Chief of Staff of the Air Force Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown, Jr. delivered a keynote address on “Airmen in the Fight,” highlighted by a mantra of “Airpower in the Answer” at the AFA Warfare Symposium, March 7, 2023. Watch the video or read the transcript below.
Voiceover:
Please welcome, AFA President & CEO, Lieutenant General Bruce “Orville” Wright.
Lt. Gen. Bruce “Orville” Wright, USAF (Ret.):
Well, good morning and welcome to Colorado. And, by the way, this is the launchpad, if you will, for September and getting us all back together to continue to send a message to the world that America is indeed ready for anything, anytime, anywhere, and certainly that is our Air & Space forces. So thank you, Mr. Secretary, for your words. And as Bernie mentioned in his opening remarks, the theme of this AFA Warfare Symposium is “Dominant air and space forces to deter, to fight, to win.” And that’s the idea of one team, one fight. Together we are stronger and our unification recently is an imperative for our nation’s security and that’s why our symposium has placed special emphasis on the seven operational imperatives outlined by Secretary Kendall. As he said himself, “Our nation owes you, our Airmen and Guardians, the resources needed to complete your mission. We, at AFA ,will remain on your wing and fighting for you every minute of every day.”
And so let’s address our Airmen, Guardians, and their families in the fight. There’s no better man, no better leader to do so than your very own Chief of Staff of our United States Air Force. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome General CQ Brown to the stage.
CSAF Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown:
Well, thank you, thank you. Thank you very much and good morning.
Audience:
Morning.
CSAF Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown:
Good morning.
Audience:
Good morning.
CSAF Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown:
As your Chief and throughout my Air Force career, I’ve talked to you about my four leadership tenets: The first is execute at a high standard. Personally and professionally, I do not play for second place. If I’m in, I’m in to win. I do not play to lose. Matter of fact, I was reminded this morning of the immortal words of Ricky Bobby, “If you’re not first, you’re last.”
But also I want to reflect on a quote from General George Kenney where he talks to … George Kenny was the Allied Air Commander in the Southwest Pacific during World War II. And he compared airpower to poker. And if you’re playing second place, you have a second hand. It’s not like having a hand at all. It’s really about losing. When you think about poker in the aspect of poker, you can bluff. But for our Air Force we have to have credible combat capability. We can’t afford to bluff. And for more than 75 years when our nation has called, airpower was the answer.
The question is what is the capability the nation, our joint teammates, our allies and partners count on throughout history?
Five months after Pearl Harbor, the Doolittle Raiders put B-25s on the USS Horn and struck Japan giving it the decisive blow and boosting the morale of the nation. Airpower was the answer.
In 1950 when North Korea crossed the 38th parallel, we brought in air to ground capabilities, close air support, mobility with an outsize influence so the joint team was enabled to support UN forces to end overt hostilities. Airpower was the answer.
In Vietnam, Robin Olds, Chappie James and Captain J.B. Stone devised Operation Bolo to alert and trap MiG-21s to attack F-4s that were mimicking F-105s. In 12 minutes, nearly half of the North Vietnamese aircraft were lost with no US losses. Airpower was the answer.
In 1991, just days after Iraq invaded Kuwait, United States Air Force with our allies and partners brought in fighters. Attack, reconnaissance, electronic warfare, airlift, air refueling. We formed a coalition during Desert Storm to execute the largest air campaign since World War II. Airpower was the answer.
Back in 2001 on 911 in response to the attacks on our nation with no plan, in less than 30 days Operation Enduring Freedom began with 12 days of airstrikes into Afghanistan, followed by Special Forces teams that included our special warfare Airmen. Airpower was the answer.
In 2011 to counter the forces that are loyal to dictator Muammar Gaddafi, the international community came together with a decisive option of Odyssey Dawn Unified Protector to enforce a no-fly zone and protect civilians. Airpower was the answer.
