Facing the Headwinds of Tradition; Rethinking Air Power's Role

October 31, 1997
National Press Club

Panelists:

Mr. McKee: I am Tom McKee, chairman of the board of the Aerospace Education Foundation and a member of the executive oversight committee of the Eaker Institute for Aerospace Concepts. On behalf of the elected leaders of the foundation and the Air Force Association and our distinguished Eaker Fellows and our Eaker staff, we want to welcome you to the second colloquy sponsored by the Eaker Institute.

Besides the distinguished fellows and panelists that we have this morning, I'd like to take a moment to briefly introduce a few of our special guests. First, from the U.S. Air Force, we have with us Lt. Gen. Larry Farrell, deputy chief of staff for plans. We also want to thank another special guest, former chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force, Gen. Charlie Gabriel. We have some of our elected leadership of the Air Force Association here, our national director from this area, Mary Ann Thompson, and our national treasurer, Charlie Church. I'd also like to introduce a gentleman who has served his country with distinction and now serves both the Air Force Association and Aerospace Education Foundation in the same fashion, retired Air Force General John Shaud, our executive director. Now I want to extend a special welcome to a group of men and women who have joined us from all over our nation. We are pleased that they could take some time from their busy two-day orientation. Please welcome the newly elected Air Force Association state presidents.

It is probably best to start with a brief description about the recently established institute. The Eaker Institute sprang into being in the fall of 1996 based largely upon a generous gift from the family of the late General Ira C. Eaker, one of the truly great air power advocates and a famed World War II commander of the 8th Air Force. An aviation pioneer who in 1929 flew the Question Mark, a Fokker C-2 which demonstrated the feasibility of aerial refueling, General Eaker was a reasoned intellectual who succeeded in articulating the early case for strategic air power. He continued to write a syndicated column and to lecture on air power for several years following his retirement from the Air Force.

The institute seeks to emulate General Eaker's intellectual approach and unique ability to further air power thinking. We call this a colloquy, a conversation, because we hope to push the air power envelope of engagement by stimulating candid discussions about the use of aerospace forces today and into the future. Our goal is to promote new ideas about the use of aerospace forces.

The first Eaker session, held in March of this year, generated quite a lively discussion on strategy, forces and requirements among our panelists: former chief of staff General Mike Dugan; Dr. Phillip Gold with the Discovery Institute; Mr. Gene Meyers, who is with us here today, previously with the Air Force Doctrine Center and now from SAIC; and Col John Warden, planner for the Gulf War air campaign. We expect today's session to be just as interesting.

Now let me introduce the moderator for today's colloquy, Mr. Phillip E. Lacombe. Phil is well known in national security circles due to his role with DoD's Commission on Roles and Missions and the recent President's Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection. Ladies and gentlemen, the managing director for the Eaker Institute, Phil Lacombe.

Mr. Lacombe: Thank you. Today's colloquy is most appropriately titled, "Facing the Headwinds of Tradition; Rethinking Air Power's Role." Headwinds of tradition buffet all organizations at one time or another, most notably when a group is forced to make tremendous changes or during a crisis. The Air Force is facing similar headwinds today as it grapples with a dramatically changing world with new political boundaries, new technological boundaries and new organizational boundaries, and in the case of cyberspace, with no boundaries at all.

America's capabilities in air and space have been a unique source of national strength. They have enabled us to project power and influence around the world, and to sustain our position of leadership in world affairs. Today's dialogue among prominent military planners and thinkers will explore whether new capabilities can change the way air and space forces can protect our national interests.

I am particularly happy to introduce the panel to you today. We call it the C³ panel. We have Chuck Horner, Chuck Boyd and Chuck Link. Let me tell you a little bit about each of them, starting with General Boyd. He is currently at the Congressional Institute and he has just completed a fact-finding mission in Bosnia for the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He served as the deputy commander in chief of the U.S. European Command prior to retiring from the Air Force in 1995. He was also the director of plans at Headquarters Air Force, commander of Air University and has a fair share of flying hours in F-100s and F-105s.

General Chuck Horner is a highly sought-after consultant in the space and defense industry today. He's a former commander in chief of the U.S. Space Command and served as the commander of air operations in the Gulf War. He would probably more likely ask me to introduce him as someone with 5300 flying hours in a variety of aircraft, just about every aircraft the Air Force has, but significantly, a hundred missions in the F-105 in Vietnam.

Major General Chuck Link is currently the executive vice president of the Air Force Memorial Foundation, and he served as a special assistant to the Air Force chief of staff for the National Defense Review. He also led the Air Force team assisting with the Roles and Missions Commission two years ago. He's done just about everything in the Air Force from flying OV-10s to being the commandant of the Air War College. Ladies and gentlemen, this is our panel for today.

Let me start by talking a little bit about the ROE [rules of engagement] for today. You have in front of you three of the nation's foremost thinkers about air, space and the employment of military forces. They have a tremendous amount of experience. I have prepared a couple of questions that I'll ask them to address, but our goal is to make sure we meet your needs as well. Feel free to ask questions of our panel and join the discussion at any time as we go on.

Facing "headwinds of change" -- where we are going to go in the future, what things we may have done that will narrow or expand our choices for the future, or those things we did in the past that narrowed or expanded our capabilities is what we are about today. Let me preface my first question by saying that we have achieved tremendous success as an Air Force. Nowhere is that demonstrated better than in the Gulf War. However, I am worried. We hear criticism of the Air Force's performance in the Gulf War. We hear that Saddam Hussein executed a unilateral halt and that changed the nature of the war. We've also heard recently from some quarters that the Gulf War wasn't the "real war," and we must plan for the "real war." Others say the experiences we have from the Gulf War can't be counted on to predict what we will do in the future. That leads me to think that we must have been planning for something other than the Gulf War years ago, yet the capabilities that we developed over a 20-year period proved to be quite successful in the Gulf War.

