The Air Force is responsible for two components of our nuclear triad, strategic bombers (now some B-52s and B-2s) and Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), leaving the submarine-launched ballistic missile component under the supervision of the Navy. With the demise of Strategic Air Command in the early 1990s, the bomber business went to Tactical Air Command (now Air Combat Command), and it was its obligation to do both the conventional strike mission and the nuclear strike mission. Because of the wars and because of the actual orientation of Air Combat Command, the nuclear mission was not a particularly good fit for ACC.
And while there were synergies surrounding the ICBM missiles being in Air Force Space Command, those similarities were largely in the launch area. They were not in the space ops area. There again, the fit for the nuclear mission was not ideal for Space Command either.
From an enterprise perspective, having the strategic bomber mission and ICBM mission split between two organizations was not working well, nor was it effective that both of these organizations shared the nuclear operations with conventional endeavors.
The logical solution was to bring these two capabilities back together into a newly created single organization whose sole purpose was to maintain focus on the nuclear mission, under a culture that was more consistent with respect to the demands for precision required by this mission. To that end, we set up a three-star command called Air Force Global Strike Command that combined the nuclear-capable bomber mission and the Minuteman ICBM mission into a single organization at Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana.
That was a major undertaking that took several years to bring to full fruition. Lt Gen Frank Klotz (currently the Department of Energy’s undersecretary for nuclear security and administrator for the National Nuclear Security Administration in a civilian capacity) was the first commander of Global Strike Command. The former Rhodes Scholar, former vice commander of Air Force Space Command, and former NSC director for nuclear policy and arms control was instrumental in getting it stood up as it should have been.
There was also a lack of focus in the sustainment of the weapons themselves as reflected by the Taiwan glitch. Our solution was to stand up the Nuclear Weapons Center at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque. They are responsible for the acquisition, sustainment, and storage of nuclear missiles, weapons, and related components.
Considering the magnitude of the nuclear mission, one might ask how the focus and attention was allowed to wane without sending up red flags at the highest level. Good question, and it’s one that we asked ourselves.
Over the years there had been staff divisions that focused on the nuclear business, but what once were divisions had withered down to a single action officer. Clearly the nuclear business and all of its dimensions needed much more focused attention than that. So the third thing we did was to create a Pentagon-based two-star director (subsequently elevated to three-star during the Welsh tenure) on the Air Staff who focused on nuclear matters—operational, resources, and policy. Called the A-10 (Deputy Chief of Staff for Strategic Deterrence and Nuclear Integration), they were my right hand with respect to the interaction that I would have with Joint Chiefs on the nuclear matters and internal headquarters supervision of the nuclear mission. For example, when the New Start treaty was being negotiated, it was this group of people who kept the secretary and me up to speed on the negotiations, on whether this was an acceptable distribution that sustained deterrence, and so forth. They not only maintained our focus on the mission area, but also worked the policy issues for which Washington is responsible.
The bottom line is we put the nuclear business back into the organization of the Air Force. These three initiatives were our way of reestablishing the relevance of deterrence as a mission within the Air Force, and of reestablishing the high standards that were required of that mission.
ALL IN
The secretary of defense had a perception that the Air Force wasn’t fully committed to the fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. He had made the comment that it was like pulling teeth to get the Air Force to send more intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) aircraft to Iraq—particularly Predator Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPAs). My predecessor had complained about sending airmen to Iraq to guard prisoners and drive fuel trucks. He didn’t believe those were appropriate jobs for Air Force personnel. I didn’t disagree, but for me, we were a nation at war and people were dying, so we had to do whatever we could to make sure that America succeeded. This new philosophy reflected a change in the vector of the Air Force that we called “All In.” It was our way of articulating that the United States Air Force was going to do whatever was needed, and we would pursue it willingly and with enthusiasm.
“All In” was about tilting the Air Force to be more visibly and culturally committed to the fight in every possible way, and that’s exactly what we did.
F-22 RAPTOR AND LONG-RANGE STRIKE BOMBER
One of the more controversial decisions we made was to terminate the F-22 Raptor program at 187 airplanes. The F-22 is, unquestionably, the most capable fighter in history. While it’s equipped to tackle ground attack and limited electronic warfare, it is primarily an air superiority fighter. And that plays into the controversy.
The F-22 is the most capable fighter in history.
The prior leadership (General Moseley, an F-15 pilot, and Secretary Wynne) viewed overwhelming air-to-air superiority as sacrosanct, so they refused to back down on their demand for at least 381 F-22s. This was despite clear resistance from Secretary Gates, who believed the 183 aircraft already approved for funding in December of 2004 would be sufficient to cover the risk of potential future wars against superpowers—the real adversaries we’d have to worry about in large-scale air-to-air engagements. Moseley never gave up in his principled attempts to get those 381 F-22s, and it remained an ongoing source of conflict between Moseley and Gates.
