Orlando AFA Forum

General Richard E. Hawley
Commander, U.S. Air Forces in Europe
Why Forward Presence?
Orlando AFA Symposium
February 15, 1996

As is often true, where you stand depends on where you sit. Right now, I sit at Ramstein. I thought maybe I ought to talk to you a little a bit about forward presence. Maybe I ll phrase that a little differently to "forward stationing" and discuss why it is so important to our nation and to our national strategy.

What prompted me to want to talk about forward presence? It came after reading a few articles that talk about this bastion theory there are some defense thinkers these days who have postulated that we can have this force structure that can sit in the United States and be ready to respond on a moment s notice to a crisis any place in the world. It says we ll deploy them rapidly forward with our tremendous mobility capability, and we ll support them with long-range air power and the flexibility of our sea-based forces. Therefore, it implies we can free up these entanglements that we have all over the world where we are basing forces and maybe even save money in the process. By the way, it also implies we can keep a few congressional districts because we can take forces down overseas rather than some place in CONUS. Being that you stand where you sit, I ought to take that issue on. That is what I d like to do today.

When I hear people talking about why it is necessary to still have forces overseas in Europe, Japan and Korea, I am reminded of a saying by George Kenney who is one of our air power legends. He said, "History is not kind to nations that go to sleep." When I hear people questioning the wisdom of maintaining an overseas presence, I wonder if maybe we are not in danger of going to sleep and we need a little prod now and then to keep us awake.

Forward presence is a very complex and sometimes emotional issue. I don t think there should be any question concerning its importance, either to our national military strategy, or to the long-term interests of the United States. The debate often seems to focus on how best to achieve forward presence, not on the basic need for it, and that is good, but I sometimes fear that in our zeal to exploit the potential of some of these newly emerging technologies, we might lose sight of the more subtle benefits that in some cases can only be realized by having forces on the ground and in the air over areas of vital interest to our country.

There are some visionaries who foresee a future in which our great nation pursues its national interests using only forces based in the United States, in space, and in that place I really don t understand yet called cyberspace. Those increasingly robust capabilities represented by our space-based forces, our long-range bombers, the demonstrated capability of our strategic airlift forces to deliver fighter and support forcesquickly as well as our ground forces, lend credibility to these visions. We have a lot of capability to deploy very capable forces forward very quickly.

I have to tell you as one who has been overseas for about 10 of the last 15 years, I would counsel caution as we chart our course for the next century. Our great nation, in cooperation with allies and friends across the globe, has led this world through half a century of unparalleled danger to the future of mankind. We ve emerged into a new dawn, if I can steal that tired old phrase. One in which the threat to our national survival does not seem very large.

The threats are not gone. They are just more distant. The threat of nuclear war has not been erased. It is only less prominent. The ethnic and religious rivalries that have spawned so much grief for mankind have not abated, they have only increased. In fact, they are more volatile now than at any time since the end of World War II. The demise of the Soviet Union has not lessened the need for an active foreign policy. Indeed, the proliferation of U.S. interests around the globe underscores the growing need for an active U.S. role in the affairs of the world.

The question should not be whether we need to be actively engaged, but only how we should pursue that engagement. I argue that we must maintain a balanced approach in our pursuit of engagement, one that most certainly takes advantage of the capabilities that emerging technologies represent, but also is one that recognizes the unique contributions that flow only from forces forward based in strategic regions of this shrinking globe. There are some things that can only be done by forces based in the region of interest. What we need is an appropriate balance that maximizes our capability to influence the course of world events in ways that make this a more secure world for this country of ours.

I suspect many of you have grown weary of hearing folks like me raise the specter of another great war in Europe should we abandon our policy of engagement in the affairs of the world. Please forgive me for quickly reviewing the events of this century that we are about to put to bed, if you fall in that category. There have been two great world wars in this century, the second of which was in many ways a continuation of the first. Those two wars killed nearly 86 million people and set back mankind s progress for many decades.

In the two cold war conflicts that followed, Korea and Vietnam, nearly 100,000 Americans lost their lives. So you d think we had learned our lesson, but sometimes I am not sure. In a recent Los Angeles Times article, Jim Mann related an episode in which the ministers of defense of the UK, Norway, and the Netherlands visited Capitol Hill only to find an empty house. Not one Congressional representative showed up at a reception held in their honor. Moving to the Senate, they were welcomed by only one of the 18 foreign elations committee members who had been invited to meet them. Mann quotes a senior representative as saying, "There is a feeling now with the end of the cold war, that there are not many vital American interests anywhere in the world."