There are three things I'd like our panel to explore. First is this notion of the real-world war, that is, perhaps the Korea-type war, and what are the implications for the Air Force today? The second is, what are the assumptions that were made 20 years ago that enabled us to have the capabilities that we used in the Gulf War, and how they might have been false or accurate? Lastly, what have we learned from our Gulf War experience that we could turn into advice to those making the planning assumptions of today?

General Link, would you please address these issues for us?

Gen. Link: That is a pretty big question. This notion of the Gulf War not being the real war is a really troubling notion to me. It is such a hard notion to argue against. Let's think about the war that we anticipated from a military strategy perspective. We had been preparing for 40 years or so to fight air and land forces in simultaneous involvement in something called air land battle. Our models about what sort of expectations we could have from the outcome of such battles were tied to that construct.

One of those models is called TacWar. It has formed the basis for most of our resourcing at the national defense level for more than 20 years. It was the TacWar model that persuaded General Schwarzkopf he would need some 20,000 body bags for friendly troops before the war was over. The reason the Gulf War wasn't the real war for most of our soldiers was because we didn't fight it that way. We used air and space power to reduce the effectiveness of the Iraqi forces before we engaged them with ground forces. That didn't create the experience that was anticipated by the surface forces who had been training in this other environment for many, many years. For them, it is easy to see this as an anomalous experience, something that is aberrational, that couldn't be arranged again.

At some point this morning we'll talk a little bit about some modifications to the strategy that occurred during the Quadrennial Review process, one of which was to emphasize that stopping the enemy is very important and time urgent. That is an important modification because most of our war plans trade space for time while we bring our heavy ground forces into the theater, then harness air power, then begin the heavy combat.

Ten years before the Gulf War, had we decided it would be very important to halt moving enemy armor forces, it would have had an impact on our acquisition and modernization decisions, it would have recharacterized our force structure and, I think, would have prepared us when we knew in August 1990 that Saddam Hussein had all the potential in the world to go into Kuwait. That would have prepared us to react with 450 knot-deployers immediately against his action. As it was, you may remember, the only conflict construct that we had in mind was to move in six heavy divisions. Since there was no way you could do that, there was no choice but to let him have Kuwait. I would ask General Horner for his thoughts on whether or not we had any choice about letting him have more if he wanted it. This notion of what sort of preparations you make for conflict is fairly important.

Now, let me just say that there were some very good assumptions on the part of Air Force planners about the effectiveness of air power over that 20-year period. Remember, we concluded the Vietnam War with airplanes that were not easily maintained, nothing like the F-16s and F-15s we've built since then. We had no stealth. Precision was a touch-and-go thing. Lethality was a problem. In each of those areas which describe sort of a tactical-level effect of air power, we improved tremendously.

We also invested in things to help us understand what was happening in the battle space and to connect all those pieces together. Even in the face of not having a strategy that emphasized using air power to reduce the enemy's effectiveness before putting our troops in harm's way, we still had technical excellence in the system that we took to the war, and it was fairly effective.

Now the third part -- what have we learned? The Air Force learned some very important lessons. In the aftermath of the Gulf War, you'll see a much greater effort among airmen to consider how to improve the use of air power independent of the other arms of the services, not because we want to be independent, but because we understand we can get there sooner. We can get there sooner, and we can create tremendous military effect against the enemy while exposing only a handful of Americans to the enemy's fire. This is a gift of air power that we forget to talk about.

I've seen a resurgence in thinking about air power doctrine. We spent 40 years writing doctrine and forgot to talk about the strategic effects of conventional air power. We now have a new doctrine manual that I am kind of fond of, that brings those things back into play. We have also begun to talk of ourselves as airmen in the big, large tent that we can all live in, rather than as fighter pilots, tankers, missileers, space people, etc. Those are the kinds of lessons that I think we took out of the Gulf War.

Gen. Boyd: I don't find anything that I disagree with there, but I would add a perspective on planning assumptions that went into building a force that we then used in the early 1990s. When General Welch was chief of staff, there was a debate that raged at the time over low-intensity conflict, low-intensity kinds of specialized forces and the kind of investment streams that we were putting into that specialty area. His thought was as follows: Since the nature of the conflict that we will next have to deal with is in all cases unpredictable, we tend to build the same kind of forces that will fight all of them. That is to say we use the same basic forces in low-intensity conflict that we use in high-intensity conflict. There may be some marginal areas of specialization, but for the most part, we have to use the same kinds of things in all of the spectrum of conflicts. That was true in an era when the world was essentially the same, yet changed in a quantitative sense in the things that people had, but the nation-states applied their power and their objectives in ways that were predictable.

It is interesting that we are trying to think about a world quite different than the world that I grew up in, the world that we all became familiar with and the world that we were successful in dealing with. As we think about how we are going to prepare for the form of conflict that takes place in the next 10, 20 or 30 years, we have to think about it in the framework of a world that we don't understand at all, and that is changing in ways that are as yet not comprehensible to any of us. What saddens me a bit is that I don't see that we are thinking about that world in a serious way, at least inside the government, as a prelude to how we then build our forces or our response capabilities for that future. That, I think, is not being done.

Gen. Horner: With regard to the assumptions that led to the force we took to Desert Storm, I recall that in Vietnam I was flying an airplane that had a bomb bay to carry nuclear weapons, as had Chuck Boyd. It performed superbly, but nonetheless the assumptions leading to that were made by people like Curtis LeMay who envisioned air power as nuclear power and the defeat of the Soviet Union as the goal. Everything you saw in Desert Storm was a function of lessons we learned in Vietnam: precision, stealth and electronic countermeasures. We came out of Desert Storm with added vision. Certainly, things like the B-2 and Global Positioning System-guided munitions are building upon what we learned in Desert Storm and I think will serve with great utility.

Unfortunately, we still tend to be traditionalists and find it difficult to change pace. So, first of all, I would warn the air power people that they have really got to think in terms of how to exploit cyberspace and all the buzzwords, such as information warfare. All the military forces need to do that, but air power is uniquely capable of doing it because of the speed and lethality of modern air weapons.

