Toward new air and space horizons

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

Next, a principal I call "we need to grow jointness from within." My good friend Chuck Link (retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Charles D. Link) is very articulate on this subject. One of the interesting aspects of Goldwater/Nichols (Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986) is that it assumes that jointness is external to the services and that somehow someone who is from within a service must be infused with jointness because they're unable to create it on their own. I think that we need to overcome that and we need to be able to demonstrate in all the services that true jointness can really only come from within as we figure out among ourselves how to create effects on the battlefield in multiple ways.

The service chiefs today are discussing a series of Centers of Excellence where we would put together our command and control, our UAV, our battlefield Airmen, close air support. Centers of Excellence where we develop those concepts and procedures together instead of developing separately and then meeting once a year to fight about which one's the best. This is something that we will continue to work on and I think will enable us to bring true jointness along with a few other concepts, the concept of interdependencies. We see today the United States Army is abandoning a great deal of its artillery and its air-based defense, depending on joint fires to be available to deal with those aspects of the battlefield.

Next we need to be able to focus technology directly on solutions and solutions to our most difficult problems. We have for a long time said that our most difficult problem is hitting moving targets in and under the weather, I don't think I've stood before you one year since I've been the Chief and not mentioned the fact that we still need to be able to hit moving targets in and under the weather.

Well, we just demonstrated--Dave Deptula (Maj. Gen. David A. Deptula, Director of Air and Space Operations, Headquarters Pacific Air Forces) and Paul Hester (Gen. Paul V. Hester, Commander, Pacific Air Forces) over in the Pacific. Dave was running the program--just demonstrated the ability to hit moving ships and boats on the water at significant speeds. The capability is there now and we have to be able now to turn that into something that we put out into the field, make reliable, sustain it and continue to make it work.

The fact that we do this rapidly in a demonstration, proves success, and then want to acquire it rapidly and put it in the field is not the way we normally do things, so the system resists it. We find those, just like my story that everyone in the room has heard me tell about the Predator, that the minute you turn your back on it they will take the laser designator off the Predator, they will take the Hellfire off the Predator. The system will not want to do anything that's not in the program.

We can do better than that, and all of us have to work together to make sure that we focus this kind of success and this kind of technology on the places that it is needed the most.