 Colonel John A. Warden III is a combat pilot with a distinguished military career. Born in McKinney, Texas in 1943, Warden received his Bachelor of Science degree from the United States Air Force Academy and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in 1965. After pilot training, Warden began his first operational assignment as an F-4 pilot at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, North Carolina. From there, in January of 1968, he deployed to South Korea in support of operations following the USS Pueblo incident. Again answering his nation's call, Warden volunteered to serve as an OV-10 forward air control pilot in Vietnam. He deployed for over a year in the Vietnam War where he flew 266 combat missions. As a student at the National War College, Warden wrote the air campaign which was the first book since World War II to address air war at the operational level. The air campaign is still in use around the world and has been translated into seven languages. As Deputy Director for Strategy, Doctrine and Warfighting at Headquarters Air Force, he and his five Air Staff Divisions created new operational concepts for air power employment, including the Air Option, introduced new force planning methodology, and conceived and wrote the Air Force's initial Global Reach Global Power Doctrine. Most notably, Warden developed the Instant Thunder Air Campaign Plan, the foundation for coalition and air operations planning and execution in Desert Storm, and established the Checkmate Washington Area Reachback Operation that supported the air campaign. Prior to retiring from the Air Force, Warden served as the commandant of the Air Command and Staff College. As commandant, he revolutionized the curriculum and teaching methodology, introduced the concept of top-down learning and developed an integrated one-year curriculum creating the most intensive and modern curriculum of any military school in the world, a leader in American graduate-level education. Colonel Warden retired from the United States Air Force in 1995 after 30 years of service. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming to the Gathering Eagles stage Colonel John Warden. Colonel Warden, it's a pleasure to be out here with you, sir, and we talked about a number of things through the course of working on the book and the interview, but today I'd like to highlight for the crowd here today some of your early deployments and the impact those experiences shaped your views on air power and planning from a strategic and operational level. Okay, yeah, great. We'd expand that just a little bit in terms of, as you sort of start out, there are three things that are going on that you're doing, I believe. One is that you are improving your ability to execute the tactical and mechanical part of the thing, learning to fly, fly better, et cetera. Second part is learning how to improve your command skills, and a big chunk of that is simply observing the things that people above you are doing well and are doing poorly, the things you're going to emulate, the things you're never going to do that kind of a thing. And then the third thing, I think, which becomes exactly relevant to your question, is the observing and learning things that allow you to do things beyond just the flying, the squadron, the wing kinds of things. So if I'm thinking about the things that I found to be particularly useful and interesting from that standpoint, one of the first ones really was in the fourth wing from Seymour Johnson, when with a week's notice we had airplanes, a whole wing that was augmented to about 100 F4s had flown from Seymour Johnson to Kunzan Air Base in Korea after the seizure of the Pueblo. That made a huge impression from two directions, and most important one was the demonstrated ability of the United States Air Force to move an extraordinary amount of combat power in an extraordinarily short period of time. It was done flawlessly. It was beautifully done sitting in an airplane and really quite impressed with it. The other side of it, though, was when we got to Kunzan, there were no plans to do anything with, at that time, the 100 top newest F4s in the United States inventory. So the airplanes were literally parked wingtip to wingtip at Kunzan, made probably a pretty decent target if anybody had been interested, and nor was there any plan for how the airplanes were going to be employed in any kind of combat thing. So a little bit surprised, because my impression had always been, well, the higher headquarters, whether that was wing or numbered Air Force or whatever it was, they knew how to do these things and said, well, you know, sometimes they do and sometimes they don't. So that was pretty interesting. The deployment, not so much from a movement standpoint, but the next thing that I think was pretty useful was, as for many of us, was the experience in Vietnam. And my observation on Vietnam's looking around was everybody looked like they were doing their jobs very, very well, whether they were flying, whether they were shooting, whether they were sailing. We were winning battles, we were beating the devil out of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese regular forces. So we're doing everything exactly right and we lost the war. So something was amiss with that. Next thing that was pretty interesting was really was at Torahon flying F4s again. So exposure now to a longstanding peacetime command, USAFI, but more importantly from my standpoint was I had the opportunity to participate in the development of the first deployment of U.S. Air Force airplanes to Persia, to Iran, to Tehran that had been done since roughly since World War II. So that gave me an opportunity to see a piece of the country, a piece of the world that I hadn't seen before and also gave me pretty good insight into the different ways of thinking that you could see between the Americans, the British, the Turks, the Persians, the