 Good morning. The Department of Joint Warfare Studies welcomed you to today's lecture. It is my pleasure to introduce today's guest speaker, Lieutenant General Allen Peck, United States Air Force, retired. Currently, General Peck is serving as the Director of the Air Force Research Institute here at Maxwell Air Force Base. AFRI is charged with conducting objective research, outreach, and education to enhance the effectiveness of air power and support of national security. Focused on dissemination of professional ideas, AFRI publishes the Air and Space Power Journal, which is currently published in four languages, and the strategic studies quarterly. AFRI also oversees 125 officers selected to serve as Air Force fellows at leading universities, think tanks, laboratories, major defense corporations, and key Pentagon offices. General Peck retired from the United States Air Force in 2011 after 36 years of distinguished service. In his last active duty position, he was the commander of Air University. General Peck earned his commission upon graduation from the U.S. Air Force Academy. After completing graduate pilot training as a distinguished graduate, he went on to become an F-15 aircraft commander, instructor pilot, and standardization and evaluation flight examiner. General Peck completed two tours on the Air Staff at the Pentagon and a joint assignment as Chief of Current Operation at U.S. Central Command, the General Commanded and Air Operations Group in Germany, an Air Expeditionary Wing in Saudi Arabia, and the Air and Space Expeditionary Force Center in Langley Air Force Base, Virginia. General Peck was a key planner for NATO's Kosovo Air Operation and served in the Vicenza Combined Air Operations Center as the Chief of Combat Plans during the subsequent campaign. He also served with the commander of Air Force Forces at the U.S. CENTCOM Combined Air Operations Center during Operation Iraqi Freedom, major combat operations. During his subsequent tour as Deputy Combined Force Air Component Commander, he oversaw planning, tasking, execution, and assessment of coalition operations for operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom. The General was a command pilot with over 2,700 hours in the air-to-air and air-to-ground variants of the F-15, including more than 300 combat hours. On top of that, he was mentioning that I shouldn't say that he was a distinguished graduate at certain places, but honest to God, he was a distinguished graduate everywhere he went. Stop. Thanks, boss. Appreciate it. Hey, gang. I think it's traditional for folks to say they're happy to be here because they're out of the Pentagon. For me, I'm a cheap date. I walked over. Thank you for the opportunity to give a shameless plug for our literature, by the way. The Strategic Studies Quarterly and Air and Space Power Journal, which are available online. But I strolled over here today, and it got me out of a staff meeting, so I am truly happy to be here today and talk about something that's of keen interest to me, and that is command and control of air power. Let's see if I can get this thing to work here. Here we go. These are the things I was asked to talk about, some CFAC and ComF4 things, and then future trends. And I'll leave some time at the end for some questions. Pause was kind enough to go through some of the background. I got some tactical experience and some more strategic experience. Right in the middle there is some time I spent in Combined Air Operations Center at the operational level of war learning from some of the masters. In 1998, NATO had not authorized planning for the Coastal Operations, so the U.S., the United States, with a couple of allies, got together on our own, essentially, and started the planning in 1998. And those eventually became conno plans for what was Allied Force, and I was part and parcel to that effort. Had a great team there. Went down to the kayak for the 79-day operation, and involved in, as you see there, the GATT. Doesn't mention the master air attack planning, airspace, information warfare, ATO production, over at PSAB, and then at AUD for a year as well. So here's some home movies. Up in the upper left-hand corner is Mike Short. I had a chance to work with General Short. He was the C-FAC for Allied Force. We're kind of smiling in that picture, but it was shortly after. Every morning we'd come in and we'd have a gathering, the C-5 and the C-3 would get together and talk about what happened overnight, what we're doing that day. And General Short's hard to get comfortable with, but after a little while I started feeling comfortable, and this picture was taken right after he caught me pilfering one of his bananas from his little breakfast tray. And he went apoplectic on that and said, Peck, what are you doing? Later on we took a picture. But I actually mentioned to him, I said, I'm going to go over to ACSC and they've given me an hour to tell him everything I know about command and control of air. And he said, hey, that's great, Peck. What are you going to do the other 55 minutes? Here we are in the lower right is Dutch Holland, Randy Gellwicks, General Short and myself. This is in June of 1999 after Milosevic had given up. And so we were having a little piece of cake and a beer in the courtyard. And not long after this picture was taken, General Short gets a call. And one of the guys came to run out and says, General Clark's on the phone, General Clark's on the phone. So General Short goes back in and it's Wesley Clark on the phone. I'm figuring he's going in to