We probably learned far more from Vietnam than we did from Desert Storm because Desert Storm was reasonably successful, and you tend not to learn things from success. Quite frankly, we didn't examine carefully our failures in Desert Storm well enough. The Scud missiles are one glaring error. Another is our inability to target rationally. We tended to look upon the enemy, the Iraqis, through American eyes and target, for example, their leadership as we would target Washington, D.C. Unfortunately, they operated under a whole different system. They operated differently, have different values and different ways of doing business and we failed miserably in anything other than targeting the strategic center of Iraq, which was the tanks and artillery of their armored divisions of the Republican Guard.

Finally, I think we did demonstrate a halt phase. It is a battle that is a little overlooked, but it is probably the single most important battle in terms of land operations in Desert Storm. That was the attack on Kafji that began on the 25th of January when Joint STARS started picking up movement up in southern Kuwait. What had happened? Saddam Hussein had organized a three-division attack into Saudi Arabia with the idea of jump-starting the ground war because his army was being destroyed in place. He wasn't securing the necessary ground combat he needed to inflict casualties on our forces so he could then argue his case in the world newspapers. I think he actually planned to defeat our ground forces. He had his infantry absorb the initial punishment and then he was going to follow up with counterattacks with his Republican Guard armor and army. As they came south, we started picking it up and we started destroying these columns as they were forming up, not really knowing what was afoot.

Finally, on the 29th and 30th, the Iraqis came across the border and occupied the town. The Marines were terrified because Walt Boomer had done the unprecedented thing of building a supply dump between his lines and the enemy lines.

We'd pulled back from the border so we wouldn't be in artillery range and yet Walt, being a brilliant guy, figured out that if he put his supply dumps up on the border, when he started going north into Kuwait, he'd have to go less far to get his supplies. Then he could make the timetables laid out for him, and of course, he exceeded all of those. The Marines were concerned that the resupply dump was the goal of the Iraqi attack.

We really didn't know until after the attack that it was a three-division effort. It was one armored and two mechanized divisions, about 40,000 troops. By the time they were able to get across the Saudi border, they were defeated in battle by company-sized units of the U.S. Marine Corps, the Saudi Arabian national guard and a brigade of Saudi infantry with a Qatari tank company. There were 40,000 troops defeated by less than 5,000 troops. That gives you some implications of what air power can do to an attacking force if we can close rapidly on the situation.

What did we learn? We learned that we have to be "rapid" in the future.

The last question concerned the real war versus the war in Desert Storm. Well, it was the only war we had at the time, so I guess it was real enough. As was pointed out before, war is unpredictable in that we have to prepare to provide the person tasked to fight the war with the capabilities that apply to the given situation, whether it be political constraints or political goals or the enemy forces or the conditions or the environment. Land, sea, air and space are all distinct and individual entities and the really brilliant commander -- and Schwarzkopf was brilliant -- is the one who knows how to mix them together properly. In this town, there seems to be a set view of how to fight war that probably does not apply to the real war -- and that is the war you are fighting at the given time.

Mr. Lacombe: Thank you. I'd like to follow up for a moment on that notion. The lesson of Kafji, the halt-phase lesson, and the application of air power has largely been dismissed around town. Why is that?

Gen. Link: If you really take to heart the lesson of Kafji, you'd go back and reexamine how we are spending the national defense dollar. The lesson of Kafji tells us, and I think this would be intuitively true for anyone who isn't otherwise mired in the debate inside the beltway, that the American people would probably like to engage the enemy's ground forces with America's Air Force, for a whole variety of reasons. The problem in the past has been the doubt about whether or not air power would be successful. There are plenty of historical cases to permit you to argue the point on either side. But those historical cases seldom take into account the qualities of modern air power combined with a sensor suite, which notices the smallest enemy movement, ties it into other kinds of intelligence so you can determine some sort of intent and then gives tremendous precision and lethality.

We have today what I call reliable precision. We used to discuss precision in terms of how many bombs it might take to obliterate a target or to kill a target. We might say, this is going to take four bombs because we knew it would take two and we thought that it was pretty good we could get two out of four in the pickle barrel. Today, when we say it takes two bombs we mean it takes two bombs. Both of those bombs are going to go there. No bombs are going to go anywhere else. The Bosnia air campaign is a very good example of that. In fact, I think we have yet to really understand and take advantage of that kind of capability. The problem in town here is when you offer that kind of capability, then it becomes so economically attractive that you are tempted to sort of readjust the distribution of resources across the Services. Everybody knows that the moment you do that, history ends as we know it. The world is over. There is a great effort to mask those kinds of qualitative differences in combat capability.

An interesting example of that just occurred to me. Most people know the story of the F-111s adapting to the Iraqi tank patterns -- being able to find them buried in the sand because of the differentials in heat as the night cooled and the tanks stayed warm or vice versa in the morning. The F-111s were able to go out there and plink tanks, as they called it, so the Iraqi tankers became accustomed to this idea that if they slept in their tanks, they might die. Well, just the other day I came across a briefing done for the Army by an independent analysis agency, a federally funded research outfit here in town, trying to explain why it was so easy for the American Army to beat the Iraqi army. One of the conclusions very clearly stated that there was a difference in training. This was exemplified by the fact that when American tankers came across the horizon to face the Iraqi tankers, those stupid Iraqi tankers weren't even sleeping in their tanks like a well-trained American tanker would. These different interpretations of the same event tend to confuse the issue, don't they?

Gen. Horner: When you get outside of the beltway, you do find that people understand the implications of Kafji. I harken back to 1986 when I was in Korea with the theater CINC.. He was sitting talking to me about air power. Most land guys, when they talk about air power, talk about close air support -- he says no, if I am into close air support, it is too late. What I have to have air power do for me is feed me the North Korean army in digestible chunks. In other words, you have to destroy them en route to the battle so that when they arrive, he can manage the battle with his ground forces.

