Space architecture and integration—challenges for the future - Gen. John P. Jumper - Transcript

Gen. John P. Jumper, Air Force chief of staff

Speech to the 19th National Space Symposium, Colorado Springs, Colo., April 10, 2003

Our thoughts today are with all those tens of thousands soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines we watch with baited breath, minute to minute, right now on live TV, hour after hour. It's amazing how addictive it is. It gives us all a sense, even if you've never had anything to do with people in uniform before, of how magnificent this military is that we are a part of, and I couldn't be more proud to be a part of them.

We haven't seen much about airmen, however, because the embedded reporters out there aren't allowed to be in many of the places where airmen are; and if they are, they aren't allowed to report it as generously as they are about other things that are going on. That's okay.

We started our work in the air component back in June of last year, and between June and March we actually flew about 4,000 sorties against the integrated air defense system in Iraq and against surface-to-air missiles and their command and control. By the time we got to March, we think that they were pretty much out of business. It's been a remarkable thing from the very first minutes of the war to see how the Iraqi air force threw their hands up and said "I give up." That's a good thing. They didn't want to get their butt kicked like they did last time. It's also because we managed to take out quite a bit of their capability before the main fight even started.

Today we have about 40,000 airmen among 300,000 or so total that are deployed throughout the AOR The Air Force has been in 36 locations around the area since the beginning of this. We've flown some 14,000 sorties on top of the 85,000 or so we've flown over Afghanistan, We've seen not only the combat portion of this but we've also seen the airlifters, and we've seen the tanker force. We have more than 200 tankers deployed. If there's a piece of ramp anywhere, there's a tanker sitting on it that enables this global power that we see daily.

And we look at the changes over the years. Think about it. When we were sitting where we were about 10 or 12 years ago, and you read the press reports about where we were going to be at the turn of the century, most of the consensus was by the turn of the century the United States would be a second rate economic power. The news was not very encouraging. And who had ever heard of a place like Kosovo? And who ever thought we'd be in a war in Iraq? And who could name one or even two of the '"stans?" We've now been to all those places. We can achieve victory in situations that nobody could have predicted.

Consider what's gone on just in the last couple of years since we've seen the kid on the horse, Staff Sergeant Lienhard, on the ground on a horse with a laptop computer bouncing off the saddle horn, and a tripod laser scope mounted on the butt of the horse. You stop and set that stuff up and you're getting the precise coordinates of targets and shooting them up with B52s at 39,000 feet in the sky, and the B-52s deliver a Global Positioning System-guided bomb within about 800 meters of Sergeant Lienhard's position. What do you call that? You call it close air support.

Curtis E. LeMay is rolling over in his grave at the thought of a B-52 from 39,000 feet doing close air support. We bought those airplanes to go halfway around the world to the old Soviet Union and drop nuclear weapons. Those kids in those B52s are used to taking off and not talking to anybody. Now they're gabbing up there with Sergeant Lienhard. What's that all about?

But the kids find out what they need to do and they put it together. The first night of the war saw the employment of cruise missiles and two F-117s. These kids flying those planes were waking up from a dead sleep. They were given their targets, and they took off into Iraq. It was an incredibly short amount of time from the time of wakeup from a dead sleep until the bomb impacted the target. And give a lot of credit to the Navy here too, because they were able to do the reprogramming of these cruise missiles in ways that during Desert Storm we couldn't even have thought about doing in the amount of time they did it.

And the other day a B-1 bomber sits out there in an orbit. And it's in an orbit because we put it there to deal with the emerging target problem. There's a B-1 that sits out there in an orbit for three or four hours. It waits to see what is happening. They get a call, saying "This is what we need you to go do." It's got three bomb bays worth of stuff and it's got something different in each bomb bay. You program it in there. Ten minutes from the time they get the word they've got bombs on the target.

We couldn't even have thought about that just a few years ago. In Desert Storm we had to load the Air Tasking Order on a Navy cargo plane every day and fly it down to the aircraft carrier because we had no means to electronically transmit it from the shore to the ships at sea. This was a pitiful testimony, back then, to jointness.