How wrong that feeling is. Maybe we should spend some time reviewing those important lessons of history. As we do, it is hard not to be struck by the many similarities between the world that existed in the first decade of this century and the world as we know it today as that century is about to close. There is tension in the Middle East, crisis in North and Central Africa, conflict in the Caucaus and in the Balkans, and the seeds of revolution seem to be growing in Russia. Does that describe the world of 1906 or of 1996? In fact, it pretty accurately describes both.

The differences are not that great in many respects, but there is one very important difference: we now have some structures in place that can keep localized conflicts from affecting Great Power interests in ways that jeopardize world peace.

Our network of global alliances is central to that structure for peace NATO is the most prominent of those alliances, but it is by no means the only one. Our bilateral treaties with Japan, South Korea and others are equally important. The one common thread that holds this delicate structure for peace together is the presence of U.S. forces on the ground, on the seas and in the air, in regions where local tensions and Great Power interests converge in ways that pose a threat to global peace.

In the aftermath of World War I, the so-called "war to end all wars," having lost more than 100,000 Americans in combat, our nation eagerly returned to a policy of isolationism and left Europe to fend for itself. Having rejected membership in the League of Nations and a policy of collective defense, the United States sent a strong message to the world, a message that we were unwilling to step forward and provide global leadership to a region plagued with conflict.

That, unfortunately, proved to be a serious mistake. As General Douglas MacArthur once said, "There is no security on this earth; there is only opportunity." Our missed opportunity and lack of vision opened the door to madmen who were intent on ruling the world or destroying it in that attempt.

Our failure to stay engaged helped create the conditions for renewed conflict in Europe and throughout the world, a conflict that cost the lives of almost half a million fighting men and women and snuffed out the lives of 60 million others while devestating most of the industrialized world. That happened within most of our lifetimes.

Our experiences in Korea and Vietnam should further reinforce the lesson that a strategy of peacetime engagement is the best and least expensive way to protect vital American interests around the globe. Would those wars have occured at all if we had been more actively engaged in those regions before they began? If we had maintained a stronger presence in South Korea, as we do today, would North Korea ever have crossed the 38th Parallel? One can only wonder how our decision making in Vietnam might hae been altered if we had more students of Southeast Asian history and politics inside the State Department and our Pentagon.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the elimination of the threat of invasion of Western Europe, we again faced a clear policy choice. We could either disengage and withdraw our overseas based forces, or stay with the strategy of engagement that had proven so successful and maintain enough forward-based forces to underwrite that strategy. Fortunately, we chose the latter, and the hopes for peace that glimmer today in the former Republic of Yugoslavia, the halting moves toward peace and stability that we are witnessing on the Korean Peninsula and the steady progress that we are seeing in the Middle East are the direct results of that wise choice.

We have learned the lessons of history. We will continue to use our influence to shape events in ways that will help bring this century of conflict to a peaceful close.

But there remains a wide range of opinion on how best to implement that strategy of engagement, and not all seem convinced of the need to keep meaningful U.S. military presence deployed overseas at a time when so many problems cry out for solution here at home. Could we not place much greater reliance on virtual presence from space and cyberspace? Can't CONUS-based bombers armed with precision munitions, those GATS-GAM [GPS Aided Targeting System-GPS Aided Munition] weapons the Chief talked about, carry more of the load? Don t our substantial investments in mobility forces give us the capability to quickly move forces to a theater in conflict? Of course, they do. They all contribute to our ability to successfully implement a strategy of engagement.

But let's not lose sight of the critical role played by forces permanently deployed forward in regions of potential instability, like Europe, where U.S. vital interests are clearly at risk. These forward deployed forces do some things that no other weapon in our policy arsenal can do. They give us a seat at the table, usually the most influential seat, when issues of interest to the U.S. are being debated. They sustain our system of alliances, which in turn allows us to leverage the military capabilities of allies in pursuit of common interests. They preserve our access to bases, ports and airfields without which we might not even have the option to engage.

They give us a pool of regional experts, both in and out of uniform and frequently very senior experts, who have served with leaders in the region of interest and who often make the difference between a policy that has an opportunity to succeed and one that is doomed from the start. They allow us to respond quickly with force in times of crisis and to more effectively sustain prolonged engagements, such as operation Provide Comfort in Northern Iraq, Provide Promise in Sarajevo and Joint Endeavor in Bosnia.