Gen. Boyd: Chuck Horner said something that I think is very important, and that is the issue of targeting and finding those things that are important, those things that will affect getting that force down there in digestible chunks. I read recently something that I had read many years ago -- how as late as 1943, air targeters for Europe were doing much of their targeting in the Library of Congress. They were up there going through old magazines trying to find appropriate things in Germany to hit because they didn't have anything like the reconnaissance that we have, the kind of thoughtful analysis we have. Even though some of the earlier airmen had thought about categories of targets, we didn't know with precision where they were. The spectacle of doing your targeting in the Library of Congress has always amused me.

On the other hand, as we think about the world that we are emerging into, I am not so sure that we are all that much better. If we are not sure of the kind of threats that we are going to have to address, then it follows that we wouldn't know what kind of targets then affect those threats.

We looked into Bosnia in the early days when Washington wanted options to use air power, searching for the kind of targets there both in Serbia and in eastern Bosnia, the area dominated by the Bosnian Serbs, to meet objectives that were very obscure. We were to find things that would hurt no one and yet would, at the same time, cause the war to turn in its progress. It struck me at the time, and I testified several times on the Hill, that out of that came one of the principles that Americans seem not to want in the application of their military forces.

There are three conditions, it seemed to me, that were important for Americans to decide on the issue of their own armed forces. One is that the conflict they became involved in had to become resolved very quickly. Two, that none of their sons and daughters get hurt. Three, that they didn't hurt anybody they weren't mad at. In Bosnia, we wanted to make sure we didn't hurt anybody we were mad at -- and we weren't mad at very many people. It made target selection a very, very difficult thing. How are you going to turn the course of the war without hurting anybody? Not only not getting any of your own people hurt, but not hurting anybody that you are not mad at.

That kind of flew in the face of the direction we were going at the time, in which we were emphasizing readiness above all other things. We worshiped at the shrine of readiness. We were paying for readiness out of modernization investment accounts for the future to build a force which was going to be eminently ready and sustainable -- and not usable under conditions that were acceptable to the American people. That is what we are in the process of doing now as well. What kind of capabilities we will have, that will, in fact, be ultimately acceptable to the American people? Chuck has been engaged in a debate on that, a debate over casualties -- how many casualties is this nation really willing to absorb? My own feeling is, very few, when our national security is not directly threatened. For the kind of feel-good diplomacy that we are increasingly involved in, upholding humanitarian law, the American people are not very interested in those kinds of conflicts in a national security sense, so I think their tolerance for casualties is very, very low.

Mr. Lacombe: Let's go a little bit farther with that, though. What you allude to is a change in our expectations of our military forces, a change in what they are going to be used for. Probably all of us in this room grew up with an understanding of what the U.S. Air Force does in war -- it kills people and it breaks things. Now we are talking about stability operations, peace operations, humanitarian operations -- and there are those who are writing an exhaustive list of missions we should be preparing for and the exhaustive list of missions that we expect to encounter. Very little effort is given to talking about major regional conflict. In fact, there are some who are suggesting that the two MRC strategy (major regional conflicts) has to be seen for what it is: a convenient force-sizing mechanism and little else; that any attempt to plan that way is not realistic. Given that, what then do we do with the Air Force? Are F-15s and B-2s the way we are supposed to go? How do we trade off against increased lift and the whole notion of cyberspace and its utility to us in this area? This gets very broad again, but my question is, what would you advise? How does the Air Force prepare for this world that we know so little about and these missions that seem to be dominating, and still maintain that regional conflict capability?

Gen. Link: Let me start out with the topic we just left: casualties. I would tell you that is the unfortunate debate that I found myself in many times before I retired. Over the last three years when we were looking at these problems in terms of roles and missions and functions of the Services, I am embarrassed at the number of times I found myself in a debate about how casualty-tolerant the American public might be. I want to suggest to you that it is a fundamentally immoral debate.

When I was a forward air controller for the 1st Brigade of the 1st Air Cav in Vietnam in 1969 and 1970, the way that I often found the enemy was by listening to a frightened 18-year-old radio operator who said the enemy is shooting at me from a (particular) direction. It was often the only way I could find the enemy. Remember, we didn't have the kind of reconnaissance or overhead capability that we have today. I'd suggest to you that if we don't have to put that 18-year-old on the ground to find the enemy, we shouldn't. It doesn't matter how casualty-tolerant the American people are, unnecessary friendly casualties are immoral. Unnecessary enemy casualties are immoral.

What we have to remember is the tremendous precision that modern air power brings permits us to unhorse the enemy. We can take away his capacity to make war and we can do that in MOOTW (military operations other than war), in the big war -- as big as Iran or Iraq -- or we can do it in a little war like Bosnia. It is very important to remember it's effective across that full range. The most important quality that air power brings to modern combat is this versatility. That means you can use it across that full range of conflict, but it is also the kind of force you ought to have if you are not sure what the future holds. If you don't know, you want something that is applicable across the greatest range of possibilities.

We have to be very careful in the Air Force to understand that bombers don't compete with fighters. We shouldn't turn in fighters to buy more bombers or vice versa. We need bombers for all the fundamental reasons that you people know we need bombers -- to be able to reach out and touch somebody quickly, to stop them before they have already taken over a lot of territory that is so expensive to take back, to begin to reduce the enemy's combat effectiveness so that we can then bring other kinds of forces in. We need bombers.

Sometimes people who say we need bombers say we don't need fighters. That is partly because we airmen have forgotten to articulate the value of fighters. Fighters permit us to distribute the commander's intent across a broad battle space over and over and over again. The three- to five-hundred mission commanders and flight leads know what it is that a joint force commander wants to have happen. You can't do that with bombers, but you can do it with fighters. That kind of paralyzing attack was very helpful in the opening hours of the Gulf War and resulted in fewer American casualties, which is where we ought to be going.

Gen. Horner: I agree with everything you say except the last part in portraying bombers against fighters. I think that is a bogus argument. That is the kind of argument which occurs within the Service that is constrained.

Gen. Link: I agree. That is a bogus argument. They shouldn't compete one against the other; we need them both.

