Previous IFPA-Fletcher Conferences

The 33rd IFPA-Fletcher Conference
on
National Security Strategy and Policy

October 16-17, 2002
The Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center
Washington, D.C.

Transcript Session 4: Transformation for a Changing World

Perspectives from the Chiefs of Staff
Address by General John P. Jumper, USAF, Chief of Staff, U.S. Air Force

Dr. Pfaltzgraff: Our next speaker is General John Jumper, who was appointed Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force in September, 2001. His numerous previous assignments included Commander Headquarters, Air Combat Command, Langley Air Force Base; Commander U.S. Air Forces in Europe and Commander Allied Air Forces, Central Europe; Deputy Chief of Staff for Air and Space Operations Headquarters, United States Air Force, Washington, D.C.; Senior Military Assistant to the Secretary of Defense; Deputy Director for Politico-Military Affairs, Strategic Plans and Policy Directorate, the Joint Staff. General Jumper is also the holder of an MBA from Golden Gate University. So, it is with great pleasure that I welcome the Chief of Staff of the Air Force as our next speaker.

General John P. Jumper: Thanks, Bob, I appreciate it very much. Jim, I think, covered about all the categories of transformation that one can imagine, and I think he got it just right. There’s a thousand ways to do it, and rather than try to go into any precise definition, like Yogi says, I’m just going to tell you what we’re doing.

You know, to me, the most fertile ground for transformation lies in the proper development of concepts of operation. We at this table, I would suggest, and most of us in uniform are what retired Chief of Staff of the Air Force General Mike Dugan used to call heavy equipment operators. We like to talk about the equipment we operate. And when you’re a captain or a lieutenant, that’s exactly the way it should be. I want that F-15 driver or that A-10 driver out there thinking that there’s nothing on the face of the earth that can beat him when he’s in his machine and he’s doing what he’s been trained to do, or she. In fact, that’s true.

But as we get older and older in our professions, we have not done all that we can as operators to sit down and write down how we plan to fight before we go into the process of what we’re going to buy to fight with. And that’s driven largely by a process, the acquisition process that Jim talked about, that forces us into this program mindset. That’s how we have to present it on the Hill, that’s how we have to argue it. But what we don’t do is talk about how to meld those programs to perhaps give us the best leverage on the battlefield.

So, we in the Air Force are going to start with a new way of doing business. We’re going to start with the concept of operations. It describes in some detail how we plan to fight, how we plan to integrate with the other services, with coalition and allied partners before we decide what we’re going to go out to buy to fight with. Now, this has caused some pain and consternation within the Air staff, but it’s going to be a slow and painful process. People have actually blanched white and fainted at the thought of coming away from the traditional programmatic way of looking at things, but this is what we’re going to do.

Also among the services, if I’m doing my job right as a service chief and my subordinates are doing their job right, we ought to be able to stand before any group and articulate Jim Jones’ expeditionary maneuver warfare or the new brigade combat team concept of operations as well as our colleagues in the other services. And we also ought to be able to articulate how our task force concept in the Air Force is going to fit with those to enable them to do their job better. And we started down that road, and we will continue that journey until we can do that.

I want to make sure that when my Army colleagues are deep behind enemy lines, we have a way to secure quarters so we can get the C-17s and the C-130s back to where they are. Want to make sure that those quarters remain clean and that the enemy forces don’t have a way to get to our forces on the ground with anything from the air. When forces on the ground are in trouble, we need to be able to get to them quickly. We need to be able to penetrate whatever is between us and them and get to them and provide the right kind of help. We need to be able to do it 24 hours a day and in all kinds of weather. And understanding where the Army is going then helps us understand where we’re going.

I’ve talked to Jim Jones before, and they have a great and longstanding tradition with the United States Navy and they float around on ships and they do that for a long period of time, and I love them for it, but why not from the air from time to time. If we’re able to get them into where they want to go quicker, why don’t we do it that way. And we’re working on ways to do that as well. It doesn’t threaten anybody, it just makes us all do our jobs a little bit better.

