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A strategic look forward
Air Force Speeches, March 19, 2007
You know, although I spoke of our challenges, keeping them in mind, our priorities are unchanged. One is winning today's Global War on Terrorism, and dominating future wars. We don't want a fair fight. In fact, as mentioned to the cadets at West Point when I was there speaking to them, if you ever find yourself in a fair fight, it's been badly planned. Priority two is to provide the environment most conducive to carrying forward and enabling our courageous, innovative Airmen and their families. In fact, we often say that we recruit Airmen, but we retain families. And throughout our Air Force we work very hard to make sure that our Airmen' s families feel comfortable about allowing their spouse to continue to service our Air Force. And priority three is to recapitalize and modernize our force to again provide that same comfort and capability to future Airmen that we have. So, we are looking at all this, and then we are wondering. We are wondering about where ground force is going, but only with the 25,000 or so that are being redeployed to Iraq, but the 92,000 that are being added to the Marines and the Army over the long term. What does that mean to your Air Force as far as its reduction of 40,000 that were ongoing in order to provide some resources for our recapitalization? We've got a team that's coming together this summer to try to figure that out because we don't know, truly, the timing or the implications or the employment of all these ground forces. So that's coming for a future look. And I would say that what we're thinking is that we know that there are airmen that are directly assigned to some of these Brigade Combat Teams. So, therefore, we know that some of it is going to be essentially a direct lever. But we don't know the indirect. We don't know how much airlift is going to be needed. We don't know all of the implications in our close air support. So we are, in fact, worrying about that.
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The other thing we're worrying about now is we know that our space assets have to be changed out over the next 10 years, all of them. We are also very concerned that the veil of sanctuary in space that we used to all kind of think about, or think that we had, is gone. The Chinese destruction of a satellite, the creation of a huge plume of debris, has now created and highlighted that they are emerging as a peer competitor. We've been talking about it for ten years. It's more like a country singer, right? A '10-year overnight success.' But we were shocked, but not surprised that the Chinese, in fact, hit a satellite. They've been putting satellites in orbit for years. It's only a matter of changing the state vector to make sure that you can take on a satellite rather than place it in a location. Shocked because it was an aberration of behavior. And then also shocked because there was an initial turn-down or denial that it was theirs at all, when everyone in the whole world, including some amateur people with telescopes, knew precisely. Which made everybody wonder, what was the true intent. And I think we still wonder, what is their true intent, as they invest heavily, at greater rates of GDP than we are, by the way, in growing their armed forces, in growing their strategic capabilities to project sea, to project under-sea, and to project in the air. So we know we need to remember that we are the strategic shield for the nation, and we need to make sure that at the end of the day our Air Force retains that notion of strategic shield, and has sufficient presence and assets to be effective in that regard.