say, hey, congratulations, you know, great job. Instead he yells at General Short and says, Mike, they're telling us that you only killed 10 tanks in the whole air operation. What's up with that? And so Short says, well, I guess it was enough. Well, that was the wrong answer. And as many of you know, that started the Air Force on an entire episode of trying to find technologies that would discover tanks under trees and all kinds of other things. We can get into more detail on some of that. But in the end, it achieved the desired effect. But the fact is that, you know, with the MUP and the VJ, who were the folks who were harassing the coast of our Albanians, their primary goal was to hide and survive. And you can do that without ground forces in there to help root them out, without folks on the ground to give the intel. It was a pretty tough task to actually go out and attrit the forces that were doing the evil. General Buchanan had a chance to work for him, General North. I'm going to talk a little bit about the difference between being a CFAC and being a ComF4, but it sort of sums up here. Here's the CFAC job. I'm giving tours of the Kayak at Al-Yadid to Bush 41. And then inspecting logistics. This is ComF4 duties, the mother of all bombs. So let me talk a little bit about this. Part of the desired learning objectives here were to do a quick review of doctrine. So those are the documents. Here's your pop quiz about doctrine. Service and joint doctrine is authoritative, directive, is it policy? Any guesses? D is probably the most common one that we find out there is that, you know, whenever you're charged with an operation, the first thought is let's take a blank sheet of paper, this has never happened before, and start drawing wiring diagrams and figuring it out. In fact, doctrine captures best practices and lessons learned, but it is not directive. It's authoritative. So it's a place to start and deviate from. And that's the main lesson on that. I was told you'd already had plenty of doctrine, so this is your doctrine review. Any questions? Command relations? Good. We got that done. So I realize this is going to be somewhat U.S. centric here, but I'm going to talk a little bit about the relationship between a commander of Air Force Forces and a Joint Force Air Component Commander. The service component, you will, from an Air Force perspective, from a service perspective, you will have a commander of Air Force Forces, and this is how we will tend to organize with an Air Staff, and you will have an AOC, even if you're not designated as a JFAC or a CFAC, you'll need an AOC to do your OPCON responsibilities and control your forces, and we typically will deploy with Air Expeditionary Wings and Groups. It is customary based on the preponderance of force and the ability to do command and control that the component that has those capabilities will also be the functional component, and that's the, in this case, would be a JFAC or a CFAC, and your AOC will become a Joint or Combined Air Operations Center with a staff, and you'll have allocated forces, TACON, and these are the service of the U.S. forces, but will also include forces from coalition members, so that's kind of the basic construct, and again, that's pretty basic. Why does all this matter? I mean, who cares? In fact, I would say the Air Component is probably more anal, if you will, about this than other services that tend to mix the two together, and part of that has to do with the makeup of our forces, which tend to be, as opposed to, in separate areas geographically, we will mix together tankers from multiple countries, fighters from multiple services in multiple countries, and the staffs will also be mixed together. So, many of you remember the story of Marcus Latrell. There were four SEALs in Afghanistan who got compromised, and this was not long after I'd showed up at the KOC in 2005, and a rescue force was sent in, two CH-47s went in, one of them got shot down and had 16 on board, and they were killed, and in the process, they were trying to recover the four SEALs who'd been compromised and then were isolated, and in the process, we had some ISR assets overhead. One of them was a predator, and we had video of what was going on to try to orchestrate, and it was a pretty chaotic scene. So, as sometimes happened, the weather started closing in, and the folks who owned the predator said, we're going to exceed our tech order limits. We have to bring the aircraft home, and the decision was made, no, this is more important because the nature of the mission, you've got to stay on station in spite of the fact that it violates your service minimums, and that was the right decision, and in fact, when it started to go home, it iced up and crashed, and that's a risky take. The problem was that the decision was not made by somebody who had operational patrol, it was made by the RAF Air Commodore who was at the KOC at the time, because I was on my way back in and hadn't gotten there before that decision was made, and nobody questioned whether the decision was made, it was just who had the authority to make that decision. That was, the KOC had TACON, not OPCON, and TACON doesn't give the authority to exceed the limit, so we had to develop a process, and in this case, it's a predator, and there's no funerals for predators, and that's a good part of it, but if it had been an EA-6, if it had been another aircraft, a C-130, and you did that, then it becomes more problematic, because you need someone with the authority and the understanding of what you're actually doing when