March 24, 1999
 

"Training for the Information Age"
 

It is a pleasure to see so many of you this afternoon. It is my distinct pleasure to have the opportunity to come and share some information with you from my perspective of the training and education side of the business and a little bit about what we in the Air Force are thinking and where I think we certainly need to be going. I agree with my friend Ken Minihan that there is lots of work to be done.

Some 53 years ago, the AFA’s first national convention was held. General Karl Spatz, the Air Force Chief of Staff at the time, said public support is as essential to effective air power as industries and airplanes and airmen. His words remain true today. We have the greatest aerospace force in the world, and we can quickly mass over any point or spot on the planet and attack virtually any facet of the enemy’s power. However, we can only accomplish this through the efforts of Air Force people supported by a great industry, the American people and our public and pro-active organizations like the Air Force Association. AFA understands the critical role a well-manned, well-equipped, well-trained, well-educated aerospace force plays in the national security of our nation and in the well-being of the world.

To Tom McKee, General Shaud and all of the AFA staff, let me say to you, our sincere thanks for all that you do for aerospace power, for our Air Force and for the nation.

It is a pleasure to see all of the AFA members who are here and so many of the folks who are in blue suits that are here. I am beginning to wonder a little bit what work is being done. That’s OK. This is a great place to be, and you are exactly where I want you to be. For sure, it is exciting to see our industry partners out there as well. It is in this spirit of mutual understanding and cooperation that we continue to forge strong ties and partnership, meeting the continuous defense challenge we face in this information age.

Just last month, the senior leadership of the Air Force met at Corona South, and we continued our effort to chart the direction of our aerospace force through the challenges of the 21^st century. We know that the challenges in the next millennium will require a certain type of military, one that is much different from the one that folks like myself came into and that we grew up with. It is certainly going to be one that is smaller, more efficient, more agile, and more expeditionary in nature. We are preparing for these realities by changing from a garrison force to an expeditionary force, an aerospace force that will be on the move.

Our organizational and mindset must adjust to this operational reality. By the turn of the century, our air expeditionary force will allow us to better posture for the threats of the next millennium by allowing us to reach far beyond our borders to respond effectively to the full spectrum of crisis. The AEF will provide our CINCs with the rapidly responsive, tailored aerospace force, which is lighter, leaner and certainly lethal. Information will be the key enabler to this expeditionary force.

Former Chief of Staff General Ron Fogleman once said: “One thing that is no secret, and that is the importance of information, both to industry, to our joint warfighting team and our national leadership. The information technology explosion in our society has awakened us to the power of information.”

This is nothing new to many of you in the audience today. Information operation challenges we face as well as how we are going to prepare our airmen to meet them, how you can help us with this challenge and the cultural transformation required to exploit the information age are just a few of the things that I will touch on for the rest of this presentation.

It certainly seems that hardly a week can pass with us not hearing on the major networks some announcement about someone attempting to penetrate our defense computer networks or any of our information technology infrastructure. Today, cyber intruders are not only nation-state kind of actors. As you well know, they also come from all aspects of various societies. They may be criminals, journalists, foreign corporations, or even curious teenagers seeing if can they exploit what goes on in our national defense.

The information revolution has made technology available to just about anybody and everybody who wants to have it - all with their own agendas and their own motivations, and I can assure you that many of those are at odds with our national security objectives.

At the same time, our military operations have become more dependent on fast, reliable exchanges of information, so we find ourselves almost in this Catch 22 of more people becoming more dangerous to more of our operations. Our enemies saw the value of information during the Gulf War air campaign, and they will be ready for us the next time, I can assure, because they will be expecting an information-centric-conflict type of operation if we are to engage.

Former Secretary of Defense William Perry once said, we live in an age driven by information. Technological breakthroughs are breaking the face of war and how we prepare for war.

You can see from General Minihan’s presentation, clearly, that is something that for sure at the national level we are thinking about today. There was a Rand study that was conducted that was entitled, “Strategic Information Warfare: A New Face on War.” It states that information warfare is rapidly evolving, and it is yet an imprecisely defined field. From where I sit, that becomes a key statement. It went on to illustrate that there are some basic features about strategic information warfare, and I want to share those with you and then talk about what we are doing in Air Education and Training Command.

The first of those is the features of information warfare. Even though we may be having difficulty trying to truly define it, one of the features of it, certainly, is a low-cost entry into the conflict. Unlike traditional weapons technology, development of informational-based techniques does not require sizable financial resources or state-sponsorship to enter the fight. Information system expertise and access to important networks may be the only pre-requisite for getting in.