Let's look at each of these attributes of our forward deployed forces in turn. First is having a seat at the table when important policy issues are being debated. Does anyone here believe that we could have played such a prominent role in setting U.N. and NATO policy toward the conflict in the former Yugoslavia if we had completely withdrawn our forces from Europe after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989?

Would we be playing such a prominent role in shaping the structure of peace in the Middle East today if we had not cmmitted our forces in response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and kept them engaged in that region ever since? Would we have had the same influence in the search for peaceful ways to resolve the 45-year-long dispute between the two Koreas if we had not maintained our land, sea and air presence in that vital region? For me the answer to each of these questions is very clear and it is, "No."

Next is the role our forward-based forces play in sustaining our system of alliances and in leveraging the capabilities of allies in pursuit of our common interest. As we sit here in the United States, we often overlook those very important contributions that our allies have made to some of our greatest military and policy successes. Naturally, our immediate focus is on the contributions of our own forces because that is what interests us in our hometown, but our allies and friends contributed a quarter of the forces that engaged Saddam Hussein s armies during Desert Shield and Desert Storm.

Allied navies contribute 90 percent of the ships that are enforcing the arms embargo of the warring factions in the former Yugoslavia. Allied air forces contribute over 50 percent of the aircraft that are flying in Decisive Endeavor and that flew in Deliberate Force and Deny Flight before that effort began. Allied armies represent more than 70 percent of the ground force that is separating the warring factions in Bosnia today.

As impressive as those numbers are, they do not tell the whole story. Because we have kept forces in those regions of the world where our interests are threatened by local tensions and conflict, we know how to work with the forces of our friends and allies. Those forces generally operate under compatible doctrine,tactics and procedures. In many cases they have equipped their forces with weapons of U.S. manufacture, a huge advantage when we operate together.

The most widely recognized benefit I ve cited is access to the base infrastructure that is so critical to the success of any military operation. Our current airlift operations in support of the 1st Armored Division s deployment to Bosnia could never have happened if we had not had access to aerial ports at Rhein Mein and Ramstein [AB, Germany]. If that division had not already been forward deployed, we would have been faced with the imposing prospect of having to move the entire force from the United States by air and sea. Any of us who have watched that division deploy over the past two months and more can t help but wonder how much longer that would have taken.

We would have had to move that force through intermediate ports and airfields that would have required their own additional force structure and lift to facilitize them for the reception and onward movement of the division. We would have needed additional time to negotiate the use of those facilities. And, of course, the deployment itself would have taken a lot longer. It is about a one-month trip from the U.S. to the Adriatic. My guess is we are talking about an additional month to six weeks at a time when policy makers were haggling over days and hours. If you want to put the fire out while it is still small, you had better have a firehouse that is close to the action. Fortunately, in this case, we had a firehouse that was close to the action.

Now for that intangible benefit of forward deployed forces, called regional expertise. This one won t make the charts of anyone s cost effectiveness analysis. But it may well be the most important benefit that we derive from our long-term strategy of keeping forces forward deployed in regions of critical interest to our country. One of the classic mistakes that we make in formulating policy under crisis conditions is that of mirror imaging our adversary. By that I mean we often assume our adversary will view the world in the same way that we do and will respond in predictable ways to our actions. That is usually not the way it works. We are far less likely to fall prey to this policy trap if we have policy makers and advisors who have served in the region of interest, who have worked with some of the engaged forces and who know some of the leaders, leaders who drive the policies of our protagonists as well as our allies.

I can think of no better example of this benefit than the role currently being played by my boss, General George Joulwan, in the formulation of both U.S. and NATO policies toward the former Yugoslavia. You might say, "I thought the Chief was your boss." Well, I ve got two bosses. I have a NATO hat and a EUCOM hat, and in those hats, I work for General Joulwan. Few would argue that George has not played a pivotal role, and it is no accident that he is drawing on nearly 15 years of service in Europe. How much more prone to mistakes would we have been had we not had that resevoir of experience to draw on in this crisis situation?

Finally, the issue that so often we focus on is the issue of dollars and cents. In fact, there is not a cost associated with our forward deployed forces. There is actually a cost benefit. Many people cite the cost of maintaining our forces overseas as though they are more expensive than they would be if based in the United States. That is simply not true. The only way we can save money by withdrawing forces from overseas is if we decommission them and put them in the boneyard.