you're violating service minimums such as altitudes, fuel requirements, crew duty days, and those kind of things, so that's why it's important that you understand the distinction, so those kind of decisions are made at the right level. By the right folks, and after that, we establish a process, typically the special operators would come in, and they'd need a predator to stay on station in spite of the weather, and we would assemble the right folks, including those who own the predator, the weather folks, the special operators, and the representative of the OPCON authority, which was Centaf, and would say, okay, you stay on station and violate, and that way the risk is placed in the right place. So you have two staffs to help you, kind of an eye chart, but basically shows you, and there's a lot of things that go on, but some of these responsibilities, you know, these are administrative responsibilities, and the commander of Air Force Forces accomplishes those, and these are joint responsibilities, and those are the responsibilities of the JFAC, and you have staffs that help you do these things, and typically this will be a joint and combined staff. So here's some of the challenges, and I've narrowed these down, but to me, as I would walk into any combined air operations center, whether it was Vachenza, or at Princeton, or at AUD, or anywhere else, I mean, it's a... the orchestration of air operations is something we take for granted. It is just, to me, still mind-boggling, even though I understand all the details of how it works, to me it's an amazing process, it frankly is underappreciated, and how many of you have served in a kayak? Excellent. So you all understand what I'm talking about, is how that all comes together and works, to me is absolutely amazing. So here are some of the things that I think are important in terms of the key challenges. One of them, you've got to master these responsibilities, and I've got two charts here. One's the ComF4, these are the responsibilities of the commander of Air Force Forces, which are typically the responsibilities of any of the service component commanders, whether it's the R4, the Nav4, the Mar4, would have these responsibilities to include the administration and discipline, force protection. I can't tell you how many times this was mixed up by the higher-headquarter staff who would say, a task would come down and say, CFAC, establish force protection here, or send these munitions over here. Well, that's not a CFAC responsibility. Those are commander of Air Force Forces responsibilities. These are what CFACs do. Recommend courses of action, strategy, ROE, Air Apportionment. Typically, and not always, and by the way, you don't have to establish a CFAC, but it is, again, become fairly accepted after the first Gulf War. Typically, at the beginning stages, the CFAC will be, as it was in, for example, Iraqi freedom. The air component commander will be the supported commander for counter air, for strategic attack, overall air interdiction, most space control, and ISR, and will be the support team commander for close air support, AI that's behind the fissile or within the other components, AOs, and maritime support, and will act as airspace control authority, area defense commander, and space coordinating authority, if designated, and then the personnel recovery and CSAR operation. So that's a lot on the plate for the CFAC. So then you get these big old staffs to make this happen, doing all these things on the blue side, all these things on the purple side. In some cases, for small operation, you could probably combine these staffs. We did that, for example, when we sent humanitarian aid down to Mozambique in 1999 after a big flood. So a couple of folks with a laptop, if you're doing a couple C-130s, can do this. In a major operation where you've got, we may have, I think, in some case, we had 300 airlift sorties a day. You've got maybe 1,000 sorties of kinetic sorties of air to air and air to ground and so forth. You need a big staff with separate responsibilities to do these things. Airspace control, area defense, space coordinating authority, the personnel recovery business, the inter-theater lift, theater, electronic warfare, and the joint training in doing all these things takes a staff with expertise. And representation, by the way, people will talk about, well, you know, you Air Force guys. This is not an Air Force thing, okay? Typically the Air Force will supply the facility and the core, but this is a joint and combined effort. In fact, much of the talent that runs this thing comes from other countries. The Brits and the Australians, for example, supplied superb K-Och directors. Other services. The Navy's second fleet has expertise in AOC business, so this is not just an Air Force thing. Pretty complicated stuff that you've got to oversee. You've got to have the right people who understand this business for the theater control system and air ground system. I'm not going to get into this, but it gets to be very complex, obviously, to make all this work. And here are the products that you're going to produce. Or you should produce. I would tell you that, you know, we've done operations strictly on PowerPoint, but to do it right, this is what's required. Joint air operations plan, an area air defense plan, airspace control plan. And by the way, your airspace control plan will then deviate every day with an airspace control order as you update what you're doing on airspace. An AOD, an ATO, which most people recognize what the ATO is, and then the air