2014: By, with, and through our partners we were able to roll back ISIS using non-doctrinal approaches of strike cells to execute the most precise air campaign in history. Airpower was the answer.
When you’re addressing the pacing, acute, unforeseen challenges of today or tomorrow, airpower is the answer.
I want to thank you for the opportunity to be here. I want to thank our One Team. Secretary Kendall, it’s a pleasure to work with and for you. I also want to recognize the Honorable Gina Ortiz Jones and thank her for her leadership. And welcome the Honorable Kristyn Jones to our One Team.
A good teammate, Salty Saltzman; and I also want to thank our senior enlisted Jo Bass and Toby Towberman. Because of this One Team, because of all of you as a One Team, we are able to execute the fight our nation needs. I want to thank the Air & Space Forces Association for their tremendous support. Orville, thank you for the very kind introduction. But it’s what you do on our wing day in and day out to support our Airmen, our Guardians, and families to ensure our Air Force and our Space Force have the combat capability we require, thank you.
I also want to thank our Airmen and families, our Airmen, Guardians, and families because they allow us to do what we do to make sure we’re able to fly, fight, and win and be Semper Supra all the time.
And, finally, I want to thank our industry and community partners. Because of them, we’re the greatest Air Force and Space Force in the world.
Today I want to talk about a few things. I want to build up upon what Secretary Kendall talked about, and talk a bit more about how we modernize the Air Force, but how we actually use the capabilities he described in his remarks. I want to make sure and ensure that airpower remains the answer for our Air Force, for the joint force, and for our nation.
I started out talking about poker. I want to take a minute or two to talk about another game of chance and tie it to our personal story. I’m going to take it way back to Second Lieutenant Brown, Williams Air Force Base and pilot training. This is me, my table mate, Tony Davis, T38 table mate, Tony Davis, on the screen. And those who remember pilot training back in the day we had early week and late week, and so early week we’d start at four in the morning, finish about in the afternoon. And, typically, on Fridays … Well, maybe a lot of days, we’d head over to the club for a cold one. I probably have a cold one in my hand right now in that photo. And one of the things we would do is we actually … This so happened, we’d get there about four and the show Jeopardy would be on and that actually became our class show.
Now, I know some of you are fairly young and probably don’t understand the show Jeopardy, but it came out in 1984, the year I was commissioned, and so I’ve been a long time fan of Jeopardy. And so as I think about Jeopardy, I want to think about the quote from Giulio Douhet, where he talks about victory and how victory smiles upon those who anticipate change, not on those who wait to change. Now, if I think about this particular quote and I was going to put it into a kind of Jeopardy kind of parlance, the way you would do that is I would say “Change,” and the response would be in the form of a question, “What makes many uncomfortable?” Change. I’d rather be uncomfortable than lose. That’s exactly why I wrote, “Accelerate change or lose.”
As Airmen, we must think differently about how we fly, fight, and win. With accelerate change or lose, we need to think about the speed, the agility and lethality we have. It’ll be force multipliers. We must adapt and we cannot do this by ourselves. It takes collaboration with Congress, with our joint teammates, with our allies and partners and with our industry partners. Success takes help. Failure you can do alone. In order to be successful, we’ve got to work together. We’ve got to make sure we have the right mix of capabilities and capacity as an Air Force and as a joint team to be successful.
We, our Air Force and our Airmen, are the security of promise through our core functions to ensure we can successfully employ airpower. We need to change to stay ahead of our pacing challenge, the PRC. The mission of the United States Air Force, is to fly, fight, and win. Airpower any time anywhere. Not sometimes in some places. It is anytime, anywhere. We are the only service that provides the nation the assurance of air superiority, the advantage of global strike, the agility of rapid global mobility, the adaptability of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance and the authority in our command and control to sense, make sense, and act. It’s what we must do today and must be prepared to do tomorrow. Bottom line, airpower is the answer.
So let’s discuss the core functions in Jeopardy parlance:
“Provides our nation with an asymmetric advantage. Underwriting the freedom of action required for all joint military operations.”
