Toward new air and space horizons

Air Force Speeches, Feb 19, 2005 by John P. Jumper

Remarks to the 2005 Air Force Association Air Warfare Symposium, Feb. 18, 2005

It is a pleasure to be here, and thanks "Pete-O" (retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Donald L. Peterson, AFA executive director) and Pat (Condon, AFA chairman) and the leadership of the Air Force Association who do such a marvelous job every year of sponsoring this event.

I'd also like to take a moment to share Pete Teets' (Acting Secretary of the Air Force) recognition of our former four-star leadership in this audience and to thank them for having built the world's greatest Air Force that they have turned over to us. Their leadership has been instrumental in the many successes we enjoy around the world today. Thank you all very much.

I'd also like to acknowledge Mr. Pete Teets. As was said earlier, he's got a separate closet for all his hats. He is the busiest man in the Pentagon between his job running the NRO (National Reconnaissance Office) and his duties as the Acting Secretary of the Air Force, as the senior contracting official, and on and on and on. He is the busiest guy I know. And he's joined by a very capable group of civilian leaders that we have had in the Air Force that have stayed with us the entire four years of President Bush's first administration. These people have been absolutely superb in their leadership, their heart is with the Air Force day and night. Mr. Nelson Gibbs (Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Installations, Environment and Logistics) said farewell to us at CORONA earlier on this week, and said for him in all of his experience this has been a life-changing event for him to be a part of the United States Air Force and be with the Airmen that he has been able to see out there every day.

So I'd like to just take a second and acknowledge the great leadership we have in our civilian leadership in the United States Air Force.

Confident and strong are good words that Pete Teets used and I think that's what we are. I'm going to talk just a little bit about some vectors I think we need to keep in mind for the future, sort of strategic level goals we need to keep in mind to get our Air Force where it needs to be.

It is based on the fundamental fact that air and space will be contested in the future. There are those who think it will not. There are those who think that because Saddam Hussein buried his airplanes in the sand that today the need for air superiority is over and that we don't need necessarily to put any more effort into dominating the skies.

That is wrong. I think that we will look forward to the time as we see it happening today, that modern day fighters being built today, being delivered today; modern day surface-to-air systems being delivered today, being built today, and challenges to our space connectivity emerge in ways that have to be confronted so that we can do our job as the United States Air Force to command and dominate the global commons of air and space and cyber.

Everything that we do enables other operations. You can't have sea basing, you can't bring people ashore, you can't do any of it if you're under the threat of attack from air or your networks are being threatened through space.

So let me go over quickly these eight sort of strategic goals that I think are necessary for the future. The first one we've all seen is, I call agility.

We've seen in the height of Operation Iraqi Freedom and the operations we've seen around the world over the last ten years, we've seen the need for us to be able to get anywhere we need to go, to get there quickly and to be able to persist there is a growing reality of our U. S. Air Force. At the height of Operation Iraqi Freedom we had more than 36 bases open. Today we still have 14 bases open.

There are those who think that access is going to be a problem in the future, and we point out the fact that when sovereignty issues or national values are threatened, access has rarely been a problem.

Our Air Expeditionary Force, as Pete Teets said, we have 30,000 Airmen deployed today all around the world. We have certainly over 200 sorties a day being flown in Afghanistan and Iraq, but we have countless other mobility sorties in the air bridges that are set up around the world, keeping our supplies and our people flowing to various places where the nation needs us to be.

The second strategic goal I want to keep in mind for our future is the goal of operationalizing space. We've talked about this many times before.

I used to talk about space guys much differently than I talk about them today. We used to talk about the guy with the thick glasses that lived in the basement and had no life. I didn't know where he was. I knew he probably belonged to the NRO, he lived somewhere that nobody knew, and he had my picture that I needed as the fighter pilot trying to hit a target. Lance Lord (Gen. Lance W. Lord, Commander, Air Force Space Command) a took offense at that. He got eye surgery. He can bench press 300 pounds now, and he gets 100 on his PT test, so he's no longer the guy that has no life. He has a life and he doesn't wear glasses any more.