Jim talked about technology, and certainly a large part—

END OF TAPE

Again, this has to do with stovepipes and cultural changes that have to take place so that the sum of the wisdom of our space, our intelligence, our surveillance, and our reconnaissance ends up with the cursor over the target. And to the operator at the console, looking at the cursor over the target, it is of little difference what the source of that information was. When you think about it now and you go into an air operations center anywhere around the world, you have a large number of consoles and behind each console is the tribal representative of some type. And the tribal representative interprets tribal hieroglyphics and then stands up and walks five stations down and reinterprets those hieroglyphics to another tribal member who then enters it into that workstation in that tribal hieroglyphics. It’s not quite that bad, but it’s almost that bad. And we don’t connect one with the other.

You’re in an air operations center and you’re going through a simulated scud attack and here comes the blue light on and whoop, whoop, whoop and everybody sits at attention and the first thing that happens is, through the miracle of magic and satellites and all the way from Colorado Springs, here comes the dot up on the screen that says this is where we think the scud is coming from. And it computes an estimated error and then 30 seconds later it computes the estimated impact point, and it’s a miracle to watch. Then you watch all the tribal representatives get up from behind their workstations and walk up to the screen and copy down the coordinates of where the launch and impact take place. The first 7000 miles is a miracle. The last 20 feet’s a disaster. Because we don’t integrate the things that we do very, very well because of cultural stovepipes. Believe me, I am the officer in charge of breaking down the cultural stovepipes and we are well on our way to that goal.

Transformational organizations. Jim talked about that and we talked a little bit about the acquisition process. And Jim and I and the chiefs have talked about this acquisition process a long time, and you know, what’s very interesting is to understand the difference between what is really in law and what people think is in law, what is really a rule and what people have long established as thinking is a rule. And it’s not really there. When I say, show me that I can’t do this or can’t do that, it goes from, oh, it’s a law, to, well, that’s a rule, oh, well, we’ve always done it that way. And I remember when we were first putting hellfire on a Predator. You know, it started over in Kosovo when you had the Predator hovering around at 70 knots, looking right at the targets you wanted shot and there’s the A-10 or the Harrier or the F-18 or the F-16 500 feet above that Predator, and you couldn’t get the eyeballs of the person with a bomb on the target from what the Predator was seeing. And you had these agonizing conversations between the person flying the Predator who is saying, sir, it’s the tank between the two red-roofed buildings. Here’s the A-10 guy up there looking over a landscape that’s got 48 villages in front of him and 8000 red-roofed villages and red-roofed buildings. Oh, it’s right beside the road. Well, that didn’t help. An hour and a half later, you finally are probably in the same zip code but you’re still not putting steel on the target. So, we said let’s put a laser designator on that Predator, and you send it back and you’re in the middle of a war. This is the acquisition process at its best. Our great acquisition warriors get in there and they pinch wires together and make this happen. In two weeks, we had a laser designator on the Predator and had it back over in Kosovo.

Then the war stopped and the old system took over. I come back to be the Commander of Air Combat Command, now I’m in charge of the requirements business. I sit down and say, okay, show me the laser-equipped Predator. Oh, sir, we took that all apart. It’s not in the program. I said, well, it’s going back in the program right now. And while we’re at it, let’s put a couple of hellfires on there and see if we can shoot hellfire off of this thing. And, of course, the whole community going into its risk-averse mode. It’s not their fault, by the way, it’s just the way it is. Come back and the first briefing I get on hellfire and Predator is, oh, all the charts are all red. This is all high-risk. It’s going to take $15 million dollars and going to take you at least three or four years, got to have an EMD process, set up a SPO. I said, you’ve got three months and $3 million dollars, just go do it. I will take the risk. Oh, you’ll take the risk? Oh, okay, that’s fine. And off they go.

Now, it took a little bit more than three months. It took five, because we had to go through some rules on missile control regimes and things like new starts and things like that to get through the process. But, of course, it worked. Of course, our scientists and engineers can do this. And we didn’t break any rules, we didn’t break any laws. And that’s just one example, ladies and gentlemen. We can do a heck of a lot better than we do.

