocity, energy, and information.

From an airman’s perspective this future brand of warfare didn’t just happen … it evolved … but most noticeably since the Vietnam War.

The acceleration of warfare as we know it can be traced to the introduction of the precision guided munition. Some may argue it was the introduction of the jet or the satellite or some other technical innovation ... but until the PGM came along we were fighting with the same weapons, the same tactics, and the same relative accuracy as we had in World War I, World War II, and Korea.

The introduction of Precision Guided Munitions changed the equation. Let’s look at an example.

Many historians and military analysts consider the destruction of the Paul Doumer Bridge as a coming of age for the PGM ... but the Paul Doumer Bridge was the longest and most important bridge in North Vietnam … its very size made it a relatively easy target even for dumb bombs.

Much harder to bring down was the smaller and more sturdy Dragon’s Jaw Bridge at Than Hoa. The Dragon’s Jaw was struck repeatedly between 1965 and ‘68 without success. In 1965 alone, the Air Force and the Navy sent more than 800 sorties against the Dragon’s Jaw and lost 11 aircraft in the process.

In 1972, during Linebacker, Air Force F-4s dropped the Dragon’s Jaw Bridge with 24 laser guided bombs. Dropping the bridge was a watershed event, but it was just one line in an ATO … and during Vietnam, regardless of where you sat in the food chain, it was tough to move beyond that one line mentality ... but the PGM made moving beyond the one line mentality inevitable … and that is why I give so much credit to the introduction of the PGM.

We now know that Vietnam in general and the PGM, specifically… triggered a revolution in how airmen think about and prepare for war ... and during what many consider DoD’s dark years between 1973 and ‘81 the Air Force was not asleep.

During that time, the Air Force was blessed with a string of brilliant leaders …General’s John Ryan, George Brown, David Jones, and Lew Allen … who dared to dream and to think about the promise of aerospace power.

They were leaders who recognized the significance of the PGM, the technology that spawned it, and the industry that produced it. As a result, they became catalysts for vigorous research and development efforts and improved doctrine. More significantly, they enabled visionaries like Generals Bill Creech and Charles Gabriel to think outside the traditional one-dimensional airpower box.

General Creech recognized that if airmen and soldiers didn’t find some doctrinal common ground we would doom ourselves to a Vietnam repeat. Working with Army General Donn Starry, then Commander at TRADOC, he became an advocate for AirLand Battle Doctrine. AirLand Battle was not Air Force doctrine, it was Army doctrine. Nevertheless, it was a recipe for a Joint campaign … and we agreed in principle to support it … and that was the key.

Looking back … AirLand Battle was a first step toward what we now call Joint doctrine. More importantly, we who embrace Joint warfare and Joint doctrine know that AirLand Battle Doctrine for all its strengths and weaknesses helped airmen bridge the intellectual divide between the one line mentality and the modern notion of a military campaign.

At the same time, General Gabriel saw great promise in precision munitions, and he envisioned the marriage of precision munitions with all combat platforms. Under his leadership, the Air Force developed a long-range plan that pushed the development, testing, acquisition, and fielding of an entire family of precision and near precision weapons. General Gabriel also envisioned the need for pushing the Air Force toward better cooperation with the Army … and toward a better working relationship at the lowest levels between airmen and soldiers. His 31 Initiatives remains a model of the cooperative efforts of the era.

We owe a great deal to General Creech and General Gabriel for pouring the foundation and drafting the blue prints for what has become the world’s premier aerospace force … these giants of aerospace power helped us take some enormous steps toward our future.

Those visionary giant steps came to fruition during Operation DESERT STORM in Iraq.

For the first time, U.S. airmen were empowered to choreograph an independent air campaign. Of even greater importance, they were told they could build the air campaign with a whole host of capabilities previously unfamiliar or unknown to them … including assets such as space, command and control, stealth, cruise missiles, advanced ISR, and precision munitions. In turn, those airmen were empowered to think on the fly, incorporating theories considered on the leading edge of innovation, such as effects-based warfare, nodal analysis, and concentric rings.

But of all the tools available to airmen, the Gulf War demonstrated how precision weapons had dramatically transformed the traditional notion of running a military campaign. On the opening night of the war, aircraft equipped with PGM’s, and cruise missiles directed against air defense and command and control facilities, opened up Iraq for conventional attackers.

In previous conflicts non-precision interdiction efforts, such as the attack against the Dragon’s Jaw Bridge in Viet Nam, took hundreds of sorties to damage a bridge … and its destruction was a roll of the dice … in the Gulf War precision weapons quickly destroyed 41 of 54 key Iraqi bridges, as well as 31 hastily constructed pontoon bridges.

Interestingly, postwar analysis discovered only 9 percent of the tonnage expended on Iraqi forces by American airmen were precision munitions …nevertheless their near single-bomb-per-target destruction capability demonstrated an unprecedented if not a revolutionary development in aerial warfare.

Yet, even in DESERT STORM airmen were hampered by an old nemesis … that one ATO line mentality. Although airmen orchestrated the air campaign,… technical and doctrinal shortcomings marred the experience. Most disconcerting was how information was stove piped.

For instance, although space and C4ISR capabilities played pivotal roles throughout the war, many airmen could not gain comprehensive intel. Unfortunately, this was largely due to our own doing having kept these capabilities in the black world far longer than they needed to be.