Iranians. And it helped an awful lot as it further started thinking about this whole business of what can be done in the Middle East. Again, not quite from a deployment standpoint, but would like to mention I think in this context a little bit about experience in the air staff after it came back from Spain and completed a year doing a master's degree at Texas Tech. And that experience was I was a desk officer for all of the Middle East Africa countries, every one of them as I recall. So I got a chance to really sort of understand how each one of them worked at a little bit deeper level. And then also got involved for the first time in really looking at high level plans, the operations plans, the con plans that were the Sincure plans and so on. And one of the things that began to be clear in my mind at any rate was that we were focusing an enormous amount of our resources, virtually all of them, to protect against a Soviet onslaught across the folder gap. Well, I was fine unless the Soviets decided to go someplace else and it struck me that they could easily decide that they were going to go around the other side basically to come down through Iran, conceivably Iraq, warm water ports, seizure of the oil in a variety of other things like that. That seemed to make a good deal of sense. And as we started thinking about that, then you realize that the command arrangements that existed at the time with Sincure having responsibility for that area simply could not work or were highly unlikely to work because Sincure was so focused on that folder gap area, that central European area that for them to think in terms of dedicating resources and other things to something that was 2,000, 2,500 miles away was simply unlikely. So then that led to the thought that well, maybe the solution is a change in command ideas and with the proposal to make readiness command, give that responsibility for that area to readiness command, which happened, that was called US Red Com at the time, if I recall, and then that morphed within the next couple of 30 years into central command and therefore the structure was there that the General Schwartzkopf and General Horner could exploit so beautifully when the actual war opportunity came up a few years later. So that worked out quite interestingly than other things with doing deployments of F-15s and F-4s, learning about the mobility, how to move things, and then thinking about large formations for air-to-air particularly and then also for air-to-ground squadron and larger size and having an opportunity to practice that at Incirlik where you could actually see the impact of having a lot of airplanes coming at any sort of area of the enemy lines, if you will. So those things then were pretty useful in thinking about kind of the next iteration, so that's an answer in any way. So talking about those problems with planning that you recognized early on, we'd like to fast forward to your time as the Deputy Director for Strategy, Doctrine and Warfighting. Could you tell us, so you talked about the state of planning earlier, could you tell us about the state of planning when you arrived there and that job and how you and your team decided to approach this? So there were a couple of issues and this is now, we're in 1988 and the planning that existed at the time was superb at a squadron level, at a wing level, with the red flags and all the rest, that was absolutely great. But then if you moved to the very highest level, that what you found was in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Defense Guidance and the other things of this sort, that air power was not being thought of in the way that it ought to be thought of for modern war, that it was seen as something that was strictly a support to the Army so that the two options for Europe really were a major deployment of 10 divisions, 10 days kind of a thing, which was probably a bit on the optimistic side, I'm guessing. And I know by the way some airplanes are going along and there are already some there, or if that doesn't work then there's a naval option. So the question then becomes, okay, so there's sort of a ground option, there's a naval option, why isn't there an air option? If you want to get power to Europe fast, you get it there with airplanes. So why don't we think about how we could deal with the Soviets significantly through air, not completely, not to win the war at that particular point, but for that to be the thing that you would put the emphasis on for your deployments and so on and so forth. So spent a lot of time trying to convince the Office of the Secretary of Defense that we ought to be changing the planning guidance and had some reasonable success with that up until the time that we got closer to the time of the Iraqi invasion of Khoi. I think that should roughly cover that I guess. We're kind of expanding upon that a little bit. As you're moving into those events, it's clear that we do a lot of planning in a hurry to get ready for that kind of unexpected event. Can you give us a little sense of what your team there did and how you became involved in the process and how you got things done in such a short amount of time? Well, there were a couple factors that were involved in it. One, that at the time I had five Air Staff divisions including Checkmate and out of that with those five divisions, almost 100 officers, all really smart people that were pretty good thinking, and we spent a good deal of time thinking about what can you do with air power at a very high level. And one of the things that flowed out of that particular set of thinking was the concept of the five rings, which was really developed initially to show what you could really do with air power and how to think about air power in terms of the impact that it could have on an opponent, on an enemy. Well, we found fairly quickly that, yes, it did that fairly well, but it also could make a pretty powerful way to actually do