Gen. Horner: When you look at what we should do in the Air Force, you have to look at the role air power plays with regard to national strategy and in regard to a broad sense across all mission areas. For example, take a look at space. If you set aside ballistic missiles and ballistic missile defense, space is an entity that is totally information warfare. All it does is provide information or transmit information or facilitate information. It is a cyber force. It is good at that. That is where we are going if we ever learn how to exploit it.

Naval forces have tremendous utility other than battle at sea, which they practice for. Probably the most significant force in terms of influencing Iraq today is the embargo carried out by naval forces. The destroyer is probably a very valuable asset to have in our quiver for a whole variety of types of war, from non-forceful intervention to things like support of the Marine Corps.

When you look at the land forces, they have a very narrow view of what they do. Their job primarily is to engage the enemy land forces. In other words, to use land forces, you must have present enemy land forces.

On the other hand, with regard to air power, air power does a whole variety of things. Mainly its function is to defeat the enemy. That may be to help land forces defeat the enemy land forces. I am not ruling that out. But there may be a situation where you do nothing more than deter conflict through the ability to be capable of inflicting such pain and suffering on the enemy or whatever he holds dear that you never have to go to war. It may be the capability that if he does commit his land forces, you can respond so rapidly that you don't have to engage in a land battle.

I think the fundamental problem is not where should the Air Force go, but how do you distribute the national wealth that you are going to allocate toward national defense. The thing I find the most difficult concept to break away from is this idea that a third goes to the maritime forces, a third goes to the land forces and a third goes to the air forces. If there are two areas where we ought to be growing in the future, I think air power and space power are those two areas. However, they are constrained to fighting within their own budget. That is the fundamental problem. Where should we go with the Air Force? What we need to do is expand air power and expand space power at the expense of other forces.

Gen. Link: You raise excellent points there General Horner, but the question that must quickly come to mind is, why don't we do that? Why don't we redistribute the national budget? I want to tell you there is probably no greater force in Washington than the force against redistributing the national budget. In the Quadrennial Review process and in legislation, it was specifically required for the Department of Defense to look for alternate force structure. We managed to avoid that under Secretary Perry. He was going to leave that to the National Defense Panel.

When Secretary Cohen came along, he said, "No, I want to do that. Make sure we do that." So the Joint Staff and OSD (Office of the Secretary of Defense) got together and said -- here is how we will do it. We will run this same model again, only this time we will take all the force structure down 10 percent, 20 percent, and 30 percent. We went back to them and said -- we don't think that is what he wants, we think he wants you to vary land and air forces up and down. Run the model and see how it goes. That made sense to us. Let me tell you, there wasn't anybody that we could find who thought that was a good idea. I still don't understand why not. I think that would have illuminated, one way or another, given some decent modeling, how we might readjust this distribution. Until everybody outside of the beltway thinks that is a good idea and makes it clear to everybody inside the beltway that they want that done, I am afraid it won't happen. We will continue expanding this stretch between the amount of money that the Air Force gets to exploit air and space and the taxpayers' legitimate expectations for the Air Force. That stretch will continue to expand until we find some way to redistribute the resources.

Gen. Boyd: It is a natural human condition, to want to keep on doing that which you know how to do. It is utterly predictable. We shouldn't expect anything else and we shouldn't condemn those who are resistant to change. If you do otherwise, you'd be performing aberrant behavior.

I do not expect, and decreasingly our politicians don't expect, an institution such as the Department of Defense to be able to examine itself and reform itself in a meaningful way. Reform does come when institutions are in great crisis -- their extinction is threatened or they have just suffered a catastrophic failure of some kind. That has not happened in our country and it has not happened to the institutions that are resistant to change. I don't think it is going to be the case any time real soon. And yet what we are doing today will affect how we are capable of responding 20 years from now when we do have an opportunity to suffer catastrophic failure.

What has to be done? There is a little-known line item in the appropriations bill put in by the Speaker of the House which puts a very modest amount of money against the problem of looking at the national security environment for the 21st century. In the form envisioned, it is not being done in this country. It is simply to do this -- to put together a group of people who have no institutional ties, no vested interest, who nevertheless are thoughtful people who would try to examine with all the means available what kind of a global security environment we expect to find in the first quarter of the 21st century. Then they would take a look at this nation itself and how it fits into that global environment, because our nation itself is an evolving thing.

It is a very different nation than it was after World War II, when most of the paradigms we now live in were developed. We are different demographically; we are different in our values, in our expectations. I am not sure anybody, at least inside the Department of Defense, has a very good feel for what kind of nation we really are, what kind of a role we will tolerate playing or what our objectives really are. So, find out what kind of world we are going to live in, find out what kind of a nation we are and then try to develop what this nation ought to have as its objectives in this world that we have now defined. Once we've determined what our national objectives ought to be, we try to develop some sort of a strategy for the implementation of those objectives. Finally, we take a look at the tools of the national security apparatus. We can also see if they are appropriate to the execution of that strategy. That is a really big idea. I am not sure it is within anybody's capability, but certainly it will not be done by any institution that risks being altered by the process. If it is done, it has to be done within some kind of non-institutional constraint. Stay tuned to see if it is a line item in the appropriations bill if it develops.

Mr. Lacombe: Absent that kind of vision of what the national security requirements are in the future, we have employed a process of the BUR (Bottom Up Review), the base force, the QDR (Quadrennial Defense Review) and now the NDP (National Defense Panel) to head us in some direction. Yet I haven't heard a lot of confidence in what you said, General Link, about where that is going to take us.

Gen. Link: The forces that would like to maintain the status quo are entrenched.

Mr. Lacombe: By status quo you mean that dividing of the pie into thirds?

Gen. Link: Things like that and a conflict construct that is centered on land warfare rather than joint warfare.

Mr. Lacombe: It seems to me that we are not communicating the importance and utility of air power, evident to everyone in this room, of course. You talked about the fact that the folks outside the beltway seem to resonate with it, but inside the beltway it gets too hard because it gets into the turf issues and budgetary issues.

