Toward new air and space horizons

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

So when we talk about putting command and control in the air and being able to read directly what the sensors are telling us in real time, there's a need to do that. We've got to be able to make sure we don't over-rely on technology when technology would not serve us well.

Another principal I think we have to pay a lot of attention to is understanding our industrial vulnerabilities. An interesting exercise is to take the price of the C-130B we paid in 1964, inflate it to 2005 dollars, the price comes out to be about $11.5 million a copy in 2005 dollars. Compare it to what we're paying for a C-130J today. The increase is over 500 percent. The capability is certainly better, but it doesn't carry 500 percent more and there's all sorts of reasons why this goes on but the purchasing power of the defense dollar today is only a fraction of what it has been in the past.

It makes us think about what sort of a national debate we have to have on this. I sat in hearings the other day and listened to a very long debate on shipbuilding. I don't hear the debate about airplane building and the aerospace industry. We need to have that debate because if I count them right I think we have more shipyards in this country than we do factories that produce airplanes. We need to think about that very carefully.

And where we need to go in this business of industrial vulnerabilities and the need to create new partnerships in industry and how we think about this is the concept of effects-based programming. We've talked about effects-based thinking, effects on the battlefield, but the big step is going to be when we get to effects-based programming. When we can take the effect we're trying to create and we can program and buy around it. When the buying of things that we do is not based on platforms, it is based on what we're trying to do and the effects we're trying to create.

We shift from worrying about platforms and then architecture to get to the point where the architecture is at least as important as the platforms, and when you think about the effect you put the platforms where you need them to create that effect.

Another example of this goes back to the space strategic goal, is the concept of near space. We talked about joint warfighting space, but what goes along with this networking is how well can you lever the orbital space and your flying platforms that fly in the air with something that can hover in about the 100,000 foot regime over a place in the sky, put two or three of those up there to create a network and be able to leverage your very expensive orbital platforms to create an effect like signals intelligence or imagery or GMTI.

It's my best example of bad effects-based thinking. Most of us guys who wear wings, we talk about zero to 65,000 feet, and above 65,000 feet there's not enough molecules to support combustion so we don't talk about it. The space guys don't start talking until 300 kilometers because below that you're not going to put anything in orbit so we just don't talk about it. Here's this no man's land. The problem with it is that the thing that exists there is not very pretty. As a matter of fact, it's ugly. It looks like a big dirigible, it's full of gas or something and it's hard to get off the ground, it's impossible to get back on the ground, and once you get it up it will stay there for months but there's nothing very attractive, you're not going to have an air show and attract a big crowd by having the near space air show at your local airbase. But that's where we've got to go. That's where the effect gets the greatest leverage. We're going to head in that direction as we consider this joint warfighting space, this near space idea, and we put this together with an effects-based programming idea that will get us where we need to go in creating the networks that we need to do our job.