Chiefs, Part 8: The ‘Joint’ Chief

Chiefs, Part 8: The ‘Joint’ Chief

Nov. 9, 2022 | By Tobias Naegele

In its 75-year history, 22 Airmen have led the Air Force as Chief of Staff. Each came to the post shaped by the experiences—and sometimes scar tissue—developed over three decades of service. Each inherited an Air Force formed by the decisions of those who came before, who bequeathed to posterity the results of decisions and compromises made over the course of their time in office. Each left his own unique stamp on the institution. As part of Air & Space Forces Magazine’s commemoration of the Air Force’s 75th anniversary, Sept. 18, 2022, we interviewed all of the living former Chiefs of Staff.

Gen. David L. Goldfein, CSAF No. 21 (2016-2020) 

By September 2015, everyone knew that year’s “AFA”—the Air Force Association’s annual Air, Space & Cyber Conference in National Harbor, Md.—would be Gen. Mark A. Welsh III’s last as Air Force Chief of Staff. He’d been in the job since 2012, and his four-year tour would be up the following summer. 

On the eve of the conference, news outlets speculated about two ground-breaking options for his relief: Gen. Lori J. Robinson, then commander of Pacific Air Forces, and Gen. Darren W. McDew, who had only recently taken charge of U.S. Transportation Command. Absent from that conjecture: Vice Chief of Staff Gen. David L. Goldfein. 

Junior to both Robinson and McDew, Goldfein had survived a missile strike that downed his F-16 over Serbia, leaving him stranded in hostile territory until he could be rescued. “Intercepting an enemy missile with my airplane was not my best mission,” he said. Surviving and then thriving as his career advanced belied the notion that the Air Force suffered from a zero-defect mentality. In the wake of losing his airplane, Goldfein had not only survived, but thrived. 

“Beginning as a young captain in Desert Storm, I had not missed a single fight in my career,” Goldfein said. That included two years as the Air and Space Component Commander for Central Command from 2011 to 2013. Even so, Goldfein didn’t see himself as a serious candidate for Chief until Welsh let him know he was a serious contender, a wake-up call that forced him to start thinking seriously about how he would approach the role if he was indeed the choice. 

“That was really when I started thinking seriously about, OK, what are my gifts?” he said. “I think every leader brings certain gifts and strengths to the table and certainly an equal number of weaknesses. So what are my strengths? And as I thought about it, it became clear to me that what I knew, perhaps as well as anybody else in the Air Force, was the business of joint warfighting.” 

Goldfein had flown in every Air Force combat operation since Desert Storm and in the prior seven years had stepped through a series of preparatory jobs: Deputy Director of Programs on the Air Staff, Director of Operations at Air Combat Command, Commander of U.S. Air Forces Central Command, and Director of the Joint Staff at the Pentagon. Now he awoke to a possibility he hadn’t really seen coming. 

Once selected, Goldfein went to Welsh with a plea: “I need some time with a small transition team to really put some serious thought into where I want to focus so I can hit the ground running on Day One,” Goldfein said. “You know, that’s tough conversation. What I was really asking him was, ‘Hey, Chief, I want you to work like a dog until the end without a Vice.’”

Welsh agreed, cutting Goldfein loose with a small team to develop his plan. That team included then-Brig. Gen. Alexus G. “Grinch” Grynkewich (now the three-star commander of 9th Air Force and the Combined Forces Air Component Commander at U.S. Central Command). He wanted focus—“big, audacious, and achievable” ideas to shape the coming four years. 

“Where I focused was joint warfighting excellence: How do I take the service from where it is to a point where I can hand it off as a more capable joint teammate?” he said. For the next four years, everything he could control—and there were, of course, plenty of issues he could not control—had to “make us better joint warfighters.” 

Three areas would get his particular focus: First, reinvigorating the fighting formation of the Air Force, in particular empowering squadron leaders; second, joint development; and third, digitizing and connecting joint warfighters, a concept that became multi-domain command and control, and then, as he was reaching the end of his tour, joint all-domain command and control (JADC2). 

Of the three, it is the third one—helping to convince the other services that his concept joint command and control concepts not only made sense but were critical—that will likely be his long-term legacy. “When we started the conversation, it was a question of whether we really needed to do this,” Goldfein said. “What took four years was building trust amongst the services that this wasn’t the money grab.” 

The challenge was that all the services were already operating in multiple domains. “Think about it: If you’re the Chief of Naval Operations, you’ve invested billions in command and control to connect what you believe is an all-domain force that operates from subsurface submarines to the surface and to the air. So you’re already a multi-domain force, and you build C2 to connect your forces at sea. If you’re the Chief of Staff of the Army, you’ve invested billions of dollars to connect your Soldiers, and you’re transitioning your Army into the digital world. And along comes this Air Force guy that says, ‘Hey, I’ve got an idea: Scrap all those investments you’ve made and let me come in and solve this for the world.’ That is a nonstarter.” 

Goldfein knew the Air Force had expertise the other services could leverage. Going back to 1947, Congress had identified command and control as an initial Air Force mission. “But if we were to approach it so that it could be interpreted as a money grab, it would be dead on arrival,” Goldfein said. He spent the next four years “squinting with his ears,” he said, listening and learning about the challenges each service chief saw in his particular domain. The Army chiefs saw the issue as one of scale and speed. While the Air Force sought to connect a few thousand airplanes, the Army needed to connect a million Soldiers; and as USAF tried to operate at the speed of sound, the Army needed to keep up only with the speed of traffic. 

“We had to educate ourselves,” Goldfein said. “If we’re going to offer solutions to the Army, we better understand ground maneuver. If we’re going to offer solutions to the world’s greatest Navy, we better understand submarine operations.” 

Slowly the multi-domain phrase caught on. The Army and Navy began to adopt the language. The question had changed. Instead of ‘Why do we do this?’ Goldfein said, it was, “How do we get after this as a team?” 

386

Not everything went so well. Goldfein inherited a force in decline, one too small to meet its many requirements. The nuclear force was decrepit, he had a new tanker that wasn’t performing, his fighter force was aging out faster than he could acquire replacements. When Congress asked for an objective assessment to define the Air Force the nation needed, Goldfein and then-Secretary of the Air Force Heather Wilson responded with a clear flight plan: 386 operational squadrons, a 20 percent increase over the existing force. 

The plan was laid out at AFA’s Air, Space, & Cyber Conference in 2018, halfway through Goldfein’s tenure, and the Air Force celebrated by giving the press and others coffee mugs emblazoned with the number 386. “There was classified assessment and intelligence analysis that went into this,” Goldfein said. “This was 386 squadrons that directly aligned with the national security and national defense strategy and combatant commander demand, given classified operational war plans.” 

Some greeted the disclosure of this plan as the beginning of a new campaign to grow the Air Force. Goldfein did not. “We did all the analysis, and you could back it up with data to say you could meet the need at moderate risk with 386. Anything below that, you just increased risk. So now, do we keep banging the drum and say 386, when we’re actually at 320? That didn’t make much sense.” 

Goldfein saw the analysis as a worthwhile, but academic exercise, because he couldn’t imagine that Congress would fund 66 more squadrons and all the people, weapons, and support that would require. 

A generation before, at the end of the Cold War, then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Colin Powell presented his Base Force, the blueprint for a scaled down, peacetime U.S. military in a unipolar world. All of the services would be cut deeply, and all of the services accepted their fate. Whatever pushback occurred, only the Marine Corps managed to take their fight public, resisting the call to shrink the Corps to just 159,000 Marines. Then-Commandant Gen. Carl Mundy, a buzz-cut, square-jawed Marine straight from central casting, launched a sort of insurgency, telling every audience possible that yes, he could cut the Corps to 159,000—but then pivoting to say that to meet the nation’s security requirements, 174,000 Marines was the number needed. Mundy repeated his case at every opportunity for a year and ultimately won the argument. 

Could Goldfein not have followed that model to achieve his needed 386 squadrons? 

“The big difference between us and the Marine Corps [in 1992] was that the Commandant already had 174,000 Marines,” Goldfein said. The two services were approaching a similar value statement, but from opposing directions. 

The Marines were drawing down from a force greater than 200,000 and hoped to be spared the deep cut to 159,000; by contrast, Goldfein’s force was already undersized. Rather than seeking to foreshorten a drawdown, he would have been asking for a budget increase measured in the tens of billions. That was beyond imagination. 

Still, “386 was a helpful metric for me because I could then articulate where I thought we were risk-wise, in various scenarios, whether in the tank or at the White House,” Goldfein said.  With that, he said, he could “now articulate what I thought was the amount of risk was, and I could do it with a lot greater granularity, based on where we were versus where the moderate risk level was. It was a very helpful benchmark in some of those discussions.”

Goldfein saw risk every place he turned. But he also saw opportunities, seizing them—at some cost. 

When the Air Force took a cut to help fund fourth-generation Navy F/A-18 purchases, he later got a chance to claw some of that back. But Defense Department leadership were offering a choice. He could have the money to fund new-build F-15s, built in the same Boeing Co. plant in St. Louis where the F/A-18s were made, but not for additional Lockheed F-35s. 

“My first response was, ‘I’m not going to spend a penny of fifth-generation money against a fourth-generation asset. That’s a red line,’” Goldfein recalled. “And then I said, second, that ‘there can be no trading of aircraft, because where we are headed is fifth- and sixth-generation. But I do have a capacity challenge, and I can’t allow the Air Force to lose $7 billion in assets.’” 

