Orlando AFA Forum

The Honorable Sheila E. Widnall
Secretary of the Air Force
The Air Force in the New World Order
Orlando AFA Symposium
February 16, 1996

Thank you. It's great to be here in Orlando, enjoying the sun and the warmth, and it's a pleasure to talk to so many Air Force members and supporters.

As you know, the focus of this conference is air warfare requirements of the future. Within that context, I usually discuss the modernization programs we're pursuing to preserve our core competencies and execute our mission. Yet, I also think it's valuable to take a step back and consider more generally our contributions to the national security strategy, and how those contributions themselves shape the Air Force of the future. So that will be my focus this morning: first, the Air Force's role in the national security strategy of engagement and enlargement, and second, how this strategy, and the lessons we are learning as we execute it, are shaping the nation's Air Force.

Engagement and Enlargement

As you have often heard, our national security strategy is founded on our commitment to remain engaged abroad. We are the world's greatest power, and we have global interests as well as responsibilities. For the American people to be safer and enjoy expanding opportunities, we must work to promote the spread of democracy, open foreign markets, and pursue new opportunities for peace.

It's clear, based on a number of successes over the past few years, that global involvement and engagement is in the best interest of the nation and it's a requirement if we are to secure prosperity for future generations. Ultimately that strategy is designed to create a better world for our children. And I would offer the premise that this same goal of making the world better for our children is the reason why we build military forces. Now that's not a mission statement that you will find written anywhere, but it's what we're all about.

Whether we're deterring global war as the Air Force did for the long decades of the Cold War; or fighting conventional wars in theaters far from home as the Air Force has done three times in our relatively brief existence; or delivering humanitarian aid to trouble spots around the world as we do routinely, every day that is the ultimate justification for the resources that the American people entrust to us.

With the end of the Cold War, the ways in which we now operate and the missions we execute in support of that larger goal have changed dramatically. I want to focus for a few minutes on two activities that are dramatically dissimilar in most ways, but share some key characteristics. First, both point to the quality of our forces; second, both provide very clear markers of the directions in which our Air Force is evolving.

Deliberate Force

The first of these was by far the more dramatic: our air operation around Sarajevo last September, Operation Deliberate Force. Already the events of those days are dimming as time passes and the situation in Bosnia evolves. But we can all think back on that time with the citizens of Sarajevo running through the streets to evade the sniper fire with artillery firing into the city from the surrounding hills with the UN forces operating in Bosnia an object of contempt for the warring parties with NATO air forces having compiled a two-year record of frustration that threatened to tear the Alliance apart and with the warring parties showing no inclination to participate in serious peace negotiations.

On August 28 the citizens of Sarajevo paid the price in blood once again for the war, with another shelling atrocity. And finally, for the first time in the sad history of that conflict, the UN and NATO were able to forge and execute an agreement for a robust, sustained response to that outrage. The following day, NATO forces opened an air campaign that fundamentally altered the course of that three-year war.

What were the central characteristics of that air response?

First, it was a coalition response. While the Air Force spearheaded the effort and Air Force General Mike Ryan commanded the NATO headquarters creating unity of effort our colleagues from the Navy and Marine Corps were there, hitting the same targets, accepting the same risks. More than that, our sister forces from across the NATO alliance were there, demonstrating the professionalism that was so central to the operation's success.

Second, it was a precision response. We tend to focus on the tactical and technical level when we discuss precision in our operations concentrating on the remarkable capabilities provided by our modern weaponry. And certainly that weaponry proved itself again in this operation. In fact, Deliberate Force extended a trend which began with the Vietnam War in which about .2 percent of our weapons expended were precision and continued in Desert Storm, where contrary to the general perception of its having been a "video war," only about 9 percent of our bombs were precision guided. In Deliberate Force, over 60 percent of the bombs dropped by the NATO force were precision-guided.