And, finally, I just want to make the point, and I think everyone up here will endorse this. When it comes down to who wins and loses, you need two things in the end. You need firepower. All the great stories we tell of Staff Sergeant Lionheart and Markin(?) and all those great youngsters on the ground up there who are deployed with the Army units putting laser beams on the target, talking to B-52s or F-18s or F-14s or F-15Es that put steel on target. And in the end, that’s what wins. We can leverage everything in the world, until you put that steel on target, you’re not going to win the war.

And the second thing is the courage of our people. And everyone up here can tell you a great story. I’m going to tell you mine. Three weeks ago, we went out to Kirtland Air Force Base and a young airman named Cunningham, Jason Cunningham, senior airman, was on his first combat mission going into Roberts Ridge along with a helicopter full of Army colleagues. There were three airmen on that helicopter. One was Cunningham, he was the PJ, a pararescue man, the other two were combat controllers. And as they sat down, the helicopter was shot down, and they began taking casualties right away. They were surrounded 360 degrees. And Cunningham began pulling people out and trying to get them to safety. And as they tried to get some help and the combat controllers were calling in help from the air that was available and holding the bad guys off, after a period of time Cunningham was mortally wounded. And during the presentation, all the guys that were in the Army unit that was with Cunningham were there at the presentation, and they told me that Cunningham was telling them how to administer to the wounded who were still alive as he died. And he knew he wasn’t going to make it. Now, Cunningham was stationed at Moody Air Force Base in Georgia, and his wife is enrolled in a local college there and she’s an Air Force ROTC. She’s got two young daughters. About three weeks ago, she graduated, just before this presentation. She graduated as a distinguished graduate from ROTC summer camp. And I gave her the Air Force cross that Senior Airman Cunningham earned. He was on his first combat mission, and I said in my speech, I’ve got about 700 combat missions that I flew and on all of them put together, I didn’t demonstrate the courage and the strength that this young man did on his very first one.

And when it comes down to it, it’s that courage that wins. It’s the firepower that wins. And as we transform, we have to keep that in mind.

Questions and Answers

Dr. Pfaltzgraff: So, we now have some opportunity for discussion, for questions, very limited, unfortunately. So, what I’m going to propose is that those who would like to ask questions do so, and then we give the last five, six minutes or so to the panel for a comprehensive response, if that will work. Let’s hope so. Let’s go to the back of the room. I see a hand up back here, all the way back. Please identify yourself now.

Dr. Jon Czarnecki, Naval War College: This is for General Jumper. In the past days, we’ve heard a lot about preemption in our doctrine now. How is the Air Force going to use preemption in a kind of proliferation intervention? How have we enhanced our capability to target and destroy NBC facilities, especially those that are deeply buried?

Dr. Pfaltzgraff: How about some more questions for the panel.

Dr. Jon Czarnecki again, still with the Naval War College. A very quick comment and then a question concerning your education, concerning professional military education. I know that many of you, all of you mentioned the importance of personnel and training. And I just give a word of caution as a professional educator for some quarter of a century, that the cheap ways that people are advising many of you concerning CDs and web-based learning, there is no cheap way. And I don’t want to take up too much more time on that, it’s just a word of advice.

The question, though, is what, and it’s really to anybody on the panel, what is being done to develop common recognition of professional military education across the services? We know about JPME, but in terms of-- If I go to an Air Force school as an Army guy or, more importantly, as a non-resident member, is there going to be common recognition as a way of achieving the jointness, achieving true transformation in terms of mindsets?

Dr. Pfaltzgraff: So, how does professional military education fit in with transformation? Next question.

Karen Johnson. I’m with Old Dominion University. And my question is for Admiral Fallon, and it’s kind of a two-part question. First, what benefit does the Navy leadership hope to achieve in transforming its carrier aviation force from a force of multiple aircraft with specialized capabilities into a carrier force of a single aircraft expected to effectively perform a variety of critical tasks and functions?

