MOAA: Rising to the Challenge

Rising to the Challenge
Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. John P. Jumper makes his case for more people and planes in an interview with contributing editor Tom Philpott.

Gen. John P. Jumper's first full day as Air Force Chief of Staff was Sept. 11, 2001. The nation has been at war ever since. Even before the war on terrorism, a full plate of challenges awaited him. Seven months earlier, Air Force readiness had fallen to its lowest level since before the Persian Gulf War, a consequence of frequent deployments, spare parts shortages, and aging aircraft. In 36 years of service, Jumper has commanded a fighter squadron, two fighter wings, a numbered Air Force, U.S. Air Forces in Europe, and Allied Air Forces Central Europe. He has flown 4,000 hours in seven types of aircraft, including 1,400 hours in combat. Today, the 1966 ROTC graduate of Virginia Military Institute is responsible for organizing, training, and equipping 359,000 active duty and 182,000 Guard and Reserve personnel. "You work a long time to be able to get to a place where you can make a difference," he says. "And we've got a lot of great people I need to make a difference for."

Jumper discusses readiness, operations, and force size, as well as efforts to modernize and transform the Air Force. While it remains the best air force in the world, he says, its people are beginning to feel the strain. He also warns that U.S. aircraft technology faces stiff competition from some potential adversaries.

In a recent speech, you said readiness hit bottom in February 2001 when only 65 percent of the Air Force scored in categories one and two, down from 90 percent going into the Persian Gulf War. How did that happen - through budget shortfalls?

You always have choices within your budgets. We had started programs, quite frankly, [in which we] assumed we could buy fewer spare parts for aircraft, or use methods to deliver parts just in the nick of time. None of that worked. ... The fact is, as airplanes get older, they need more, not fewer, spare parts. We're flying Mach II jet fighters into their 25th year of service. You wouldn't dream of driving your 1976 Ford at max performance. If something that old is in your driveway, you pamper it.

Take our [KC-135] tanker fleet. At Tinker Air Force Base (AFB) [Okla.], on the depot repair line, we find airplanes that, essentially, have had their skin taken off because of corrosion problems. They are in the depot longer than we anticipated. That time away, and the money needed to repair unanticipated corrosion problems, affects readiness.

For several years now we've put lots of money into getting flying hours back up [and] getting spare parts back into the inventory and have redesigned our depots. We're seeing the benefits of that with increasing mission-capable rates. [Across the fleet, aggregate mission-capable rates in fy 2002 improved 2.5 percentage points, to 75.7 percent, the largest jump since the mid-'80s. The gain is even more striking because it occurred while aircraft utilization rates rose for the war on terrorism.]

In 1999 we did not meet recruiting goals for the first time in Air Force history. We never took recruiting seriously. But the economy of 1999 offered very attractive outside jobs. Suddenly we had to compete. To do that, we tripled recruiters in the field, from 500 to 1,500, and started putting ads on television. Then we began meeting our recruiting goals again.

Due to [Sept. 11 and] other factors, retention has improved too. We're keeping people dedicated to this war on terrorism. Also, the Air Expeditionary Force [aef], formalized in 1999, put more predictability into their lives. Before that, we sent people on contingency operations having no idea when they were coming home. It was a Cold War mindset, to float contingency missions on top of everything else. But with the aef concept, our day-to-day focus is on deployed operations. We are in a rhythm to accommodate that deployed state as the steady state.

We started with 80,000 people in the deployable air force. We're up to about 250,000. We have done the Afghanistan operation from within our aef concept. It's not perfect yet. We have shortages in certain specialties and with very high-demand assets. We also had to stand up a very large force to handle airspace protection over America. This involved up to 15,000 people a day, 40 to 50 tankers, airplanes deployed in 25 to 30 new locations. You can imagine the strain on security forces. We were never [staffed] to deal with security conditions increasing both at home and overseas. We had to augment both, with reserve forces and by recruiting additional security forces. You can only train so many at a time, however.

As a fighting force, we were ready. But after sprinting for a year, the equipment now is getting tired. We're making it age at two to three times the normal rate and putting great demands on people. The rotational concept helps, but we're leaning on people very, very hard. The nation is getting a lot of work out of its Air Force.

Ready to Soar

This chart shows gains in mission-capable rates across all aircraft types in FY 2002 versus FY 2001. Jumper attributes this growth in large measure to aircraft spare parts orders, which began to rise before he even took office.

Even before Sept. 11, experts debated whether the services had gotten too small, whether people were being worked too hard. As we prepare for a [possible] war with Iraq, many Americans now wonder how the military can do it all. How do you answer that concern?