But all this technology means little without aircrews rigorously trained and operating with absolute discipline. And across the Alliance, the nations provided exactly that kind of force. Perhaps the most difficult task that can ever face a young pilot is to plan and brief a mission fly those long, lonely minutes to the target area accept the risks of penetrating the defenses and then deliberately withhold his weapons release because he could not absolutely, positively identify his target. Yet we demanded exactly that and those young pilots delivered. It was a remarkable testimonial to their training and leadership.

But we need to step back from this narrow focus, to look at the larger issue of the precision with which this operation met the political ends toward which it was directed. And this was among the key lessons of this operation though hardly a new one. This force was effective, ultimately, because it was applied toward clear, achieveable policy objectives, in effective coordination with other diplomatic tools, with a clear view of military requirements. The United States, of course, was central in defining those objectives within the Alliance framework and carefully applied the lessons we learned in places like Vietnam and Somalia as the operation was contemplated.

What did this operation achieve? Simply stated Sarajevo's citizens are free to walk in the sun. The parties agreed to serious negotiations. And the air campaign triggered a sequence of events that lanced the boil of this war before it further affected the NATO alliance or spilled out of its borders.

What did we learn from our perspective as we look toward shaping the Air Force for the next millenium?

First, we learned that precision weaponry is essential to modern air operations. The military utility of these weapons, of course, has been recognized for decades. But beyond the ability to strike more targets, with less exposure of friendly forces, their role in limiting collateral damage has become central in this media-intensive environment we operate in. The NATO air operation was operationally robust but it was politically fragile. With the first report of civilian casualties, the entire operation would have been put at risk but that report never came. Today we are bringing on line a whole family of next-generation precision weapons that will extend their capabilities beyond anything now known.

Second, we learned again that information dominance works. You can never have enough of an edge over your opponent in your awareness of his capabilities or how to counter them.

We are focusing huge resources, energy, and attention to this problem creating new structures for theater battle management and command and control looking toward new capabilities among our space-based communications and intelligence sources. In the months immediately preceding the air campaign, we worked hard to upgrade the NATO headquarters controlling this operation with a system we call the JFACC Situational Awareness System, or JSAS. This system was designed to meld information from space-, air-, and ground-based sources instantaneously, and present a real-time picture of what is going on in theater. That system gave our air commander the situation awareness he needed to orchestrate this enormously complex, multinational operation. It was hugely successful and provided a precursor of what lies ahead.

The Air Force has long concentrated on this area, and has developed some amazing capabilities but as we look toward the technical possibilities now opening before us, the image that comes to mind is of standing before an open doorway, looking through it toward endless possibilities beyond. We are getting ready to step through that doorway.

In fact, we are employing some of these capabilities right now, in our peace enforcement effort in Bosnia, and last week I heard a story I want to share with you. We have employed the E-8 JSTARS, a modified Boeing 707 with its moving target indicator and synthetic aperture radar, to take incredibly detailed real-time pictures of Serbian movements and encampments. The NATO commander enforcing the separation there has taken to slapping those pictures down in front of the Serbs during their meetings to say, "See, you can't do anything we don't know about!" This is powerful it's like playing poker, and being able to see all the cards against an opponent that knows that you can do just that. Talk about dominance!!

Third, coalition operations work. The decades of cooperation with NATO fielding interoperable equipment, defining common doctrine, exercising and training together paid off handsomely. Our allied air forces operated as a force multiplier. Equally important, they operated as a glue for the political consensus needed to see that operation through to completion. We have paid close attention to our ability to work with coalition partners around the world not just in NATO, where the Alliance's political-military framework provides such a strong structure for such work, but around the globe, through a series of bilateral training efforts.

And finally, in Deliberate Force we reaffirmed the utility of air forces in providing options for our national policy-makers. Over the years of our growing involvement in the war in the former Yugoslavia, this nation had used political tools economic tools diplomatic tools all to no avail. This nation's air forces provided a military option at relatively low risk, with a real prospect of success. And that option paid off.

So in this case we saw a carefully controlled use of lethal force. We had tried to avoid that for all the right reasons. But that operation served to jar the course of events from the tracks they were on, to a more promising course.