What is air superiority? One, the path to go to four fighter fleets. We’re bringing on the F-35 to be the cornerstone of our fighter fleets. We’re procuring the F-15EX and we’re doing it right here on the FY24 budget. We’re bringing on the next generation of air dominance family of systems. Secretary Kendall highlighted the collaborative combat aircraft and the 1,000 we’re going to bring on. That is a capability we’re going to need to ensure we can fly, fight, and win. We’re bringing on advanced weapons like the joint advanced tactical missile to increase our range of capability, to hold our targets at risk. We need to make sure we have the right mix of capability and capacity, whether it be our aircraft or our weapons. They all come together. With air superiority, airpower is the answer.
“Provides our nation with safe, secure and reliable power projection.”
What is global strike?
Audience:
[Cheering]
CSAF Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown:
It’s okay to cheer for the core functions.
Hey, with the rollout of the B-21 back in December, and for those that were there, it was an awesome event, but it demonstrated global strike and our path to get from a three bomber fleet to a two bomber fleet. At the same time, we’re modernizing to bring on Sentinel to replace Minuteman III to ensure that we can maintain two legs of the triad. At the same time, we’re bringing on hypersonic and long-range weapons so we can hold targets at risk anytime, anywhere around the globe. With global strike, airpower is the answer.
“Delivers on demand allowing us to respond quickly and decisively anywhere needed around the globe.”
Audience:
[Cheering]
CSAF Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown:
What is rapid global mobility?
Audience:
Let’s go.
CSAF Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown:
We’re bringing on the KC-46 and this past year we got the initial operational capability to ensure we can support the joint fight. Secretary highlighted we’re accelerating towards next generation air refueling system. At the same time, mobility along with munitions and electronic warfares described by the Secretary are cross-cutting operational enablers that ensure we’ll be able to fly, fight and win. In order to do logistics under attack, it will require rapid global mobility. For rapid global mobility, airpower is the answer.
“The foundation upon which every joint interagency and coalition operation achieves success.”
Audience:
[Cheering]
CSAF Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown:
What is intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance? It’s the capability to be persistent, connected, and survivable in a contested environment. It’s providing actionable intelligence to the war fighter. I’m excited that we’re accelerating the E-7 Wedgetail into our Air Force and combine that with the capabilities provided by the United States Space Force, we’ll be able to strike moving targets at scale. With intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, airpower is the answer.
“Pervasive and highly interconnected networks that allow us to access reliable communication information networks for global operations.”
Audience:
[Cheering]
CSAF Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown:
What is command and control? The advanced battle management system is the Department of Air Force’s contribution to joint all domain command and control. This will enable us to close long range kill webs with speed, precision, and lethality. Our command and control communications at Battle Management PA will bring on the DAF Battle Network so we’ll have decision advantage for the Air Force, for the space force, for the joint force and for the coalition. With intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, airpower is the answer. The Air Force, our Airmen, through these core functions, underwrite the entirety of the joint force, and we are uniquely suited to provide airpower as a cornerstone of the nation’s defense. Airpower is the answer.
I’m going to shift gears for a second. There’s a lot of great debates. Tastes great, less filling. Ford or Chevy. Coke or Pepsi. Internal to our United States Air Force core mission or core function. What I’ve found as your chief, as I’ve gone through and read, there’s some inconsistencies in some of our strategic documents. Some of those inconsistencies have probably been rewarded with performance report bullets, but I’m going to set the record straight so I like to read them. So I’ve read through the Joint Publication one, definition for mission and function. “The enduring roles the Air Force is designed and equipped to train for: air superiority, global strike, rapid global mobility, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, command and control.” I want to end the debate. From this day forward we refer to them as our core functions and capture them that way in all of our strategic documents.
