Special Briefing on Army and Air Force Headquarters Reorganization

Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2001 - 1:30 p.m. EST

(Special briefing on Army and Air Force headquarters reorganization with Secretary of the Army Thomas White and Secretary of the Air Force James Roche. Also participating were Gen. John Jumper, chief of staff of the Air Force; Gen. John Keane, vice chief of staff of the Army; and Rear Adm. Craig Quigley, deputy assistant secretary of Defense for public affairs. Slides shown in this briefing are on the Web at http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Dec2001/g011218-D-6570C.html )

Quigley: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.

On September 10th Secretary Rumsfeld gave a speech to launch DoD's Acquisition and Logistics Excellence Week. I'm sure many of you may have forgotten those particular set of remarks, given the events of the very next day. But he noted at that point that our challenge is to transform not just the way we deter and defend, but the way that we conduct our daily business as well. He challenged the men and women of the Defense Department with addressing those challenges that faced us, and outlined a set of imperatives:

One, the need to shift resources to protect against the evolving threats of the 21st century.

Two, the need to attract and retain talented people to both military and civilian service.

And three, the need to streamline and modernize our business processes, organizations, and ways of doing business.

And the following day, September 11th, one of the evolving threats of the 21st century became all too apparent to all of us.

Throughout the period between September 11th and today, the military departments and other elements of the Department of Defense have been doing many things to answer those challenges that Secretary Rumsfeld laid down on the 10th of September. So with us here today we have both Secretary Tom White, secretary of the Army; Secretary Jim Roche, secretary of the Air Force; as well as General Keane and General Jumper, the vice chief of staff of the Army and the chief of staff of the Air Force, to address what those two military departments have been doing in the way to reorganize and make themselves more efficient and more effective in this early part of the 21st century.

And since you will all ask, by the way, Secretary of the Navy Gordon England is similarly working on similar efforts within the Navy and Marine Corps, within the Navy Department, and will be down in the not-too-distant future to discuss parallel efforts under way in the Navy Department as well.

I will ask you that the subject of this is strictly on the reorganization of the Army Department and of the Air Force Department; it is that subject and that subject only. It is not Operation Enduring Freedom. And with that, gentlemen, I'll turn the podium over to you.

White: Thank you.

Good afternoon. On behalf of Jim and I, thanks for coming. I'm going to talk about the realignment of the Army headquarters.

I might also introduce Deputy Under Secretary of the Army John McDonald. John, will you stand up just a minute? John has led a group that's done all the hard work on the Army side, so if there are questions that we don't get to in the Q&A, and you want detailed follow-up, John would be happy to provide that.

As the chart indicates, we are transforming. As you well know, we're transforming the tactical and operational side of the department. We are also going to transform the business side of the department, making decisions faster, with smaller headquarters.

We've got to have one Army headquarters. As you know, we have traditionally had a secretariat and an Army staff. My experience as a staff officer on the Army staff and now as a member of the secretariat is that in the past those organizations were always not appropriately aligned. We've got to free up people from the headquarters and push them out to the -- and the associated funding to the war fighters. And we can't wait for some optimal time where we're not at war or where the pressures of daily operations create some pause. In fact, I would argue that the 11 September situation and the war that we find ourselves in makes this transformation even more important than perhaps it was before.

What you will see is the result of an enormous amount of work. It is work that both the uniformed side, represented by our vice chief today, and the civilian side of the department agree on. It has congressional support. We've briefed in detail, both the House and the Senate side, the committees that have interest here. And I want to publicly thank the Army Science Board for a great deal of help as we put this together last summer.

Next chart, please.

Okay. This is phase one of what we expect to be a three-phased activity. Phase one focuses on the Army headquarters -- the Army staff and the secretariat. And I'll get into phase two and phase three a little bit later. It unifies and streamlines decision-making. It realigns fragmented functions within organizations. It appropriately restricts the secretariat, the Army secretariat to the business of policy, principally, and the detailed staff work is done in the Army staff. We have mushed together those two responsibilities, and that has caused the secretariat, in my opinion, to grow too large, so we're doing something about that. It takes out unnecessary layers. And I want to stress that this is all consistent with Title X, so we don't anticipate any legislation that will be necessary to enact this.

Next one, please.

This is the structure, and let me just migrate over here and explain this. This is what I call the unified headquarters, which aligns the secretariat part up here with the Army staff part, the principal officers, down here. The executive office of headquarters, Department of the Army, includes myself, it includes the under secretary, the chief of staff, and the vice chief of staff. This is analogous in a corporation to an office of the chairman.

And each of us has statutory responsibilities that we perform. But we are looking to have a much more course integration amongst the four of us and an executive office of headquarters DA as we go forward. Those pieces that by statute report to us -- the office of the chief of public affairs, for example, legislative liaison -- all of that will continue.