Goldfein took the deal, accepting a future that would include dozens—and possibly up to 200—new-build F-15EX fighters. If it was the will of the Department of Defense and the Congress that the Air Force purchase F-15s, Goldfein said, “then we’re going to look at these airplanes and we’re going go take a look at the fleet, and then determine the best option.” 

What the Air Force found, he said, was that the Pacific’s long ranges made the new-build F-15EXs attractive because—as good as the F-35 is—it can’t match the F-15 for range and payload. “In a Pacific scenario, when we played various force elements together, the combination” proved attractive, he said. 

New advances promised by the F-15EX also helped change his perception. “Stealth is not the only spectrum,” he said. “Radar is not the only spectrum where you have to hide. And so the more we looked at the options, the better the F-15EX looked from a joint warfighting perspective.” 

Now Goldfein’s focus on jointness came into play. “I was confident I was making the Air Force a better joint warfighter and joint warfighting service by entering the F-15EX,” he said. 

He also had a problem. The first was that he was breaking a line held by every Chief before him for nearly two decades, that the Air Force should not “buy new old airplanes.” Second, the real skinny on why this made sense couldn’t be shared in the open. The real advantages could only be shared in classified settings, Goldfein said, meaning Goldfein struggled to tell that story publicly, while generally holding his own in private.  

Goldfein’s tenure included four wildcards. The first, was his nomination to be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As Marine Gen. Joseph F. Dunford’s term as Chairman neared its end, Goldfein seemed the hands-on favorite to succeed him. Having positioned himself as a joint warfighting advocate, focused on projects and programs that made the joint team stronger, he was a natural. No Airman had been Chairman since Gen. Richard B. Myers from 2001 to 2005, and in the 15 years since, the position had been held by two Soldiers, two Marines, and one Navy Admiral. 

Goldfein had the endorsement of Defense Secretary James Mattis, himself a retired Marine general. But by then, [President Donald J. ]Trump was feuding openly with Mattis, questioning his loyalty and challenging his independence. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark A. Milley, a burly New Englander, was less joint in focus but held some special appeal to the President. Whether it was his Princeton pedigree, his New England roots, his substantial presence, or merely the fact that he wasn’t Mattis’ choice is unclear. But Trump nixed Goldfein for Milley, regardless. Goldfein has no regrets. 

“I’ve never looked back for a second on the decision to make Mark Milley the Chairman,” he said. “Hey, he’s a friend. He’s a great officer, we served together as Chiefs, we served together in Afghanistan when he was there, and I was the CFACC.” The President interviewed both—chose one. “He chose the individual he had really good chemistry with. … It’s not personal. It’s professional.”

Space Wars 

This was 2019, debate about forming a stand-alone military branch focused on space was underway. Goldfein was opposed at the start. He saw a seamlessness in the integration of air and space within his force, and “I was worried that in the business of separating the services, we would separate that jointness,” he said. “I was worried about us, you know, losing some of our edge and the integration of air and space.” 

He imagined turf wars ahead, because he’d been around the Pentagon to know well enough that when something is new, “First thing you build is a castle, then you dig a moat, and then you fill it with dragons. Because you’ve got to protect your resources,” he acknowledged. But then Goldfein went to Maxwell Air Force Base and Air University. He met with a group of Schriever Fellows, “our smartest space officers.” 

Goldfein was trying to sell them on his operational integration concept. “I was watching their body language, and could see: They ain’t buying it,” he admitted. “So I finally just stopped, and did what Chiefs really ought to do, which is to listen.”

By the time the conversation was over, Goldfein said, “I was convinced. I said, ‘Show of hands: How many of you think we need a separate service for space?’ Every hand went up. You know, when you’re the Chief and your Airmen are telling you something, you better listen.” Goldfein set out to learn more. I visited every space base, I went and I read, I listened, I watched, I spoke to industry leaders, I went to NASA. 

“I had two fundamental questions I was asking myself: Can we as a service culturally embrace space superiority with the same passion that we historically have embraced air superiority? And, who can move space for the nation faster in the business of joint warfighting?—Me, as a service Chief that does leaflets to nukes and everything in between, and operates in all the domains? Or a service Chief that is singularly focused on advancing space for the nation?”—In the end, he said, “I came to my own personal conclusion that the President got this one right.”

There were still risk, he thought. If the Air Force and Space Force got this right, the two would co-exist as close and effective partners, independent masters of their individual domains, yet at the same time interdependent on each other and tightly integrated to maximize their joint effect. 

He took to sharing a photograph of himself holding his two granddaughters, each two years old at the time. “I said, ‘Hey, meet my granddaughters, Eva and Rae. They don’t know this, but they are members of the Class of 2040 at the Air Force Academy. And one of them—I’ll let them choose—will join the Air Force and one will join the Space Force. And when they walk across that stage in 2040, the class of 2020 will be graded.”

The test, would be what the two services had forged over the prior 20 years. “Did we build two services that were focused and built on a foundation of trust and confidence in each other, able to work as a joint team for air and space operations, as both supported and supporting commanders?” he asked “Or did we build castles, moats, and dragons?” 

Goldfein bet his tenure on tearing down castles, slaying dragons, and breaching moats. He sees just one good option for the future. Slay the dragons—or fail.                                        

Chiefs, Part 7: ‘Surviving the Budget Control Act Debacle’

Chiefs, Part 7: ‘Surviving the Budget Control Act Debacle’

Nov. 9, 2022 | By Tobias Naegele

In its 75-year history, 22 Airmen have led the Air Force as Chief of Staff. Each came to the post shaped by the experiences—and sometimes scar tissue—developed over three decades of service. Each inherited an Air Force formed by the decisions of those who came before, who bequeathed to posterity the results of decisions and compromises made over the course of their time in office. Each left his own unique stamp on the institution. As part of Air & Space Forces Magazine’s commemoration of the Air Force’s 75th anniversary, Sept. 18, 2022, we interviewed all of the living former Chiefs of Staff.

Gen. Mark A. Welsh, CSAF No. 20 (2012-2016) 

Gen. Mark A. Welsh never dreamed of becoming Chief of Staff, never saw himself as a visionary. “I’m not really good at looking deep into the future with a clearer understanding of what we should be and how to get from A to B,” he says, underselling his intellect. “I can figure out what is important for us to be. And I’m pretty good at moving people toward that.” But a visionary? That’s someone else. “I would characterize myself more as a realist, more of a rubber meets the road guy than a deep thinker.”  

The rubber hit the road in August 2012. The Budget Control Act of 2011 was now in full force, and its unintended consequences were becoming clear. The measure was the result of a compromise: Republicans agreed to raise the debt ceiling so long as Democrats agreed to cut spending. But the measure was intended to drive further compromise. The BCA imposed annual statutory limits on both defense and nondefense discretionary spending; it established a committee to work on a future deficit reduction agreement; and it imposed annual, automatic spending cuts if no deficit reduction agreement was reached.  

The threat of automatic cuts had been seen in 2011 as so onerous that no one would ever let things get that far. But by 2012, it was becoming clear that a deal was not in the offing. Automatic cuts were about to wreak havoc on Air Force spending.  

Welsh became Chief with seven weeks to go in fiscal 2012, a year in which the Air Force budget had declined by $4 billion to $162.8 billion. For the next fiscal year, spending would plunge more than 11 percent to $144.3 billion, its lowest total since 2007. Actually, it was even worse. More than 20 percent of that total passed directly through the Air Force to fund other agencies.  

“We were cutting $20 billion a year out of our budget—or trying to figure out how to do that and get it through Congress—and the Air National Guard had just very publicly started a public argument with the United States Air Force about lack of support for the Guard,” Welsh said.  

The Air Force kept running into walls in Congress. Finding cuts was hard enough internally. Finding cuts that could be sold to Congress was harder still. Welsh didn’t want to sacrifice modernization. That had to be a priority. He needed big chunks of money.  

In 2013, Air Combat Command proposed paying a chunk of the bill by retiring National Guard A-10 Warthogs. Getting rid of all those A-10s could save $4 billion in a hurry. But the Warthog was beloved by Soldiers and Marines, who found joy and triumph in the BRRRRTBRRRRT of its nose-mounted cannon, and it was a favorite of the lawmakers whose districts were home to the Guard’s A-10s, including Arizona’s influential Sen. John McCain.  

Welsh understood the reasoning. Only about 20 percent of the Air Force’s close air support (CAS) missions in Iraq and Afghanistan were being flown by A-10s, and as useful as its 30 mm gun can be,  “its only got about 15 seconds of trigger pull with the gun,” Welsh said. “After that, they’re dropping the same precision guided bombs in the same place everybody else is dropping them.”  

The A-10s could carry more weapons than the F-16, but there were fewer of them, and they couldn’t get places quite as fast. “So really, if you’re in a firefight at night somewhere, do you want a B-1 with 36 precision guided munitions or do you want an A-10 with a GAU? They’re all great at what they do, but the A-10 does only one thing.” The other planes were more versatile.  

“All the modeling and simulation that we’d done showed that this would be the least impact of any airplane fleet that you could divest, and it was the only way to divest an entire fleet—back shops, the engines, the whole supply chain—which is where you get the big savings,” Welsh said. “There was logic to it. It’s just that it wasn’t going to happen.”  