Now, maintaining our advantage requires collaboration. Maintaining our advantage requires accelerating the capabilities through the operational imperatives. And maintaining our advantage requires an on-time budget. Last AFA, I talked about a future design. In the future design concept, I talked about the joint war fighting concept and the change in trends and character of war. Yesterday I signed the Air Force Future Operating concept. It talks about how we will operate, fight, and win as an Air Force. This was put together by our Air Force Futures led by Lieutenant General Q Hinote. It’s linked to the joint war fighting concept. It talks about how we execute our core functions, how we integrate with the operational imperatives and how we create opportunities for the joint force.
Without the integrated capabilities of the United States Air Force, the joint force opportunities are infrequent, fleeting and costly. Future conflicts will be contested and complex. We’ve identified those within six fights within the Air Force future operating concept: The fight to compete and deter, the fight to get into theater, the fight to get airborne, the fight for air superiority, the fight to deny adversary objectives and the fight to sustain the fight. All these six fights overlap. They’re not done independently. Airmen need to fight them all at the same time. This is why you must be multi-capable as an Air Force and multi-capable as Airmen to integrate the core functions simultaneously across domains in the context of winning all six fights. And we’ll do so through continued development of our future force design.
I had a chance to sit down with Q and his team about a week ago to take the first look of this future force design. Guess what? It’s going to make a few people uncomfortable because it’s driving change.
In Jeopardy there’s a Daily Double where the contestant is allowed to double their bet than they normally would. Many of you know I’ve been stationed at Nellis a couple of times. There in Las Vegas. I’m kind of a tightwad. I’m not a better, but there’s one thing I would do that I would double down on every time, it’s our Airmen. Our Air Force recruits and retains the highest caliber talent within our nation and we, as leaders, have a responsibility to empower them, provide them the tools and resources and opportunities for success.
“Understand an employ airpower to accelerate change in, from and through the air.”
Audience:
[Cheering]
CSAF Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown:
Because of our Airmen, airpower is the answer. Because of our Airmen, airpower is the answer.
I’m going to go off script for a second. And can you turn the lights up a little bit? You got your phone, right? You pull it out, take a selfie. I’m going to take a selfie of all of us and I want you to text that to your parents, significant other, good friend, neighbor. And on the bottom put, “Because of me, airpower is the answer.” Because of our Airmen … I’m going to send it to my mom … Because of our Airmen, airpower is the answer. And when I think about our doctrine, when I think about mission command, it’s about our Airmen. It’s about providing intent, trust, and empowerment to execute what the nation’s asked us to do. We will not be able to execute the Air Force future operating concept without mission command. It takes practice and intentional development. You must brief mission command. You must train mission command. You must exercise mission command and you must debrief mission command. Mission command is essential to winning.
Part of the essential part of winning also includes talent management and the initiatives we’re putting in place, they’re focused on inspiring a culture of excellence. You heard me say before, “One of my prominent goals as your Chief of Staff is to create an environment where all Airmen, active, guard, reserve, and civilian can reach their full potential.”
Secretary Kendall highlighted the historic anniversaries. Integration of women into the services 75 years ago, desegregation of the services 75 years ago, 50 years since the beginning of the all-volunteer force. I think about all those anniversaries. I think about the generations that have gone before us that rose their right hand, took an oath of office or took an oath of enlistment. I’m also thinking about how we inspire the next generation. And so as I travel as your chief and I have a chance to talk, I talk to Airmen and I talk to our families. I talk to historians, influencers, gaining insights on the call to service.
Why did we all serve? That’s the question we want to ask ourselves. What inspired you? Why did you join? And share that story.
I always believe young people only aspire to be what they see. You never decide to grow up to be something you’ve never seen. And so we have to do a better job of providing young people an opportunity to see our air force, to see our Airmen, to see the great opportunities this call to service offers and provides. We need to connect with our communities. We need to open up our bases and spend more time with the American public, say more about our United States Air Force and the United States Space Force and our military. Our legacy depends on doubling down on our Airmen and accelerating change.
Video: Jeopardy Contestant:
The Postmaster General.
