General Richard Hawley, USAF (Ret.) Remarks Print Page 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 Copyright © Lexington Institute. All rights reserved. |