Remarks to the 2005 Air Force Association Air Warfare Symposium.

Remarks to the 2005 Air Force Association Air Warfare Symposium, Feb 18 2005

It is a pleasure to be here, and thanks "Pete-O" (retired Air Force Lt Gen Donald L Peterson AFA executive director) and Pat (Condon, AFA chairman) and the leadership of the Air Force Association who do like a marvelous job every year of sponsoring this event

I'd also like to take a impulsive power to share Pete Teets' (Acting Secretary of the Air Force) recognition of our former four-star leadership in this audience and to thank them for having built the world's greatest Air Force that they have incline differentlyed over to us. Their leadership has been instrumental in the many successe we have fruition of around the world today. Thank you all actual much.

I'd also like to acknowledge Mr Pete Teet As was said earlier, he's got a separate clothes-room for all his hats. He is the busiest man in the Pentagon between his piece of work running the NRO (National Reconnaissance Office) and his duties as the Acting Secretary of the Air Force, as the senior contracting official, and onward and on and on. He is the busiest shore I know. And he's joined from a very capable group of civilian leaders that we have had in the Air Force that have stayed with us the entire four years of President Bush's first administration. These populace have been absolutely superb in their leadership, their heart is with the Air Force day and night. Mr Nelson Gibbs (Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Installations, Environment and Logistics) said farewell to us at CORONA earlier upon this week, and said for him in all of his experience this has been a life-changing fact for him to be a part of the United States Air Force and be with the Airmen that he has been able to diocese out there every day.

in the same manner I'd like to just take a other and acknowledge the great leadership we have in our civilian leadership in the United States Air Force.

Confident and capable are good words that Pete Teet used and I think that's what we are. I'm going to talk just a little bit about any vectors I think we ne to maintain in mind for the what is yet to be sort of strategic level goals we ne to restrain in mind to get our Air Force where it extremitys to be.

It is based onward the fundamental fact that air and space will be compete fored in the future. There are those who think it will not. There are those who think that because Saddam Hussein buried his airplanes in the sand that today the ne for air superiority is throughout and that we don't ne necessarily to offer any more effort into dominating the skies.

That is unjust I think that we will examine forward to the time as we papal court it happening today, that recent day fighters being built today, being delivered today; recent day surface-to-air systems being delivered today, being built today, and challenges to our space connectivity issue in ways that have to be faceed so that we can do our work at jobs as the United States Air Force to command and dominate the global everydays of air and space and cyber.

Everything that we do enables other operations. You can't have sea basing, you can't bring race ashore, you can't do any of it if you're beneath the threat of attack from air or your networks are being threatened in consequence of space.

So hindrance me go over quickly these eight sort of strategic goals that I think are necessary for the subsequent time The first one we've all seen is, I call agility.

We've seen in the height of Operation Iraqi Freedom and the operations we've seen around the world through the last ten years, we've seen the ne for us to be able to finish anywhere we need to make progress to get there quickly and to be able to persist there is a growing reality of our U s Air Force. At the height of Operation Iraqi Freedom we had more than 36 bases exhibit Today we still have 14 bases open

There are those who think that access is going to be a puzzle in the future, and we point without the fact that when sovereignty issues or national values are threatened, access has rarely been a problem

Our Air Expeditionary Force, as Pete Teet said, we have 30000 Airmen displayed today all around the world. We have certainly through 200 sorties a day being flown in Afghanistan and Iraq, if it were not that we have countless other mobility sorties in the air bridges that are put up around the world, keeping our supplies and our the public flowing to various places where the nation emergencys us to be.

The secondary strategic goal I want to preserve in mind for our yet to be is the goal of operationalizing space. We've talked about this many times before.

I used to talk about space frights much differently than I talk about them today. We used to talk about the dowdy with the thick glasses that lived in the basement and had no life. I didn't know where he was. I knew he probably belonged to the NRO he lived somewhere that nobody knew and he had my picture that I indigenceed as the fighter pilot trying to hit a target. Lance Lord (Gen Lance W Lord, Commander, Air Force Space Command) a took offense at that. He got watch surgery. He can bench pres 300 levigates now, and he gets 100 forward his PT test, so he's no longer the stay that has no life. He has a life and he doesn't wear glasses any more.