Still, in Operation DESERT STORM we saw the pace of war had accelerated dramatically … and maybe if we’d had a glance at the future of war …

A future we’ve seen unfold over the past eight years as other opportunities to employ aerospace power would have surfaced.

As a prelude to Kosovo, Deliberate Force and Bosnia proved invaluable … because our current Chief, General Ryan, who at the time was the JFACC, was able to develop and integrate key warfighting capabilities to fuze information in a first-of-its-kind Combined Air Operations Center ... placing real-time knowledge … where it was needed most … with the JFACC and his aircrews. More importantly, it signaled that airmen needed to be prepared for even faster and more dynamic military operations. This crystallized when Operation ALLIED FORCE began, when we witnessed yet another evolutionary advance in aerospace power. This time we can place the marker on that first Joint Direct Attack Munition ... That first JDAM, dropped by an Air Force B-2, was in microcosm a synthesis of what Operation ALLIED FORCE was at the macro level.

To understand the significance of the event, let’s look at what our folks planning the Kosovo military campaign faced.

At the strategic level, planners faced the complexities of alliance warfare … with decision-making that was at once deliberate and sudden,… and that was influenced by political and military limitations,… produced by 19 different opinions, which marched toward consensus. With this kind of chemistry at play, planners found themselves with a classic puzzle … instinctively wanting to inflict strategic paralysis while political and military necessity dictated operating under the umbrella of gradual escalation.

These complexities at the strategic level clearly impacted how things happened at the operational level. The development of a military campaign largely emphasizing an air equation challenged military professionals who grew up thinking of aerospace power purely as an enabling force ... and there were many pundits who openly doubted aerospace power could be a conduit for success.

Undaunted, the professionals who planned and executed aerospace operations took aim at the core of Milosevic’s power … and did a magnificent job … and I’d like to say it was flawless, but fog and friction are a reality in war … and there was some fog and friction. Such imperfections in the aerospace war played out at the tactical level. Although the air war was stunning by any measure there were plenty of opportunities for error … driven by events at the strategic and operational levels. For example, on at least one occasion JDAMs had to be withheld because there was insufficient time for planners to react to a sudden shift in events on the ground.

While such fog and friction will always be with us, we must keep our focus on the certain transition to wars of the future … and imagine if it had been a B-2 with 200 weapons rather than 16 … that had to be diverted … because there wasn’t sufficient time to react to change.

In future conflicts we must be prepared for the inevitability of immediate change … and we must be ready to react.

Fortunately, with Operation ALLIED FORCE we’ve begun to see airmen break from the one ATO line mind-set.

In the intense, high velocity military operations we should expect in our future, pre-planning will be an essential and very time consuming process that will pay huge dividends during the two minutes the JFACC will have to re-target those B-2’s and their 600 weapons.

So, now that we’ve looked at the evolution of the wars of the future, what can we do to ensure we are adequately prepared to face it?

Well, clearly we need the full range of aerospace systems tied together to react instantaneously … the system of systems must become a reality, and the sooner the better … but as I mentioned earlier, I’m not worried about the technical component of the issue. What America’s aerospace industry made possible for us in DESERT STORM, ALLIED FORCE, and everything in between was nothing short of miraculous, and I am certain our partnership will continue to serve America’s defense needs. So I’m not worried about that aspect of the equation.

What we really need to face the challenges of the wars of the future is a cadre of people trained and dedicated to understanding and integrating aerospace power into military campaigns ... airmen who embody the expression, “flexibility is the key to airpower.”

These must be airmen who have mastered the art of campaign planning

… airmen who not only think beyond the one line in the ATO

… but who live the ATO

… and can turn it from a 24-hour time capsule into a living, breathing aerospace process

… a process that instantaneously meets the dynamic needs of the Joint Force Commander.

This may by pure necessity take the form of a standing Joint Task Force of dedicated planners with dedicated responsibilities who could, as Napoléon suggested, think and prepare for war. It would include airmen who combine the mental training of the School of Advanced Airpower Studies … with the in depth technical training of the Air Force Weapon School. They would be dedicated operational level thinkers ... they would be campaign planners. And, it is incumbent upon us to ensure we don’t stifle their flexibility.

When we were lieutenants, and we said, “flexibility is the key to airpower,” what we really meant was… “we have no doctrine,” or at least none that was worth a lick.

Now that we’ve published aerospace doctrine, tested in battle, we must avoid the temptation to hold it so close that doctrine stifles the very flexibility that has become our trademark and will be the key to conquering the unknowns of the wars of the future … … remembering, as Clausewitz so wisely wrote, “all action in war is directed on probable, not certain, results … there are cases in which the greatest daring is the greatest wisdom.”

It is our duty to ensure we are doing all that we can to nurture and grow the next generation of airmen … for as Air Marshal Sir John Slessor wrote, the airman “is much more likely to do the right thing if he really understands why he is doing it, and what will probably happen if he does something else.” Having been in the trenches, we all know that this is our responsibility … this is our trust.

So, as we transition to the next century, indeed the next millennium, we do so with great pride in knowing that for aerospace power … this was a great century.

I challenge each of you here today to work to ensure the men and women of America’s aerospace force are prepared for future conflict and I am convinced the talent, drive, and dedication are there ... and they will rise to the occasion if we do our part … giving them the freedom to excel … passing on the keys to the future.

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