When I took over, Secretary Rumsfeld’s advice kept replaying in my mind. “Put your emotions aside and run it like a business.” Great advice at TRANSCOM, and just as essential here. Irrespective of my personal position on the fighter issue, I wanted an independent assessment to determine the minimum number of F-22 aircraft that we could live with—and what we came up with was a number of 243. Although this is not well known, Mike Donley and I fought hard for the 243, but in the end the secretary said no, even though we had shaved over 35 percent off the Moseley/Wynne demand for 381. Those additional sixty aircraft would still create an unfunded bill of $13 billion in a time that defense budgets were being tightened. It was his view that we needed to invest in other things like remotely piloted aircraft and MRAPs (to protect the ground forces from IED explosions) at the time.
The F-22 debate had consumed enough oxygen and it was time to move on. Secretary Donley and I wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post and made the argument for capping production at 187. We essentially conceded that this was an unwinnable debate. As we stated in our op-ed:
Buying more F-22s means doing less of something else. In addition to air superiority, the Air Force provides a number of other capabilities critical to joint operations for which joint warfighters have increasing needs. These include intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, command and control, and related needs in the space and cyber domains. We are also repairing years of institutional neglect of our nuclear forces, rebuilding the acquisition workforce, and taking steps to improve Air Force capabilities for irregular warfare …
Make no mistake: Air dominance remains an essential capability for joint warfighting. The F-22 is a vital tool in the military’s arsenal and will remain in our inventory for decades to come. But the time has come to move on.
There were bigger stakes for the Air Force than continuing this fight either overtly or clandestinely, and Donley and I certainly were not going to go to the Hill behind Secretary Gates’s back and lobby for more F-22s. That was never going to happen on our watch. Some people argue that that was too pristine a judgment and that in Washington any
thing is fair, but I say no. I had never been disloyal to a boss and I wasn’t about to start then.
There was a method to our madness. We felt that the real coin of the realm was the replacement bomber, and convincing a very skeptical civilian leadership that it was a much smarter, in fact essential, thing to pursue. We had our work cut out for us.
About that same time, Secretary Gates also cancelled the Next-Generation Bomber (NGB), and he did it for rational reasons. The Next-Generation Bomber had grown too big; it had become something for everybody. For example, there was a requirement suggesting that it needed air-to-air missile capability for self-defense. Not completely nonsensical, but one can only envision such a thing where cost was no object, and that was not Bob Gates’s view of the world. So he cancelled it.
But the necessity for long-range strike remained a valid need for the country and the Department of Defense. We felt it was our responsibility to convince Gates that a penetrating platform with long-range strike capability was an unquestioned requirement for a future secretary of defense or a future president—both for warfighting and deterrence purposes. And we had to convince him that we as an Air Force could field such a system with discipline and in such a way that would avoid the sort of elaboration and requirement “creep” that the original NGB program reflected.
We had to convince him that the B-52 and the B-1 were going to have to be replaced at some point in the not too distant future. The B-2 is still relevant in a much less benign or a standoff environment, but the reality was that the B-2 was twenty years old and the B-52 was fifty years old. The B-1 was sixty-plus airplanes and had become a good conventional platform but was not a penetrator.
We had to convince him that this undertaking was not going to repeat the B-2 experience of twenty airplanes. Originally, there were supposed to be 132 B-2s. We only ended up building twenty-one and then we lost one, and as result the cost of the B-2s were a billion dollars–plus each. He was not going to repeat that experience, and we had to make it clear that we were going to buy eighty to one hundred new bombers and not less. This was not going to be a niche fleet or boutique fleet like the B-2, but was going to be more like the B-52 model—meaning a hundred-airplane fleet that lasted for many decades.
The other aspect of it was the cost, and we settled on a cost in the 2010 time frame of about $550 million each. The notion was that the design imperative on this machine was cost. It’s not performance, it’s not advancing technology; the prime imperative was cost. So what that meant was not starting from scratch with new inventions when proven technologies could be used far more efficiently and cost-effectively. For example, by using engines that had already proven themselves—proven components that might entail some adaptation, but minimally so.
In addition, the airplane would not be a standalone platform. There would be other platforms that would feed this one in order to enable it to accomplish its missions; not every capability needed to be on the airplane itself. It had to be presented as part of a larger system of systems. We succeeded in getting the secretary’s endorsement of that formula.
We had to convince him of all this, or like the Next-Generation Bomber, the long-range strike bomber would be dead in the water. We worked our asses off and we ultimately succeeded. We convinced Secretary Gates that it was an unquestioned requirement both for warfighting and deterrence purposes, and that we as an Air Force could field such a system with discipline. This one was well worth going all out; the F-22 was not.
One must choose carefully which battles to fight.
On October 27, 2015, the Long-Range Strike Bomber (LRS-B) contract was awarded to Northrup Grumman at an initial value of $21.4 billion. At the 2016 Air Warfare Symposium, Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James announced that the aircraft was formally designated the B-21. It is expected to reach IOC (Initial Operational Capability) in 2025. * IOC reflects the time when a new weapon, item of equipment, or system is received by a unit or force that is adequately trained, equipped, and supported to sufficiently employ and maintain it.
Mike Donley and I are proud that we succeeded in persuading Gates that the Air Force was going to exercise discipline like he had not seen, and so it’s up to our successors to deliver on that promise. The Air Force has to, if it is going to bring this one home.