Number two is blurred traditional boundaries. Clearly this is a problem for us. Traditional distinctions don’t apply -- things like public versus private interests and warlike versus criminal behavior. Geographic boundaries, such as those between nations as historically defined, do not apply any longer when we are thinking about information warfare.

Number three is an expanded role for perception management. In other words, how do we manage what the public really perceives is going on? New information base techniques may substantially increase the power of deception in image manipulation activities, dramatically complicating what our government efforts might be to build political support for security-related initiatives. In other words, they get to the hearts and minds of our people. It will make it much more difficult for us to set policy and to engage in warlike activities.

Number four is a new strategic intelligence challenge. I need certainly not tell this to folks like Ken Minihan. Poorly understood strategic information warfare vulnerabilities and targets diminish the effectiveness of classical intelligence collection and analysis as you and I have known it for many years. A new field of analysis focus on information warfare may have to be developed so we can stay ahead of the enemy who may be trying to attack us in this arena, and we certainly watch the conversation about that on a daily basis.

Number five is a formidable tactical warning and attack assessment problem. There is currently no adequate tactical warning system that distinguishes information warfare and strategic information attack from other kinds of cyberspace activity, which include espionage or an accident - some event that took place unintentionally by a company or another nation.

The sixth feature that is information warfare is the difficulty of building and sustaining coalitions. You can imagine the problem might come as we continue to do warfare with coalitions and try to ensure we are protected from an information standpoint because you have to share techniques and ideas with the coalition if you are going to be secure. We are finding that difficult even in a peacetime environment today as we put up roadblocks for folks just trying to break into our system only to find out that they have broken in through someone else that is doing business with us. This will make warfare much more difficult.

The seventh and final one is the vulnerability of the U.S. homeland. Information-based techniques render geographic distance irrelevant. Targets within the continental United States are just as vulnerable as those in-theater targets are. Given the increased reliance by our U.S. economy in our society on high-performance network infrastructure, a new set of lucrative strategic targets presents itself to any one of our potential enemies. Clearly, those folks that have been on the commercial side of the business for a long time, did not think, from a security standpoint, with reference to their business. Unfortunately, as we move rapidly into the information age, they, too, along with us, have become very aware of the security ramification with reference to their business and how folks can manipulate their business and cause them great difficulty.

The questions come because each of these features presents us with a certain problem. The question before the audience today, and I think why we have symposiums such as this, is: what are we doing about them, and what can we do about them, particularly when you realize all of the other things that our military is tasked to do on a given day. I heard and understood Ken’s frustration with his concern about this area, but when you start throwing all of the other things on the table, it is a matter of priorities. It is a matter of priorities with a very limited budget, and we need to make you aware of those and have you work those issues. We will head down that road.

From where I sit, both the Air Force and the rest of the Defense Department have recognized how vital information is to warfighting. We have adopted the concept of information superiority and information dominance - two gigantic terms. When you think about it - when your side has fast and more reliable information than the enemy’s, you can consider that you may have a level of information superiority. Any time you can be inside the enemy’s decision loop, you can be sure that you may have an advantage on the battlefield. The JCS envisioned this new and fast moving environment when it published Joint Vision 2020. Planners conceived a fluid, responsive warfighting structure that would address not only command and control, but all forms of information, be it propaganda, in the electromagnetic spectrum, deception, everything that contributes to a commander’s view on the battlespace.

This is nothing new for many of you. For thousands of years, warriors have always wanted to look over horizon and gain information and insight on the enemy’s intention. Any time you have rapid information and information that you can skillfully use, deception and credible propaganda against enemy forces will give you a decisive advantage on the battlefield. We did this in World War II in any number of occasions that many of you can think about when we gathered information through various means to help our commanders make decisions so they could battle, interdict and intercept what enemy forces were doing.

During the Gulf War, this was very clear when Iraq thought we were going to advance and come in from the eastern shore only to be surprised that we came from totally a different direction. This is using information to its max and being inside the enemy’s decision loop.

Our goal in the Air Force and mine in the Air Education and Training Command is to assure that all Air Force personnel are able to operate effectively in this fast moving information-rich environment. Information dominance isn’t something that can be left to a few or one or two specialties or a few agencies or to just one command. We must develop and ensure that we have credible information warriors, both defensive and offensive. In my mind, the best way to do that is to ensure you have a training and education program in process that will develop these individuals.

