Toward new air and space horizons

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

The same thing applies to networking. We will get the greatest leverage that we can possibly get by proceeding to network in a machine-to-machine way the platforms we already have. We can talk about the future, we can talk about 2020 and 2025, but in fact in 2020 and 2025, 70-75 percent of what own today will still be in the inventory.

We can talk about grand visions of brand new things, but the biggest leverage we're going to get is to network the things that we own today and doing it in ways that produce the effects that we need.

Another example is the gunship. We have to think of the future of the gunship and the vulnerability of the gunship and what is this going to look like in the future? Does a gunship have to look like a gunship? Or can it look like something else that produces the effect that the gunship produces today? Does it have to be a C-130 that's got heavy artillery poking out the side, or can we find another way to do it?

Electronic warfare. When we talk about electronic warfare the assumption is that the definition of electronic warfare in the air is the replacement for the E/A-6B. We've talked about this before. When in fact there are other alternatives that would give us persistent electronic warfare and the one that we put forward to be able to help do that is a concept for putting such capability on a B-52 without taking any of the other capability away from the B-52. And then joining that with the other aspects of information operations that might create the same effect without carrying anything on a platform. This is the way to think about focusing technology where it needs to be focused.

We were talking about another one today that I added to my list just today, the notion of layered security so that our coalition partners can join with us in our Air and Space Operation Centers during conflicts, during contingency operations. Again, a great deal of effort going on in this direction. It has been going on in this direction for a very long time, and we need to start seeing results on the layered security problem that we have in our Operations Center.

We need to be careful that we don't over-rely on technology. There's a lot of opposition out there to the E-10. As a matter of fact it's humorous to me to hear the reports I get back that as soon as Jumper is gone the E-10's going to go away. It's an interesting notion because we are not ready to give up yet on the need for line of sight command and control, the need for line of sight apertures and processors and sensors.

You can't deal with the latencies that you have to deal with in long reachback when you're dealing with sensors that depend on a real-time reading of sensor feedback. And if we didn't need line of sight then we would just tell the Army or Marine company commander to put his people ashore and he could just command them from back in Washington.

In fact, if you were worried about the reachback, the dependability of reachback in your communications relays, then you'd better have a line of sight option so that you have the reliability in hand to get that job done.