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A strategic look forward

Air Force Speeches, March 19, 2007

Secretary of the Air Force Michael W. Wynne

Remarks to the 2007 Air Force Defense Strategy Seminar Series, Washington, D.C., March 19, 2007

Thank you very much Congressman (John) Boozman, and thank you very much for hosting us today and for what you do for our Air Force every day from the great state of Arkansas. And not only that, but now we know your contributions to the history of football. We are tremendously appreciative of that aspect because we hope Joe Gibbs goes on to restore our nation's capital to a position of prominence. And every time I go to the football meetings I see Fred Smith and I see Dan Snyder and Joe Gibbs, that's kind of the general message that everyone gives him.

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I will tell you I am excited to be here, and kick off the strategic discussions. I think it's an imperative that we communicate amongst ourselves, and to all of you who are interested in the national capital region, it's really a distinct pleasure to be here. I will tell you today is just another great day to be affiliated with the United States Air Force, and I really mean that, in consideration of all that we do, all that goes on, and in great deference to my friend Denny Reimer, who knows that my roots are in the Army, and recognizes 'How did I get out of there and escape?'

Well, I'll tell you my father was also over 20 years in the U.S. Air Force, one of the founding members, a 1940 graduate of West Point, and converted to the Air Force along with many others as a radar and then missile officer. He ended up going down, and essentially founding, as a space pioneer, the Cape Canaveral complex. And I got to grow up watching rockets fly. And it became kind of an inspiration to me to follow on in that. That doesn't mean that my time at West Point has allowed me to forget about roots in the Army. It didn't, and, in fact, even today we are trying hard to establish greater and greater connectivity with the ground force commanders to make sure that we can allow them the full range of ability to defeat and conquer the enemy.

In fact, what we are struggling with, and trying to foster, is to make sure that we as an Air Force take as a mission to set the strategic, and then tactical conditions for victory. Here it's been a while, but the strategic conditions for victory were set early on by allowing us total freedom of skies, total freedom of operation in the skies, and even some of the things we are arguing with our colleagues about in the area of unmanned aerial vehicles, specifically because we have unopposed operations in the skies over Iraq and over Afghanistan. Setting the tactical conditions for a fight, to win, is another area where we are really pushing a lot of technology. We have now connections through the Rover platform, which is a computer-based laptop--a hard case, to all of our joint tactical air controllers and many of the ground force commanders, including our convoy operators. Connections with every fighter that goes into country, every bomber, many of the ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) assets, as well as our Predator, Shadow, and Global Hawk contributors, so that the ground force commander can, essentially, get an Airman's view of his battlefield, and begin to operate on it. As we used to do as cadets, we used to be able to see all of the battlefield because we would have a map. The map, of course, would be 1:200,000, 1:50,000, 1:25,000. Hardly ever would you see it in real time, and hardly ever would you get an opportunity to manage it in real time.

So one of the things we did last year was actually to take a Rover platform up to the Service Academies, both West Point and the Air Force Academy, to make sure that incoming junior officers were very much aware of what vertical situational awareness was, and what spherical situation was. When I graduated, we used to worry very much about "three-sixty." We would watch in front of us, beside us, and behind us to make sure there were no bad guys in the area. We didn't much think about overhead assets because we had no connectivity to them. Now, a ground force commander can think spherically and see what the overhead assets can see and therefore get a vertical view. And so not only does he have to think 360, but also, now, spherically.

Air dominance is something that I think we earned for the last 50 years and we intend to retain for the next 50 years. It has been now 53 years since one of America's Soldiers got strafed. We intend to keep that for another 53 years. We are investing very heavily in fifth-generation fighters to make sure we can retain that audacious remark. I say audacious because it took us a lot of years to overcome the investments that others were making and finally assert American air dominance in the skies where we fight.

The aspect of American air that we are looking at now is the soul of an Air Force, which is range and payload. And trying to think strategically about that we are, and should retain, strategic shield, and the strategic sword that (General) Curtis Lemay sort of set as our goal in the early 1950s, (General)Nathan Twining, some of our early people. One of the neat things about the Air Force is that we can remember our roots. We can look back and we know the people. I mean we may not know personally the people. But we know people who knew the people. Many of the authors on the history of the Air Force are contemporaries, which allows us now to actually reach back and actually read some of the contemporary writings that happened at the time. And we see where the notion of a strategic shield was written, in tankers and bombers in the 1950s. And what we are struggling with now is to recreate that requirement, that need, and of course those assets to make sure that we retain the strategic shield and deterrence for the next 50 years or SO.

A strategic look forward

Air Force Speeches, March 19, 2007

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