In Air Education and Training Command, we are working hard to continue to design a road that will be necessary to incorporate information operation and its capabilities and all of our necessary functional areas within our technical training side of the business. We have established a team which has developed a list of specialties requiring additional training. The career field managers have added appropriately to their requirements and to their training standards. We have not stopped there, I can assure you. Information operations have been embedded in the appropriate unit instruction for our communication and computer areas, from the information assurance perspective. This has been an eye-opening experience for many folks that have been in the business over the last 18 months to two years. Information assurance will be one of our greatest challenges as we move into the new millennium.

Intelligence training by its very nature and the nature of the environment has extensive coverage into all aspects of information operation, and we do that training up at Goodfellow Air Force Base here in Texas.

Over on the other side, the responsibilities which we have in the command, and one which have been exploring in this arena for a long period of time, has been in education. At Air University, information operation concepts are fully integrated into the curriculum at the Air Command and Staff College and the Air War College. They are also introduced at the Aerospace Basic Course, our new course which we are just bringing on, as well as in Squadron Officer School, our accession programs and in our enlisted Professional Military Education schools.

Furthermore, we offer a major IW course at Air University, and in our joint flag officers course where we try to get them involved and exploit techniques which we may be able to use at the senior officer level and the command level. These courses offer students an opportunity to learn more about the theories and the concepts behind informational dominance.

This is a good start, but we still have obstacles to overcome. Some of those have already been mentioned. In terms of training and education, we must ensure our people have a basic awareness of the challenge that lies before them. We have been doing some of this and have been making some progress in the doctrine arena. Just recently the doctrine center in concert with the other commands, including this one, published doctrine 2-5, which is on Information Operations. I think this is a good start. This Service doctrine calls for a comprehensive, integrated strategy to the approach we may have in Information Operation. I heard General Minihan talk about the fact that this shouldn’t be just a course that sits on the side -it is something we’ve got to integrate into everything we do.

Through training and education and doctrine institutionalized within our courses, we in Air Education and Training Command will continue to prepare our service personnel to plan and conduct Information Operations and information dominance to the maximum of our capability. We are in the process of a cultural transformation, not only in the information arena, but the space arena and in our air expeditionary strategy. We need to grow information warriors as I stated before.

However, we can’t do this job alone. Every organization must be aware of the information warfare threat and how we plan to counter it. Everybody must be involved. This includes all of you here today. For sure, it includes organizations like the Air Force Association, our defense contractors and all those who concern themselves with national security matters.

I urge everyone here to make information and information warfare training and education your mission. If you make it your goal to educate yourselves and others on how information represents both a valuable tool to us, which is obviously does, as well as a deadly weapon, we’ll be ready to face the challenges that are now looming before us for the 21^st century and as it approaches.

We face a manpower shortage. There is certainly an increase in worldwide commitment and clever adversaries in a world that seems more different and more dangerous every single day. We do not choose our conflicts; instead, they choose us. We must be prepared to fight on any battlefield with any enemy, and those enemies have learned that while they might not be able to defeat us outright on the battlefield, there are many other places where they can find vulnerabilities and take advantage of those.

One of those vulnerabilities will certainly be in the minds of the American people or of its leadership or of its military. We all know that the ultimate center of gravity is the hearts and minds of the people. American people are entitled to the most agile and the most versatile and most effective armed forces that money can buy. It is up to us, though, to ensure that we are up to the task ahead.

By educating ourselves on the information threat as well as the physical ones, we will be well on our way and much closer to providing this nation with a first class kind of national defense it truly deserves.

As we close, let me say to you that information truly is power. We are learning this in a big way everyday that we go along. There is much more to be learned here: how do you harness this? How do you protect yourselves against others getting what you have and on and on and on. The list continues to get long. There is no easy way of going about ensuring we have the proper mechanism to ensure we are going to get the total desired result at the end. But I can assure you that having information is power, and it takes power to influence - that is what our military is all about - influencing others to help us achieve our national objectives.

Thank you for having me, and I’ll answer your questions at this time.

General Shaud: The line of questioning is the recruiting and training of our information warriors. The first question is this. We understand the Air Force has started a national TV advertising campaign. The goal is to attract new people. To meet recruiting, are there some career fields and technical areas which are harder to fill than others?

General Newton: We find a whole host of career fields that, as the days go by, become more and more difficult, and some of those you heard General Minihan mention. Folks that are in computers and information technology areas are highly sought after on the outside. There are some that are more difficult to hire to than others. That is not necessarily one that is hard to hire to, but it is hard to keep. Retaining folks is probably even more critical than recruiting at this point, and I’ll tell you why. Unlike the other services, we plan to keep our folks much longer than just one or two terms. We plan to keep our folks on for many, many years. There is a certain percentage that we need to stay with us. That impacts on the experience level, and once that experience level is drained, it puts you in a very difficult position of retraining. Not only is it costly, but it takes a long period of time to train to the levels we need to maintain in certain of those critical career fields. Anything in the flying arena is difficult these days to recruit to, not only in the pilot arena, but air traffic controllers. If you can spell computers, you’ve got a good job. Even if you are a fire fighter these days, security forces, all of those are difficult areas to recruit to and that is why you see this real emphasis these days on, for the first time in the history of the Air Force, paid television advertising.