Welsh found himself getting beaten up for a plan that he’d never supported, but it didn’t matter. Once a decision was made it was his job to make the case. And the alternative that resulted was hardly his idea either.  

“Senator McCain really got irate about this,” Welsh added. What ended up happening instead is we got told to keep the A-10 and keep bedding down the F 35, but we were still cutting people.” That created a crush. “We needed the people in the A-10 squadrons to transition to F-35 squadrons, but when that didn’t happen, we had to cut manning in every squadron in the Air Force to 80 percent, just to have enough manpower to stand up the new F-35 units.”  

It didn’t matter. Congress wasn’t buying it. The Air Force appeared tone-deaf to a nation focused on the plight of Soldiers and Marines slugging it out in a ground fight.  

In the Spring of 2013, as Welsh was visiting Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, ahead of a budget hearing the next day, one of the senator’s aides interrupted to share a news alert on his phone. Levin tried to wave him off, but the aide persisted, handing him the phone. Levin looked down at the device through his reading glasses, then peered over the rims at the general before him.  

“You should read this,” he said. Welsh learned that a lieutenant colonel, the chief of the Air Force’s  sexual assault prevention and response branch, had been arrested the night before in Arlington, Va. The charge was sexual assault.   

“So Senator Levin looks up over those glasses, and says, ‘Enjoy your hearing tomorrow.’ Ha—not a good day for us,” Welsh noted.  

He can laugh about it now. At the time, it was just another painful smack, one in a series of embarrassments that kept the Air Force institutionally on the defensive.  The officer was later acquitted, but the incident and others made it seem the Air Force had a bigger problem with sexual assault than the rest of the military or society in general. That wasn’t a true representation of the facts, Welsh explained. But what that kind of publicity did was deflating.  

“The impact those things were having on Airmen in general was significant.” Welsh said. “All they heard was bad news about the Air Force. They were frustrated by budget cuts and sequestration from the Budget Control Act, training dollars were going down, they were deploying constantly. They were frustrated. And my biggest concern as Chief was that we can lose everything else, but if we lose Airmen, there’s no Air Force.” 

Welsh saw his job then as rallying the force, reminding Airmen “of who they are, and what they do, and how well they do it, and why they do it—why it matters,” Welsh went on. “I spent a lot of time on the road talking to Airmen, all over the world, just trying to let them know that we did care, that people were paying attention, that we wanted to make them better at their mission, and that we weren’t going to let everything disintegrate and leave them hanging.” 

Every Chief’s career path is different. In Welsh’s case, he’d had very little time on the Air Staff where he would have had more exposure to the politics and knife fighting of the budget process. “I’d never been close to that interaction and activity, and that was a shortfall of mine,” he said. “You know, if I’d been the Vice Chief of Staff before, it would have been a much easier transition.”  

(It is not surprising then to recall that Welsh’s successor, Gen. David L. Goldfein, suffered no such challenge; he fleeted up from the Vice Chief’s job in 2016, with the benefit of a month of prep-time in which he was cut loose to focus on his new role, rather than the duties of the Vice.) 

It dawned on Welsh too late that the real fight needed to be about his Airmen. It wasn’t just that they needed to be reassured. It was that he needed more of them. And while he and Secretary Deborah Lee James were ultimately able to draw that red line, it was late in his tenure. If there’s one thing he would do differently, he said, it would be to fight for people sooner.  

“There is this assumption that there’s all kinds of efficiencies” to be had in any budget, that there is always fat to be cut, Welsh said. “Well, not really. There isn’t nearly as much as you think. When you go to look at where you can take big chunks of money out of the Air Force budget, its infrastructure, it’s modernization, or its people. The biggest chunk of money is people. So it’s the easiest way to save. But every time you give up an Airman you give up mission capability in some way, shape, or form.” 

To try to identify what could be sacrificed from the budget and what could not, Welsh knew he needed the buy-in from his four-star major command generals, the Air Staff, and the combatant commanders. “You’ve got to have those conversations across the senior leadership of the Air Force,” he said. “It can’t just be the Air Staff having this debate.”  

One of the things Welsh is most proud of is how he attacked this problem by building a visual model of the budget, “a wall of money,” he said. Then he “brought all the four-stars in to do our first programming meetings off of that visual.”  

On the wall were color-coded magnetic strips. “Just one-inch-wide magnetic strips, every inch was a million dollars,” Welsh said. They spent two days staring at that wall, “one of the things I learned the most from as the Chief of Staff.”  

The color-coded magnets created a visual understanding of the challenges—the colors of money, the programs, the available resources.“It goes floor to ceiling and across the whole wall,” Welsh said. Everything included in the budget was above a line in the middle. Everything desired but not yet in the budget was below. In order to move something from below the line to the top, something else had to be subtracted.  

This made clear the choices the Air Force faced, choices that were not about what programs were needed or desirable, but about which ones the Air Force needed most. The trade-offs could thus be made across major commands, not just in the usual stovepipes.  

“We all sat there for two days and talked about it,” Welsh recalled. “And John Hyten who was Air Force Space Command at the time, said, ‘Just go to my column and take those two off.’ And it was like a hush in the room. I mean, he actually gave something up. And that broke the dam.”  

Once Hyten got things started, others followed. Hyten, Welsh noted, was nobody’s fool, because that bought him good will from others as the horse trading continued. But his initiative, his willingness to take a chance by offering something up in the open was crucial to progressing through the job at hand.  

“The big point was, this is our budget, all of us,” Welsh said. “And to optimize it, if we want to put something on the board, something’s got to come off. And if it’s not going to be one of your own things, you’ve got to justify why they are all more important than everybody else’s stuff. That was the discussion we had and it was a really honest discussion. We did it for every year I was there.” 

Like other Chiefs, Welsh found it took too long to learn the job well, that progress came too slowly, and that time went too fast. Four years sounds like a long time, but it isn’t long enough to institutionalize change in an organization so large.

“I do think four years as Chief of Staff is not enough,” Welsh said. Should it be five? Eight? Welsh thought for a moment, then answered decisively: “Six.” The extra time could be subject to re-confirmation by Congress, perhaps, or a renomination by the administration. But more time makes more sense, he said, even if the job itself is exhausting. “Physically, four years is enough,” Welsh said. “I was, I was pretty much dying after four years. But the reason I think it is enough is you don’t really get a chance to implement things that stay implemented. … You work so hard to put some things in place that you think are really meaningful for the Air Force” and they whither when the next Chief focuses someplace else. “They don’t intentionally get rid of the other stuff, maybe they just quit focusing on it—and then there is a certain stasis on the Air Staff, which everybody will go back to.” 

Some call it the frozen middle. Welsh cites “the iron majors and lieutenant colonels and civilians—GS 13s and 14s—who are so incredibly capable and dedicated” to the rules and regulations, the systems and processes. “They understand it, they know how to make it work. And so they’re almost too loyal to it.”  

When the change agents depart, the system reverts to its prior function. “It’s very easy just to go back to the process you know and love,” Welsh said. Two more years as Chief might help prevent that.  

In the Tank, where the Joint Chiefs of Staff hash out matters of policy and strategy, Welsh said his interservice partners were honest and direct with each other and generally cooperative and reasonable. He always felt he was heard, even if he didn’t get his way, including during visits to the White House, where he recalls President Barack Obama giving each of the Chiefs or participants around the table a chance to express their views.  

Yet in the wider national discussion, the value of Air and Space Power seems little understood, either taken for granted or not recognized for its true and full value.  

“The reality is that air power is the most valuable integrating and attacking force on the battlefield. It just is, there’s no argument against that,” Welsh said. “You don’t get to the fight without air power. You don’t get the ISR you need to prepare for the fight without air power and space power. They work together, even if they’re different forces now, they still work together. And when required, air power can be the decisive force on the battlefield.”  

Of course, he adds, there are things air power cannot do, like occupy some piece of territory, or set up and support a mayor in a small village. But these capabilities are not mutually exclusive.  

“The idea that nobody’s been attacked from the air since the Korean War …. that’s an astonishing fact,” Welsh said. “It’s because air power and air supremacy provides freedom to attack and freedom to maneuver. It gives you the ability to be the greatest Army, the greatest Marine Corps on the planet.” Without it, those other advantages erode quickly. Investing in air power is therefore an investment in the Total Force. “If you are fighting against the U.S. Air Force, supported by Naval aviation and Marine Corps aviation, you’d have a problem,” Welsh said, because “it is and can be a dominant force.”  

The question the nation must answer is whether that is something it still values. “Can we provide air superiority everywhere these days with the amount of force structure we have? Of course not,” Welsh considered. “But where we choose to have it, we can have it.”

Chiefs, Part 6: ‘The Accidental Chief’

Chiefs, Part 6: ‘The Accidental Chief’

Nov. 9, 2022 | By Tobias Naegele

In its 75-year history, 22 Airmen have led the Air Force as Chief of Staff. Each came to the post shaped by the experiences—and sometimes scar tissue—developed over three decades of service. Each inherited an Air Force formed by the decisions of those who came before, who bequeathed to posterity the results of decisions and compromises made over the course of their time in office. Each left his own unique stamp on the institution. As part of Air & Space Forces Magazine’s commemoration of the Air Force’s 75th anniversary, Sept. 18, 2022, we interviewed all of the living former Chiefs of Staff.

