SENATE ARMED SERVICES COMMITTEE HEARING: Revisiting the Roles and Missions of the Armed Forces
Thursday, November 5, 2015
Witness statement of Lieutenant General David A. Deptula, USAF (Ret.)
[...]
However, while Air Force officers are perhaps the most joint of all the services (almost half the Air Force budget goes to enabling the other military services), they have been historically excluded from joint command and staff positions. To optimize the solutions that our military provides to the nation, it is imperative that the options of exploiting the dimensions of air, space, and cyberspace be well understood and considered in military course of action development, planning, and execution. However, the military can’t do any of those activities if Air Force leadership is absent from the key military organizations involved. To put this in context, here are the facts why this is an issue, and requires attention.
From 2006 to early 2010, there were no U.S. Air Force officers in any of the top 11 positions in the Pentagon—the Chairman, the Vice Chairman, the Director, the J-1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, or 8 on the Joint Staff—almost 4 years with no leadership position on the joint staff. A look at the historical record of how the Air Force has fared in command assignments in the combatant commands is quite revealing.
Since the establishment of regional combatant commands—the warfighting commands—on January 1st, 1947, there have been a total of 105 commanders—only 6 have been Air Force officers. That is less than 6 percent of the regional combatant commanders in the entire history of the Department of Defense have been from the Air Force. There is a story behind those statistics, and it is not a good one from a joint perspective. The issue here is not simply that the Air Force has not been given its “fair share” of joint task force command assignments, but that far more than just 6 percent of those areas of responsibility could have benefited from an air-centric perspective, as is the case in today’s fight against the Islamic State. Furthermore, the Air Force needs to look at itself in the mirror in this regard to appreciate more honestly how it grooms, selects, and offers officers for these critical positions. The situation involves more than just other-service prejudice and turf protection.
[...]
Air Force aerospace power will inevitably be pivotal in future wars. This is by far the most preeminent unifying theme that has emerged from the collective global combat experiences of the last quarter of a century. Operation Desert Storm in 1991; Operations Deliberate Force and Allied Force in the Balkans in 1995 and 1999, during the major combat phases of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan in 2001; Operation Iraqi Freedom in Iraq in 2003, Operations Odyssey Dawn and Unified Protector conducted over Libya in 2011, and most recently, combat operations in Syria and resumed operations in Iraq. These operations underline the fact that the Air Force has been at war not just since 9/11/2001, but since 1991—now approaching 25 years. The nature of the modern security environment demands that we focus on not just sustaining, but accelerating Air Force contributions. Whether providing stand-alone options or serving as an integral part of joint operations, the Air Force is a vital national asset. Modern combat operations are simply not feasible without the capabilities afforded by the Air Force. Our nation has three services that possess air arms—the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps. Those air arms primarily exist to facilitate their parent services’ core functions—their mastery of operations on the ground, at sea, or in a littoral environment. However, our nation has only one Air Force. Its reason for being is to exploit the global advantages of operating in the third dimension of air and space to directly achieve our security objectives around the world. It is this unique and specific focus of the Air Force that makes aerospace power America’s asymmetric advantage. Said another way, while the other branches of the U.S. military have localized air arms suited to supporting their respective domain activities, only the U.S. Air Force possess the capabilities and capacity required to facilitate sustained global operations anytime, anywhere—and the perspective to exploit those capabilities in a way no other armed service has the expertise to provide.
http://www.armed-services.senate.gov/download/deptula_11-05-15