We can do anything the president asks us to do. People might be a little more tired than you'd want them to be, but the performance will be absolutely magnificent. What we have to consider, however, is the impact over the long run. With Afghanistan, we've raised the baseline of activity we're asking our people to sustain. How that affects things like end strength [requirements] we're starting to mull right now.

Early in the '90s, the Air Force came down by 40 percent. With the Soviet Union's collapse, we struggled to find the new baseline. Now the question is, did we go down too far [in light of] a 400 percent increase in contingency operations? One area of strain is on Guard and Reserve forces. Even before [Sept. 11], they were supplementing the active duty Air Force on contingency operations at a rate greater than during Desert Storm. After [Sept. 11], that support has been even greater. Fully 30 percent of some packages we deploy are Guard and Reserve. ...

Americans see their military performing superbly in this surge mode and conclude, "Hey, that's the level of performance I want and with this many people." Problem is, you can't surge all the time. You've got to have a "normal" that leaves our people enough time to be with their families, to supervise the upbringing of children, to have private lives commensurate with the lives of people they are sworn to protect.

We've been doing operations Southern Watch and Northern Watch there for more than 10 years. But there would be a much greater level of effort.

We have grave concerns over the tempo of our people. We cannot operate the way we are without more. [Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld] has rightly challenged us to make sure we have explored efficiencies through technology or other ways of doing business. That gets into privatization and outsourcing, which we have been doing for a number of years.

But we have to be careful. Visiting a base you might say, "We could have civilians guarding this base." But military people guarding that base are part of a rotation base deploying every 90 days. If we substitute a civilian for that guard, then there is nobody to take the place of the one over there right now. You can kill your rotation base. In some skill sets, like communications and security forces, we've already gone too far.

So have you squeezed the "efficiency" turnip about as much as you can to free up more uniformed personnel?

There are always ways to find efficiencies. We have people working in other defense agencies. Are those necessary functions? If we harvested them all it might be 3,000. We're not going to be allowed to harvest them all. So this won't take care of a problem that might be in the tens of thousands.

We requested a 7,000[-person] increase in the first year and 30,000 overall. That's when we were asked by [Rumsfeld] to take a look at inefficiencies. We're doing that now.

Do you still believe you will need 30,000 more personnel over the next several years?

We're trying to get that number down. But there's great pressure on the personnel we have. Something is going to have to give before long.

People understand what we're going through. Retention rates actually are improving.

The Air Force used blanket "stop loss" authority for a time after [Sept. 11] and with war in Afghanistan. Along with that, only the Air Force has extended some mobilized reservists into a second year.

It's a balance. People come in under contract. When their time is up they have a right to leave when told they can. We can stop loss them for a time. But at some point you've got to honor the fact they have other obligations. [The last personnel in stop-loss status were released by September 2002.]

On reserve forces, we were very hesitant to extend people any longer [than a year], but we flat couldn't do our job any other way. We had 31,000 reservists called up for Afghanistan. We had to extend almost half of them, mostly security forces, for the second year. This is painful for all of us.

When we came off of stop loss for the active force, there was big concern those people would walk. You know what? They didn't. Most stayed. Morale is good. These are patriotic people. They valued their service to the nation previously, and they want to keep doing it. These are not people who will walk off and leave Americans in the lurch.

Will the Air Force have the resources to handle another war - this one in Iraq?

We're going to have to have a call-up. No doubt about that. The size of it will be a subject of conversation. But listen, on our flight lines in America, on our flight lines overseas, these people are fired up. They're not just doing their duty. ... I met a young captain, a National Guardsman, working on a giant ramp project at one of our bases overseas. It was tens of thousands of square feet of ramp. This young highway engineer saluted and said, "Sir, I'm not leaving until this is finished." He has a bunch of guys working for him. They own that thing! You find this attitude all over the place. These are people who care.

What do you need to do to modernize your aircraft fleet, and how have you been constrained by budgets?

What beats an enemy is firepower on a target. We have bought virtually nothing in the last decade that modernizes or delivers firepower. We've got to start procuring things to employ in combat. That's why we are so adamant about the F/A-22. This airplane will give us magnificent leverage. Most people think it is all about dogfighting because the F/A-22 was advertised as a replacement for the F-15. But the most important thing it will do for us is take out the next two generations of surface-to-air missiles, kick down the door in the highest threat scenarios with a combination of stealth and supercruise. ... Right now our stealth assets have to fly in the dark. The F/A-22 not only can protect itself but [also] other stealth assets. It leverages stealth into daytime for the F-117 and the B-2.