Gen. Norton Schwartz, CSAF No. 19 (2008-2012)  

One thing was sure about Gen. Norton A. “Norty” Schwartz: He was never going to be Chief of Staff. Soft-spoken and a self-confessed introvert, he had spent barely three of the prior 11 years in Air Force jobs in the summer of 2008. Air Force Chiefs are typically fighter pilots, but Schwartz had flown C-130 transports and spent much of his career in the special operations world. When, in the spring of 2008, Schwartz’s relief as commander at U.S. Transportation Command was named, Schwartz already filed the paperwork to retire.  

Then lightning struck.  

Thursday, June 5, 2008. All the Air Force four-star generals were gathered in Dayton, Ohio, for Corona—one of the few, elite gatherings of the service’s top generals each year. But on this particular morning, something was wrong in this room full of high-priced talent. The two principals, Chief of Staff Gen. T. Michael Moseley and Secretary of the Air Force Michael Wynne, were late.  

“We were all there in the room in Dayton, and we are awaiting the Chief’s and the Secretary’s arrival,” Schwartz recalled. “They were late, which was unusual. And everybody’s BlackBerry started buzzing.”  

The first iPhone had hit the market in 2007, but the military was still deeply wedded to the BlackBerry, a dedicated mobile email machine with a built-in physical keyboard, a small screen, and superior security. Incoming messages awakened the BlackBerrys in every general’s pocket to Air Force Times and Defense News reports that Defense Secretary Robert Gates had fired both the military and civilian leaders of the Air Force, an unprecedented beheading of the service’s power structure.  

“Everyone around the table understood that the institution was in jeopardy,” Schwartz said. Everyone also knew that one among them was almost certainly going to be the next Chief. While it was possible to bring someone back out of retirement—Army Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, who retired in 2000, was recalled to Active duty to become Army Chief of Staff in 2004—the sudden and double-barreled firing would increase the pressure to fill the job rapidly. All of the four-stars were potential candidates, and to Schwartz, the likeliest candidate seemed to Gen. Kevin P. Chilton, the former astronaut who now headed U.S. Strategic Command.  

Gates had other ideas. Chilton was another former fighter pilot, and Gates was looking to do more than change drivers. He wanted to send a lasting signal to a service he viewed as out of touch with the bloody mess that Iraq had become. U.S. military deaths in Iraq peaked in 2007 at more than 900, and while the death rate had slowed by mid-2008, at least one American was dying in Iraq each day. Gates believed Moseley and Wynne were too focused on some future conflict with China and not vested enough on the immediate problem at hand.  

He wanted the next Air Force Chief to represent a radical departure from its recent past. And Schwartz was everything the brash and plain-spoken Moseley was not: Quiet, self-effacing, steeped in joint-service thinking after six joint tours—and a transport pilot. If Gates wanted to get the Air Force to change its tune, here was a bandleader who sung a different sort of song.

Gen. Norton Schwartz spent much of his career in the joint, special operations world, making him at times an outsider in his own Air Force. He met with Airmen from the 212th Rescue Squadron in Alaska during a tour of the JBER installation. Staff Sgt. Sheila deVera

Mosely retired in July, and Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Duncan J. McNabb assumed the duties as Acting Chief for a month before Schwartz took his oath of office in July. Now Schwartz had to prove himself to the doubters, especially among his fellow Airmen.   

“In many ways, I was more respected in the United States Army than I was in the Air Force,” Schwartz said. “I had earned my spurs largely in the special ops community. … There were people in the Air Force who were not persuaded, you know, that Schwartz was worthy. Fair enough, but that didn’t matter. There was work to do to preserve the institution of our Air Force,” he said. “And the guidance, you know, from Secretary Gates was really pretty straightforward.”  

Gates’ brittle relationship with Moseley and Wynne was characterized most plainly by his characterization of leaders suffering “Next-War-itis” and obsessed with “exquisite” platforms that applied to enemies he didn’t see on the horizon. But firing a Chief and a Secretary over a disagreement in military advice and priority would have been unseemly. A series of Air Force failures relating to the safe and secure handline of nuclear weapons provided a ready excuse. In August 2007, an Air Force bomber crew flew from Minot Air Force Base, N.D., to Barksdale Air Force Base, La., unaware they were carrying six nuclear warheads.  Seven months later, the Pentagon admitted the Air Force had erroneously shipped a nuclear weapon fuse to Taiwan in 2006, learning about the mistake from Taiwanese authorities. 

Gates said that incident was the final straw. “It was the second incident that prompted me to believe that there were serious, systemic problems here,” he told reporters. 

Schwartz said his marching orders from Gates were clear: “Number one was fix nuke, obviously,” he said. In his first 30 days, Schwartz took action to impose accountability. “We let 13 people go during a three-day period,” he said. “In every case, I met with the individuals personally,” Schwartz said. To him, the major failure was not the fuse shipment, but the Bent Spear incident with the B-52.  

“Losing track of six nukes for 36 hours wasn’t just a mistake,” he said. “It was an egregious level of incompetence.” 

Next on Gates’ list was to move past what he saw as Moseley’s and Wynne’s intransigence regarding funding for the F-22 fighter and support for the Army’s struggles in Iraq. Number two was “Get in the fight.”  

“There was a perception that we were reluctantly participating in the conflicts in the Middle East,” Schwartz said. Gates wanted the Air Force to provide more intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) support to ground forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, which was crucial to disrupting insurgents’ ability to plant the deadly improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that were killing and maiming so many American soldiers.  

Prior to the Iraqi invasion, Army Chief of Staff Eric K. Shin­seki testified that it would take a force “on the order of several hundred thousand” troops to occupy and pacify Iraq after an invasion. The same week Shinseki testified, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz told Congress Shin­seki’s estimate was “wildly off the mark.” The fact was, the Army lacked the capacity to field such a large invasion force. Even with the contributions of a large allied force it would have been impossible to put that many troops on the ground there for any length of time—especially since the U.S. was simultaneously sustaining a second occupation in Afghanistan. 

Schwartz had been caught up in this debate in 2003 as the J-3 or operations chief on the Joint Staff, because he testified the same week before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Asked how many troops it would take, he fell back on guidance and declined to speculate, despite knowing a range of estimates that had been discussed among the military leadership.  

But what looked like a heady decision at the time would later emerge during Schwartz’ nomination hearing to become Chief as a potential obstacle. Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) questioned Schwartz: Had he been “sufficiently forthcoming?” Schwartz ultimately apologized, saying, “I did not answer your questions directly. And, by definition, that is not sufficiently forthcoming.” 

Of course, it was obvious by then that it was Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld whose judgment had been wildly off the mark. “You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you want or wish to have at a later time,” Rumsfeld said in answer to a soldier during an all-hands call in Iraq in 2004. By 2008, the Army was facing a recruiting and retention crisis and the Air Force and Navy had become the billpayers, forced to cut their forces, lend their manpower to drive logistics convoys in Iraq, and enable “blue-to-green” service transfer programs.  

Being the Army’s billpayer galled Moseley, whose blunt objections only increased Gates’ frustrations with Air Force leadership. To Gates, the Air Force was failing to see itself as part of the joint team and hewing instead to an individualist view that the Army was responsible for solving the Army’s problems. 

Schwartz, as his successor, had to answer for it.  

“This was the perception of the Secretary of Defense—think about that,” Schwartz said. “Fair or not, having been in the positions I had been in, watching the Air Force, outside in, I had some reason to understand why there were such perceptions. There was a view that the Air Force was going to play these conflicts according to its own rules, … that we were reluctant participants.”  

Was that fair? “Kids were dying,” Schwartz said. “In the Joint Staff, in combatant commands, certainly on the third floor [where the Defense Secretary’s Pentagon office is, it seemed] that it required far, far too much effort to get the Air Force to deliver capability.”  

If perception is reality, this was the perception of the people “that mattered.” To an incoming Chief, then, it was fact. 

One example was medevac helicopters. In 2009, wounded troops were bleeding out after being wounded by IEDs, gunshots, or rocket-propelled grenades. To stanch the deaths, Gates mandated a “Golden Hour Protocol,” cutting in half the objective time required to provide assistance to troops with life-threatening injuries.  

“My question was, ‘Where are our rescue assets?” Schwartz recalls asking Airmen on his staff. The Airmen answered that this was an Army casualty evacuation mission, not for Air Force search-and-rescue operators.   

“That’s nonsense,” Schwartz recalls saying. “Kids are dying. Americans need evacuation. Our helicopters, our rescue people are qualified—better qualified than [Army] cas-evac, and we’re going to do that.”  

Then Schwartz went further because his best search-and-rescue operators were trainers, and he wanted them in the fight. “Against some headwinds, we decided to temporarily close the H-60 schoolhouse at Nellis [Air Force Base, Nev.,] and the very best of our H-60 weapons cadre were going to go to Afghanistan to support the Golden Hour. There was a little bit of a disturbance in the force field when we made that decision.” 

In retrospect, that disturbance was worth it, Schwartz said. “As it turned out, after their return, they were far better instructors in the Weapons School than they were before they departed.”  

That shouldn’t be surprising, he said, nor should it have been a challenge to deploy those talented Airmen. “That it required a Chief of Staff intervention to make that happen,” Schwartz said, “is so unfortunate.”   

‘ALL IN’ 

Every Chief has his watchwords, or themes, and Schwartz was no different. For Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., Chief No. 22,  it’s “Accelerate Change … or Lose.” For Schwartz it was “All In.”  

