One of the things that brought us together today is PBD-753
- Reduces planned spending by about $6B in '06 and $30B across the FYDP
- Just over one third of that comes from future fighter procurement in
the form of about 100 F/A-22s that are currently programmed for
procurement from '08-'11
Now many pundits have been after the
F/A-22 almost since it began development in 1991, so I presume there
are many who applaud this action
I do not fall in that camp, and
I thank the Lexington Institute for giving me a few minutes this
morning to tell you why I think this proposal is bad for the nation and
the future of Joint Warfighting
The bad news in PBD-753 is that
it proposes to give our future warfighters a force that includes only
five operational squadrons of F/A-22s, 120 aircraft plus another 60 for
training, test, attrition reserve and back-up inventory
The good
news is that the cuts don't begin in earnest until 2009, so we have
some time to debate the merits of the decision, and this year's QDR is
tasked to do just that
So let me suggest some things the folks who prepare the QDR should consider as they examine this issue
First,
ever since airpower came of age during World War II, control of the 3rd
dimension has been critical to successful joint warfighting, and will
be even more so in the future as our ground forces transform into
lighter, more agile, more situationally aware formations that are
increasingly dependent on reliable communications for their survival
and on non-organic joint fires for their lethality
Second, we
should expect future adversaries to challenge us in the air with
whatever tools they can find. They will study our history and will
understand how critical freedom of maneuver through the air has been to
our military successes
A little history lesson from the first decade of my service in the Air Force helps make this clear
-
During the ten years of conflict in Vietnam, the United States lost
2,448 fixed wing aircraft to a third world military whose air force
deployed fewer than 200 combat aircraft
- But they launched 9,000 SAMs and maintained more than 6,000 AAA sites throughout the war
- It was the AAA that proved so lethal, accounting for more than 65% of our combat losses
-
We've learned to operate effectively above the AAA threat, but that's
not the point. The lesson to heed is that adversaries will understand
our need for freedom of maneuver through the air, and will do all that
they can to deny us that freedom
The history of the Vietnam era
offers another lesson that the QDR should take to heart. Namely, that
building a force focused on a single vision of the future is fraught
with risk
- The air force of the '60s that was sent to Vietnam
had been built to deliver nuclear weapons - by bomber to the Soviet
Union and by fighter to eastern Europe
- Air supremacy was not
even an afterthought - the fighter tactic was to fly at very low
altitude - under the radar coverage - avoid the defenses, don't try to
defeat them
- After all, no one thought there would be very many tomorrows
- That force, so carefully optimized for World War 3 in Europe, fell well short of what we actually needed in Vietnam
So
my third suggestion is that the QDR have a little humility about their
ability to predict what kind of fight we may be in fifteen years hence,
and avoid the temptation to shape tomorrow's force around a single
vision of the future.
I received a piece of internet humor
recently that makes the point - in 1954, the RAND Corporation made a
prediction about the future of home computing in 2004. They said it
"...will not be economically feasible for the average home ... but with
teletype interface and the Fortran language, the computer will be easy
to use." They even built a model to illustrate their vision - it would
fill your dining room.
One key to the successes that our air
forces have enjoyed over the past 25 years is the balance that was
built into the force during the '70s and early '80s
- Learning
from their Vietnam experience, Air Force leaders of that era saw the
need to specialize parts of the force on the two most demanding tasks
they faced - air superiority and close air support
- They
established general guidelines that called for about 20% of the fighter
force to be optimized for air superiority and 20% for close air
support, with the rest to be multi-role fighters focused on
interdiction and attack, but that could also swing to help out with air
superiority or close air support as needed
- On the eve of the
first Gulf War the USAF's fighter force was split 20% air superiority,
23% CAS and 57% multi-role. Pretty close to the guidelines.
- Today the split is 21% air superiority, 15% CAS and 65% multi-role
That
balance between specialized and multi-role capabilities has served the
nation well; and the task of defeating enemy air defenses continues to
require specialized capabilities that the F/A-22 was designed to
provide, including the suppression and destruction of missile defenses,
which today is a mission for the multi-role part of the force.
The
nation and its joint warfighters will be well served if the QDR
produces a fighter force that is balanced between the specialized
capabilities required to do its most difficult work, and multi-role
capabilities that can shift as the situation requiresBut of course the
real question is how much is enough, and the answer to that question
depends on our assumptions about the future, and on how we decide to
manage the risks imposed by having to make those assumptions about an
unknowable future - how many fights at once, what kind of fights
against what kind of adversaries, in what kind of geo-political
environment, how much forward based and how much forward deployed.
We
know from experience that combatant commanders require specialized
capabilities like air superiority, suppression of enemy air defenses,
and close air support to be forward based or forward deployed. We also
know that we need a rotation base of two squadrons to sustain one
squadron forward based, and four squadrons to sustain one forward
deployed on a rotational basis. So if we assume that we'll keep one
F-22 squadron forward based in Japan, and one on rotation to the middle
east; we'll need a force of at least eight squadrons - that's about 270
aircraft - 192 for the operational squadrons plus 80 or so for
training, test, back-up inventory and attrition reserve.
That's
a bare minimum, and just happens to be about what we planned to buy
through the end of the FYDP - before PBD 753. If you think you need to
prepare for a couple of serious fights at more or less the same time,
the requirement grows substantially. The Air Force has said they'll
need 380, and I suspect even that number requires substantial risk
tolerance.
Now I don't pretend to be an expert on the theory of
risk management, but I have stayed pretty close to the concept
development work being done at Joint Forces Command and in the Joint
Staff. If those concepts have any validity, the joint fight of 2015
will involve operations aimed directly at key adversary
vulnerabilities, along multiple axes of attack and in multiple
dimensions. Most, if not all of those operations will depend on control
of the air.
They will depend heavily on exquisite situational
awareness about ourselves, the adversary and the environment. Many of
the sensor platforms that provide this situational awareness