Video: Alex Trebek:
Yes.
Video: Jeopardy Contestant:
Government 800.
Video: Alex Trebek:
Yes, sir. Daily Double. All right. It’s a close game, but you’re in the lead.
Video: Jeopardy Contestant:
Yes. Let’s throw caution to the wind. Let’s make it a true Daily Double.
Video: Alex Trebek:
All right. In 2020, Charles Q. Brown got this three word title for the Air Force and is the first African American General to lead a military branch.
CSAF Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown:
Now, never in a thousand years back at pilot training …
Audience:
[Cheering]
CSAF Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown:
One, I never thought I’d be the Chief of Staff of the Air Force. Two, I never thought I’d be smart enough to get on Jeopardy, and most definitely, I never thought I’d be a clue on Jeopardy and be the Daily Double. If you’re wondering, he got the answer wrong.
I, as your chief, we, as an Air Force, can’t get this wrong. We have a responsibility to get the answer right. Our Airmen, our joint teammates, industry partners, allies, and partners all need to work together to make sure we get to the right answer. In order to execute a high standard, we can’t play for second place. We need to play to win. I’ve known since I was a second lieutenant. I know it even more today as your chief. Airpower is the answer.
At this momentous time and an inflection point in our history, I’m proud to serve with and for you. I want to work with each of you to ensure our Air Force can execute our mission to fly, fight, and win; airpower anytime, anywhere.
Thanks for the opportunity. Airpower is the answer.
Lt. Gen. Bruce “Orville” Wright, USAF (Ret.):
Well, thank you Chief Brown. And it’s my honor on behalf of your Air & Space Forces Association to present our coin and also we’re going to stay on stage here for just a minute-
CSAF Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown:
Okay.
Lt. Gen. Bruce “Orville” Wright, USAF (Ret.):
… to present a very important award. Thank you, Chief.
CSAF Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown:
Thank you.
Lt. Gen. Bruce “Orville” Wright, USAF (Ret.):
We got to get a picture.
Voiceover:
Ladies and gentlemen., we will now have the presentation of the General Larry O. Spencer United States Air Force Innovation Awards. Will Master Sergeant Jason Yunker please come forward.
While deployed to Kadena Airbase, Master Sergeant Yunker worked to decentralize the Spark Tank finalist VIPER hot refuel kit procurement process by creating a central point of contact for integrating partner equipment refueling kit orders enabling commanders to purchase as much needed increases as possible, the ability to perform hot refuel operations globally and saved an estimated $72 million annually.
Additionally, he partnered with the Air Force Lifecycle Management Center to synchronize data and introduce new fuel equipment to seven aircraft platforms while securing approval for use in refueling operations. These efforts resulted in the first new petroleum oil and lubricants kit in 15 years.
The United States Air Force proudly presents the General Larry O. Spencer United States Air Force Innovation Award Individual Category to Master Sergeant Jason Yunker, Kadena Airbase, Japan.
Will Major Sean Pasieta and team please come forward.
The 60th Aircraft Maintenance Squadron’s Dash-21 team captured the essence of this prestigious award and drove operational and cultural results as they established air mobility commands, sole dual powered winch maintenance and repair facility. This enabled mission-critical asset availability for the entire fleet of 52 C-5 Galaxy aircraft across the active and reserve air components. In establishing a Dash-21 shop, the team repaired 38 assets and saved the Air Force more than $20 million in replacement and procurement costs.
The United States Air Force proudly presents the General Larry O. Spencer United States Air Force Innovation Award Team Category to the 60th Aircraft Maintenance Squadron Dash-21 Team, Travis Air Force Base, California.
Thank you, General Brown and General Wright.
Ladies and gentlemen, our exhibit hall is now open until 16:30. Please help yourself to coffee and visit more than 100 exhibitors. Please be sure to return to the Aurora Ballroom at 10:00 hours to hear from the new Chief of Space Operations, General Chance Saltzman.