Toward new air and space horizons

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

And as Pete Teets says, this is not an argument about the capability, it's about how much of this you need. And as we lay this out in the Quadrennial Defense Review we will make this case for F/A-22s.

We also have to think about this capability in the context of the new Army Concept of Operations that are being developed. The United States Army and their brigade combat team concepts, they put forces around the battlespace. When these forces are arrayed around the battlespace they can do a number of things, but if they're engaged in conflict against any sort of an enemy, the ammunition expenditure, the food and supplies that are needed to keep that maneuver unit going are going to be substantial. Corridors are going to have to be kept open. When they get in trouble, people are going to have to get back to them quickly. This is the kind of capability again, that the F/A-22 excels in all of those things.

We need to think about how we deal with unmanned air vehicles. Again, something we've talked about before, in the '06 budget the United States Air Force was able to take the lead in the development of the JUCAS, and as we look forward to how we might do this one of the options that is before us is to first of all leverage all of the great work that's been done by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). To be able to stand together with the United States Navy and get the development effort, get the basic things right. Develop the engines, the landing gear, the avionics, the architecture, the control laws, the things that you need to put these things together. But perhaps the biggest shape is the variable depending on what the mission might be. Whether it's an ISR mission or a mission with conventional munitions or both.

People ask me all the time, do you guys feel your job is threatened? No. Because the things this is going to do are going to be things you can't do in a conventional airplane. You can't stay airborne in a conventional fighter for 24 or 30 hours. But in order to make this work we're going to have to make it do things that conventional airplanes do like air refuel. We're going to have to make it do things that make it worthwhile to invest all this money in making an unmanned vehicle that can air refuel, it's got to be able to carry a lot of weapons, and it can be in direct contact with our battlefield Airmen on the ground that dials up the kind of weapon that he or she needs to be delivered, hits enter, and watch that weapon be delivered using the organizing principle we like to use called one time of flight.

I get a lot of questions about why don't you just stand off with standoff cruise missiles from a ship or an airplane and shoot those things from hundreds of miles away? You could do that for a fixed target, but consider the time of flight. Time of flight is measured in hours when you're doing that. Versus the thing that is orbiting stealthily overhead that is 35,000 feet in the air with the rule of gravity that says it will drop 1,000 feet per second. You're never more than about 30 or 40 seconds away from having a weapon on the target. The principle of one time of flight is a principle that we need to make sure we keep track of.