And second, will relying so heavily on a single aircraft decrease or harm the Navy’s ability to successfully carry out its mission?

Dr. Pfaltzgraff. Next question is all the way over here, I believe.

__: Just like to expand on the first question a little bit and direct the question to all of you on preemption. What sort of capabilities from a service standpoint, from a joint standpoint, do you think we’re lacking or need to further a little bit to implement a strategy of preemption?

Dr. Pfaltzgraff: Right down here, please.

General ...(inaudible), Sandia: I’d like to hear anyone talk about integrating the intelligence community and real-time situation awareness with our war fighter capabilities.

Dr. Pfaltzgraff: Maybe one or two more questions. Who else would like to?

Jacquelyn Davis: You all mentioned the importance of reforming the acquisition process. I wonder if you have some specific ideas, and in that context, how can we more effectively use the JROC process and integrate CCNC requirements, Combatant Commander requirements, and service requirements as defined by OSD? How can we effectively get that done and marry up requirements with the budget priorities?

Dr. Pfaltzgraff: Now, I know we have enough questions for about five hours more of discussion and presentation. But is there one more now, because this is your last chance?

Okay, then, let’s start with the panel members and ask each panel member to respond to any or all of these questions. Shall we start with General Jones?

General Jones: With regard to the education question. I think that’s a good question, and I take the full meaning of your statement to heart. The challenge of professional military education is that we have to figure out a way to transform it in such a way that we make as much education available to a broad number of people. I’m somewhat frustrated by the fact that we have a system where we have a physical number of seats and many, many more officers who need the education than the physical limitation of the classroom permits.

And, so, the question for the future is how do you solve that problem? And within the Marine Corps, I think we’re doing some things that are going to address that. But it’s going to be a network of educational systems that reach out to our bases and stations. Instead of requiring everybody to go to Quantico, for example, for nine months, why can’t we, under the auspices of the Marine Corps University, take the education to the people who need it? Whether they be in Camp Pendleton, Hawaii, and so on. We have not harnessed the power of the retirees, for example, around all of our major bases and stations, who would be fantastic instructors to conduct a quality professional military education that can be delivered locally. In other words, we don’t always have to come to the classroom to get the quality education that you need.

A second point is that I’m increasingly of the opinion that starting with our command and staff colleges, there would be great benefit in considering whether to make all of those schools truly joint PME schools. And instead of a Marine Corps command and staff college, for example, that has, let’s say, out of 200 students, 140 Marines, why couldn’t we have command and staff colleges that teach maybe some emphasis of what the Marines teach but certainly a broader mixture of the student population, being soldier, sailor, Coast Guardsman, airman, starting at that level. Because that’s really where you want to make that cultural shift into the joint world.

The dichotomy for the services, as I said earlier, is to preserve the service cultures and make sure that our Marine warriors and our airmen and our soldiers, sailors, Coast Guard know what they’re supposed to do. And you can do that through the company grade levels, but somewhere at the field grade levels you need to start making that transition. And, so, instead of continuing to teach individual service cultures in individual service schools with a little bit of attention on jointness, you might be able to do some pretty dynamic stuff in terms of getting people on the same page at an earlier age.

With regard to preemption, I’m not sure from a Marine perspective, being forward deployed, hopefully, being near a point of engagement where you might be asked to implement that strategy, whatever the case may be. We are working very hard in partnership with all the services, but, obviously, with the Navy perhaps a little bit more, to make the sea-basing concepts of the 21st century be so powerful they can offset somewhat the sovereignty access questions that are going to be presented. So, it’s a question of being there and being useable immediately on a particular focus. But I don’t think there’s a particular weapons system, other than the ones we’re searching for right now, in terms of transformation that we’re lacking to integrate this particular strategy.

With regard to intelligence integration, the Marine Corps has, within the last two years, promoted its first general officer who has an intelligence background. We really should have done this about 10 or 15 years ago. We’re a little late in coming to the ballgame on this one, but that has had a major transformation. And, as I alluded in my opening remarks, being able to support the task force in Kandahar in Camp Rhino with a lot of the intelligence products and real time for the Marine Corps intelligence activity in Quantico, Virginia, was really eye-opening for us. And, so, we need to continue to make a great contribution in the joint arena.