Determined to be a team player in the joint world, even if doing so made him unpopular in some Air Force circles, those two words embodied his and Gates’ objective.  

As Chief, Moseley had objected to using Airmen to drive convoy duty. Where previously, “the Air Force wouldn’t support resupply of ground forces because that was Army business,” Schwartz said, under his leadership, “well, we played our part.”  

Gradually, the Air Force began to “change that negative perception.” 

Within Air Force circles, however, Schwartz was criticized for being Gates’ henchman, carrying out his bidding. The military services have a way of attacking their own leadership when it changes direction, a reaction some liken to the antibodies in the human bloodstream that fight infections. In Scwhartz’ time as Chief, the antibodies attacked him. Today, they are on public display attacking Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David H. Berger, whose efforts to radically redesign the Marine Corps—to retire its tanks, reduce its helicopters, and reshape its infantry to be more relevant in today’s Pacific theater—have met with stiff resistance from earlier generations of Marine leaders.  

In April, two years after Berger released his Force Design 2030 plan to makeover the Corps, two dozen retired generals pushed back, an unprecedented rebellion of former Marine leaders that reportedly included every living former commandant. 

Schwartz was spared such extreme treatment, but was still viewed as too willing to compromise the Air Force to make peace with the Secretary, especially when it came to the F-22 Raptor, the air superiority fighter the Air Force needed to replace its F-15C/Ds. Schwartz, however, said it was the Air Force, not DOD leadership, that failed to prove its case.   

“In my mind, the Air Force did not justify the F-22 sufficiently,” he recalled. “It’s important to understand that Gates was writing letters to the families of the fallen every day. So the ‘Next-War-itis’ [comment] was not so much ideological, as it was this visceral reality, that we had a lot at stake right then. And you know, had the Air Force played it a little differently, in my view, and been a little more loyal … it might have turned out differently.” 

Loyalty gets complex at the highest levels of military service. A leader’s loyalty is to the Constitution and the United States, not to an individual office holder. But military leaders must also navigate the reality that their job is to execute the strategy and directions of civilian leaders. When Schwartz was the J-3 and had dodged the question about how many troops would be needed to keep the peace in a post-invasion Iraq, his choice to not be fully forthcoming had placed loyalty to the administration—over his own obligation to answer questions openly and honestly. As Chief, he would have to wrestle with similar issues more than once.   

When the Pentagon sought to shut down the F-22, Air Force leaders sought to take their case directly to Congress, a violation of protocol since the military works for the executive branch. Schwartz said Gates took that personally. In Gates’ autobiography, “Duty: Memoirs of A Secretary at War,” however, he glosses over his responsibility for killing the F-22. “Over 25 years, the F-22 suffered almost as many cuts from as many hands as Julius Caesar,” Gates wrote.  

Yet it was Gates who dealt the fatal blow, ending the program at 187 aircraft.  

Schwartz and Michael B. Donley, who succeeded Wynne as Secretary, tried to find a middle ground. They advanced a plan that would have kept the production line running until the Air Force had 243 F-22s.  

“We did a very good piece of analysis that suggested that the right number was 243,” Schwartz said. “And we went to Secretary Gates and his folks and made the argument that if he was going to terminate the program, he should terminate it at 243. … It may be wishful thinking or it may be Pollyanna,  but my view is that had the Air Force enjoyed a slightly better reputation on the third floor at the time, 243 would have survived.” 

Gates ended production at 187, however, and by the Spring of 2009, Schwartz and Donley were ready to move on. In an Op-Ed in the Washington Post in April 2009, as the fiscal 2010 budget was being rolled out, they unfurled the white flag, concluding that the $13 billion bill to keep building more F-22s could not be justified “as defense budgets are becoming constrained.”   

Schwartz felt there was no alternative at that point. “F-22 had consumed enough oxygen,” Schwartz said. “The question that every leadership team has to wrestle with is, ‘What are the existential issues for the United States Air Force?’ And our judgment was that, in the long view, the bomber successor was more important.” 

Giving up on the F-22 was crucial to ensure Gates did not “double down on the F-22 decision” and also cut off funding for the future bomber. Today, as the B-21 nears first flight sometime in 2023, Schwartz believes his and Donley’s decision was the right one. Better to develop the bomber than to have won the battle for more F-22s at the cost, potentially, of a bomber replacement program.   

The RPA Revolution  

Another one of Gates’ frustrations with the Air Force had been over remotely piloted aircraft. Gates wanted more MQ-1 Predators in the fight.  

“When I got back to Washington, we had eight 24/7 orbits of MQ-1,” Schwartz said, referring to the Air Force’s ability to maintain continuous overhead presence with Predator unmanned systems. “That was clearly insufficient, and there was frustration that the Air Force wasn’t more aggressive in fielding additional capability. … When we left, there were 58 orbits of MQ-1 and MQ-9 capability, and some other stuff, and in addition to that, the utility of remote aviation became embedded in the culture.” 

Schwartz said institutionalizing RPAs meant ensuring that remote-control pilots earned wings so they could not be seen as “lesser beings” when lined up against other rated officers.  

“That was another disturbance in the force field,” recalled Schwartz. “The reality was, I could not persuade the skeptics because of my pedigree.” Instead, it was his three-star head of operations, plans, and requirements who helped make that happen. “It took Phil Breedlove, who had the correct pedigree, to basically tell the skeptics to pack sand.”  

Today, Schwartz said, it is hard to imagine that the next airlifter won’t be optionally manned. “The cargo business is going to go remote,”he added. Passengers will take longer, but cargo is going that way, as is at least some portion of attack aviation, he said. “It is clearly the right path to be on to have a mix that is less costly and where you can afford some attrition.”  

Schwartz and Donley also sought to change Air Force leadership in terms of the diversity of backgrounds of Air Force leaders. The choices a Chief makes about general officer assignments and three- and four-star appointments may be their most enduring legacy. Who is chosen—and who is not—leaves a lasting mark.  

“Mike Donley’s and my effort to diversify the leadership, both in terms of expertise, of ethnic background, in terms of gender—that was an important undertaking,” Schwartz said. “And it wasn’t done for political reasons. This was the right goddamned thing to do.” Quoting CSAF No. 12, he added, “Larry Welch told me when I first got in the chair that if you don’t spend 25 percent of your time on flag officer management, you’re not doing your job,” Schwartz recalled. “Well I don’t know that I spent 25 percent, but I did spend considerable time on that. The country needs good people to do this stuff, people who are competent, who can withstand the pressure, who model the right behaviors. You try to put people on a trajectory where, if lightning strikes, they’ll be there and they will be prepared.”     

Shyu Says Wargames Define R&D Investment; New NDS Tech Document Coming

Shyu Says Wargames Define R&D Investment; New NDS Tech Document Coming

Nov. 8, 2022 | By John A. Tirpak

Wargame results and opportunities to asymmetrically counter adversaries are driving the Pentagon’s investment choices in new technologies, said Heidi Shyu, undersecretary of defense for research and engineering. She also said an unclassified document outlining the science and technologies underpinning the new National Defense Strategy will come out in the spring.

At a Nov. 3 acquisition-themed event hosted by George Mason University, Shyu said she is choosing to invest in technologies that prove to make a significant difference in the outcomes of large-scale wargames derived from a gaming system developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Those technologies that don’t have a big impact on the outcome will either be dropped or sent back a few steps for refinement, she said.

Shyu is also looking for asymmetric countermeasures that can offset adversary strengths, about which she didn’t elaborate.

“Our decisions and investments ought to be driven by exquisite modeling/simulation” at the campaign level, which offers excursions on new capabilities for both the Red and Blue forces, she said.

“We can literally play it out,” she said. “Let’s go through this battle and see what happens.”

If a technology plugged into the game “doesn’t really change the outcome, do I really need this? Should I spend my money somewhere else? Where I can get a bigger bang for the buck?”

She said this approach is being taken for a number of new capabilities among her 14 technology priorities. A specific one is looking at many variations of the nuclear command and control system.

“This is how we get rapid experimentation capabilities proven in a contested environment,” she said. Sometimes, “a great widget works fabulously inside your lab, but when you get it out to the real environment, all the pitfalls show up.”

The results of these exercises, along with her office’s notes, are providing insights to help the Joint Staff and regional combatant commanders set their priorities for what they want the R&E enterprise to focus on.

Shyu declined to pick the most important or highest-priority areas under her 14 areas, saying that’s like a parent choosing a favorite child. “They’re all beautiful,” she said.

The 14 areas laid out in a February memo from Shyu include ”seed areas” such as biotechnology, future wireless technology, quantum science, and advanced materials. Under “effective adoption areas,” Shyu listed technologies already available in the commercial market which can be integrated into defense systems. These include artificial intelligence and autonomy, human-machine teaming, advanced computing, microelectronics, space technology, renewable energy, and energy storage.

A third grouping identified as “defense-specific” includes hypersonics, directed-energy weapons, integrated sensing systems, and cyber warfare.

In her February memo listing the 14 focus areas, Shyu said she will rapidly protype systems that employ these capabilities and develop “continuous campaigns of Joint experimentation” to refine and deliver the new capabilities.

Shyu said her office will release an “unclassified volume” describing the technology foundations of the National Defense Strategy, “so the public has visibility into these technology areas that are priorities.” Industry may also be able to see a classified version “to give you a little more context about why” certain technologies are priorities and others aren’t, she said. It will contain “a rationale you won’t see in the unclassified” version.