Gen. Link: There is a simpler reason that is important to understand. When a soldier talks about using air power to support soldiers on the ground, he is applauded for his jointness. When a sailor talks about using Air Force tankers to extend the range of naval aircraft, he is applauded for his jointness. When an airman talks about using air power to kill the enemy's army instead of putting of putting our Army in harm's way, he is parochial; he is "unjoint." In the last 10 years, the sin of "unjoint" is real close to the sin of adultery. It is not something you want to do. No one other than an airman can advocate air power, but it is very difficult to do it without sounding as if you are just trying to advance the interest of your own Service. I believe, that airmen since the Gulf War are increasingly understanding that when they fail to advocate air power effectively, they are contributing to future unnecessarily casualties. That kind of motivation is helpful.

The QDR process didn't benefit from some of the vision demonstrated in General Boyd's last recitation of the House Speaker's intentions. For example, large working groups studied the strategy, the force structure, our modernization programs and infrastructure, and they all finished at about the same time. In the strategy, there was a fairly substantial modification made which, if it works its way through to the war plans, should encourage our uniformed commanders out there to reexamine the extent to which they could use modern air power to halt the enemy -- before the enemy has taken a large part of our allied territory.

But that strategy wasn't pronounced until the modernization panel was all finished with its work. So, their work was in this other context, the old strategy that saw joint warfare as best described by organizing air and sea forces to support land combat. Make sure that nobody heard me say that we don't need an Army. That is not my point. I am absolutely certain that there are large numbers of very difficult tasks on the ground that can't be done with air power.

Mr. Lacombe: Like what?

Gen. Link: Actually controlling territory. Restoring stability. Transitional phase between chaos of conflict and the regime that will restore civil order, etc. I know there are a number of combat activities that can't be conducted from the air. But stopping large, moving, armored columns isn't one of them. We can do that from the air and we can do it without putting a lot of young Americans on the ground in range of enemy fires. The other day I described the strategy that we've lived with for a number of years now at the national level as perhaps doing everything we can to get the largest number of young Americans within range of enemy fires as soon as possible. I thought of that in response to a question from a Congressman who wanted to know what I was going to do about the Air Force's tooth-to-tail ratio. That is right after the Marine next to me explained how everybody in the Marine Corps is a shooter. I thought for a moment and said, "Sir, I don't think you want me to do anything to the Air Force's tooth-to-tail ratio. I could improve it by changing all our single-place cockpits to say, 10- or 20-man cockpits. What the Air Force does is take just a few people within range of enemy fires and creates great military effect. We ought to invest in that."

Question: What is wrong with cutting up the pie in four pieces -- space, Air Force, Navy and the Army? It may cause us to give up a little bit in that we are the aerospace force. Wouldn't that achieve starting to move to where we need to be going?

Mr. Lacombe: The question from the floor asks what benefit or value is there by redividing the pie into four pieces, adding space as the fourth force. Since we have a former CINC Space here, sir, could you address this?

Gen. Horner: I have advocated that. Not that I am dismayed at the stewardship the Air Force has given to space; it has been superb. In the Gulf War, it became apparent to me that space is a fundamental military force nowadays to be reckoned with, albeit mostly a support force. Not a lot of medals were given out to space within the Gulf War, but it's certainly something we must exploit and must build upon. Space is as fundamental to land operations and sea operations as it is to air, so it is fundamental across the board. It has a different doctrine than air. It doesn't have the lethality of air. It moves at much higher speeds or it is geosynchronous; it is present all the time.

When I came back and became CINC Space, I approached the government and said, why don't we move all of space acquisition out of the Air Force budget and put it in the NRO budget? We'll let the Air Force operate the space (assets) like they do now. There is about five percent of space that is funded by the Navy and the Army; it is very small and mostly in the Navy. Army operates a couple of DSCS (Defense Satellite Communications System) sites.

The idea is if we can get the first step, then at some future time -- at 2010 -- they will say, "These spaces in the Air Force operations are all space dedicated, these are the Navy and whatever. Then, likely in the year 2015, anybody filling those jobs will change uniforms. I always said, cynically, we'll give them light pink uniforms since they are space geeks (being a geek, I can say that). We will create a fourth force, because I have the feeling that the Air Force is where the Army was in 1920 in its state of denial. Because it almost becomes, at the most cynical, a roles and missions grab on the part of the Air Force to say they arae moving from an air and space to a space and air force. Air is too important. DSCS and an F-22 are too important to trade off against each other.

On the other hand, I also think we have a very important need for a very effective land force. The trouble is our land force is becoming rapidly irrelevant to combat because it can't get there. So the land force defines itself in terms of manpower when it ought to be defining itself in terms of combat capability -- how it can affect the battle and how it can survive on the modern battlefield. The Army is trying to come to grips with this and they are doing a superb job, but the trouble is, the institutional bias not to change is so strong. Not so much in the Marine Corps; the Marines are doing a much better job of fighting with it.

The trouble is, our Army is too important to be allowed to sit there and become obsolete on its own. Logistically, it is unsupportable and you can't transport it to the far-flung points of the earth. The guys will disagree with that, but I happened to be in Saudi Arabia in August of 1990 and I was stuck with the relevance of only having the 82nd Airborne and the embarked Marines to stop 27 Iraqi divisions. Believe me, they are not capable of being relevant rapidly enough. It is too important to this country not to modernize our land forces, not to make them come to grips with new environments out there.

Gen. Link: I don't understand how creating a fourth service creates any additional resources. Is our questioner suggesting to take the current full pie, take all three services, put it back in, then cut it up into fourths and redistribute it.

Gen. Horner: You have to evolve into it. You don't do it tomorrow.

Gen. Link: I don't find it an attractive idea. Naturally, I accede to a former CINC Space. I see a future in which most of the important combat-oriented missions that the Air Force does today will be performed from space. If I move to a fourth service, number one, the taxpayer has to bear the brunt of the stand up of all of that. It is fairly important to go back and study the history of the Air Force in its infancy -- let me tell you, there weren't a lot of bucks coming just because we were a new service. That is a fairly important step to take. I'd rather risk trying to get a better understanding of the relative distribution of the three-thirds today as a way of increasing the likelihood that we move money where the need is.