From the acquisitions standpoint, I think there is great progress that can be made and should be made with regard to taking into account the various interests of all of the players. The Combatant Commanders’ conferences that we have, for example, I think are very good opportunities for us to not only read what the Combatant Commanders want, but we also spend a lot of time talking to them throughout the year.

I think transformation is really fundamentally on the shoulders of the services. The Combatant Commanders don’t have time to worry. They may be able to transform some new operational concepts and things like that, but if you’re going to transform and you’re going to do the things we’ve all talked about, it’s going to be done by the services, the ones who organize, who train, and equip, who deliver the force for employment. We want the feedback from the Combatant Commanders as to what it is they want, what capabilities they want. It’s our job to go out and get that.

And with the JROC and the service chiefs-- Nobody should think that the JROC functions independently of the service chiefs. The vice chiefs might want to think that, but they don’t. At least they shouldn’t. And I don’t think they try to. But there is great connectivity there. And I really believe that the JROC process under the current construct has the capability to do great things. But I also believe that we have to change some of our laws. And we have to change some of our rules so that there can be more players in the process, because it’s fairly exclusionary right now.

Dr. Pfaltzgraff: Thank you very much, Jim. Now we go to General Jumper.

General Jumper: Well, I’ll try to be brief. Let me start with the preemption notion. The con ops that we’re writing for things like preemption are what we call the global strike task force con ops, and it’s advantage is still standoff and precision.

Now, with regard to hard and deeply buried and specific targets, it’s true that we’re still working hard on the hard and deeply buried issue. But I don’t consider that the only answer to that is something that comes out of the air. At a certain point in time, you put people on the ground and they go and deal with those things very well. They’re trained to do that, and we take advantage of that. And we do what we can in this con ops orientation to enable that ground force to go in and deal with those situations.

We are looking toward developments in the future like the Mach 10 weapon that comes from very high in the sky. And, as you all know, Mach 10 you could hit something with a piece of Quaker Puffed Wheat and it will make it go away. You don’t have to worry about the cave entrance, you just make the mountain go away. If you want that kind of power, it will be available in the future.

With regard to PME, I’m in 100% agreement with Jim Jones. I think that we should all transition ourselves to the point where our PME is all joint in nature, and we certainly don’t mind doing it from a soldier’s or a marine or a sailor’s standpoint at their school or an ...(inaudible) standpoint at the appropriate school with the right slant on it but with the goal that it does, indeed, fill a joint square. I think that’s well worthwhile.

The question from Sandia on integrating intelligence with war fighting is right on. It’s part of my stovepipe theory. You are in a habit in the intelligence community that says you collect, then you analyze, then you report. If you’re in that mindset, it’s very hard for that same group of people to shift seamlessly and effortlessly to a find, fix, track, target, engage, and assess kill cycle. But, in fact, that’s exactly what we have to do. And that’s one of the paradigms we’re watching being broken right now with the Predator UAV, as we have traditional target tiers actually sensor operators on the UAV and being able to put those skills to work in real time. The trick is to be able to work that into the joint context so that you can shift seamlessly back and forth between a collection requirement and a time-sensitive or time-critical target and kill requirement and then back to your collection responsibilities in a seamless fashion and to be able to manage that in real time and be able to train the people to do that.

And, Jackie, on acquisition reform, one of the things that we’ve done in our development of command control at ...(inaudible) at Langley Air Force Base is a bold experiment on putting testers, developers, the companies, and the operators all under the same roof and forcing them to get along. And as they do this, what we have found is the testers when they’re in on each phase of the evolution of a program, suddenly the test requirement comes down, orders the magnitude. When the operators are involved, you’re being able to do technology trades with requirements on the fly in a reasonable way and through the appropriate process in a way that does not violate acquisition laws or rules, maybe habits. But the end product is coming out many times quicker than we’ve ever been able to do it before. This is a small step, admitted, but I think it’s a template that is worth exploring in the long view.