targeting. It would give you a methodical way to think through the problems, what are you trying to accomplish, et cetera. And one of the things that we did in the roughly the year prior to the advent of the Iraqi invasion was to do an exercise using the five rings and applying it to Soviet ground forces making an attack into Europe. We presented that, the conclusions, that study in a briefing to the then U.S. Army in Europe, Commander General St. John, yes, St. John. And he said, wow, this is a great way to think about this, this is a great way to use air power. How about going and putting this against the big stockpiles of weapons that the Soviets had buried in a variety of places? I said fine, we'd be happy to do that. But then it wasn't too long after that that the Iraqi invasion came along so the Soviets were no longer of any interest in it. And when the war was over, nobody had the slightest interest in planning anything for the Soviets because they were all gone. So that was the, we had a lot of an opportunity to think about what you can do. So along comes the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. So we've thought about this and thought, well, so you know, we don't know what, we don't know specifically what plans might be going on at SENTCOM, SENTAF, wherever, but we've got some pretty good ideas. So pulled together just a handful of people and said let's put something together and just to do the best to put together the best sort of a plan that we can to use air power and really to use it to win. And it said to the groups that you know I have no idea how we're going to sell this or even whether we can, but let's build it and then we'll see what happens from there, which we did. And then we had a bit of an unusual break, if you will, certainly from our standpoint, and that was a couple of days after we started that process, that General Schwarzkopf had called up their staff, talked to General Lowe, General Lowe said hey, got some guys that are doing this sort of a thing, and they'll be happy to show you what they're doing. So we did a couple of days later and we're doing this all out of Checkmate, which has now expanded into people coming from all over the air staff and from TAC headquarters and some from TAC headquarters, not a lot, and then from a variety of other places in the government, the intelligence services and so on. So we put this together with these 300 people in a couple of days, took it down to General Schwarzkopf, General Schwarzkopf said this is good, developed a little bit more week later by giving it to General Schwarzkopf, said this is great, this is what we're going to do, talk to General Powell, etc. and then he asked me to take it over to give it to General Horner, which we then did a couple of days later and left some guys there, Dave Deptula and then Harvey and Stanfield, and they then I think served as the core for things that were going on in Riyadh. In the meantime, we're back in Washington and finding that this open planning that we have done with Checkmate, in which that we've had people coming in from all the intelligence agencies and getting lots and lots of flows of information coming in, provided us the opportunity to send an enormous amount of information and do an enormous amount of analysis that we then sent over to General Glossin, Colonel Deptula, Lieutenant Colonel at the time, for them to look at, use in any way that they might choose to do it, there was no identification stuff on it, and having that connection turned out to be, I think, of more than a little bit of value. The other thing that was really fascinating about it was, and it's difficult for the majority of you probably to envision this, but in fact that you think that all of the decisions that are made in Washington are made on the basis of cold rationality and objectivity and so on and so forth. Not the case, simply not the case. And I would have to say that there was huge, huge opposition to the whole concept of an air campaign of the things that were done and were being created to what would eventually become a desert storm, huge opposition significantly from the Army, some from the very most senior Army officer who was in Washington at the time in as high a place as you could find, some people in the White House itself and scattered all over the rest of the place. And you can't imagine the kinds of attacks that are always going on. This is never going to work, this is wrong, we can't do this, this is not fair, all kinds of stuff. So just having that ability to have people in Washington that had pretty good understanding of what the concepts were to go out and deal with it, I think was, I believe, was essential. It's one of those things that I think was very difficult to have done, maybe impossible, to do it from Riyadh, because you get very far away from a power center and all of a sudden the power center is doing what it wants to do and sort of nuts to what it is that you want to do. So that was all really, I think, enabled by this whole concept of open planning. And the open planning very simply was, let's not decide who is authorized to see it, but let's get people in that are going to have ideas. And boy, the ideas that came in from outside that WEN thought about, and that in several cases turned out to be of significance, we never would have gotten them within the absence of the open planning, nor would we either have had all of that automatic info of intelligence, current information. We literally had people, by the time the war started, we had people who were in the KH-11 download stations and they would pick up the phone if they say, hey, we see something like a railroad train that's unloading just to take up a trivial example. They would call instantly and say, okay, interesting, important stuff, and we'd pick up the phone and call over and talk to Dave or to Gawson or whomever. And then again, they can confirm that information and do whatever