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Air and space dominance
Air Force Speeches, Jan 28, 2005 by John P. Jumper
Remarks to the Lexington Institute, Washington, Jan. 28, 2005
Good morning, everybody. It is a pleasure to be here. I've got 15 minutes in which to deliver what would normally be an eight hour, all-day seminar. So I will get right to it.
Of course the thing that's on everybody's mind is F/A-22 as we look forward to that program, what might happen to that program. We'll be laying all of the arguments for the F/A-22 out in the Quadrennial Defense Review and be able to put the analysis back into our consideration of that program.
Two weeks ago I was down at Tyndall Air Force Base (Fla.) and I got checked out in the airplane so I'll be able to sit before Congress this year and talk about it in first-hand terms.
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When I went down there, of course, I'm an old guy. I do have about 5,000 hours of flying time, but I don't get to go fly the fighters as often as I'd like to. I had four days of academics and simulator and I told them we'll go as far as we can in the time that I have to fly three sorties in the airplane. On the third sortie we took off, we were not using afterburner, 1.7 Mach. We were contested by about eight F-15s. They never saw us. We bombed the SA-10, they never shot us. We came back out, the F-15s never saw us on the way out, and we were able to do this mission on the third sortie.
If there's going to be contested airspace like that out there in the future somewhere we need to consider whether we need this sort of capability or not, and how much of it we need. Those are legitimate questions. We have been asked those questions many times before during this program and we will stand the scrutiny of answering them again. We don't mind being asked those questions.
We look at the world as it's arrayed out there today. Anything we would have to do in contested airspace including fighting urban wars or any sort of business we have to do in or through contested airspace, we better be able to get the access to that airspace. If we're going to have an Army that is networked and on the ground, distributed around the battlespace, we better have the means to be able to resupply that Army on the ground that's engaged. To resupply them, we'll require corridors that have to remain open for us to put C-17s through. We will have to invent things like precision air drop and be able to air drop to our Soldiers and Marines on the ground with the same precision we deliver bombs. And we'll have to be able to get to that soldier or marine or special operator perhaps deep in enemy territory or under contested airspace and we'll have to be able to do that reliably.
So those who continue to insist that the F/A-22 is all about dogfighting obsolete Soviet airplanes are just flat wrong. It's about being able to dominate the airspace and gain access to airspace around the world wherever it might be. And we owe it to ourselves to put the array of airplanes that we're spending money on today on the table and ask which ones can do that mission and do it reliably, and then how much we need to balance that investment between and among different kinds of platforms. That's exactly what will happen in the Quadrennial Defense Review.
The Air Force is banking on the fact that we will be able to bring on these modern kinds of aircraft that are very much more capable than the current inventory. Our plan had us asking for about 381 F/A-22s and we'll replace about 800 legacy aircraft. Similar numbers for the F-35. We're prepared for the Air Force to get smaller with that increased capability. That's part of the plan in the program we continue to plan to argue for our Air Force.
There are other things out there that we think are extremely leveraging. One of them is the E-10. The battle of ideas that goes on between how you integrate and how you go about bringing legacy systems together is an interesting debate. What we think is that systems like the E-10 are the systems that you can put up there in a battle management situation. It happens to have a very capable sensor on it and is able to use line of sight communications to be able to manage whatever is going on the ground or in the air, be able to integrate networks as they come together, and be able to in real time in the line of sight communications be able to manage those events.
I get a lot of comments about the E-10. We just put the sensor on there and then just reached back to do all the battle management stuff. The problem is it's the same vulnerabilities that our Marines and Soldiers on the ground tend to avoid. They don't put their regimental commander back in Washington, D.C. while they put the troops ashore. Why? Because when you're in a close fight, close line of sight communications is very important. It's the same thing for any sort of battle management. You need to have the reliability of line of sight to be able to manage that fight. That's what we will continue to try to argue for, and the E-10, of course, gives you some other capabilities that are unique to the ground moving target environment and when networked with things like the space-based radar, I think will give leverage to our commanders and bring the attributes of space-based radar, operationalize it and put it in the hands of commanders on the ground. This is a bit of a different way of looking at our space capabilities, and when you combine the space-based radar with something like the E-10 and something like the concept of near space.