We are establishing a very strong director of the Army staff here who will coordinate all the activities in the department, not only for the Army staff, but for the secretary as well. I guess there's some irony in this, because in 1973, when the steadfast reorganization of the Army established the director of the Army staff, that was the original intent. And it never came about over the years. The actions, the activities of the secretariat and the coordination of staff activities were all separate from the Army staff. We're combining those in a director of the Army staff.

Each of the assistant secretaries will have an advice and assistance relationship with its principal staff officers. And the principal staff officers will be renamed along classic traditional lines: G1 for personnel, G2 intel, G3 operations and plans, and G4 and G8 and so forth. This better aligns the Army staff with the way the field designates these people. And by the way, the staff was organized with these titles by General Pershing in 1919, again by General Marshall during the war -- Second World War. So this is going back to Army tradition a little bit. But each one of these people from the G8 over will have an advice and assistance relationship with the assistant secretary. So that we combine in a way the two organizations in the personnel business and the manpower business, the assistant secretary from M&RA, Richard Brown in this case, with the G1. And we put everything that has to do with staff operations on the G1 side, and we put the policy on the assistant secretary side. And we have an effective linking of the organization.

The G3 and the G2 have specific requirements to support the chief and the vice in their joint responsibilities. And so they don't have the counterpart oversight that the rest of the staff does. The assistant secretary for M&RA, then: we're taking civilian personnel operations, putting it back in the G1 shelf where it belongs, and the M&RA will focus on policy.

One other key note here is that the G8, who is responsible for the program of the Army, is and, in fact, lines up well with the J8 on the Joint Staff and will have an advice and assistance responsibility with the ASA FM&C, which creates for the first time in the Army a chief financial officer in the assistant secretary that has responsibility for resource allocation not only in the short term, called the budget, but also in the mid- to long term called the program. And those will both flow in through the assistant secretary for FM&C.

Why don't you flip the next chart there, and we'll leave this one up down there, and I'll talk about some of the guiding principles.

Okay. Some improvements. Requirements development and validation. Up until about a year ago the approval of requirements for new systems and other things in the Army had migrated to Commander TRADOC. And that tended to produce fiscally unconstrained -- a dollar value unconstrained requirement which was not terribly useful. We have brought responsibility for oversight and approval of requirements back to the G3, and we have formed an Army Requirements Oversight Council which tracks well with the Joint Requirements Oversight Council run by the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. So again we have alignment between us and either the Joint Staff or OSD in a critical area. And we will have from day one the consideration of the financial impacts of requirements right alongside with the operational concerns that generates requirement as well.

Resource management I have already talked about. The G8 with the PA&E of the Army underneath the G8 combines with the Budget Officer of the Army in advice and assistance to the assistant secretary for Financial Management. And that lines up well with the way the OSD comptroller is organized, which has both PA&E responsibilities and budget responsibilities.

In each of these areas, the G8, for example, will have a list of tasks that are chartered to flow with assistance and advice to the assistant secretary, and a list of tasks that they will be responsible to the chief of staff and the vice chief of staff for, and that'll be very clearly established in the implementing instruction.

Acquisition -- we've done three things here. First thing in acquisition is we have gotten AMC out of the major acquisition business. That will all report in and through the acquisition executive, which happens to be the statutory requirement. The second thing is we are establishing a contracting command to centralize the function of contracting, which should produce efficiencies of scale and quality of operation, underneath the assistant secretary for Technology and Logistics.

The third thing we're doing is, we are establishing an advice and assistance relationship between the G4, the Army's logistics staff officer and the assistant secretary for acquisition, logistics and technology, for the obvious reasons of including sustainability in the business of developing new equipment. So that's the acquisition side.

AC/RC integration -- we are one Army today. We're one Army in Bosnia, where the 29th Division is deployed in pulling the stabilization mission. We have 18,000 reservists mobilized today in a variety of tasks, everything from airport security on one end in the homeland security business, to deployment into CENTCOM and the tactical AOR. What we are doing is taking the Office of Chief of Army Reserve and the National Guard Bureau and we are taking functions out of there and integrating them fully in the Army staff, so that the personnel function for the National Guard will be in it. And we have our C officers fully integrated in each one of the staff billets of the Army staff, and we'll significantly reduce the size of the shadow staff that has developed over the years in the separate offices of OCAR and the National Guard Bureau.

Installation Management. We've taken a page from the Air Force here, and that is we will establish an installations command that doesn't run through the major commands of the Army. Where the major commands in the past in their efforts to oversee installations have had different standards for installation performance, have taxed the money on occasion or diverted it for other purposes, we're going to use the Air Force model here and the installations of the Army will report directly in to the assistant secretary for Installations and Environment, who will be ably assisted again, typical of the other relationships, with the assistant chief of staff for Installation Management.