they wanted with it. But it provided a way to move information and intelligence, which was significantly developed or processed or only available in Washington, to move it to the place where it was going to be used. And this is the open planning and I not only became a huge believer in it during that experience, but then subsequently in my business life have introduced it into the business world, we've found it's equally valuable and important. Sir, in the time leading up to the Gulf War, your team recognized that we as the Air Force were stuck in the Cold War mindset and your team was able to in part help move us out of that mindset to the credit of the enormous success of the Gulf War air campaign. What we'd like to hear about are what are your thoughts about the Air Force now and our mindset now. Do you think we're stuck in a mindset and need to evolve from where we are? Yes. Next question. Thank you. I can expand a little bit if you'd like. I'd appreciate that. So you all may remember that the Secretary of Defense Bob Gates gave the talk in the Colorado Springs about ten years ago, ballpark, it may have been plus or minus a year or two. And I'm paraphrasing, but I think reasonably accurately, what he said was I want to do away with this whole business of futurism. I don't want anybody thinking about future wars. I want you to concentrate on today's war. Well, so the Secretary of Defense says that he remains in power for what, another four or five years, and that becomes a big part of service life, defense department, the country and all the rest of it. Well, the focus on the war, one can sort of understand that, but we think about the war that he was having his focus on. You'd really have to say that the wars, at least since the invasion of Baghdad in 2003 for the Second Gulf War, have really been very tactical operations where there's some little group over here and you do something with them and then something with this one and one or two airplanes or three or four or whatever, and it's a primitive thing. There's no air defense. There's nothing else. So if you specialize for that kind of war, what you are doing is that you are virtually putting yourself out of business to fight a serious war against a serious enemy that presents a genuine strategic threat. So I think in some ways that maybe we are in a worse situation today from that standpoint than we were at the end of the 1980s because at the end of the 1980s we had people, some of the planning, the thinking may not have been as smart as it could be, but boy the development of the technology and so on. It wasn't based on fighting the original Korean war again. It was based on fighting something really important and thus the 117s and all the rest of this grand stuff. We know what the results have been of some people that have really pushed the high tech things like the F-22s and so on and so forth. We have that element of it. Second element was the I think sort of the underlying contest. When we were coming towards the, well when we were still deep in the Cold War, that you had Soviet Union with a military capability. It was kind of slowly moving and it was kind of cumbersome, but nevertheless it was pretty significant. And the underlying philosophy was communism. Well we knew that communism was bad and sort of everybody in the West said we don't like communism. We like some form of capitalism or freedom, et cetera, et cetera. And it's interesting that although people will die for communism it's not quite as deep of faith as there might be from something else. So you could deal with that and it was reasonably easy. Now we're into a situation where that we are facing an opponent who deeply, deeply, deeply believes in everything they do. I mean there's no if, ands, or buts. They genuinely believe. And I guess you almost throw this out as a question. So ask yourself what do you all believe in? What does the West believe in now? What is the West and what is its raison d'etre? Why is it that it should be willing to fight for in all of these far off places and so on and so forth? That's a question that must be addressed and it must be answered. So I think even given that in the shorter term and in rate that we can afford to make a lot of mistakes in a place like Afghanistan or Iraq or whatever. It's not going to be strategically destructive on any short term basis. But that's not going to last forever. At some point, five years, six years downstream, whatever it is, there's going to be a genuine strategic threat by somebody that's extraordinarily competent and maybe actually has better stuff than what we have. And if we haven't prepared ourselves adequately to deal with that kind of threat, then we are facing civilization, destruction, we are facing destruction of the country and we don't need to do that. So we simply have got to be thinking about what is it that we really want to do and my simple idea on the thing is that from a military technological standpoint, we really ought to be at least a revolution ahead of everybody else in the world, whoever is number two, that they are one-tenth of wherever we are from a technology standpoint. It doesn't mean we need to have ten times as many airplanes. We need to have ten times as much technological capability and that I think is actually doable if there is a decision to do it and that there is a commitment by the senior Air Force, senior DOD and the White House. The White House has got to make that commitment also. So that was a great answer and it kind of makes me think of the other side of that equation. One of your discussions we had was about an experience you had over in Russia and the chance that you got after the fall of the Soviet Union to go over there and see kind of their planning. I'm curious to maybe share that experience with the folks here and hear what your thoughts are on today's version of that. What your thought of a peep behind a curtain today would reveal