Shyu said she’s anxious to “transition” new technologies into the hands of operators. But “everyone has a different definition of ‘transition,’” she said. The obvious one is when an “advanced prototype” turns into a program of record, but “it could be a piece of software that got into the hands of a warfighter … It could be something dual-use, and we decide to go commercial. That’s a successful transition: We funded it; it went commercial; we’re buying it off the shelf.”

Shyu also said she is making more efficient use of technology funds. New data systems are giving her insight into the technology programs across the breadth of the Pentagon’s science and technology and R&D enterprise at a level of detail not previously available, “and we’re sharing that with industry.” She said she has monthly meetings with small and large companies, looking for feedback on the “pain points” of working the Pentagon S&T enterprise.

Her shop is also focusing on  international engagements, sharing information that can help avoid duplication of effort and yield results that both parties can use. As an example, she cited the SCIFIRE air-breathing hypersonics initiative with Australia, which she said helped the Air Force makes its downselect for the Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile.

“Every single novel idea was not invented here, right?” Shyu said, adding that she wants to “look wide” at partner and ally technologies, in an application of “integrated deterrence,” to “collaborate together to counter our adversary.” She said she’s created a “SAP umbrella”—meaning special access programs information sharing agreement—“to share more sensitive information” in pursuit of co-development.

She noted that President Biden “made the decision to share exquisite [intelligence] data with NATO. That built trust. Because they realized” what the U.S. said it was seeing “all … came true,” and that built trust to work better together.

“I want to share development with partner nations,” she asserted, naming “Australia, the UK, NATO, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Italy, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Latvia … Israel, you name it” who “all want to be partners with us, [who are] interested in co-development.”

She’s particularly interested in “leap ahead” technologies that can asymmetrically blunt certain threats, which will be important for the “campaigning” aspect of the NDS’s integrated deterrence mantra, Shyu said.

“Just because you have 1,000 tanks, if I have 1,001, I win … that’s very linear thinking. I want to think about what are the asymmetric ways we can counter the threat,” she said.

To that end, she’s setting up a “war room” that will focus all available “intel threat” intelligence, along with the state-of-the-art of technology and the status of technology efforts underway in the DOD, so that “we can get to … the asymmetric things we’re developing, faster.”

“So that the ‘war room,’ and I want to use that to drive the S&T strategy,” she said. It will look at the enterprise “cohesively. And it’s going to cover underwater to space.”

Shyu said she’s had “a very significant impact on the POM,” or five-year spending plan, and that’s because she has regular engagement with the regional commanders and understand their needs for “what we need to be ready in the 10-20-30 year timeframe” as well as in the short term.

The acquisition system needs to move faster, Shyu said, and have more flexibility. China, she said, doesn’t suffer from the protracted process of funding requests, approvals, and oversight, and this allows them to obtain new technology faster.

“Our budget process is a two-year process … and you have to have exquisite knowledge of what you need … five years into the future,” Shyu said, which is “crazy because threats may pop up that you didn’t anticipate.”

“Right now, we have a problem: You did [research, development, test and evaluation]. Now, did you POM [submit a long-term plan] for the procurement money? If you didn’t … then it’s a year you’re sitting there waiting for the procurement money.”

Shyu asked, “Why would you do things like this to yourself? Right? Money is money.”

She said the Pentagon needs “a lot more flexibility to be able to pivot. It’s a rigid structure to which we shackle ourselves, like tying our shoelaces together and trying to run.” It would be a big help to “give us some colorless money, as well,” she said, referring to funding accounts that can only be used for certain kinds of technology efforts, often referred to as the “color of money” problem.

Asked about friction in the breakup of the position of undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology, and logistics into two jobs—hers, and that of the USD for acquisition and sustainment, William A. LaPlante—Shyu said the friction is largely erased because of their working relationship.

When Shyu was acquisition executive for the Army, LaPlante was the acquisition executive for the Air Force, and they have a solid partnership, she said.

If there’s a problem between the two enterprises, “it gets escalated up to us … and we fix it in five minutes. We trust each other,” she said. This “sets the example” for the two organizations to be collaborative, she said.

Maintenance Procedure Likely Led to Cracked C-130H Propellers, AMC Says

Maintenance Procedure Likely Led to Cracked C-130H Propellers, AMC Says

Nov. 8, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

Air Force maintainers examining the propellers on C-130H planes used electric arc etching pens to inscribe serial numbers once inspections were complete—and in doing so, likely caused the damage that has forced a grounding of the fleet.

That’s the conclusion Air Mobility Command has reached a month after it first ordered a safety stand-down of more than 100 C-130Hs with older propellers due to cracks in the propeller barrel assemblies.

“The process used to engrave serial numbers on the propellers caused the cracking that is being found on the C-130Hs. That process … involved an electric arc pen to incise digits into the surface of the metal,” AMC spokesperson Maj. Beau Downey told Air & Space Forces Magazine in a statement.

The practice of engraving the serial number on propeller parts is “standard,” Downey added, but the process for doing so isn’t always the same—sometimes maintainers use what he called an “acid wash,” chemically etching the number onto the part. AMC Airmen first began using the electric arc etching pen process more than a decade ago and continued to do so up until six months ago.

At that point, the method was discontinued, though Downey said the cracked propeller parts were not discovered at that time and AMC had not made a connection between the electric etching pen and cracked parts.

“Further analysis will be needed for a full understanding of the root cause of the cracks,” Downey added. “Right now our focus is on safely and quickly returning these aircraft to supporting the mission.”

When the safety stand-down was first announced Oct. 3, Downey said up to 116 C-130Hs could be affected, all with older 54H60 propellers dating back as far as the 1970s. Air Combat Command and Air Force Special Operations Command subsequently confirmed to Air & Space Forces Magazine that their respective variants of the C-130H, the MC-130H Combat Talon II, and EC-130H Compass Call, were being grounded as well.

A few weeks later, AMC said two C-130Hs had returned to flight. Now, however, the command is declining to say how many planes are still grounded, citing operational concerns.

Moving forward, though, the Air Force is working on a “multi-faceted recovery plan to resume safe aircraft operations as soon as possible,” Downey said, noting that it will be an “incremental process.”

Much of that process will unfold at the Warner Robins Air Logistics Complex, Ga., where maintenance crews are inspecting, repairing, overhauling, and testing affected propeller assemblies, Downey added.

The Air Force’s C-130H fleet is entirely in the Guard and Reserve—some 141 total as of Sept. 30, 2021, according to the latest inventory numbers. Of those aircraft, only those with four-bladed 54H60 propellers are grounded. Others had already been upgraded to eight-bladed NP2000 propellers prior to the grounding, while the C-130J has six-bladed R391 propellers—neither types are affected by the grounding.

As of 2021, the Air Force had ordered upgraded NP2000 propellers for 83 of its C-130Hs, according to a Collins Aerospace release. Now, the service is considering accelerating the production and installation of those propellers to replace the damaged ones, Downey previously told Air & Space Forces Magazine.

Chiefs, Part 5: ‘Buzz Was Right’

Chiefs, Part 5: ‘Buzz Was Right’

Nov. 8, 2022 | By Tobias Naegele

In its 75-year history, 22 Airmen have led the Air Force as Chief of Staff. Each came to the post shaped by the experiences—and sometimes scar tissue—developed over three decades of service. Each inherited an Air Force formed by the decisions of those who came before, who bequeathed to posterity the results of decisions and compromises made over the course of their time in office. Each left his own unique stamp on the institution. As part of Air & Space Forces Magazine’s commemoration of the Air Force’s 75th anniversary, Sept. 18, 2022, we interviewed all of the living former Chiefs of Staff.

Gen. T. Michael Moseley, CSAF 18 (2005-’08)        

The one thing everyone knows about Gen. T. Michael “Buzz” Moseley is that he was fired from the job. Being relieved short of completing his four-year tour as Chief was not on the radar when Moseley moved up from Vice Chief to become Chief of Staff in September 2005. 

Moseley had been the vice Chief for two full years. His prior experience included commanding U.S. Central Command Air Forces for nearly two years before that and before that two years as the Chief Air Force legislative liaison. Few were better versed on the issues facing the service at the time. But Moseley was no politician. Shaved-headed and stiff-necked, he remains as bluntly plainspoken now, 14 years after leaving office as he was when the bombshell struck in July 2008. 

Moseley was enroute to a Corona meeting—a gathering of Air Force four-stars—in Dayton, Ohio, when word came that he and Air Force Secretary Michael W. Wynne were both being relieved, a stunning dual beheading executed by Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates whose frustration with the Air Force had become a public feud in recent months. 

Gates had considered the Air Force “one of my biggest headaches” for some time. But in a speech at the Heritage Foundation on May 13, 2008, he unloaded his concerns publicly: “There is a good deal of debate and discussion—within the military, the Congress, and elsewhere—about whether we are putting too much emphasis on current demands—in particular, Iraq—and whether this emphasis is creating too much risk in other areas, such as preparing for potential future conflicts; being able to handle a contingency elsewhere in the world; and overstressing the ground forces, in particular the Army,” Gates said. 

“Much of what we are talking about is a matter of balancing risk: today’s demands versus tomorrow’s contingencies; irregular and asymmetric threats versus conventional threats,” Gates went on. “As the world’s remaining superpower, we have to be able to dissuade, deter, and, if necessary, respond to challenges across the spectrum. Nonetheless, I have noticed too much of a tendency toward what might be called ‘Next-War-itis’: the propensity of much of the defense establishment to be in favor of what might be needed in a future conflict.”