Still, the F-15 and F-16 get the job done in Afghanistan and in enforcing [Iraq's] no-fly zone. So skeptics ask, "Why spend extra billions on F/A-22?"

There's a line of folks out there who say, "Damn, you guys go off and nobody is able to touch us. We're good enough." Well, the fact is the Russians have never stopped building airplanes. A series Sukhoi aircraft started with the SU-27 in the mid-'80s and is up to the SU-37. The SU-37 is not in production, but it is flying, and models in between are being delivered around the world. From time to time we get our hands on these airplanes. We take our Fighter Weapons School's best pilots, put them into one of these airplanes and, after two or three hours, put them up against other Fighter Weapons School guys flying an F-15 or F-16. The result is our guy flying their airplane beats our guys flying our airplanes every single time.

Not well known. The good news is, when we go to war, it's their guys flying their airplanes. But that's a heck of a thing for America to count on. During the '90s we've seen several other nations' air forces challenge us. They got their butts kicked. So I don't think there is an air force out there, with what they've got this minute, willing to take us on. But every air force out there is looking for a way to beat the U.S. Air Force.

We're going through what we always do in development - the normal frustrations of fluttering tail sections and software instability. Test aircraft are not being delivered as rapidly as we would like, so tests are behind. ... Once in the hands of pilots, the airplane is exceeding every specification we lay down for it, sometimes by quite a bit.

This will be a truly transformational airplane to deal with future concepts of operation. The Army's Brigade Combat Team concept puts elements deep into enemy territory. With [the] F/A-22, we have an airplane that can penetrate using supercruise - going Mach 1.5 without afterburner - to very rapidly help those guys on the ground when they need it. It will have eight internal 250-pound bombs so we don't compromise stealth with external stores. The bombs will have wings and fly out to 40 to 50 miles from a supercruise configuration to keep open flight corridors, so C-17s can go deep behind enemy lines to resupply those units.

Meanwhile, sensors on this aircraft suck up enormous amounts of information and process that in displays to the pilot. A pulse-to-pulse threat analysis system can put that information on a network for others to take advantage of, building a total picture of the environment based on F-22s in an area.

The key over the next decade is integration. We have got to integrate manned, unmanned, and space systems at the digital level. Right now we're a collection of tribes. Visit any operations center, you see a tribal representative sitting behind a tribal workstation. They interpret tribal hieroglyphics and reinterpret for the next tribe member next door, who then reenters the same information to his workstation so it can go up through his tribal network.

But put the machines in contact with one another at the digital level, and they have this conversation in a nanosecond. Results are immediately available. We will have arrived in that element of transformation when the sum of the wisdom of our manned, unmanned, and space platforms ends up with a cursor over the target, and the operator behind the console cares not one bit where it came from. ...

I talk about a multisensor command-and-control aircraft - an aircraft controlling unmanned aircraft while talking to [National Reconnaissance Office (nro)] satellites. Think of it! People blanch and faint at the very notion of a machine-to-machine conversation with an nro satellite. This is something we should be pursuing with some vigor.

Budgets are secondary to cultural considerations. We have to have people agree that the objective is to put that cursor over the target. Precise location is absolutely required. We want to be able to call these sensors - manned, unmanned, and space - into a network instantly.

We're less than halfway there. Everybody's got their own vision of how this should happen, unfortunately. We need to pull this together in a systematic way. ... We don't want one person owning it and creating it in the image of one service or another. We have to have standards that allow us to plug our stuff in and be part of a network. ...

We also are changing the way we think ... where somebody likes this kind of system or that kind of program and advocates it. We no longer want to talk about what we're going to buy to fight with before we describe how we're going to fight. Concept of operations, or ConOps, is replacing that platform-centric way of thinking.

We start on it in 2004. It will begin to mature in 2005 as we get all the concepts of operations written. The first we wrote is for the Global Strike Task Force. That's why you're hearing about kicking down the doors.

... [Q]uality of personnel isn't a problem. We graduate 1,000 new airmen every Friday at Lackland AFB [Texas]. ... These kids have just come through a profound experience. I shake their hands and say, "Are you proud of yourself?" They tell me, "This is the first time I really feel like I've accomplished something" or, in the worst cases, "I was living where I was probably going to be dead in two years. ... This has saved my life."

Kids tell you this with tears streaming down their faces. Then here come the parents, looking for their kids. They don't recognize them. "Yes, Mom. It is me." Last time his dad saw him the kid looked like he fell down the stairs with a tackle box - pierced ears, nose, lips. Now he's standing up straight saying, "Yes sir. No sir."

This generation of Americans, when properly led and motivated, is no less dedicated or patriotic or committed than any generation that ever served.