defense orders and airspace control orders. The Wheel of Death. This is the doctrinal view of how this happens. It's an orderly process. I mean, it happens pretty quickly, but it allows all the right inputs to be vetted. And let's face it, air power is a finite asset and you want to make the most, not just efficient, but effective use. And so there's a process for doing that that can be short circuited when you need to. And that's probably one of my main lessons here is, yeah, this is a complicated process, but it doesn't mean that in real time, if a high priority target pops up, we've got the capability to divert forces and go attack a high priority target even though it wasn't input 72 hours at the start of the circuit. This is kind of how the, this is how the ATO battle rhythm unfolds and what that allows you to do is take your strategy, develop the target, so you make sure you got the right weapon, the right desired mean points of impact. You've done the weapon nearing and now you can make sure the munitions folks load the right munitions, the folks flying the missions have got the right briefings. You can package them together to include tankers and electronic warfare and CSAR and air-to-air support and everything else and go hit the target. Again, you can do things on short notice, but it will probably be less effective and less efficient. Basically you've got five ATOs in process at any time. Typically you'll have somebody, these are vertical processes here. You've got folks that do gyptals, you've got folks that do the map or the mayop and so forth. You also will typically designate one or two folks who carry the football for each ATO and follow it all the way through the process, but it doesn't mean it can't be short circuited. An Allied Force, for example, this would be the doctrinal flow and some of these terms are a little bit outdated because this was back in 1998 and some things have changed, but you've got a flow for how these happen. Well, the senior leadership, General Clark or Admiral Ellis, had wanted to be updated and provide updates at times that may not have been completely convenient in terms of the doctrinal flow and would provide guidance. So you'd have VTCs in the middle of some, while you're in the middle of guidance apportionment targeting, you'd have a VTC or you're already developing the ATO, you'd have VTC and get some direction to go do something different. So, modified the cycle. Typically, you know, you're going to modify your cycle to fit the higher headquarters as opposed to expecting the higher headquarters to adapt to your cycle. And I've never been part of an operation where something like this didn't happen where you took the doctrinal flow and you changed it based on the situation. I'm going to talk a little about command relations here and without going into excruciating detail, but there's typically two chains. You have, at least in our doctrine, you have a service chain which has the ADCON support and then you have the operational chain. There are a couple of options here for a CFAC. One is to essentially have a theater, CFAC, COMF4, and then those are, if you have subordinate joint task forces, then based on the priorities established, not by this guy, but by this commander here, you point that fire hose in whichever direction it needs to go. Now, I would tell you that sometimes this causes some heartburn because the JTF commander say, hey, where's my KOC? Where's my CFAC? And so there is another option, and that is as opposed to supplying, in this case, is where you're putting a liaison, if you will, at the JTFs. Here, you actually put a separate facility with the JFAC and his own air forces. If they're geographically separated to where the two probably don't interact, that may make sense. It becomes more problematic when you could take forces that are used here and you may want to use them over here. It becomes more challenging to do that again if the weight of effort should be over here. But that is an option and it's included in doctrine, and it's really at the behest of the combatant commander. This is another case where the JTF could have a commander of air force forces and a JFAC. It's important. But it's never that clean. I'll just show you that the fact is that, okay, when you get it out in the real world, and again, sometimes because folks start with a clean sheet of paper or the situation dictates differently. So this is JTF Haiti. You see, it doesn't look as clean as the one that I showed you and I can just show you some other examples. This was Noble Anvil, which was Allied Force. Again, sort of a convoluted, and it has to do some of it has to do with the U.S. versus the NATO versus other components in other countries. And it gets very complicated. This was the ISAF relationships. Some of this is sort of touched on in a book by Dag Henrickson that's just come out. It's available online, on the AFRI website, by the way. But Dag goes through looking at U.S. commanders and NATO commanders in Afghanistan and compares and contrasts their reflections. But part of this was, as you can see, becomes problematic. And I'll just say somewhat, I guess off the record here, some of this had to do with the politics of concern about having too many U.S. Air Force or U.S. officers in charge of this operation. So that's why some of these things ended up being not doctrinally pure. But in this case, you had the NATO chain and the U.S. chain. But if you think about it, the NATO mission and the operation and during freedom mission had somewhat different perspectives. The