That is the first time I have heard that said in a long while. And this of course was the result of the review that was led by Dr. Schlesinger.
The events that led up to the Schlesinger Report were a clarion call to take a very close, detailed assessment of the state of the nuclear enterprise within the Air Force and ultimately within the entire Department of Defense. In fact, a number of different internal and external reviews were done. The Air Force chartered its own Blue-Ribbon Review, and the Secretary of Defense commissioned former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger to convene a panel of nuclear experts to look closely at the situation. There was also an examination by Admiral Kirk Donald [Deputy Administrator for the NNSA Office of Naval Reactors and Director of Naval Nuclear Propulsion] of the entire enterprise, including supply chain management and production. So there were multiple looks.
Secretary of the Air Force Donley and Chief of Staff Gen. Schwartz drew from all of these reviews and developed a nuclear roadmap that laid out a number of tenets. First was that reinvigorating the nuclear enterprise is our number one priority as an Air Force. Second was a pledge to reduce the fragmentation of authority, command responsibility, and accountability. This led to the creation of an Air Staff directorate [A-10], solely focused on nuclear issues; the stand-up of a new Air Force major command, Air Force Global Strike Command; and the enhancement of the capabilities of the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center at Kirtland Air Force Base. For the record, Kirtland has a long history and association with the nuclear mission, going all the way back to its proximity to the Los Alamos National Lab and the Trinity test site [in the 1940s]. In fact, it was the first product center that dealt with nuclear weapons on the part of the Air Force, which was then the Air Force Special Weapons Unit.
Please explain Global Strike Command to us. What it will be, who will it be made up of, and where will it be?
Global Strike Command will be an Air Force major command on par with Air Combat Command, Air Mobility Command, and Air Force Special Operations Command, etc. It will consist of two numbered Air Forces – 8th Air Force, which will have responsibility for the B-52 and B-2 bombers; and 20th Air Force, which is responsible for all of the nation’s 450 MMIII ICBMs. In addition, we’ll have two smaller units, including the 576th Flight Test Squadron at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, which has responsibility for operational testing of our intercontinental ballistic missiles. We’ll also have the 625th Strategic Operations Squadron at Omaha, Neb., which assists U.S. Strategic Command in targeting and mission planning.
Can you tell us how the standup of Global Strike Command has developed?
We are establishing the command in a very systematic, step-by-step approach. To use the military lexicon, Phase o was the standup of a provisional command at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, D.C., in January 2009, under the leadership of Maj. Gen. James Kowalski. The purpose of the provisional command was to develop the initial planning documents, define manpower requirements, and begin the process of assigning people. The next phase takes place on the 7th of August of this year, when we will formally activate Air Force Global Strike Command at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. We’ll spend the next several weeks after that ensuring we have all we need to function as a headquarters, including the ability to respond to emergency situations. Then, on the 1st of December, we will assume responsibility for 20th Air Force and all of the ICBMs. Finally, on the 1st of February of 2010, we’ll assume responsibility for 8th Air Force, including the B-2 and B-52 wings. At the end of the day, there will be roughly 23,000 people in the command – officers, enlisted, and government service personnel.
In terms of tasking, will you be subordinate to STRATCOM or will you be on a tier with STRATCOM? If a tasking comes down that requires you to do something operational with your assets, is it going to come from STRATCOM?
Air Force Global Strike Command is an Air Force major command. Therefore, under U.S. Title X, our responsibility is to organize, train, and equip forces for strategic nuclear deterrence operations and global strike operations, which can be conventional as well. We present those forces to combatant commanders. The intercontinental ballistic missiles are presented to Strategic Command. The bombers, because they have a conventional capability, are presented through Joint Forces Command [JFCOM], which will then provide capabilities for other combat commanders as required. The commander of 8th Air Force also works under the commander of U.S. Strategic Command as the Joint Force Component Commander for Global Strike, and will retain that additional responsibility even as Air Force Global Strike Command stands up.
Let’s talk a little bit about your nuclear warhead/bomb stockpile stewardship, because so far we’ve mostly been talking about the platforms that carry them. U.S. Air Force Global Strike Command is going to be the primary handler of USAF nuclear and thermonuclear weapons for this country for the foreseeable future…. correct?