Dr. Pfaltzgraff: Thank you very much, John. And now General Keane.

General Keane: I’ll also try to be brief. In the education, I accept your caution, but the reality is that distant learning is here. And we can reach a larger audience more frequently and stylize it so that it can penetrate an audience and be complementary to their duties. For example, we have new soldiers who do not have college education, so a very aggressive business learning program that we’re providing to them, we’re giving them a computer and access to colleges of their choice. And they’re taking college courses around their schedules, which, in the Army, has always been very troubling to us because we have more youngsters who have dropped out of our courses, even when we try to do it on the weekend or during non-duty hours. And for our officers and non-commissioned officers, it’s here to stay, and I think it’s going to enhance our capability, as I said, to reach a larger audience and to do it more frequently.

I also want to associate myself with the comments made about JPME. We are pushing down into our staff colleges considerably more joint education than what we have historically done in the past, because we recognize that our officers and non-commissioned officers have to be equipped much earlier with the skill sets and education requirements to meet the needs of an ever-changing joint environment. And it’s just essential that we do that. And we’ve already got that in place.

On preemption, it’s clear that we have forces that are stylized to do that. Our special operations forces, our capacity to do forced entry today, and our transformation strategy is all about being able to provide forces to the joint team to be able to do those kinds of tasks.

And integrated intelligence, you know, General Schwarzkopf, after Desert Storm said, and it was his number-one criticism, that the national intelligence community was not able to effectively, in a timely and responsive fashion provide intelligence to the tactical field commander. And I know for a fact that in the 18th Airborne Corps, which I have associated most of my life with, in the five divisions that were there, despite the fact that operational objectives-- We were there for five months, and when operational objectives were assigned, we did not know the composition or disposition of the enemy in any of those objectives, despite we had been there for that period of time. We have changed that. There has been dramatic change in getting national intelligence sources in the hand of war fighters in the ensuing 11 years. It is truly remarkable. But we still have a very large national intelligence apparatus, it is still stovepipe post-9/11 to some degree, despite all of our efforts to change it. We won’t get there, I don’t believe, until we have truly shared databases, where an intel analyst who is pursuing something, say, with Osama bid Laden, and asks that question and all of the databases respond to his question, because he’s authorized to ask the question and he has access to the information. We still do not have that today. We’ve got to get to it.

And the acquisition process, to me, the number-one issue is the cycle system itself and all the ensuing underpinnings for it that you have to change to get to that. And the JROC, General Jones, we take our guidance from our service chiefs, as we always have. In the JROC process, I think we are on the cusp of some fairly profound change in this requirements process. Because we are looking at an operational concept and developing that concept, a joint operational concept, from which will flow the capabilities that you need to meet the requirements of that concept. And then you turn to the service, and you ask the service to provide these capabilities. We have never, ever done that in the past. It has always been bottom up.

END OF TAPE

— decision makers at the highest level. My view is that we provide the capabilities and tools to carry out any decision, should one be made to preempt. We think we have the capabilities and we keep them forward deployed in our Naval forces. We work in concert with the other services to execute whatever the desired outcome is.

Professional military education, one of my priorities. A graduate of the War College in Newport and proudly stated, we’ve got a challenge, particularly in the Naval service, and that is getting the time to get our people to do these things. We ask a lot of them. We want them to be professionally trained to do their warfare missions. We want them to be educated and well understanding and capable of operating in the acquisition environment, the business side of the house. We want them to have graduate education in special areas that they can lend their expertise. But we clearly recognize the need for JPME, again, endorse stronger the idea that we figure out a way to get joint credit for these courses at the staff colleges. That’s a no-brainer to me.