as we move across there? So actually when I was here as the commandant of Command Staff College, John Quash, one of your predecessors, John Kelly, was invited to go to, then by now Russia on a tour of their professional military education. Part of that tour was to go down into the General Staff headquarters in Moscow, which was absolutely fascinating. It was a building that was maybe six or seven stories tall, but that wasn't what was really there. What was really there was six or seven stories that went down. So we went down and down and down. I have no idea how many levels we went down. And finally we came out into this large briefing room. It was probably almost like the middle, the last third of this auditorium in size. And they had some bleacher kinds of chairs around in a place for somebody to do briefing. And then probably a hundred foot long was a topographical map that stretched from the Europe to the Channel. And it had all of the major terrain, the militarily important terrain features that existed and all that. And then this bright Russian General Staff Colonel got up and briefed what their plan of operation would have been for a war in Europe when the Soviet Union still existed. And boy, you listened to that and said, wow, these guys were planning to duplicate exactly what they had done in World War II. Exactly. And they hadn't changed much in ways of organization. The equipment was a little bit better, but not dramatically so on a comparative basis. And they were making the same assumptions about air power that they had made in World War II and only survived in World War II because of an extraordinary amount of luck on their part. And because Germany was under strategic attack, which had forced the Germans to pull all of their air power back. So the Russians were fighting without a significant air threat through the majority of the time from December of 1942 on. So we could have beat these guys. It wouldn't have been fun. It would have been pretty expensive, but we could have beat those guys. They did not. They have learned almost nothing since World War II. Well, maybe I'm right. Maybe I'm wrong on that. But that was my impression. And my impression is that there are probably a lot of people in the United States that are mentally kind of, let's put it this way, are refighting the march on Baghdad. They are refighting the Taliban campaigns and so on and saying, well, we're just going to put some more airplanes or more bayonets against this sort of thing. And that's how we're going to deal with Chinese or Russians or Turks or whomever else that we might happen to do it. I mean, the Russians were not stupid people by any means. So if they could get locked into that lack of examination, that lack of critical thinking, then for sure anybody can be. And any time you think about that, you got to say, all right, let's stand back and really take a really hard look at ourselves. And how is it that we're thinking about fighting a serious war and what are we really going to do about it? Sir, speaking of evolution, we're curious to hear your takes on the Air Force as a service. Currently we have space and cyber operations nested within the Air Force. Do you believe it's appropriate for the service to evolve so space and cyber become independent services? This is a popular question that we like to talk about this year. And if so, what do you think the catalyst needs to be for that evolution to occur? So if you think about it, can anybody think of a single instance in all of world history where that there was an autonomous horse cavalry force? And the answer to the best of my knowledge is no. I mean, horse cavalry has been important, was important for several thousand years. But it was always important as an adjunct to really, when you get right down to it, to heavy infantry and then later artillery. Nor was artillery as important as it is ever conceived to be a separate service. So those were ground things that moved on the ground in part of the army or whatever it was called. On the other hand, you've had in every civilization that was close to the sea, you have had a naval surface, operates in a completely different kind of a medium, the medium of the sea, utterly capable of independent operations in many, many cases, independently winning wars in many cases. Makes perfectly good sense to have an independent sea service and not to tie it to a land service. Then along comes right here with the Wright brothers with their first school and you are suddenly in this new dimension. The new dimension were things that were dramatically different in all kinds of ways from the ground, from the sea, made perfectly good sense to have a separate air service. Now you start thinking about cyber stuff. So right now you can conceive of interesting operations with cyber just the same way that Jeb Stuart could make an interesting swing along March around with his cavalry before the Battle of Gettysburg, but it was a contributory operation or at least that was how it was designed. So right now it seems like for the most part that the cyber is contributory and significantly in my view to the exercise of air power but certainly to other forms of power at the same time. Seems to me that you have about the same situation with space. Yeah, space is different, orbital mechanics are different than flying an F-15, but it's still that it is done right now in order to support, to enhance air operations of one sort or another, or other ground operations. So the focus of anything that happens in space is basically against the ground. Now does that ever change? And I think that the answer is yes. There will be a time in the future without any question at all, I believe, that we will break the gravity string, if you will, and we'll be out conducting operations flying in pure space. Will we encounter aliens of some sort? I don't know, we might. Will we encounter asteroids? Yes, with absolute certainty and so