On the six-month anniversary of the kamikaze attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a four-star general answered a hypothetical question about what his Air Force could do in the not-too-distant future should a suicidal terrorist take over a New York skyscraper and threaten to blow it up.
The Air Force, the general said, could launch an unmanned airplane to hover over the building. The plane would then use its X-ray eyes to scan the skyscraper for the terrorist, while it sent three-dimensional images of the building's innards, including the terrorist's exact location, to police on the ground. The plane then could zap him "on the 10th floor" with a death ray or other futuristic weapon without killing anybody else.
Generals brainstorming in Pentagon cubicles and coming up with such radical-sounding ideas is nothing new. An Army general, for example, once wanted to issue rocket-powered pogo sticks to soldiers so they could leap over trenches and even rivers. His idea didn't fly.
But this Air Force general and his ideas are different for three big reasons: 1) He is positioned to bring his ideas to life. 2) The war in Afghanistan showed that he can indeed accelerate the ongoing revolution in aerospace. 3) He has a tailwind of support that most of his predecessors would envy.
This Pentagon in-house radical--at least in the eyes of white-scarfed pilots who only want to yank and bank their airplanes and not do the "nerdy" management of the complex systems inside and outside them--is Gen. John P. Jumper. He took over as Air Force chief of staff on September 6. Understandably, finding ways to foil the next terrorist attack has been very much on the general's mind. But his most consuming day-to-day occupation has been trying to revolutionize the Air Force, especially the thinking of the 359,500 active-duty airmen in it.
"Not everybody gets it," Jumper says of the new kinds of ideas he is pushing on the military establishment, particularly the Air Force he commands. "We have to first admit that we are in ruts. We are in stovepipes. We have been taught to think one way. We have been taught to defend our prerogatives. We've been taught that we're heavy-equipment operators; we love our platforms"--the bombers, fighters, and space-based satellites. "If you can't do it with a bomber or a fighter or a satellite, then by God, it can't be done. We've got to break out of that."
Jumper's revolution, if this former fighter pilot can bring it off, will be mental, cultural, and technological--in that order. His main objective is what he calls "horizontal integration." The idea is to put everyone and everything involved in a war on the same line, much the way the old rural telephone party lines did. People, satellites, airplanes, ships, and even individual bombs would all be able to talk to each other. Moreover, everyone from a soldier on the ground to a general in an underground command center hundreds of miles away would not only hear the same thing, they would also get a picture of the attackers and the attacked.
This Air Force chief often uses an Army Special Forces sergeant to help him with his proselytizing. The sergeant, with the general at his side, describes to congressional committees and other groups how he recently got off his horse in Afghanistan, set up his communications gear, and punched away at his laptop computer to tell a B-52 bomber crew seven miles above him where to drop their bombs to hit terrorist hideaways.
Jumper is impatient to build on that Air Force-Army integration by exploiting the untapped potential of today's high-tech equipment. His fervor for speeding up this integration recalls a congressional witness who was asked in the 1960s why she was in such a hurry to force racial integration on the United States. She replied that integration was like pulling off a Band-Aid--it's less painful to do it all at once than one hair at a time.
"This is the era of unlimited potential," Jumper preaches. "What if today we were fully integrated with all our space, manned, and unmanned platforms? What if they conversed? What if we didn't have to go through stovepipes and tribal representatives to get the information from one tribe to another? What if the machines had the opportunity to do this for us? We should be there today. We should be doing that today, but we're not," Jumper says.
"So if there's a theme," Jumper adds, "a buzzword for the rest of this decade, it's going to be integration--the horizontal integration of manned, unmanned, and space--the integration of stealth [capabilities], standoff precision [weapons]; space [satellites] and information," gathered by everybody from the Special Forces soldier on the ground to the satellite looking down on him from space. Jumper sees his mission as "closing the seams that divide our capabilities today."
What Jumper and the rest of the Air Force, with big assists from the Army, have accomplished in Afghanistan gives the new Air Force chief credibility in getting the military establishment to think new and bold. His direct role in transforming the unmanned Predator aircraft from a passive spy to an active warrior aids Jumper's cause.
In his sermon last week at the Air and Space Conference in Washington, Jumper described how he pushed the bureaucracy during 2000 and 2001 as head of the Air Force's key operational command--the Air Combat Command in Langley, Va.--into making the Predator a hunter-killer, not just a passive aerial spy.
