Toward new air and space horizons

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

Next, as I've mentioned already, we need to leverage what we already have. Seventy percent of what we already have is going to be here 15 or 20 years from now, and the conventional threats don't go away.

It's interesting how we categorize things. The F/A-22 some say is built to dogfight old Soviet era airplanes. Well, yeah, it does that with one hand tied behind its back, but it also does a whole lot of other things. It gets to anything you want gotten to anywhere on the earth and nobody will know.

So there I was. Sitting on the runway at Tyndall (Air Force Base, Fla.). My wingman is a squadron commander, a bright young lieutenant colonel, BamBam Stapleton's his name. We take off in two F/A-22s. This is the old guy's third flight in the airplane. I went down there, I had ten days to devote to this. We went about four and a half days of academics and simulators. I said I'll do as much as I can do and no more. We're not going to push it.

The third ride. Take oft; go up to the area, accelerate to supercruise. Put the nose down 20 degrees, light the burners, accelerate to 1.3 mach, take that calibrated air speed, it's about 600, hold 600. Pull the nose up 20 degrees, nose high, going through 40,000 feet at 1.76 mach. We come out of burner and go just below 50,000 feet, stabilize at 1.76 mach military power.

On the scope before you is a picture even the old guy can understand. It says you've got a bunch of Eagles down there. You've got an SA-10 over here on the far horizon. The Eagles are trying to see you, but they can't. You see your wing man building his shoot list, you build your own shoot list. They can't see you, they can't see you, they can't see you. Let's let them go. Okay, we'll let them go. Go down, you approach the location of the SA-10 site, as you get close to that, and these particular training versions didn't have all of the air-to-ground software, but the newer versions will have air-to-ground software. As you get closer you get this envelope that tells you get the target in that envelope and let the bomb go.

You turn around. When you turn around, it says, I think they can see you now, they can see you, they can see you, they can see you. They can't see you any more.

By that time the Eagles are still trying to find you. You build your shoot list, shoot all the Eagles, light a Lucky, and go home.

Now this, by some, is called strategic overmatch. "It's too much. You don't need that much." And like Mr. Teets said, I think if we talk about the full array of being able to deal with the hardest things in the air, the hardest things on the ground, being able to win back contested airspace no matter where it exists--and remember, contested airspace isn't just above traditional Soviet-style linear warfare. It's above anything that goes on--urban warfare, terrorist activity, anything in the world where this airspace could be contested that you think you have to get to and you've got to get to it quickly. This is the thing that can do it every time as far as we can see into the future. As well as dealing with the thing that we still have to pay more attention to, and that's the threat of cruise missiles. Cruise missiles can come at you from 360 degrees. They do not obey the laws of Newtonian physics, and we have to start considering this a threat not only to deployed forces but in the Homeland Defense context as well.