The chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force wants the service to stop
doing business “by advocacy” and to take a fresh look
at funding priorities in its weapon procurement budgets.
That has been the persistent message from Gen. John P. Jumper during
the last several months. As it plans its modernization budgets,
the Air Force must change some of the old “tribal” approaches
to funding programs, he said, because the top priority now is “integration.”
“How many budget lines and dollars are dedicated to integration?”
Jumper asked during a recent industry conference. The answer, he
said, is “zero.”
The Air Force today is a “community of stovepipes,”
he said. “We have formed antibodies to integration.”
Each aircraft program constitutes a tribe that fights for dollars
and clout, and speaks its own language. Tribes, said Jumper, are
not necessarily bad things. But they are not conducive to the type
of “horizontal integration” that Jumper wants to achieve.
He describes horizontal integration as the ability to fuse data
from every Air Force platform into a single repository of information,
such as crews, planes, targets and loads. The idea is to be able
to accomplish the entire “kill chain” from a single
source of information. The kill chain, according to Jumper, is a
combination of “find, fix, track, target, engage and assess.”
The lack of integration lengthens the time it takes to plan combat
missions, he said. “We have a 72-hour ATO [air tasking order]
planning cycle, because we aren’t integrated very well,”
Jumper said. “Instead of using Post-it notes, why can’t
we input the data digitally?” The Air Force often takes a
bad rap for the 72-hour cycle, and the bureaucracy gets all the
blame. But the reality, Jumper said, is that the way the Air Force
funds programs is one fundamental reason why it’s difficult
to compress the “kill chain.”
The integration that Jumper envisions is “all within today’s
capability,” he said. “Instead, we budget by a system
of advocacy.” Typically, program officials who brief Jumper
start their presentation by saying, “We’ve already briefed
this to Speedy [Gen. Speedy Martin, commander of U.S. Air Forces
in Europe] and Hornburg [Gen. Hal Hornburg, chief of Air Combat
Command], and they loved it.” Such statements, said Jumper,
imply that “if you don’t [love the program] you’re
a scumbag.” This system of advocacy hinders the integration
that Jumper advocates.
“There is a 0 percent chance that we have this 100 percent
right,” he said. “People have tried integration before
and failed miserably.” Jumper is hopeful, he said, that some
changes will begin to take shape in fiscal year 2004. About two
months ago, he appointed Lt. Gen. Leslie Kenne as deputy chief of
staff for integration. To begin the job of “building the right
packages to fund,” Jumper also created seven task forces that
will serve as “champions” for specific mission areas.
Rather than just look at what programs are not funded, these task
forces also will be asked to assess whether the dollars already
in the budget are funding “the right stuff.”
Jumper’s task forces are still evolving. So far, they include
the following:
Budget Planning
These task forces will be composed of the “people and the
platforms” that currently form the so-called “air expeditionary
forces,” Jumper said. The rotational AEFs are slated to be
deployed for various missions, so they “come together in certain
ways and train for specific types of scenarios,” he explained.
“In the future, for example, the B-2 and the F-22s will train
together in this ‘kick-down the door’ scenario with
the space C2ISR task force doing time-critical targeting.”
Asked how he expects that these task forces will influence future
budgets, Jumper said that they will “put certain emphasis
on certain things,” especially on command and control technologies.
For instance, the global strike task force will push for a “smart
tanker.” The smart tanker will not just refuel airplanes,
Jumper explained, but also will serve as an information gateway
that will translate messages back and forth between air, land and
sea forces to platforms in the air and “facilitate digital-level
conversations between manned, unmanned and space platforms.”
As each task force writes its own concept of operations, he said,
they will “find that those things are critical and [therefore]
put additional emphasis on our C2 budget.”
Improvements in C2 capabilities—which enable “time-critical
targeting”—make the Air Force more “deadly”
in combat, Jumper said, even though “you are still subject
to the fogs and frictions of war.”
Increased emphasis on C4ISR programs, ultimately, should help Air
Force survive a series of major Pentagon reviews that are scheduled
through September, in preparation for the fiscal 2004-2009 Defense
Department spending plan. The C4ISR content of weapon systems is
one of four major reviews planned, said a senior defense official
who briefed reporters in May. “If we don’t do it [C4ISR]
right, what we’re going to have are a lot of discrete units
that fly around, collect information, but we don’t merge it
properly,” said the official. “The implications [of
the review] in terms of cost—dollars is quite high.”
The Pentagon reviews this summer also will address the possibility
that the Air Force and the Navy may co-fund a joint multi-mission
aircraft program, to satisfy requirements by both services for surveillance
and reconnaissance, as well as emerging needs for joint operations.
“The Air Force and the Navy particularly are very close in
talking about these programs,” said the defense official.
There are many details to be worked out, he said. “Do we need
more than one airframe? What about the avionics on board the aircraft?
Can we have one set of avionics that they can all use?” The
idea is to figure out whether the Navy and the Air Force can have
a group of airplanes that can be “interchangeable for surveillance
missions.”