on. So it's when that you get out there and you can actually conceive of independent operations in space that are done in a completely different medium, at that time I would be the first one to stand up and say, it's time for a space command. But I don't think that we're, I think we're probably, many of you would know better from a technology standpoint, but I'm guessing we're probably a quarter of a century, maybe a little bit more away from that particular time. Thank you, sir. One of the concepts that's come up a lot this year is, we as majors are kind of that mid-level tier, we're kind of breaking our way into leadership and we're learning how to do that. One of the concepts we discussed a little bit in our interview was the concept of leading up and how to influence above yourself in the organization. I'd love to hear your thoughts on how to do that and what's some good ideas for us majors as we're moving along and could engender in the way we move forward. Well, I mean that's a, that's, it's a challenging question. It's a great question. I would mention a couple things. That one, at any level as a major in a squadron or any kind of another operation, contracting, whatever, you've got people working with you, working for you, etc. This getting these people to function as a team becomes really, really valuable. It becomes valuable for you because it makes you smarter and it gives you a heck of a lot more ability to do things that you think are important. I'll come back again to the idea of the open planning. Get the people together periodically and talk about what it is that you are trying to accomplish, get their ideas, have some sort of a structure for going through the thinking process. Have as good a plan, a set of ideas as you possibly can before that you move up to whoever your superior is and say, hey, I've got a really good idea. And if you, if you thought the thing through clearly, then that you have at least some possibility that you might get a, you might get approval. Sometimes you might not, but that's a different, that becomes a different kind of a question and different sort of a situation. I think it's sort of over, overarching all of that to some extent though, is this idea that, you know, that the Air Force, countries, Air Force, Army, Navy, other countries spend a lot of money putting you all through here for the last year. Some of you will stay on for SAS and so on and so forth. It's a pretty significant investment. You're pretty smart. I mean, you know a lot of stuff and you're here because that you are pretty darn good. So when, if you're pretty good, then that means you probably have some pretty good ideas. So when things come up, really think about how can I take the initiative? I've thought about this. I'm an expert or a semi-expert in it. How can I take the initiative? And sort of with the, with a, with a minor degree of concern. But nevertheless, I would say that that sort of that old adage of sort of act first and then ask for forgiveness later is a reasonably good way to do things. How long you can survive that depends significantly on how successful your actions are. If your actions are failures, a really good boss will say, hey, you goofed that up. Why did you goof it up? Well, I did this, this, this. Okay. Don't do that again. Other bosses will say, who are you to do that? You're gone. You go someplace else and try it again. So those would be some thoughts. Sir, as a former ACSC commandant, do you have any advice for the ACSC students here in the audience who are about to graduate in five days? Who's counting? Who's counting? As we're about to head out to staff and leadership positions. Do you have any advice for us? At least I would reiterate somewhat of what I've covered in addressing the previous question. But it really, I think it comes down to think about what you've learned. And you've learned some positive things. You've learned some negative things. You certainly have gotten a lot of ideas there. That's not a very good way to do that. So try to avoid not doing the thing in that particular way. And you've got some pretty good ideas about how to do things and try to orient yourself in that particular direction. But I think it's a matter of confidence. You should have a lot of confidence. And I know all of you do right now. So capitalize on that confidence and that desire to go out there and make something change in your world and the larger world. Sir, we have a few minutes to take Q&A from the audience. So we'd like to open it up for questions. If there's any from the audience out there. Afternoon, Sir, Major McDaniel from Flight 21. So over the past two days, we've been cautioned not to draw too many lessons from Desert Storm. At the same time, you know, graduating this year, we've read your work and have thought about sort of how it applies or doesn't apply to the current conflict and future wars we might fight. So I guess I've got sort of a two-part question. Looking back, what would you have changed given your framework for how Desert Storm was conducted? And then looking forward, how would you adapt your framework or your way of approaching an air campaign to cover the full spectrum of adversaries that we might have to face? So the execution of Desert Storm was, I mean, it was superb. I really can't think of much of anything that could have been done any different. There were a few minor surprises like the success of the mobile scuds and so on and so forth. But it ended up being a tactical kind of an issue which was survivable and by and by that it was solved adequately, I mean solved from a strategic standpoint. So all the execution worked fine. I think that we've probably made two errors at a very, very high level and I'm talking about Chairman of the Joint Chief's White House kind of a level with the First Gulf War. The first one was that we did not think through what our endgame was going to be. So when General Schwartzkopf