Mr. Lacombe: Do you think there is effective understanding of the relative contribution of space and information capabilities today within the services?

Gen. Horner: I think there is. The Air Force has been very true to the other Services in providing airlift. A significant amount of our resources go to airlift. The Navy has not been as good with sealift and the Army (transportation), in the Gulf War, consisted of Bangladeshi drivers driving Saudi trucks. The other two Services have been unfaithful in providing the transportation they are directed to by law.

What is the core function of the Air Force but to provide long-range air power and lethality anywhere throughout the battlefield? At the rate we are going, particularly with the unified CINCs really enjoying the value of space and airlift to land, sea, and air operations, suddenly the debates with regard to the allocation of resources come down to where the Air Force runs the risk of becoming the support Service for the other Services. That is why we have to do something to change the paradigm.

The Air Force has always been very good about space. What color the uniformed people carry with regard to space, I couldn't care less. That is not important, but it is important that we quit having to trade off the combat power of the Air Force to support functions that should be legitimately shared across all the Services.

Gen. Boyd: Let me throw out one more thought on that before you transition, because what Chuck Horner just said resonates with me. In terms of the transition of what we do in the lower atmosphere into space, over time, the trend is in this direction and it will continue -- maximizing lethality or decision- making kind of application of power while minimizing the risk that you put young Americans in, consistent with what the American people are willing to tolerate. If you buy the argument that this nation and its culture will only be a dominant force in the world when it can apply its power in such a way that not very many of its kids get hurt, then you keep the technological lever against your adversary growing. Space is the natural place to take that. I would also add that it seems to me within the culture of the Air Force.

I wholeheartedly endorse what Chuck Horner said -- I want a really good Army. The world is populated with problems that armies have to handle. I want a more highly effective Army than we have today. I want an Army that looks a little different probably, but has a lot more capability than the Army we have today. I want a Marine Corps that is highly capable. I want a capable Navy, but it probably needs to be a little different also. I would say this: All of them are capable of changing only when somebody else applies the lever to them. That includes this aerospace force. I don't think we do that very well. I think there is a historic vector in that direction, but I don't think the Air Force is the best steward of that change.

Mr. Lacombe: But where do you think that lever might come from?

Gen. Boyd: If you buy the premise that the institutions themselves are not capable of significantly altering themselves, one of the deficiencies in this resource allocation process is -- who will? Where it seems to me that we are deficient is in the kind of wise and experienced and capable civilian leadership that this country once had. Power as a result of Goldwater-Nichols shifted into the Office of the Secretary of Defense. It did not bring with it the kind of wise and capable leadership through every level of the civilian leadership. It is only a transition place. For the most part, it is populated by people who are en route to some place else and whose long-term interest in institutional development is not a high priority. I don't know the answer to how we incentivize capable people to come in and be under secretaries and assistant secretaries and deputy assistant secretaries, given the nature of the penalties we require of them in so many different ways. I don't know how to do that, but it is a problem that is worth thinking about very carefully and talking to your politicians about it.

Gen. Horner: There is a little bit of a model in Goldwater-Nichols in that probably that incentive for change came from a combination of political leadership over in the Hill, retired military people and a need for change. You also have to have that catalyst, that Desert One, the Tet Offensive, the Pusan Perimeter, or Pearl Harbor were. This nation only changes when there is an incentive to change and right now we are lacking that.

Mr. Lacombe: So, if we had lost the Gulf War, we might have gotten that incentive?

Gen. Horner: Yes.

Gen. Boyd: That's why you said we learned more from Vietnam than we did from the Gulf. That is probably true.

Gen. Link: But there is a reason to study why we were successful. General Horner made a good point, we have spent a lot of time on studies of things that went wrong in the Gulf War and not near enough time articulating why things worked. I would just like to step back briefly to the transportation command example. I'd cite that as an example of the airman's dilemma. I think I could find a fairly significant number of people who might agree at this point that the Air Force, in its zeal to be a good support Service in the joint context, may have been a more effective advocate for platforms to carry young Americans to be shot at than for platforms to carry bombs to the enemy.

Question: How would you deal with the arguments today about protecting air power's lethality and effectiveness?

Gen. Link: I think I read someplace where Chuck Horner was quoted as saying that he underestimated the capability of air power. He didn't know it would be as effective as it was in the Gulf. Is that true?

Gen. Horner: I don't think any of us understand air power. For example, during the Gulf War, we learned how to target precision munitions. We didn't know how to do that. We had no experience with PGMs other than the bridge in Vietnam. So we go into Desert Storm and when you compare sorties carrying precision munitions and aim points, you find that the sorties and the aim points are about equal. There is some variance because in some cases we dropped two bombs on one target, called double doors, and in some cases we dropped one bomb each on two targets with the F-117. Then, late in the Gulf War, you will find that in the number of sorties versus the number of aim points, we probably had two to four times the aim points as sorties. In other words, one aircraft was servicing more than one target. That is a case that demonstrates that going into the Gulf War as airmen, we were ignorant. We came out ignorant in many ways, too.

If you really wanted to do realistic training, you pay out a lot of bonuses, then when you go to your Solid Shield exercise down in the Carolinas, the B-2 carries live GATS/GAM [GPS Aided Targeting System/GPS Aided Munitions], the F-16 has a sensor-fused munition on it that goes boom, you allow the tankers to have live ammo, you allow the Patriots to have live missiles and you get it on. Then you will know what the outcome is and you will probably change your strategies, your way of doing business. That is called realistic training. Unfortunately, it is only for the insane.

But that is a very useful exercise because of the way have learned to do business. The first thing we do is put together air, land and sea forces in this joint entity. I am not saying that is good or bad, but there are some consequences. The separate qualities of air, land and sea forces -- the unique qualities -- are then masked when you merge them into one force. It is like tying a feather to a rock. Once you have tied the feather to the rock, you don't have any idea how light the feather is.