THE SURGE
On October 27, 2009, Sgt. Dale Griffin was killed by a roadside IED blast in Afghanistan’s Arghandab River Valley. Well past midnight on the 29th, President Obama and I were at Dover Air Force Base for Sgt. Griffin’s somber, dignified transfer ceremony. We snapped to attention and saluted as six Army pallbearers carried his flag-draped transfer case from a C-17 into a white mortuary van. Sgt. Griffin was the last of eighteen fallen Americans we saw taken from the plane that night—one of fifty-eight killed in action in Afghanistan on the 27th.
The following day I was with the president again, this time inside the White House Situation Room. This was a very serious meeting that would lead up to the president’s decision on the surge. How many more American troops would he order sent to Afghanistan? Although not present for the meeting (either in person or by VTC), General McChrystal requested forty thousand. Vice President Biden was seated directly to the right of the president, across from NSC Advisor Jim Jones. I was four seats down, directly across the table from Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, but I had no difficulty hearing the vice president’s passionate presentation on why twenty thousand was a much more realistic number—with half to be used for counterterrorism, the other half for training Afghan forces.
The president went around the table to query each of the Joint Chiefs, along with the SECDEF, General Jones, and of course Chairman Mullen. The president was 100 percent locked in and demanded that each of us be completely candid, even though our opinions might not comport with what we believed his to be. “Norty, what’s your view?”
I leaned forward so that I could have an unobstructed view of the chief executive past Army chief of staff George Casey, who was seated directly to my left. “Mr. President, the Afghan-Pakistan border area is the incubator of jihadism and we cannot allow that to metastasize. My advice is to go big.”
The debate would go on for another month, with new questions raised in increasingly heated gatherings. Secretary Gates would propose what he called “Option 2A,” which was thirty thousand troops from the United States and an expectation that NATO forces would provide an additional seven thousand. On November 29, the president announced that he would commit to the Gates proposal, and thirty thousand more young Americans would be sent to the war.
REDEMPTION
Long before President Bush first coined the phrase “War on Terror,” we were well aware of the devastating threat posed by terrorism, working hard behind the scenes to combat that threat. We didn’t talk about it and to this day the majority of our efforts (both failures and triumphs) remain classified, with details safely archived inside planning and operations cells in nondescript offices inside the Pentagon and at other locations throughout the country. In one way or another, counterterrorism remains a primary focus of our top-tier special operations units. From the catastrophe at Desert One through those times UBL slipped through our fingers, disappointment led to lessons learned and intensified resolve.
For years I’d worked closely with Homeland Security advisor Fran Townsend on counterterror issues related to the pursuit of bin Laden and other high-value targets. Now, as Chief, most of my time was spent tackling broader strategic issues more confined to the Air Force. Still, even then, there were times when I’d be asked to intervene. Perhaps the most noteworthy took place in early 2011.
“I need you to prepare sixteen nonmetallic weapons for use in a B-2” was all that Vice Chairman Hoss Cartwright said to me, but it was enough to start the ball rolling. I had known the well-respected Marine Corps general for years, and worked with him long enough to have built the solid level of trust required to facilitate his request. We had spent the past three years together as Joint Chiefs, and befo
re that he was STRATCOM commander while I was commander at TRANSCOM. Lack of trust would not be an issue.
Basically, he was saying, “Norty, this is of the highest priority and I need you to make it happen with no questions asked. And by the way, there’s no action order, no paperwork, and no other calls you’ll get coming up the chain of command. Just take care of this one for me based on my word—and please don’t ask for any details.” Now you see why trust is so important.
At that point my responsibility was one of due diligence, getting his confirmation that it was an appropriate request—the implication being that it was either presidential or SECDEF direction. “Indeed, it is,” he confirmed. I had a feeling it involved bin Laden, but I didn’t ask.
I picked up the phone and made the appropriate contacts to ensure that he’d be given number one priority at the Ogden Air Logistics Center. Ogden was responsible for preparing the specific weapons; it’s the Air Force weapons depot. Later on I would learn that they were being considered for use in a bombing of the bin Laden complex, one of three options that were under consideration. But in the end, it turned out they were not needed as we performed an Air Assault for Operation NEPTUNE SPEAR. That special night in Abbottabad felt like redemption for those of us who had been involved in so many of the challenges faced by the special operations community over the preceding thirty years.
DOVER / MISHAPS
Suzie: In a high-risk business like ours, you’re going to have some mishaps and you need to be prepared to deal with the crisis. When I first arrived, I wasn’t. In the Air Force, when there’s a crash and someone dies, the official term for the event is “mishap.” To me, stepping on a shell at the beach and breaking a toenail is a mishap. Crashing a C-130 into the side of a mountain and killing all six crewmembers is no mishap, it’s a catastrophe. Or a tragedy. It’s certainly a heartbreak. But whatever you call it, I was ill-prepared to deal with it and I messed up. In my attempt to comfort a grieving spouse, I unintentionally put my foot in my mouth and said the wrong things, things that I thought would help, but just ended up causing her to burst into tears. That’s one vision I will never forget. But as I watched that poor woman grieve, I vowed to learn how to do better—how to be part of the solution, not the problem.
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