Over the past few months we have seen the movement along this new track. The Alliance has moved in with its interposition force. Peace, however fragile, has descended over that land. And with the arrival of the NATO force, we have noted one more lesson the value of the unique national treasure of our strategic airlift force.

Our workhorse for the last 30 years, the C-141, and our newest carrier, the C-17, worked around the clock to deliver thousands of American service men and women, as well as their supplies and equipment to Bosnia. Airmen unloaded tons of gear in a frozen countryside. The C-17 delivered extra large bridge sections, which allowed us to ford the swollen waters of the Sava River and cross into Bosnia, bringing our message of hope to a ravaged land and more significantly, opening a crucial line of supply for our troops engaged in the peace implementation force. In fact, the C-17 is quickly becoming indispensable, as our operations in Bosnia show just how well its unique capabilities fit our needs. Operating from small airfields, sometimes hostile environments, and delivering oversize equipment, twelve C-17s delivered almost 50 percent of the cargo during the peak deployment period.

I was discussing our effort there with a member of my staff, as the intensive initial portion of our airlift operation drew to a close. We were both shocked at the ease with which we had just executed a mission that no other nation on earth could even attempt in lifting these forces into theater rapidly, despite the terrible weather that prevails in Bosnia this time of year. It is very like Sherlock Holmes's dog that didn't bark in the night: the most remarkable aspect of this story, is that nobody notices how remarkable it is. Needless to say, this has been a source of great pride to us in the Air Force. And again, it points to the powerful tool that your military puts into the hand of our national decision-makers.

Mil-to-Mil Contacts

Now I'd like to turn to a second area in which your Air Force is making this world safer for your children the range of contacts we have established with emerging democracies.

One could hardly think of a sort of work more unlike Deliberate Force. Our contact program will never receive even a small proportion of the attention that Deliberate Force did. It will last for years, not weeks. But perhaps when we look back from the vantage of years hence we will find that this range of contacts has had a more profound impact than did that air campaign.

This is a story that I find amazing every time I tell it and still more amazing every time I see it in action. There remains something uniquely thrilling about seeing troops from Ukraine exercising in Louisiana or German forces exercising with the Polish Army outside Cracow or a Russian colonel attending the Air War College in Alabama. (Unfortunately, the first one defected perhaps we taught him too much about life in America.)

We have established an enormous range of contacts with these nations. From the President's Partnership for Peace initiative in Europe, to the military contact program we conduct with the nations of central Europe, to the National Guard's "Building Bridges to America" program, which pairs a State Guard with each emerging nation the intensity and the ingenuity of this contact program continue to grow. And these programs have long since expanded beyond their origins, when they concentrated on tactical events. They have long since stepped up to the more difficult and fundamental questions facing these nations as they restructure their military and its relationships to society.

But I've spoken to you before about the transformation in Central Europe. You need to take what we're doing there and project it worldwide. Every day the Air Force is engaged in literally hundreds of similar activities with countries around the globe. Beyond improving training and international cooperation with foreign forces, these operations accomplish many other objectives. They serve to show the flag abroad, demonstrating American interest and commitment to many regions of the globe. They are a learning exercise for both U.S. forces and our international counterparts. And they build relationships, trust, confidence and a working knowledge of each other's military and culture.

For instance, in South America we have Special Ops forces in Peru, Bolivia, Columbia, and Venezuela, working with local governments to curb drug trafficking. We have three major humanitarian and civic assistance exercises going on today involving 13 units from all over the United States. As I speak, we have a Prime Beef Team building schools in Belize, a Red Horse Squadron drilling wells in Honduras, and an Air Evacuation Squadron at Howard AFB supporting Southern Spirit, a medical exercise.

Our Judge Advocate General has conducted 26 visits and exchanges with eleven countries in the region, exposing those emerging democracies to the myriad of legal issues and precedents associated with civilian control of the military. Through all these efforts, we learn the challenges these nations face, and better understand the pressures they endure. It's a win-win situation.