"People blanch white and faint at the thought" of doing something entirely different, he said. When he proposed transforming the Predator, "bureaucracies rose up, including our own acquisition people," he said. "They came to me with the first briefing and said, `Everything is red. It's all high-risk. It's going to take tens of millions of dollars and many numbers of years to do this.' But I called Gen. [Air Force Chief of Staff Michael E.] Ryan and the Secretary of the Air Force [F. Whitten Peters]. And I said, `I'm going to give them three months and $3 million. Will you back me up?' And they did.
"You run into all sorts of silly things when you get into these" attempts to break the mold, Jumper said. "We wanted the Hellfire [missile aboard the Predator] to fire from a higher altitude" but were told this was not possible. "Well, why not? `Because the plane has got to depress its angle' " to do that. "Well, why don't we put the nose down? `You can't put the nose down, because the airplane will over-speed.' Why don't you pull the power back? `Oh.'
"It's not that this is hard, but the people who own the Predator are intelligence people," Jumper pointed out. "They don't know about pulling the power back. They don't know about lowering the flaps and putting the nose down. We don't pay them to know that." What you have to do, Jumper explained, is put a guy in there who knows all about close-air support--using aircraft to bomb and strafe enemy soldiers and armor on the ground that threaten our own and friendly forces. "And guess what?" Jumper asked. "It's not cats and dogs living together, they get along pretty damn well. But if I had taken that first `no' that I had gotten, we never would have had that capability that we have today. I had to go visit. I had to sit down and sip a little coffee. And sometimes pull out the velvet hammer to make it happen.
"But you know what made the difference?" Jumper continued. "The difference was that I was willing to take the risk. We weren't going to have a program manager fired if something went wrong. We were prepared for something to go wrong. We've got to be prepared to bust bureaucracies. And I need the ingenuity of the majors and the lieutenant colonels and the captains to think this thing through and help me figure out what's right and what's wrong about this horizontal-integration notion. There's a zero percent chance that I've got this 100 percent right. I'm just a dumb fighter pilot."
Jumper, at this point, may just evade the fate of so many other Pentagon revolutionaries and visionaries who find themselves shouting down a well. President Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Air Force Secretary James Roche are among the political heavyweights listening and urging Jumper on.
Air Force Secretary Roche, like Jumper, views Afghanistan as proof that the Air Force can adapt to a 21st-century environment, where the American military will be spread across the globe in small numbers, not in big concentrations like in the Persian Gulf War. "We want to be able to support this light, dispersed Army, and we have now demonstrated that we can do it," Roche said recently. "We can hook into the troopers on the ground in ways we never could before."
The Air Force and Navy, in addition, have amply demonstrated in the Afghan war that their planes not only can destroy strategic targets on the ground, they also can act as deadly, downfield blockers for allied troops by attacking enemy fighters that are in a pickup truck, a trench, or a tucked-away cave.
Today's happier marriage of air and land forces comes just when Bush, despite his campaign promises, is widening the role of America's armed forces as the world's policeman. In addition to Special Operations advisers and warriors, who made such a difference in Afghanistan, U.S. planes and helicopters are certain to be rushed to distant hot spots to support friendly governments trying to combat terrorists. Bush has recently added the former Soviet republic of Georgia, distant Yemen, and other obscure places to the U.S. military's already long worry list. The commander in chief has served notice that his own hit list is unlimited when it comes to terrorists.
Political winds can change quickly for military leaders. Jumper enjoys a tailwind right now. But how long it will last is uncertain. Special Forces troopers would be killed if they tried to duplicate in such hostile countries as Iraq and North Korea what they did in Afghanistan-direct bombers to their targets from exposed positions on the ground. Also, the Air Force has problems with an aging fleet of aircraft, the high costs of the new F-22 fighter, and lingering technical problems with the B-2 stealth bomber that resulted in a mission-capable rate of only 31 percent in fiscal 2001, according to a new Pentagon report. Any of these problems could generate headwinds that would slow down the Jumper revolution.
On the other hand, Jumper, unlike many of his predecessors, has money going for him. In its proposed fiscal 2003 budget, the Bush Administration gave the Air Force $107 billion, only $1.3 billion less than the combined Navy and Marine Corps budget and $16.1 billion more than the Army's. Moreover, Congress is expected to increase the amount.
And a dumb fighter pilot Jumper is not. Although, for now, he is following a flight plan backed by former Air National Guard F-16 pilot George W. Bush, Jumper is wise enough to warn his higher-ups that the air-power tactics that broke the back of the Taliban in Afghanistan will not necessarily work elsewhere. To underscore this warning, Jumper likes to quote his colleague on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Vernon E. Clark, who says this about the Afghan war: "This one ain't like the last one, and it's not like the next one."