In every theater where we maintain a forward presence, a significant fraction of our total stationing costs are borne by our friends and allies in the region. Let s not forget that time and distance can be talked about in terms of money. When I send a squadron from Germany to Turkey in support of operation Provide Comfort, the deployment costs about $175,000. When we support that same mission from Hill Air Force Base in Utah, it costs about three-quarters of a million dollars. So when we get frustrated by the hard, grinding work that it takes to maintain a diplomatic environment that is receptive to our forward based strategy; when we are tempted by the siren song of technology that promises to free us of the need for entangling alliances; and when the pressures of a declining budget prompt us to look overseas for force structure reductions in order to spare those closer to home, let us keep in mind the enormous benefits that our nation, and indeed the whole world, has gleaned from our nearly five decade-long committment to a strategy of engagement built around a robust, forward deployed presence.

In closing, let me ask for one small favor from this audience because I know many of you can exert influence in one of my favorite places, Capitol Hill. I need some help. We have 73,000 Air Fore people and family members living in Europe today. They are deployed more frequently to contingency operations than any other part of our force, yet they are living and working in some of the worst facilities to be found anywhere in our Air Force. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, we stopped investing in new facilities in Europe. We didn t want to risk pouring good money into installations that might soon be closed down. That was a smart thing to do.

But that period of uncertainty is now over. We know with some confidence what our posture in Europe will be for the next decade or so and it is time to fulfill our obligation to give our people facilities that meet Air Force standards and are able to support the missions that we call upon them to do. Our people in Europe don t live in anyone s congressional district so their needs sometimes get pushed to the bottom of the stack. I, and they, would appreciate your help in keeping that from happening.

Ok, enough talk about forward presence. I suspect many of you would like to ask a question, perhaps about our ongoing operations in Bosnia. I would be happy to deal with those at this time. Thank you.

GEN. SHAUD: As you might suspect, the questions are in two categories: Europe and with acquisition. Let me start with a question that all European generals get on France. France s President Chirac recently recommended NATO reforms to allow European allies to play a more active role without U.S. participation. Do you see any changes in NATO and are some changes desirable in this regard?

GEN. HAWLEY: We are seeing a lot of change in the relationship between France and NATO. I think France, NATO and the United States are in the midst of a way to better integrate France into the NATO military structure that will protect the long-term interests of the United States, the NATO alliance and France. President Chirac s recent meeting with President Clinton is a clear indicator that France is reexamining the policy established by President De Gaulle some years ago. In fact, in my AIRCENT headquarters, which is my NATO hat, we have long had a French liaison element. That French liaison element was there to facilitate military planning and cooperation between the forces committed to NATO on a day-to-day basis and those of France.

I recently signed a memorandum of understanding with the commander of the French combat air forces to cement the procedures and rules under which the NATO forces of AIRCENT and his forces would work in times of crisis in the central region. The French liaison element which until now lived in a building remotely located on Ramstein [Air Base, Germany] is in the process of moving into my headquarters. We see daily increased cooperation. We exercise with the French Air Force. Our most recent tactical air meet was held in France. I see a lot of cooperation; it is increasing every day.

The policy issues are working toward resolution. It will take awhile, and it will be slow, but I think we are going to make steady progress. We ll end up with a situation in which both France s long-term interests and those of the United States and the rest of the NATO nations will be well served.

GEN. SHAUD: We'll take you up on your offer to talk about Bosnia. Can you characterize air operations, Post-Deliberate Force, as they are going on today?

GEN. HAWLEY: We have been in a period of steady transition from the more than two years of Deny Flight, with on-again, off-again hot spots like Deliberate Force, which culminated that period. The focus is now on our forces deployed on the ground. We have transitioned from the time up to and including Deliberate Force, where we were trying to apply air power to influence the adversaries in the former Yugoslavia with virtually air power alone, to a time where we are clearly in direct support of our forces on the ground.

We now have JSTARS [E-8 Joint Surveillance and Target Attack Radar System] deployed. It flies every day and is doing great. I don t think we ve lost one day. We haven t even lost an hour of a planned sortie due to breakdowns in the platform. We are doing a great job. Air lift has been our prominent role as we helped to deploy the 1st Armored Division, even though most of it went by train and road. Establishing the airheads at Tuzla and Taszar was a big effort on our part.