To the question from my colleague at ODU, we’re not quite at the single aircraft mode on the aircraft carriers yet. I think you’re probably referring to the fact that we have just introduced the F-18E and soon the F-Hornet to go with our other forces. It’s going to be quite awhile before those appear in great numbers throughout the fleet. And, so, we are in an evolutionary process here where we are exchanging some tired iron and some of it very, very capable. I have a son who flies an F-14D and he badgers me every day to no end, what is wrong with you, Dad? You’re throwing away a beautiful, wonderful airplane, the F-14D is the best thing you’ve ever seen. And I said, I agree, but there are some things out there with tremendous capability, in some areas much better, and, by the way, it’s going to be maintainable a lot easier than the kind of things you’re struggling with. So, we’re in transition. We will have F-14s probably another five, six, seven years. They are going to give way to F-18Fs, they’ll be complemented by Cs, and as we do the Naval integration piece, we envision a Marine squadron in every one of these airwings. You’re going to see a Marine Airwing Commander before very long. And we are going to jointly be able to cover the missions of both services. And this is just the strike fighter business. E-2s are going to be a mainstay of our air capability of our force for a long time. We firmly believe that electronic attack is a necessity and, so, we’re going to have prowlers, and the helicopter is going to play an increasing role in all of our con ops as the air capabilities have just been dramatically expanded. So, I think there’s a pretty good mix, and we really believe that we can answer the mail when we’re asked to do it.

Intel integration, ditto what’s been said. You know, we put the two and the three, the intel and the operations people together for a reason, because they are constantly in communication, need to be, so they’re almost always placed in close proximity, even if there are only two of them, so that they can get the right information to the decision maker. We’ve got a way to go to this. No doubt about it. We spend a gazillion dollars here in this nation on product that often is in stovepipes, and we’re just going to have to work on it. In the Naval services, we are looking very hard at how we might integrate our intelligence, Navy and Marine Corps intelligence, to come up with a better product for ourselves and for other services.

Jackie, the acquisition thing. Jack’s touched on this business of the joint con ops. This will truly, truly shake the place and turn it upside down. Just how we’re going to do this, and we’ve got a Title 10 reality here that all the money comes through the services and how we change this piece of the culture, not to mention the other aspects of it, it will be truly a challenge. But we’re taking that on in the JROC, trying to figure out how to do this. But I think when that day dawns, we’ll be in a new era and we’ll be the better for it.
Thanks. Tom?

Admiral Collins: Just a brief comment on three of the questions that were posed.

Education and training, it’ll cost us more money out of training and education costs, but I would submit there are a couple of things. You’ve got to make the business case, you’ve got to look at the return on investment. And there are multiple delivery vehicles that you can use. Use the one that makes sense and gives you the performance you need at the lowest cost. I think performance is the magic word here, that you’ve got to start at the higher level, education and training and what is the performance of the work force. And there are human technology folks that look at this from a systems perspective and look at a whole host of interventions, education, and training as one, but there are others. I think you start at that higher level systems approach to performance of the work force, then you make the right business case, and then you make the right investment.

On preemption, my only comment on preemption is that we’ve got to ensure that we think of preemption in the broadest strategic concept. It goes beyond the traditional military approach to preemption. It means from a national perspective, use all the tools in the toolkit, economic, diplomatic, and on and on interventions to give you preemption. There are many ways to get preemption. Working through international bodies in a proactive way is a preemptive type of approach, and we’ve just got to not get into the trap of thinking of preemption too narrowly, but how does our piece of it fit into broader approach to preemption.

On acquisition reform, I’m not totally objective here, but I think our integrated ...(inaudible) system is a very imaginative, very forward-looking, very flexible, focused on requirements performance approach. Take a test drive on that one. Take a look at that. I think it’s an incredibly flexible approach, and there are a lot of people looking at that as a model, and the jury’s still out whether it will be totally successful. We just awarded it on the 25th of June, but it’s a system, performance-focused, life cycle cost-focused procurement over a number of years with incredible flexibility, but accountability built in. You might want to take a test drive on that one.

Dr. Pfaltzgraff: Well, thank you very much to this outstanding panel. We’ve run about 10 minutes overtime, but I believe it’s been worth it. We thank you for being with us this morning, for adding so much to this conference.