We also work closely with the air forces in the region, attending and hosting a number of service chiefs conferences. We recently hosted a conference on Personnel and Professional Development in the military, and this summer we will focus on the exchange of weather information. Finally, several countries Argentina, Venezuela, Chile, and Brazil want to join us in our Red Flag exercise.

This strategy of engagement is equally effective on the other side of the globe as we exercise, train, and exchange information with our Asian-Pacific friends. In Japan, our 47,000 troops provide a stabilizing force for all the nations of Asia. In South Korea, the U.S. security commitment remains unshakable, demonstrated by the 37,000 American troops stationed there. Further south, we participated in an Australian-hosted, multilateral exercise with five other nations, including Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia. In December, we held an air doctrine symposium in Guam, which was attended by 14 Asia-Pacific nations. And just last Friday (9 Feb 96) we finished a two-week COPE TIGER exercise with our Thai and Singapore counterparts.

Once again, the common thread running through all these activities is the professionalism and commitment of the men and women of the United States Air Force. I never cease to be amazed at the ability of our 20-year-olds to represent the U.S. effectively in Bosnia, work closely with their Russian counterparts on a peacekeeping operation, or help build schools in El Salvador.

These tremendously effective initiatives are only some of the new obligations that the Air Force has picked up with the change in the strategic environment of the past five years. They are part of a larger phenomenon that we have faced, of an operational tempo far exceeding any that we ever saw during the Cold War. We are supporting these obligations with forces about 60 percent of their size during that period. Right now, of the roughly 400,000 Air Force men and women on active duty, 80,000 are stationed overseas

and about 14,000 more are deployed in support of these new missions. Our people are proud to be called upon to perform these duties but we have taken a series of steps to ensure that they, and their families, can sustain this tempo.

Conclusion

So now I'd like to close, asking you as I do so to keep in mind the ultimate end of military forces that I mentioned as we opened this discussion. Ultimately we exist to create a better world for our children.

Toward that end, the American people entrust enormous resources to our care. We feel a keen sense of stewardship as we employ those resources to build an Air Force capable of meeting its responsibilities now and in the decades to come.

And I would ask you to look beyond the return on that investment as being just so many satellites or fighters or bombers or communications squadrons. As we move throughout the world to support America's interests, we do so with more than just aircraft and weapons. We do so with an Air Force that is better trained and better educated than any in our history. And above all, we do so with the conviction that by enduring sacrifices and, if necessary, risking lives today, we can build a better, safer world for tomorrow. That safer world is the real return on your investment and I am proud of the role that we have played in helping create that world over the past few years. Thank you.

GENERAL SHAUD: The array of questions falls in two areas: the scientific-industrial area and the other about quality of life. Does the Air Force-industry partnership in space launch provide a good model for obtaining cooperative Air Force-industrial efforts in information dominance?

DR. WIDNALL: The simple answer to that is yes. I view all of these as evolutionary, and I believe George Muellner will talk about this when he discusses acquisition reform. z,p. We really have developed a new way of working with industry to bring them in very early in the developmental stage. With Darleen s [Darleen Druyun, SAF/AQ] Lightning Bolt initiatives to get out of their way when they are trying to run a program, it saves us money and provides a better product. We really are working with industry in a new way across all of the program areas. I am keeping special interest in the EELV [Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle] and in the JAST [Joint Advanced Strike Technology] program and in the Direct Broadcast Satellite program that the Air Force is now running.

We have a lot of really exciting things and again, it is almost the theme that I spoke about earlier. It isn t just the hardware; and it isn t just the technology. It is the people and the way we work together in new ways. It parallels my remarks about what the Air Force itself it doing.

GENERAL SHAUD: Evidently, information warfare is a popular subject. As we approach information in the international community are there contacts that are proving useful as other nations work on this same subject?

DR. WIDNALL: I am not sure I can answer that question. Information warfare is a sensitive subject, and I think I d just as soon deflect that one, if I might.

