The US Air Force represents the largest source of air power in the world, but finds itself at an inflection point in its history, facing dramatic choices in technology, manpower and mission areas. Gen. Mark Welsh took over as chief of staff two years ago.
Q. Would you say communication between the active, Guard and reserve components has improved?
A. Oh, yeah, no question about it. We have a lot of rational actors in the United States military in general, in the Department of Defense and in the Air Force, and we do not make decisions without thinking through them and putting some thought into it. So the more we talk about what we are doing, why we are doing it, the pros and cons, the more people come to kind of a common view of the issues. And it does not mean we will agree on the ultimate solution, but they will certainly understand why people are proposing different things. And I think that helps generate trust. Even if you do not agree with the solution, you trust the people who put the options together. And that is what we have to try and do. I mean, that is the whole goal. Professional disagreements are fine, but lack of communication is just toxic.
Q. Do the conflicts that have popped up since you submitted the budget make you reconsider your budget choices?
A. No, I think it is platform by platform as things change, but I think there are some fundamental assumptions you have to make. The first is why does the United States of America have an Air Force? And the question is do you have an Air Force to support a counterinsurgency fight? Do you have an Air Force just to operate in space and support a cyber domain?
Or do you have an Air Force to conduct global operations, to provide strategic deterrence, to be able to fight and win a catastrophic conflict, a full spectrum fight in some part of the world? That is kind of a fundamental question. We believe, based on our national security strategy and the task we have been given, that a superpower has an air force to be able to fight the full-spectrum fight.
Q. Some in Congress have said those conflicts should result in a re-look at last year's budget. Do you agree?
A. Depends on what the nation wants to do. The military services have the job of executing the tasks that the nation gives them to do. And our job on the resource side is to make sure that the nation understands what is required in the budget to do those things. We have to be able to explain what we need to do, what we need to have, how we need to train and what it costs to do those things. That is all the budget is for us.
If the nation wants to continue doing what we have been doing for the last 28 years or so in engagement around the world, which has ramped up significantly from where it was before, if you cut the budget significantly, the logic of that does not line up.
Q. What do you say to critics who argue the F-35 isn't worth the investment?
A. The big three acquisition programs we have did not just appear because they are cool or they cost a lot. If you want to be able to fight a full-spectrum fight in the air in 2025 and beyond, we must have more fifth-generation capability than we have today.
The F-22 cannot fight a theater's worth of air superiority by itself; there are not enough of them. So the F-35 is going to have to help with that. They were not initially designed to do that. They were supposed to complement the F-22 fleet, but now they are going to have to assist it in the air superiority fight. Our older legacy fighters will not compete against generation 4.5 or 5 fighters for all kinds of reasons. They cannot compete equally with them. So we have got to have a new capability.
The F-35 is going to be required to eliminate the air defense systems in the future. Nations are building these things. There are 10 of them today around the world. There are going to be about 25 of them by 2025, in places that we should be concerned about. And, so having this capability is really important to joint war fighting. Nobody else can provide a theater's worth of air superiority other than the United States Air Force.
Q. Are there lessons to apply from the F-35 to the new long-range strike bomber program?
A. I think there are some, and there are some that we learned from F-22 that we can apply, and there are some we learned from the B-2 that we can apply. One big lesson I think we are learning from the F-35 program is that, while we have a team dedicated to developing a program and getting into a test program, it is probably smart for us to figure out in the future, at a major program, how do we put together a team that is dedicated to actually operationalizing that program?
In the F-35 program, one of the issues that the program office, Lockheed Martin [and the services], are working very hard is transitioning the maintenance ideas for this airplane from something that facilitates a test program to something that is operational. So if we have an office that thinks about how you operationalize programs, not just how you field it, it will change the way we look at the initial development of the program. And so we are thinking through that right now, and is there a way to do that. If so, when would you stand up that kind of an organization, how big does it have to be? How do you transition your maintenance people out of one airplane, because you are not going to get more people? How do you transition out of one airplane into the other, and what are the things that could happen that could throw that off?
Q. You've expressed serious concerns about training and readiness levels. Can you elaborate?
A. My concern with training overall is that we have really let our readiness levels go downhill because of world events and commitments that we had over the last 20 years. The bigger impact on training for us has been impact on infrastructure for training. This service has been shrinking especially since 9/11 but actually since 1990. We have been declining in size. We have not been fully manned on our maintenance organizations, on our flight lines. As a result, we have trouble generating enough sorties to keep our flying force fully trained. We have not been able to fully invest in range infrastructure. We have not fully invested in the live-virtual-constructive arena, which we need to have in order to fully train our newer technology aircraft in particular, and to train some of our newer intelligence and cyberspace-based systems.
So when you are a force based on technology and high-end training, and you need that to be successful across your mission areas, you've got to invest in that infrastructure. We have not had the resources to fully invest in that infrastructure for the last 20 years. And as a result, that infrastructure has declined. That is more my concern in training for the future. We have got to be ready to do what we are asked to do. We have got to be fully trained in all the missions we are expected to accomplish in support of the nation and the joint force. We have not been that way for a while, and so we are trying to really focus on returning to that kind of training capability across the full spectrum of missions. That is my bigger training concern, and that is going to take consistent, persistent investment over time.
Q. Do you think you are going to have the ability to make those investments?
A. I hope so. We are going to certainly tell the story of why we need to. And we internally need to prioritize to do that. Some of this decision is on us. One of the things that we are talking a lot about in the Air Force right now, that we hope to get at with our new strategic planning process, is the importance of infrastructure — not just building infrastructure or IT infrastructure, but infrastructure in many different ways. S&T [science and technology] infrastructure, human capital development infrastructure, training infrastructure, test, with white-world and black-world test infrastructure. Those things are institutional imperatives if you are going to be successful as a service that is focused and based on technology and staying ahead of it over time. It is great to have the capability to do a particular mission, but if you only do it for the next five years because you are not trained, you are not developing the S&T, you are not developing your people to be able to do it 10 years from now, you are kind of being short-sighted for what a service ought to be.
Q. Given the budget situation, can you envision the president or Congress asking you to perform a mission and you having to say, "We can't do that"?
A. Yeah, that is the dilemma sequestration puts us in. We have less capability in every mission going forward. So if you want to add new capability or expand a mission, something has got to go. And so the question is going to be, what do you cut? This idea of cutting is not going to end here, this year or next year. As long as we are under sequestered budgets, we are going to be looking at what we cannot do that we had previously planned to do.
Programs that we have had on the books for a while have already been cut. We have cut 50 percent of our modernization programs. We cannot maintain all of them. Every one of them has supporters, for good reason. They are good programs. They are should-have programs or nice-to-have programs or we-would-like-to-have programs. We have cut to the things we have to be effective as a war-fighting force in the '20s and beyond. So if we have to cut more of that, we just need to be able to state the impact.
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Aaron Mehta was deputy editor and senior Pentagon correspondent for Defense News, covering policy, strategy and acquisition at the highest levels of the Defense Department and its international partners.