Gates had taken over as Secretary in 2006 from Donald H. Rumsfeld, as the War in Iraq descended into its messiest phase. Two-and-a-half years prior, President George W. Bush had flown onto the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and delivered a televised speech in front of a giant banner proclaiming “Mission Accomplished.” By the 2006 mid-term elections, that image had come to haunt the administration. Far from being over, things had only gone downhill from that moment on. By 2006, it was clear the Army was ill-sized or equipped for the mission in Iraq, recruiting was suffering, and the Army was lowering its standards for incoming troops. The Iraq War had become precisely the kind of quagmire the administration had wanted to avoid, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who had become a media sensation in the wake of 9/11, had fallen out of favor. 

The weekend before the election, the Military Times newspapers wrote that, regardless of the outcome, the time had come for Rumsfeld to go. “His strategy has failed and his ability to lead is compromised,” the editorial said. By Wednesday morning, victorious Democrats were in full agreement. “The Army Times has spoken,” said Nancy Pelosi, who would soon be the next Speaker of the House. 

That afternoon, Bush announced, with Rumsfeld standing awkwardly on his right and Gates on left, that change was coming to the Pentagon. 

That Gates would shake things up was a foregone conclusion. But that his focus would be the Air Force, rather than the Army, was not quite so clear. But Air Force leaders were not solely focused on the Iraq problem. They saw trouble on the horizon—and in their own aging force. 

By 2006, the weapons that had so impressed the world in 1991’s Operation Desert Storm had aged 15 years. Except for 100 or so Predator unmanned aircraft, the force was otherwise much the same, though smaller, and without some capabilities that had been sacrificed over the intervening years. The force was also getting tired; the service had been flying nonstop patrols over Iraq for 15 years and had supported combat operations in Somalia (1992-’93), Haiti (1994), Bosnia (1995), and Kosovo (1998-’99), prior to going to war in Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003). 

The job description of the Chief of Staff is spelled out clearly in Title 10, U.S. Code: The Chief leads the Air Staff, with responsibility for “recruiting, organizing, supplying, equipping, … training, servicing, mobilizing, demobilizing, administering, and maintaining of the Air Force.” The Chief administers today’s force, but his real work is in ensuring that tomorrow’s force is up to the job. Each Chief is heir to the decisions of those who came before him, and each Chief leaves a legacy to those who will follow. 

Moseley was worried about the future. In January 2007, China successfully conducted an anti-satellite missile test, destroying a defunct satellite and producing thousands of space debris fragments that continues to orbit the Earth even now. Air Force leaders saw the strike as a wakeup call, a clear indication not only that China was ascendant China in the East, but that it was honing the ability to threaten a key U.S. advantage: air and space dominance. 

At the center of the Air Force’s modernization plans was the F-22 Raptor, the stealthy fifth-generation air-dominance fighter. This was the key weapon the Air Force wanted for the future. But it was also Exhibit A in Gates’ case against “Next War-itis.” The stealth fighter was unparalleled in the world and a generation ahead of any rival. But it was also an “exquisite” technological marvel, intended for a war that Gates didn’t think was ever going to happen. 

“I kept saying, ‘We can’t defer this. We have to fund the [F-22],’” Moseley said in a May video interview. “That’s when I got accused of Next-war-itis. And I wrapped myself in that. I said, ‘Man, I want that framed on the wall.’ Because that’s an A-plus for me doing my job: organize, train, and equip. If someone thinks I’ve got Next-war-itis, hallelujah! I do! Because that’s my job. A combatant commander fights today’s fight. I’m fighting tomorrow’s fight.” 

That future fight would challenge the nation with technology and weapons far more complex than anything the insurgents could muster in Iraq or Afghanistan, and Moseley saw his requirements as obvious: “We need the best air -superiority fighter. We need the best utility fighter. We need the best penetrating bomber. We need a reliable tanker. We need a combat search-and-rescue helicopter that can go some distance. And every combatant commander said, ‘Thank you.’ The Army Chief, the Navy CNO, the Marine Commandant, they all said, ‘I get it.’” 

Not Gates. 

Prior to Gates’ arrival, Moseley and Wynne had already secured both Rumsfeld’s and the President’s support for modernizing. “The President had even agreed to give us the money,” Moseley said. Bush, who was flying F-102s in the Air National Guard when Moseley was in fighter training, liked to point out when meeting with his national security team that the two of them were the only fighter pilots in the room. 

But now Rumsfeld was gone, and Bush was trying to rescue a presidency damaged by the Iraq War. Gates was running the Pentagon. The wind had shifted. 

“I remember one time in a discussion with President Bush,” Moseley said. “He said, ‘Moseley, you said you think we’re going to fight the Chinese or the Russians?’ I said, ‘Mr. President, I’m praying not. … I think the probability is very low. But I think there is a 100 percent chance we’re going to fight their aircraft and their SAMs and their early-warning radars.’ And he goes, ‘I agree with you.’ So I said, ‘Therefore, you need an Air Force and a Navy that is beyond question the most technically capable, skilled, and modern because that’s where you can persuade, dissuade, and deter.” 

The Air Force executed a mission area analysis that took more than a year, preparing modernization roadmaps for each mission area: strategic lift, tankers, space, air superiority, suppression. The analysis covered every major defense system. “And out of all that, we defined the budget deficit for the force that we needed,” Moseley said, “and we took that to every combatant commander and got his OK, and I personally briefed it to the Navy CNO, the Marine Commandant, and the Army Chief, and I said, ‘Look, you don’t have to agree with me, just please don’t get in my way.’” 

When he presented it to Rumsfeld and the President, he had a friendly audience. “Secretary Rumsfeld’s handshake with me was that we would modernize and re-cap the Air Force,” Moseley said. They would use multi-year deals to buy out their C-130J and F-22A requirements, then focus, in order, on the new tanker, the combat search and rescue helicopter, the F-35, and new survivable maneuvering systems for all four families of satellite systems. And they would acquire a new bomber that would reach initial operational capability by 2018. 

“Rumsfeld said, ‘Press.’ The President said, ‘How much more do you need?’ I said, ‘$20 billion more a year.’ He goes, ‘Deal.’

Rumsfeld had no hesitation. According to Moseley, he said, “We’ve put you in this position, haven’t we?” And Moseley answered, “Yes, sir, the department has, because we kick the can on things, we study things, we jack around with them. We’re flying airplanes right now in combat that were never designed to fly this long. And we’re asking our kiddos to go do this, and yes, they make it look easy. People think it’s easy. It’s not.”

The problem in Iraq wasn’t the Air Force, but the Army. It didn’t have enough forces to man the mission, its vehicles were too light to withstand increasingly sophisticated improvised explosive devices, body armor wasn’t good enough, recruiting was in the dumps, and the public was turning against the war. America had invaded Iraq with the Army it had, to paraphrase an infamous Rumsfeld comment, not the Army it needed, and to keep that fight going it had to sacrifice the very forces it would need to stave off China and Russia in the future. 

“We were hemorrhaging money,” Moseley said. “I get it. But if it’s going to cost $48 billion to buy MRAPs [Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles], then write a $48 billion check. You don’t take the seed corn for the next 20 years to do it. Because it’s not going to end well.” 

Discussions in the tank, where the Joint Chiefs met, focused almost exclusively on the Army’s challenges: “Almost every problem we dealt with in the tank was an Army problem: Recruiting, retention, the size of the Army, the force deployment rotations of units.” 

The need for more overhead intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance flights. Gates wanted the Air Force to do more. Moseley, who was the first Wing commander to use the Predator at the 57th Wing in 1996-97, understood the issue firsthand. Moseley told Gates the Air Force was all in, but that the Army actually had more ISR to answer its needs than the Air Force did. 

“Look, we’re giving you everything we’ve got,” Moseley recalls telling Gates. “We can close down the Weapons School, we can throttle down the schoolhouse, and we’ll do it. But you’ve also got a few hundred of these things [Army Shadow UAVs] that are living in the Army, that are in garrison, and the Army won’t deploy them.” 

The Army’s Shadows were organic assets to its battalions, and the Army didn’t have a model for pulling them out and deploying the operators as detachments. “I said, ‘Give us the airplanes and give us the sensor operators. … This is a no-brainer. We’ll shut everything down and give it to you,” Moseley said. Gates’ response, as Moseley recalls it: “It’s more complicated than that.” 

Moseley found himself disagreeing with the Army over other issues, as well. When the Army wanted Airmen to help drive convoys moving fuel, food, ammunition and other supplies to forward units, Mosely asked Army Chief of Staff Gen. George W. Casey Jr. why the Army could not manage this on its own. 

“George, does every Army company commander have a driver?” Moseley asked. 

“Oh, yeah,” Casey said. 

“And the drivers are trained in small arms and self-protection?”

“Oh, yeah.”  

“So why don’t you guys deploy your own drivers? The company commander can drive his own jeep.”

It was no use. Airmen started doing Army convoy duty in 2004 and thousands continued to do so for several years afterward. 

Gates had begun his career as an intelligence officer in the Air Force, including a year at Whiteman Air Force Base, Mo. But Gates soon joined the CIA, and growing up as an analyst there had not endeared him to the Air Force. In the early 1990s, while with the CIA, he had tried to get the Air Force to join in developing unmanned aircraft but was rebuffed, Gates wrote in his book. 