The airlift flow got the immediate force on the ground at Tuzla and then has played a big role in deploying the forces into Taszar as a stage forward has been our big focus.

We continue to fly in a Deny Flight-like manner to patrol the skies over the former Yugoslavia. In at least two cases where our young company-level commanders on the ground were confronted with belligerent participants, whether they be Serbs, Bosnians or Croats, the two commanders had the presence of mind to call on air power to fly overhead. It shows how the air power message really is getting across. In one case, they flew over supersonic just to get their attention. They let tose adversaries know that if they keep violating the terms of the Dayton Accord, there are some guys who are going to make life pretty unpleasant. It worked in both cases.

Air power has been very effective and I couldn t be prouder of the men and women of our Air Force who have made this operation virtually incident free. We could not have carried on a peacetime exercise for this period of time without hurting more people and damaging more equipment than we have done in this exercise. It has been virtually incident free.

GEN. SHAUD: The next question concerns basic troop strength and the base structure in Europe. Has it stabilized or do you visualize more change in the future?

GEN. HAWLEY: I think it has stabilized, but it needs some fine tuning. As you know, we drew down our forces in Europe very quickly. In the process of drawing them down, we realigned forces all over the command and created some anomalies in the support structure things like our forces in Italy not having any range to work on day-to-day. We need to figure out a way to get them access to a gunnery range where they can do that kind of backyard range work that everybody needs.

Certainly we have facility problems all over the command, which is why I made that closing plea for some support in that area. In terms of the overall numbers, we are about there. We are going to end up at the end of this year with about 27,000 people in USAFE, and another 5,000 Air Force people in other commands in Europe. I don t see it going any further south for at least some period of time. Certainly not as long as the political and contingency situation exists as we see it today.

We are stretched very thin. While I am on the subject, I need to give credit to the rest of the Air Force, in particular the Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve, for the support they give our contingencies in our theater of operations day-to-day. When I review their presence in my command on any given day, I have anywhere from 700 to 1,100 Air Force Guardsmen and Reservists in theater flying missions, installing communications and doing great work for us. It is a Total Air Force effort.

GEN. SHAUD: How would you assess the capabilities of the Rafale fighter and the progress, prospects and capabilities of the EF-2000?

GEN. HAWLEY: I haven t had the pleasure of flying either of those airplanes, so I don t have any additional data on the Rafale or the 2000 that you don t have. I will refrain from trying to compare them to any U.S. system. Both the French with the Rafale and the consortium that is building the EF-2000 are doing their very best to put together airplanes that will serve their needs in the next century. It is clear that there is interest in Europe in sustaining their defense industrial base just as there is interest in our country in sustaining our defense industrial base.

It is very difficult for the nations in Europe to produce systems on a par with the emerging system that we are talking about building in this country, like the F-22. I don t see the Rafale and the 2000 being in the F-22 s class. But they will certainly be in the F-15/16/18 class. They are going to be very good fighter aircraft with very good weapons. If I know my French friends very well, the Raphael in particular will have superb avionics. They do a great job in that area. They are going to be formidable airplanes and unfortunately, they will probably sell to anyone who has a fat wallet to buy one of them. We need to think about that as we look to our own modernization program over the course of the next ten years. There is going to be a lot of competition out there.

GEN. SHAUD: The last question has to do with GPS. What do you perceive to be the current position of the allies regarding GPS? Many host nation governments don t want to rely on U.S. controlled systems to land aircraft in bad weather. Is this an interoperability issue and have you had to address it?

GEN. HAWLEY: It has not really arisen on my watch in Europe, but I do hear some concerns about our policies regarding GPS. That has to do with our deprtmental requirement that we maintain control of the system and in particular be able to adjust its accuracy in time of crisis. Frankly, I think GPS is going to have a life of its own and everybody in the world will be using it. When I was in Japan and before I went to the Air Force Acquisition job a few years ago, I was invited to visit a guy on the east coast of Japan who had a fishing boat. He took me out in the fishing boat. In this boat, he had a GPS installed with a moving map display and a sonar and he could plot his position anywhere in that region down to a couple of feet and get to any place where somebody said there were fish to catch. GPS is everywhere. It is only a matter of time before it is probably the sole means of navigation for all kinds of purposes around the world.

GEN. SHAUD: Thank you very much and give our best to our troops in Europe.

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