enduring freedom mission included a counter-terrorism piece to it and was also mixed into what was going on in Iraq. And so had more of a theater perspective, because the NATO mission was fairly focused on countering the Taliban. So there's a lot of tensions that come out of that and some of these are indicated here. In the case of Iraq, for example, this was early on, the multinational force, the multinational core Iraq. Who's the joint force commander? What's the role of the ASOC? And I'm not going to go through all of these things, but these are continuing challenges that had to be worked through as we progress through the campaign. One of the facts of modern warfare is you're going to fight as a coalition and it's a great thing. The fact that it's not just the gringos going in with a couple of folks, it's truly a coalition effort. In this case, this was Allied force, but there were complications and you can expect that this is going to be the case in an operation. Target approval. I could give you an hour-long brief on the challenges of getting targets approved through four different countries and some of the complications. And we had a spreadsheet, essentially, that would have different target categories in every country and which types of targets some countries would and would not hit. So as an additional constraint, as you began the targeting, for example, AM radio stations. Some countries viewed that as freedom of the press and we're not going to attack that. Some viewed it as a Milosevic propaganda vehicle and so only certain aircraft from certain countries would agree to attack those. And by the way, then it got to do with will you refuel aircraft that are going after that if they're based in your country? Will you support it in any other way by supplying electronic warfare or so forth? So it got to be very complicated. It's just a reality of coalition warfare. And by the way, the military folks involved, this has nothing to do with impugning folks doing the mission. The airmen, the soldiers, sailors, marines from all countries doing this. This was directed from higher up in the political chains of each country. Not everybody has the same capabilities. Air refueling, ISR, electronic warfare, precision munitions, secure comms. That was a huge headache in that typically you'll go to the least common denominator and so much of the comms in Allied force was unsecure in the open because not everybody had the encryption to be able to talk secure. Airspace control. What had happened was in the initial phases of Allied force, I can tell you, I learned more about airspace control here in a hurry than I ever wanted to because as the forces came in and we created more and more tracks, tanker tracks and cast stacks and air to air areas and so forth, the airspace filled up. I'm curious. Did any of you fly in Allied force? You probably know what I'm talking about. We were having at least one near miss every night because the airspace just became more congested. So on the 1st of May of 1999, we instituted a complete change to the structure to allow avenues and boulevards and restructure the airspace. I tell you, trying to make a major airspace change in the middle of a war, that was a challenge. We had to send liaisons out to every base and brief them on what was going on, make sure everybody knew the changes and then just kind of held our breath as we rolled it over, but it improved things. If you were involved in it, presumably in May, you'd notice huge changes and improvements in the safety and efficiency of airspace but it just had not anticipated that that was going to be the case. Munitions shortfalls ended up aircraft countries running out of precision preferred munitions. Are we different as I talked about all these kind of things as well? Host nations really worried the country of Italy, a great host, but they're worried about noise, they're worried about if aircraft are dumping, they come back and need to land and dump munitions, where do you dump them? Some of those things are still out there in the Adriatic. Now let me talk a little about flexibility as we get into some of the challenges and typically at the start of an operation you'll be rolling along and this is kind of where the focus is on air and addiction and defensive counter air, offensive counter air, strategic attack but pretty much every operation that I've been part of, over time you'll shift and more and more of your effort will be supporting other components. We started running out of targets and allied force and it wasn't too long after the start of Iraqi freedom that there were no aircraft left to fly in the Iraqi Air Force and so the weight of effort will naturally shift as you go through that and so it looks like this and your theater air missions will shift to the support of the ground component and this is something that happens and I think it's food for thought is what happens is typically we don't have a sufficient liaison or presence in the ground force I would say to anticipate this and so the ground component are developing missions that may not include the air support and the effectiveness of air for example to protect their flanks or to do deception or something else and so it is sometimes added in at the end of the plan and it's something we've got to think about as we move to this area more effective support to the ground component as the importance of the theater mission starts winding down one of the challenges we have we do operate on the centralized basis centralized control decentralized execution and