“I think he was just frustrated. The surge was about that time and none of the Joint Chiefs were in favor of that.  I think there was just a lot of anxiety.” As Wynne said in a 2008 interview with Air Force Magazine, Gates “didn’t beat up the Army, which had almost a thousand Shadows. He beat up the Air Force, which had about 100 Predators.”

Gates couldn’t have dismissed Wynne and Moseley over the UAV dispute, and the F-22 debate—which amounted to a U-turn in terms of administration policy—did not amount to a fireable offense either. What did work as suitable cover, and to end, once and for all, the discussion about building more F-22s, was the sloppy performance of a B-52 bomber crew in Minot, N.D. On Aug. 29, 2007, a B-52H Stratofortress lifted off from Minot and flew to Barksdale Air Force Base, La. On board were six AGM-129 ACM cruise missiles, each one carrying a W80-1 variable yield nuclear warhead. No one realized the error for a day and a half, so the nuclear weapons had effectively gone missing—what the Air Force calls a Bent Spear incident.

A series of investigations followed. A number of officers were disciplined. And the following June, Moseley and Wynne were asked to resign. The Air Force had indeed become lax about nuclear weapons handling and procedures. But no one in the know ever believed the dismissals were about the nukes. Moseley and Wynne had fought hard for the funding and programs they believed in, and they had warned, loudly and often, of the consequences if those investments were put off any further, predicting that aircraft would age, become unsafe, and that training and readiness would decline. The record shows that’s exactly what happened. 

Says Moseley today: “Buzz was right.”

STARCOM to Expand Space Training Exercises in Coming Months

STARCOM to Expand Space Training Exercises in Coming Months

Nov. 8, 2022 | By Amanda Miller

International personnel will join the Space Force in December for its flagship training series Space Flag, just one new aspect of Space Training and Readiness Command’s planned slate of space-oriented exercises.

Activated in August 2021, STARCOM is one of three USSF field commands, roughly equivalent to an Air Force major command in the newer service’s flatter organizational structure. STARCOM added new types of personnel to Space Flag in 2022, when the exercise also received accreditation as a Joint National Training Capability.

The JNTC accreditation gave the command “more incentive to bring in other service partners,” said Maj. Gen. Shawn N. Bratton, commander of STARCOM. A Space Flag event in August, for example, involved members of the Army’s 1st Space Brigade practicing electronic warfare alongside Space Force Guardians. The event also included more cyber and intelligence personnel, Bratton told reporters at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference in September.

“We actually brought the cyber team in like a week or two ahead of time [for] the cyber portion of the exercise,” Bratton said. “Then the outcomes of that impacted the space operations piece.”

Doing so amounted to “a good first step” in incorporating cyber, Bratton said, “but we really need to integrate them together. … I think in December, we’ll be a little more integrated, and then I expect in next year’s Space Flag series, that cyber team will be fully integrated.”

In addition to Space Flag, STARCOM has begun to stage its new Skies series of exercises for Guardians and space personnel in the Air National Guard. 

Black Skies, a live-fire electronic warfare exercise against a satellite target for USSF’s Space Operations Command, took place in September. Guardians practiced attacking what Bratton characterized as “the beginnings” of a training range in orbit—the range coming to be known as the National Space Test and Training Complex, or NSTTC. 

The Guardians practiced EW against a legacy satellite target, the existence of which was why, Bratton said, Black Skies came first in the series.

A new Red Skies exercise will focus on orbital warfare, he said, which will call for a new “orbital warfare capability,” though “live-flying an asset on orbit” is unlikely to happen as soon as 2023—“as much as my team is super excited about doing that.”

A Blue Skies series will eventually focus on cyber, while a new command and control exercise, Polaris Hammer, begins in February.

Bratton said the fiscal 2023 and 2024 budgets will determine how much more STARCOM might be able to add to the NSTTC, while it’s already developing the range’s “digital side.” Meanwhile, the balance of live vs. virtual training remained a question.

“How do I weigh the value of live training versus simulation, and how do I know which provides a better training environment?” Bratton said. Right now, space operators in the Space Force never operate a real satellite until they arrive at their first unit, arriving prepared with only classroom instruction.

“We don’t think that’s exactly right,” he said, “and so we’re trying to balance that with the resources we have.” He said partnering with a university program, such as with the Air Force Academy’s FalconSAT program to build and fly cubesats, could provide a cost-effective solution.

This story was updated at 7:55 a.m. Nov. 9 to include information at the Polaris Hammer exercise.

T-38 Crashes Near Columbus AFB—Pilot OK

T-38 Crashes Near Columbus AFB—Pilot OK

Nov. 7, 2022 | By John A. Tirpak

Editor’s note: This story was updated at 11:15 a.m. Nov. 23 to clarify where the crash took place.

A T-38A Talon jet trainer of the 14th Flying Training Wing crashed near its home of Columbus Air Force Base, Miss., about 2:30 p.m. local time Nov. 7. The pilot ejected and survived, a base spokesperson said. No one on the ground was hurt.

The T-38 experienced “an in-flight emergency” and went down approximately 20 miles from the base, according to a press release, but details of the mishap will await the results of an investigation now underway. The pilot, whose name was withheld pending further inquiry, was taken to a hospital for evaluation.

Only one pilot was flying the two-seat, supersonic aircraft.

“We’re thankful the pilot ejected safely, and we appreciate the continued support of the Columbus community and our community partners,” the 14th’s vice commander Col. Jeremy Bergin said in a press statement.

“We continuously train our pilots to react appropriately for all emergency situations such as the incident that occurred today,” Bergin said.

Two pilots—a USAF instructor pilot and Japan Air Self-Defense Force student pilot—died in a T-38 crash at Dannelly Field near Montgomery, Ala., in February 2021—the crash was later attributed to spatial disorientation. A day earlier, a T-38 crashed at Beale Air Force Base, Calif., due to a landing gear malfunction, which did not claim the life of the pilot. T-38 crashes over the past five years have chiefly been attributed to pilot error.

The supersonic T-38, built by Northrop, entered service in 1960 and has been modified a number of times to restore its structural strength and improve its training capabilities. The Air Force is developing the Boeing T-7A to take its place, but the T-38 fleet is not expected to be fully retired until about 2030. The Air Force uses the T-38 for advanced undergraduate pilot training for pilots headed to fighters and bombers, as a companion trainer for some aircraft, and as a graduate-level fighter training platform. The type is also used as an “aggressor” aircraft to provide sparring partners for some USAF fighters. More than 1,100 T-38s were built and have served the Air Force, Navy, NASA, and foreign operators.

USSF’s Bythewood Takes Command of Joint ‘Space Troopers’

USSF’s Bythewood Takes Command of Joint ‘Space Troopers’

Nov. 7, 2022 | By Amanda Miller

SCHRIEVER SPACE FORCE BASE, Colo.—Space Force Brig. Gen. Dennis O. Bythewood took over U.S. Space Command’s Joint Task Force-Space Defense on Nov. 4, becoming only the second commander of the task force’s 300-400 “Space Troopers” at Schriever Space Force Base, Colo. 

Army Gen. James H. Dickinson, the commander of U.S. Space Command, presided over the ceremony. He described Army Maj. Gen. Thomas L. James, the outgoing commander, as “an exceptional officer” and “constant gentleman.” 

James served simultaneously as U.S. Space Command’s director of operations. He assumed the roles the same day the Defense Department reestablished U.S. Space Command in August 2019. The task force, abbreviated JTF-SD, was one of two functional component commands activated the same day.

James characterized the task force’s “unique and absolutely critical national mission” as “protecting and defending our access to key space systems.” The mission includes space domain awareness, warning satellite operators of threats, and “space superiority,” which is to ensure “the conduct of operations at the time and place of our choosing.”

Some of James’ contributions included the “fusion” of commercial and Missile Defense Agency remote sensing data into the military’s space domain awareness; and the creation of “new response options to counter a range of threats,” Dickinson said. “Simply put, Tom was the right leader at the right time for this unique and certainly demanding command.”

James, whose next position will be announced at a later date, previously commanded the Army’s 1st Space Brigade.

Bythewood served as James’ deputy commander of the task force, “so he knows the business and the stakes that are involved today,” Dickinson said. “Dennis displays an intense dedication to the mission and genuine care for his people. Because of his war fighting focus and high integrity, Dennis is ready to assume command of this organization.”

Bythewood said the task force would “continue to innovate as we have the last couple of years to better understand our area of responsibility and execute our space superiority mission.” He said the command is “developing the foundational intelligence needed to maximize our capabilities, and when new ones are delivered, we will synchronize those with support from USSPACECOM.”

Dickinson warned that space’s “strategic and operational environments will only grow more complex.

“And we all know when we see the news every day that the Chinese and the Russians are developing and demonstrating capabilities that can hold our space assets at risk,” he said. “Our freedom of access and action in the domain is not guaranteed.” 

Attending the ceremony in Shriever’s gymnasium were retired USAF Gen. John E. Hyten, the 11th vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Space Force’s Lt. Gen. Steven N. Whiting and Deputy Commander of U.S. Space Command Lt. Gen. John E. Shaw.

This story was updated at 7:49 a.m. Nov. 9, 2022, to correct that James’ next assignment will be announced at a later date.