went to Safflant, he basically went to Safflant, told to set up an armistice to stop the shooting, et cetera, as opposed to saying, this is what we intend Iraq to do for the next 10 years, et cetera. These are the terms that you're going to give to the Iraqis and tell them if they don't accept it, et cetera, et cetera. There was almost a palpable refusal until very, very late in the game for either the Joint Staff or the White House or the State Department to think about how you are really going to end the war. And, you know, ending wars, it's kind of easy to start them in one form or another, but ending them is a real significant challenge. And if you haven't thought through it and all of a sudden it's there, then you are presented with some really tough things and you tend to fly by the seat of your pants and that may not be the best answer and in fact in probably 99% of the cases it really isn't. So we need to incorporate into our strategy thinking construction the idea of you've got to know what your objective is, you've got to know what you're going to push your resources against, you've got to know how much time and you've got to know how you're going to get out, whether you are successful or whether you're not successful. So that's one thing that I think is really important. The other thing that one of the huge lessons it seems to me from the Gulf War is this value of time and the more that you can compress time, the greater the impact that you are going to have on your opponent. If we take Iraq, if we had done the same thing to Iraq that we actually did, same targets, et cetera, and had done it over a two or a three or a four year period, all in North Vietnam, some half century previously, I think that the Iraqis could have survived it because people can deal with serial operations. They can fix things. They can figure out how to react and so on. I think we got pretty darn close to that necessary amount of time compression against the Iraqis that really simply put them into a position where it was virtually impossible for them to react at any kind of a significant operational or strategic level. There one minor attempt, the battle of Khofji, was picked up very quickly and interestingly because the communications were in such a lousy shape that Saddam Hussein actually had to drive down there to talk to the Iraqi three corps commander in order to give him the instructions as to what to do because they couldn't send the darn things down over what previously had been a very, very good command and control communications kind of a system. So that 40 days was adequate in that war. I don't think that it will be adequate in the next war. And I think that we've got to figure out how to compress that time more and more and more. And as we move into places where people like North Koreans have potentially nuclear weapons and maybe people have satellite killers and a bunch of this other stuff, we really probably get driven down into the point of thinking how do we compress time sufficiently to create a paralytic impact on an opponent in a matter of maybe hours eventually, certainly days within the relatively short future like the next five, six years, et cetera. So that to me is something that simply has got to be done. We've got to figure out how to compress the time. And that interestingly has an application whether you are talking about dealing with a large state or whether you are dealing with small groups of people in Taliban in Afghanistan or Iraq or particularly the Islamic State. You think about the Islamic State and over the last two and a half, three years now, that we have done the last that I was aware that it's been something like five or six, seven, eight sorties per day average that have been spread over, you know, something roughly the size of Alabama. I mean, this is bad if you are standing underneath one of those bombs, but from an organizational standpoint this is tolerable. So we can apply this time compression against the Taliban or against the Islamic State and likewise even with relatively small groups of people that we typically have thought about from a counterinsurgency standpoint, which is probably a bit dangerous to think about anything from that standpoint, is that if you give people little time to move from point A to point B to rethink their plans to recover, et cetera, you present them with problems that pretty soon become simply intolerable that you can't overcome. So I think there was another one over here if we still have time. Yes, thank you. Sir, Lieutenant Colonel Dennis Cheshul from Ukraine and Flight 17 and my question to you will be not relevant to Iraqi war or everything. My question is relevant to Russia. You touched it and I was listening carefully and didn't get the answer to my question. So if you like, could you share with us your strategic perspective according to the situation in Ukraine in exactly the role of air power in that conflict? Is Russia able to do the next step to escalate this conflict to full scale? What is the probability of using air power? Just your strategic perspective. Thank you. So I must apologize. I don't have a good current understanding of exactly what the force ratios are, et cetera. My general impression is that if the Russians made a decision to destroy or to defeat Ukraine, they could do it within a very short period of time. And it would be very difficult for you to do anything other than to pull back into some kind of defensible positions and try to prolong the operation long enough that the Russians would say, not some going home or whatever, which is a pretty chancey thing because you have no idea whether they will or not. So then you start thinking about it from a use of your own air power and I don't know what you have in any detail, what its range is, what its capabilities is, but I've come back, I really have found this whole five ring concept to be really, really an important kind of an idea. And