That’s correct.
What role overall will you have in that stewardship program and the overall nuclear weapons development effort for the United States?
We were talking earlier about Kirtland Air Force Base and the National Labs. Since the very beginning of the atomic era and ultimately the thermonuclear age, responsibility for the U.S. delivery platforms and for weapons themselves has been divided between the military on the one hand, and civilian government agencies on the other. First, the Atomic Energy Commission, then the Department of Energy (DOE), and now the National Nuclear Security Administration [NNSA] have held responsibility for the weapons. So, it is the job of the DOE and the NNSA to develop those kinds of capabilities for us, and I’ll leave it to scientists and engineers at the National Labs to do that.
What we will do as an Air Force is define our requirements. And our requirements are that we have weapons that are reliable, weapons that are safe, and incorporate the latest safety features in them, and weapons that can be readily maintained by the airmen and civilians who service them. So, those are kind of the criteria that we will lay out to the designers. The process by which we do that is to make our views and requirements known to the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and to the Nuclear Weapons Council. The Nuclear Weapons Council is chaired by the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, and includes the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other senior DoD officials, as well as the Director of the National Nuclear Security Administration.
But you feel that you’re going to have a good voice in making the inputs that go over to Secretary of Energy Dr. David Chu and down to the nuclear security people?
The Air Force has had a very good close working relationship with the labs and civilian agencies in the past, and I would expect that that relationship will continue into the future.
One of the things that is clearly in the Schlesinger report, as well as your own [USAF] blue ribbon report, was the issue of personnel reliability and conforming to procedures. What are you going to do to get USAF Global Strike Command to that level of professionalism that looks upon the handling of nuclear weaponry the way we did during the Cold War?
For one, we’re making our overall inspection system more demanding and relevant. The nuclear surety inspection is a very tough test. It’s like taking a final exam in which there are a thousand questions. You can get 990 of those questions right, but if you miss the wrong 10, or in some cases, the wrong one, you fail the entire test. At the end of the day, it’s not about passing or failing. It’s about being able to perform the mission.
One of our principal responsibilities is to assure the senior leadership of the military, as well as the American public, that every organization knows how to conduct operations, maintenance, security and support involving nuclear forces. There’s no room for error. There are a lot of different tasks a unit has to do, and we keep adding to the “job jar.” But, an analogy that I think is particularly apt here is that any unit or any commander has to juggle a lot of balls. Some of them are rubber, so if you drop one of those, it bounces, you pick it back up, and you carry on. But some of those balls are made out of crystal, and if you drop one of those, it shatters and there’s no way you can recover. Operating, maintaining and securing nuclear weapons fall into that “crystal ball” category.
How do we prevent this from happening? We go back to the “old-fashioned” way we conducted business. Commanders and supervisors at every level must pay very close attention to the training and to the actual activities of the people under their charge to ensure that they fully understand how to do the work, that they have the right attitude, and that they’re following checklists. What we will try to take from the SAC legacy is the same intense focus on expertise, on professionalism, on excellence, and ultimately on pride and esprit, and bring those qualities to this new command.
Many people have said that what we’re trying to do is re-create the Strategic Air Command…
Is that such a bad thing?
No, it’s not such. On a purely technical point, Air Force Global Strike Command will not re-create the Strategic Air Command. For instance, we do not have, or will not have under our command the tanker force, which was a major part of Strategic Air Command. In fact, if you walk outside this office and look at the portrait of [General] Curtis LeMay as Chief of Staff and see what airplanes he chose to include in his portrait, you may be surprised to see that his hand is resting on a KC-135 tanker, because that’s how important it was to the overall mission. We will not have that, nor will we have the long-range strategic reconnaissance aircraft under us. As I indicated earlier, the times are changing. [When] Curtis LeMay was the commander of Strategic Air Command, what he used to tell his commanders was, “You need to be prepared to go to war tonight.” Happily, the world has changed dramatically since then, and while it’s still a world that’s very complex and full of threats, there is not the expectation that we will have to go to war tonight, at least not with these forces. Again, what we will try to do is take from the old Strategic Air Command the same intense focus on expertise, on professionalism, on excellence, and ultimately on pride and esprit that it had and bring those qualities to this new command.