General Shaud: We are finding it increasing difficult to retain young men and women with information system skills. Do you believe any statutory or policy changes would help fix that? What form could such changes take if you would agree?

General Newton: I would recommend against any statutory kind of specifics to keep folks in a particular career field. I think there is another way to do this. It is very simple. It is very straightforward. Bring money. That is flippant on my part, but it does boil down to that. Let me explain. Not just to bring money to pay our folks a salary. All of us who are in the blue suit and folks that come in a blue suit as well as those who are leaving, understand clearly that there it is not a position where we pay the same amount of money to people in uniform that they see folks getting in industry. That is illogical to even think that way, and it does not conform to the way our military is operated.

What I really mean in the way of “bring money” relates to all those things that add to quality of life. If you are going to have a ready force, when folks go to the supply shelves and want a part to fix something, they want the part to be there. It is all of those things that add to their quality of life. When the parts are not there, it adds to their frustration, and they may say, “I think I will go do this some place else.” It is that part of bring money that I am talking about.

General Shaud: General Dugan remarked, as he introduced the colloquium, that over the last 200 years, warfare has been about 90 percent information. Our great challenge today is how to execute that and how to take advantage of it and how to exploit it. Aptitude battery tests mean we find mechanical, electronic and administrative aptitude. Is there such a thing, or should we now have an information aptitude measure?

General Newton: The battery of tests of young folks who are headed to the Air Force is used as a mechanism to determine if they have the capability to learn so we can train them in a reasonable amount of time. Depending on what the course might be, we have to ask if we train them to the level we need. I don’t think we need to test to specifically go to a given career field, but just to see if individuals have the aptitude to apply themselves so they can learn. We are finding that if we stay in those high levels of our tests that they can do that very well. As a matter of fact, because they have been brought up in the information age, they know a lot more about this business when they first walk in than I do for sure. I don’t think it is so much as specifying specifically to the information techniques, even though our tests need to be upgraded as time goes on, so we can stay to the level we expect for those who are coming out of the various high schools.

General Shaud: In terms of information ops personnel, is the military reaching out to specific civilian expertise, especially in computer areas?

General Newton: My recruiters do that. It is hard to be successful because the target audience we are looking for are those who are just out of high school or in the first year of college. In trying to attract folks beyond that to come into the Air Force, all of a sudden you get into this pay business again. We are finding that some folks who have been with us and have left and gone back to industry, may want to come back, and we’ve been working various instruments to allow them to do that, unlike we’ve done in the past. We are trying to open the gates completely so we can bring some of those folks back on. I would be hesitant to say we would be successful going specifically for someone without a large pocket of money because they are already out there in industry making a sizable check, and it would be difficult to bring them on.

General Shaud: The last question has to do with technical training. How is Air Force changing to take advantage of the skills necessary in Information Operations? Do you have the money to keep this sort of training current?

General Newton: The answer to the last question is no. You never have enough money. There is certainly lots of work to be done in this arena, and there is work to be done that we haven’t even discovered yet as a Total Force. However, that doesn’t mean we are just sitting around and not doing anything. As I mentioned earlier in my talk. We are trying to look at all of our courses to see where we can infuse a number of things. For certain ones of them, you want specific skills on Information Operations and information techniques and knowing about information technology, so we zero in on those, whether it is folks going to fly JSTARS or in the intel community. There is a whole host of other places where there are very specific skills you may want. One other thing we have started here is to seek folks who are more culturally oriented to various cultures around the world. We think that will pay us big dividends this arena. So, you don’t just get data, but you get information that you can understand and we think that will be helpful as well. There are a whole host of those career fields out there that we are putting specifics into. But more importantly than that, since everybody starts right here in this command, we are trying to infuse into all of our training in this command, the awareness of the criticality of information and how you look at that from both a defensive and an offensive standpoint. Things that we just accepted in recent years no longer can be taken for granted because those will give you vulnerabilities that folks can exploit on the inside. They know a lot about the internet before they get to us. We have to teach them how to be careful with the internet so we don’t expose the wrong type of information to folks we don’t want to get it.

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