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A strategic look forward
Air Force Speeches, March 19, 2007
Last year in our testimony we had a young gal who had not yet turned 21, who had already been in Afghanistan and Iraq on three four-month rotations as a security forces person. She was ready to go back for her fourth time. She was a gun-trucker. She had been in 30 active ambushes as a gun-trucker, and she stood up as tall and as proud as she could, and she wasn't that tall. We figured she must've had an orange crate in the back of the Humvee. To do that--and I would tell you--her courage and her desire to continuously serve her fellow Americans was daunting. But we are husbanding our resources. We are looking forward into a different future. And we're thinking to ourselves: we're investing very heavily in higher productivity. We're investing heavily in high reliability, and far more capable aircraft.
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Therefore we're going to restructure our forces and restructure our headquarters, organize for warfighting, much like our fellows did in the AEF rotation, and get ourselves ready to fight a longer war. In 1993 who knew that we would still be in Southwest Asia in 2007? And now that its 2007, how far can we see into the future for the Air Force to be there? And I'm beginning to mention to members of Congress across the spectrum that no matter how this engagement begins to wind down and end, and how much time it takes, my guess is that it will move from green to light green and blue before it fades to black. We have an Air Warfare Center now in the Gulf, for which we invite members of the air forces from the entire Gulf emirates and around the Gulf region, including Pakistan and India, because we do feel like we need to manage the international partnerships that we have over there in a very forthright and upbeat way. And not only that, but they may well be future coalition partners of ours, and we'd like to make sure that they understand the American way of war.
We're increasing productivity through a program called Air Force Smart Operations 21. We're reducing expenses across the board, investigating alternative fuels wherever we can, looking at ways to get our bases more and more, if you will, buying alternative energy, or getting off the grid, but essentially being able to get predictive capability in our fuel expenses in the future. We actually have an experiment now going on in Hawaii that asks the question that many airlines have asked themselves over the years: How do I get fuel cost down while still maintaining mission? We have great support from all of our airline colleagues, United, American, Continental, and Southwest, to try to make sure that we do this. We're also flying alternative fuels, mainly Fischer-Tropsch fuel out with the B-52. We just went through cold-testing up in Minot. We're being followed on that by our airline colleagues as you might imagine, members of the FAA (Federal Aviation Association). We just had a wonderful energy forum. I hope some of you got a chance to go there.
Currently there are 10,000 extra Airmen who have retrained from their Air Force specialties to assist our overstressed Army and Marine Corps in convoy duty, explosive ordnance demolition, guarding prisoners, and various other taskings on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq. We hope that the Army reset includes sufficient Soldiers for these missions that they've been using our Airmen for. And we helped them by sustaining the theatre airlift C4ISR dominance they've come to expect from us. Although they are all performing their ground-assigned missions very well, the notion of 'every Airman a rifleman' is not the best use of our asymmetric capabilities.