it works very very well and by the way it's not centralized planning it's more than planning it's synchronization, it's integration of the entire effort but you need to have a backup plan and whose job is that by the way? Is that the CFAC's job to have a backup plan? No, it's the COMF-4 responsibility to ensure that because typically the air force component in this case for example supplied the combined air operation center and also needs to supply the backup capability and test it so something to think about because again I think that the centralization model works pretty well when you've got that capability if you've not done so I'd encourage you to read the spider and the starfish and essentially the book talks about, although it kind of wanders off course towards the end of the book but if you think about it the chaos to me is kind of it's the spider model and it does really really well but if you smish the head of a spider it's ineffective as opposed to the starfish that pops off an arm and eventually it kind of grows the arm back and it can survive pretty serious attacks and I think what I would say as food for thought is this is our model here but adversaries are coming to recognize that and so we have got to evolve to a capability to be able to do less decentralized operations and we've talked about adaptive control methodology but otherwise you find, I think you're going to be vulnerable to either through kinetics or cyber having your centralized capability taken away so we can talk more about that but I think it's food for thought as a challenge we've got to be prepared to operate in an area where at least temporarily the CFAC at the headquarters is not able to communicate in real time and so we need folks who can operate at the operational and tactical level without continual guidance from on high and that gets into this staying at the right level as a CFAC and this can be a problem most folks who are working in the chaos came up in the tactical business and frankly most of them would rather be out there in the tactical business flying the airplanes than necessarily being on the staff someplace and so it's a tendency and unfortunately I think we don't have the technology but typically it's like a window on the world here, see we had at the time I think we had five predator orbits at the time and so they would be up on the wall and you can kind of watch what was going on up there and in this case if we could roll it this building blows up and there's a tendency to get fixated on tactical level issues to get a sense of what's going on out there but you've got to resist the urge to focus on that you've got to stay at the operational level and there's a CFAC also let the folks out the field do what they need to do you stay at the operational level but you still need to do battlefield circulation you need to get out there and get a sense of what's going on I found that you're issuing these ATOs and ACOs but you need to get out there and see the weather you need to listen to the comms the rules of engagement are and experience that so you can have a better capability to command all that go visit the units and those from other countries go where you're not comfortable and let me see if I can get this thing to work there you go get out in the field once in a while and it's my trusty backseater keggy after a mission here we go now I'm going to talk about some trends this is where some of this is looking in a rear view mirror in the past but here are some thoughts for the future what are some of the trends this is taken out of the blue horizons briefing it talks about technology trends for the next 15 to 20 years so these are some things to think about as future CFACs and operational level staff moving away from platform maneuverability of missiles hypersonics and swarms photonics dispersed operations versus big bases this is a huge discussion particularly in the Pacific right now you have certain bases where we've concentrated capability which can become pretty lucrative targets for an initial volley of theater ballistic missiles for example how do we operate in dispersed manner that can be a deterrent but it also logistically is very challenging to operate off of a couple hundred dispersed fields and highway strips and those kind of things is a huge challenge and how do you make that happen moving from man to remotely piloted or autonomous vehicles I'll focus on one area and that's the unmanned area we kind of think about this as an offensive capability we think about predators and reapers and other countries are thinking about this as well and this is something that CFACs are going to have to think about from a counter air standpoint small, cheap, easy to obtain tend not to recognize the threat that these will pose to us in terms of adversary use of unmanned systems and the likelihood is we're going to face adversaries that will have access to small unmanned systems that need to be included into your counter air plan or air space plan so they got to be included in air space control, area defense, the spins, the ROE interoperable systems and then command and control of counter air ops below the coordinating altitude that's typically where you're going to find some of these and air space control is a huge challenge because everybody wants their own air space but you need a centralized capability of command and controlling it so I think I managed to get through that in about 40 minutes those were what I talked about so what questions might you have that this has sparked any thoughts apparently uh oh