Innovative airmen: celebrating centennial of flight - Air Force chief of staff John P. Jumper - Transcript

Air Force Speeches, April 24, 2003

We broke other barriers too, as you all recall, with the Tuskegee Airmen and our first African-American squadrons that flew P-51s that escorted the bombers, and we broke ground in racial integration in our United States military in the years that followed.

Of course the more interesting chapters followed in the '50s and the '60s as the Cold War came onto us and we conquered the challenges of supersonic flight. Things like air-to-air refueling became commonplace. The large airplanes like the B-29 and the B-36, we'll remember the B-45, the medium bomber called the Tornado, the Boeing B-47, the Martin B-57 Canberra. Remember the B-58 Hustler, what a great airplane. The Douglas B-66 which we flew on into Vietnam and beyond. And the Boeing B-50 Super Fortress. And of course the venerable B-52 which we use still today.

The numbers were overwhelming. We built more than 2,500 B-29s; more than 380 B-36s; 2,000 B-47s; 750 B-52s; 116 B58s; and so on and so forth. During the years of the Cold War the total procurement was almost 7,000 bombers that we had bought between the end of World War II and during the period of the Cold War. Many of those on nuclear alert ready to go in 15 minutes time.

During that time we also saw the advent of precision-guided bombs. Actually in Vietnam, after we had spent many years trying to drop the bridges outside Hanoi with F-105s and F-4s and dumb bombs, we lost 15 or more F-105s plus other kinds of airplanes trying to drop those bridges. We got the 9-Pave-Knife laser designator pods over there during Linebacker II, and on the first sortie with four airplanes we were able to drop the bridge, two spans of the bridge with four airplanes and just a few bombs. It marked the beginning of new era.

Along that time at the end of the Vietnam War and on into the late '70s we began to deal with stealth technology and to upgrade our missile technology and to keep the technology moving and things just getting better.

So where are we now? Technology is certainly an enabler, but from the days in World War II where we needed more than 9,000 bombs to assure that one target was hit, we can now attack 24 targets with a single aircraft on a single sortie.

Our global positioning system that guides our bombs, of course was the big news during the Kosovo operation and on into Afghanistan and into the recent engagement with Iraq, but only nine percent of the bombs we dropped actually in Desert Storm were precision bombs. That went up to 67 percent in Afghanistan and against the current conflict in Iraq we're at about 76.5 percent precision weapons. That means less collateral damage of course, and less wasted effort. It means fewer sorties, less exposure to get the same job done.

Of course, our stealth technology is preserving our advantage of surprise and our unmanned air vehicles such as the Predator is saving lives. I believe we have some pictures of the Predator up here to show, and some of the work that it's able to do. This is a picture of a satellite dish that we hit. There was a portable TV satellite dish that was broadcasting Iraqi TV that we were trying to take out. This is a Hellfire missile shot from a Predator UAV that hit this. This radar antenna was in the vicinity of the Grand Mosque, and about 200 feet to the right if you look closely you can see the CNN dish, so we would have been in big trouble if we had hit that thing. But this is an idea of what a small warhead, a small 40-pound warhead on a Hellfire missile shot from a Predator, a remotely piloted vehicle, can do against a very precise target.