It's not a bad idea, as I think about it here, to disassemble this and let's let the Army fight the Navy as a big exercise here in our mind. It would probably be a draw somewhere along the beach. Then let's let the Navy and the Air Force fight. It seems to me that Billy Mitchell gave us kind of a hint as to how that might turn out. Then let the Air Force and the Army fight.

As we work our way through that, let's think about what kind of forces we want to invest in if we believe that our Army can beat any other Army in the world and our Navy can beat any other Navy in the world. That little mental exercise just gave me some things to think about.

Question: As we are discussing the different methods that we would use in our Services, we are studying the Jane's (Defense Weekly) on what the other countries are doing in the non-free world, and we see China building up a commitment to air power. It must be obvious to someone that air power is pretty significant. Do you feel that China and Russia have the raw materials and manufacturing capability to arm these countries, and are we in another arms race?

Gen. Horner: That is really a tough one. The answer is, too often we've required a threat in order to judge a military force. As we know during the Cold War, we tended to exaggerate the threat in terms of its capabilities in view of what it did in Chechnya and places like that. That is probably an inappropriate way to build your military force if you intend to fight to win with the fewest casualties. In fact, the ultimate goal of military force is conventional deterrence, to prevent conflict altogether. I think we have to modernize and build our forces not against what the worst the enemy can do to us, but against the worst that we can do to ourselves, so that we maintain the number one position. We don't want to become the Dallas Cowboys.

Question: If we underestimated air power in the Gulf War, how badly are we underestimating space and the value of space today?

Gen. Horner: Actually, we haven't learned to use space; we are learning to use space. There are some things going on, most of them are highly classified, that are really exciting. The space facility out at Falcon Air Force Base reported the Scott O'Grady shoot-down. They didn't know what it was, they just reported it. Then when it came back that O'Grady was shot down, they gave the coordinates and that is where they started the search for him. People don't know that.

There are so many things going on that are expanding the horizons of what space can bring to the table. I keep talking about information warfare and cyber warfare and all these kinds of things, both offensive and defensive. I think we in this country are the ones most adept to learn how to use this, and yet there is great difficulty in terms of security clearances, in terms of reluctance to change, in terms of legal constraints, policy constraints and our own vulnerabilities. We hate to admit what we can do to the enemy, because we are so vulnerable. There is a lot of talk about asymmetric warfare and things of this nature. I do believe that in all the Services and all the interested defense agencies, we've got to generate more heat and smoke about these topics so that we can grow -- and certainly use them in our exercises.

Question: (Inaudible)

Gen. Link: I need to talk to that. You and I know that air power is good because of an interesting set of reasons. Number one, we tend to measure it against an ideal. We look for the perfect bomb. The perfect strafing path. We look for perfect situational awareness.

When you and I say situational awareness, it is a dynamic thing. We not only know where he is, the snapshot, but know where he can be in the next two seconds, five seconds, and where he can't be. We take that kind of technical competence and we test it across the Air Force over and over and over again. We have an ORI (Operational Readiness Inspection), where we test the combat readiness of every individual in the organization to make sure supplies are in the right place, bombs are in the right place, sorties can be generated and targets can be struck with specific reliability. We keep track of those numbers.

So we do know how good air power is, but we tend to measure it against this ideal and sometimes it is only 80 percent of that ideal. Then we enter into a joint argument and accept as an article of faith that when the forces on this side of a line on the ground meet some certain formulas, they will overcome the forces on that side of the ground. That is the scientific basis for most of our war plans. There is a lot more science behind what air power can do than there is behind what land forces can do. We have tended to say if air power can't do this, then we'll have to use land forces. There is nothing certain about the use of land forces other than casualties and commitment. Once you put them on the ground, then you know you are in the war. I am not nearly as sanguine as you are that things will work out. We had our chance and it went away, and I want to be more affirmative about air power's unique contributions to joint warfare. I'd like to ask the other Services to do theirs more effectively.

Mr. Lacombe: We have one more question we have time for, if it is quick.

Question: Do you feel that our current military leaders, officers and retirees, are willing to make the sacrifices that the founders of the Air Force made in standing up and saying what they really feel or are they trying to be too politically correct?

Gen. Boyd: Let me throw a little bit of a twist into it -- this is a point I haven't heard made. I know that youngsters in all of our Services criticize their leadership. It is a tradition. We criticized ours when we were young. But there is a special barb to it today that I think is different. We must recognize that at least in a very recent event in our history, a chief of staff of the Air Force, on a matter of principle, stood in support of his subordinate. This is downward loyalty -- the kind the kids out here consistently say their leaders don't possess. He was willing to fall on his sword, did fall on his sword, in support of that downward loyalty. It was a matter of honor. It was a matter of truth. I think he is not unique. There are all kinds of active duty officers, Marine Corps officers, Naval officers, Army officers who have just as high integrity as Ron Fogleman had and are willing to support it and demonstrate it in the way he did.

Gen. Link: We are so poor at articulating the real truth. Maybe the part of the organization that most of you belong to is one that can help in that regard, to help get the truth out.

Gen. Boyd: People will get it. There was a very serious effort made not to dwell on that because there are two important principles here -- one of them is civilian authority. None of us in uniform can ever question the Secretary's authority to do what he did. So, had there been a lot of focus on the issue inside the Air Force, had we all got out and made speeches in support of Ron Fogleman, it could have eroded that very important principle. Over time, history will treat that as probably a watershed in our civil-military relationships in the United States.

Mr. Lacombe: And now we do have to close. In fact, the last question I was going to ask of these three gentlemen is, in light of the fact that we have a very senior group of Air Force Association corporate leaders here, what might they ask you to do. From this discussion today, one of the things that we have to take is that the Air Force and the Air Force Association and every one of us who are or claim to be air power advocates have a share of the blame for the fact that we haven't told our story sufficiently. That comes through readily in that the Army and the other Services have to understand what air power can do for them. Certainly the American people and those who work the political process have to understand what air power can do, the opportunities it enables for an effective, efficient, less-dangerous defense in the future. That is our job in the Air Force Association. So, we are very pleased to have had the opportunity to make those points with you. Now, I think we would charge you as well to make those points with the American people.