GENERAL SHAUD:You stress the importance of precision and well-trained air crews, while Dr. McCall [Dr. Gene H. McCall, Chairman, USAF Scientific Advisory Board] and the New World Vistas has focused heavily on unmanned aerial vehicles. How important will the "man" be in the loop for future systems?

DR. WIDNALL: Again, I am not sure I can answer that question specifically. I d rather talk about it from a process point of view. We tasked the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board to give us a vision of what might be possible in the next 50 years with technologies that are rapidly emerging. We have received their report. We have gotten extremely good response from the scientific community and from the media, but we are at a very early stage in pursuing a number of those ideas.

The next step for the Air Force is to look at those ideas and map them on to our R&D programs our basic and applied research programs that will take us into the next decade. As we move forward, we will learn a lot. We are already committed to UAVs [Unmanned Aerial Vehicle]. We have a UAV squadron and we are getting good information from the Predator in Bosnia. It is just on its way over there for the spring cycle. It is a "learning by doing" process that we are going through.

We are necessarily committed to the future. That is what the Air Force is all about.

GENERAL SHAUD: We look forward to Dr. McCall briefing our science and technology committee this afternoon. The new world order seems to require a lot of TDY. Are there any innovative thoughts or plans to help manage this load and keep the quality of life for Air Force families as high as possible?

DR. WIDNALL: We have done a lot. The Chief mentioned yesterday that we have set a standard of 120 days/per year which tells us where we ve a problem. The individual bases are doing wonderful things, and they are organizing a variety of programs into a single, one-stop shopping family support center. People in a deployment situation can really get everything they need. The bases have been absolutely fanastic in responding to this.

It isn t just the air crews and the weapons systems and certain specialties. It is also the security police, medical personnel and the Red Horse teams for goodness sake. Air Force people in all specialties are in great demand. This is a comprehensive problem that applies to all of our people. But it is worked at the base level with extremely good support from Air Force leadership.

GENERAL SHAUD: Dr. Perry [Honorable William J. Perry, Secretary of Defense] has talked a lot about the emphasis on military family housing. The Quality of Life Commission had recommended the involvement of the private sector in the process. Would you give us an update on how that is going?

DR. WIDNALL: The best way to think about that is a phase 1, phase 2, and phase 3 approach. We are into Phase 1. My understanding is there is legislative relief in the Authorization Bill which will allow us to expand the range of experiments we can run with the private sector. Our civil engineers, headed by Gene Lupia [Maj. Gen. Eugene A. Lupia] who is probably here some place, are hot on the trail by looking at experiments with the private sector at specific bases.

What we want to do in Phase 1 is to learn a lot about what these new legislative initiatives will give us. There may be some Phase 2 and Phase 3 activities that are coming out of the Marsh Commission. There is a an IPT at the OSD level that is looking at the possibilities, and we are staying very plugged into them. We believe the Air Force, by working out the details in specific opportunities, can actually teach the overall system a lot about what is possible.

The bottom-line for us is that we truly believe we want the projects managed by the face-to-the-customer level at the bases. We don t ever want the management to get too far from the customers. We will work privatization issues with our customers, our airmen and our families in mind.

GENERAL SHAUD: Dr. Widnall we have a final question. We know you travel around a lot and hear from the troops and this is about the commissaries being under seemingly endless attacks. In your view, how important is this benefit and are there opportunities for further reform of the commissary system?

DR. WIDNALL: I actually notice that the attacks on the commissaries have decreased since Dr. Perry made it quite clear that he supports the commissaries. So we haven t seen a lot of that. On the other hand, all of us in DoD are looking for ways to be more cost effective and efficient in what we do. The Commissary Agency should not escape that scrutiny. We would expect them to continue to streamline and apply good management principles. But Dr. Perry is completely supportive of the commissaries, so we don t see a lot of budgetary attacks on the commissary system.

GENERAL SHAUD: Dr. Widnall, we thank you for your nurture and care of your U.S. Air Force.

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