it's important not simply from the application of kinetic force, air power, et cetera, but if you think about your opponent has a central ring that has leadership in it. Well, the chances that you could actually attack that leadership with airplanes is probably pretty small, probably zero for practical purposes, I'm guessing. So you start thinking, all right, if I can't use air power, what else can I use to begin to get these guys to move in a different direction? What would have to happen for them to say, I don't really want to do Ukraine, I'd rather do something else, or what can I do to make it more difficult for them to do it? I don't know whether they have financial interests in Ukraine or not, but you know, people do take their financial interests into concern. We certainly saw that in the war against Serbia. So you just start thinking about, okay, I can't do this, but I need to get the leadership to move in a little bit different direction, or what about the resources that they have, their communications is their way to interfere with that, and that probably begins to get into the cyber kind of a thing. And what I would suspect is that in your case that what you don't want to do is to get into an all-out kind of shooting war, because I think that would be very, very unfortunate for you. So you think about strategically, here are the things that need to be accomplished, how can I accomplish those things without getting into a shooting war? So I mean, this is a very complex question, it's a good one, so there's some thoughts on it. Sir, I think we have time for one more question, and I see someone standing over there. Good afternoon, sir. Lieutenant Colonel Hoyer from Flight 23. Early in the year we certainly spoke and contrasted our ideas about Germany and Klauswitz. I was wondering if you were able to identify any of the merits of the counter-argument to the Five Rings theory? No. I'll expand just a touch on that. And I want to say, and probably with the risk of offending 50% of the people in here, maybe more, that one of the... Let me ask you to name a single country that really believed in Klauswitz that ever wanted war. I'm not seeing any nominations putting a bit in a spot here. So that might suggest that maybe these ideas aren't very good. And just as an example, so Klauswitz wrote about the Napoleonic Wars, how many Navy guys are there in here? You know, a handful in the thing. So you all have read Klauswitz. How many mentions are there in Klauswitz about the Royal Navy operations and the creation of a blockade against France? Zero. Yeah, absolutely zero. So I would say this guy didn't know what he was talking about. He wrote some pretty neat words, maybe. And there's a couple of high-level things. Wars of continuation of politics. Okay, fine, got it. And so, read any more? Eh, read something else. So it's not so much a Germany-Klauswitz kind of a thing. There's probably value in Germany, but it's a little difficult to get out simply because that the things that he's talking about, siege warfare, fortresses, lines of communication, all the rest of that stuff, still really apply. But it's a little bit tough to do that mental translation to move into a current situation. So the idea of spending much time with Klauswitz, just to me, no longer makes very much sense. Is there a good substitute for it? I think the five rings certainly contributes a lot to the creation of strategy. But there's, you know, talk about things to do, and some of you are going on for advanced degrees and so on. Figure out a way to replace this guy. And when talking about books, let me just mention one book real quickly. About two years ago, roughly, a book came out which was called How the War Was Won. It's about World War II. And it's written by a guy named Philip O'Brien. The basic thesis of this book is that the land battles that took place in World War II were basically insignificant insofar as the success or failure of either side. The thing that defeated Japan and Germany simultaneously for practical purposes was really was the operations that reduced the mobility from strategic operational and tactical levels down to pretty close to zero. You couldn't move stuff, you couldn't move troops, you couldn't move ships, you couldn't feed people. That mobility was just squeezed down to nothing. And that attack on strategic mobility was primarily accomplished through air power and sea power. Probably air power a little bit more important, but nevertheless it was both of them that contributed. But if you start thinking about, well maybe that's a pretty good answer to what the real war is, is how can we reduce the mobility capability of the opponent down to pretty close to zero. That probably provides you success regardless of the operation that you're talking about. If Taliban guys can't move from one place to another, they're not very effective. If Islamic State can't move from one part of their caliphate to another, they are pretty darn ineffective, et cetera, et cetera. So think about that sort of stuff. Read that book if you haven't read it because it's extraordinarily well documented. The statistics are really eye-opening. So figure out a better and let's get ourselves out of it. It's time to end the fascination on Napoleon. And if you ever think about it, the Clausewitz was writing a book about the brilliance of Napoleon. The last time I looked, he lost. And he died at St. Helena, a broken man. So probably not the best guy to try to copy when you're trying to put together some kind of a serious war with somebody or other. Sir, it's time we have for questions today. Colonel Warden, good ones. Thank you. On behalf of the Gathering of Eagles in ACSE, we want to thank you for your time here this week and sharing your experiences and insights with us today. So thank you. And thank you both for all of your work. Thank you all. Thank you all. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.