And then finally, Information Management down here. We will have the chief information officer for the department, also known as the G6, the same person. And they will be responsible to manage the overall IT infrastructure and information management for the department, just like you would have on the corporate staff of a normal corporation.

Okay. Next chart here, please. And we can get into more detail, if you want, in the Q&A.

What are the next steps? Phase one -- really at the end of November we were complete. We're telling you about it today. The actual implementation will be done by the summer of 2002. We intend to save resources and do all the things we did at the start, but this is not a game to reduce the end strength of the Army. This is a game to take excess staffing that we have in corporate headquarters and move it to the fighting units and the tactical side of the Army. So it's not about a reduction from the end strength of the Army. But that's phase one.

Phase two is, we go to the remaining field operating agencies, which have a number of spaces in them. We'll make decisions and then march there. And phase three we'll start in January and we'll be finished by mid-March, so you'll see follow on phases to this as we go through throughout the Army.

Okay. Anything more here? Let's see. I think that's about it. Do you get the -- you get the point.

Let me turn the business over to Jim Roche and let him talk to you about the Air Force transformation, and then we'll both be available for Q&As. Jimmy?

Roche: Thank you, Tommy.

I'll be more brief because Tom has gone over a number of the points. We have a bit of a different circumstance. One, the Air Force staff had shrunk over the past number of years, so it wasn't a matter that we had a lot of excess weight. We in fact are organizing to fit how we really have been operating on a day-to-day basis now for a good six months, and even longer in some cases, and that's along the lines of integrated product teams wherever possible.

So what you see is something that conforms precisely with the law -- then you'll -- the red lengths are those who reported to me; blue lengths are those who reported to the chief of staff -- (coughs) -- excuse me -- and we recognize that we all live with a duality in our lives. We both worry about the Department of the Air Force's future; we also worry about preparing the fighting forces and supporting the forces that are fighting currently.

And in each case, we'll find that different parts of the staff at different times are serving me, as the senior member of the Air Force, or serving the chief of staff in his role on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as the operational leader. In good IPT fashion, when it comes to an operational issue, we all line up, and we support the chief of staff, because he is the representative to the Joint Chiefs -- yet, in fact, things go -- flow back and forth to Title X responsibilities to train and equip the force -- to equip; "train" was the third word -- organize -- organize the force. We're organizing now.

So this "spaghetti chart" appears to be complicated, but there were three basic purposes: One was try to improve the effectiveness of how we operate on a day-to-day basis -- to remove stovepipes, to not have things go up one chain and then start up the second chain. The second was to give ourselves a chance to find where overlaps might occur -- where, in fact, we were duplicating effort in the functional areas where there were both representatives on the air staff and the secretariat -- and you see these teams we form, showing where the green dashed arrows are, things like NAPAR (sp), reserve affairs and financial management, our installations logistics and our chief information officer and some of his areas. So that was the second.

The third, though, was really to help us transform in the way we lead. So there are two new things on this chart that were not part of the air staff of the past: One, we increasingly feel that subjects of command control and information surveillance -- or intelligence surveillance, reconnaissance -- are key to our futures. And the architecture we have for command and control is so important to us that everything we develop -- our doctrine as well as our equipment -- has to be consistent with that.

So we're creating a new position, the deputy chief of staff for warfare integration, which is shown right here. And in fact, it's -- that office will worry about the architecture for our fighting forces. We've put it in parallel with the office of chief information officer, because there, we're talking about enterprise architecture and how we actually run the entire department. There should be good best practices that can flow back and forth. For instance, supply-chain management and the management of the department should help in combat logistics for the fighting forces. But we wanted to have one place to try to integrate us, so that when we build new systems or design new systems, they fit a common architecture.

This will put great pressure on the group who does requirements for the Air Force, which basically can be the major commands flowing into our -- of our operations group or Air Force XO. And here we're looking for concept of operations, so we know what it is we want to do, and then how does that integrate with other things.

So, one notion is to emphasize much, much, much more than in the past the command and control for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, as well as for strike.

Second transforming thing is to take our responsibility as executive agent for space very seriously. We now, as of last week, have an undersecretary for space who's been confirmed, appointed, on board -- Mr. Peter Teets. He is responsible, as you know, as director of the National Reconnaissance Office, but also for what we call Air Force space or wide space, for pulling these together, and will have powers based on the implementation of the Space Commission's recommendations that are being implemented by Secretary Rumsfeld.

In this capacity, we're not taking space and saying, okay, you worry about space and we'll worry about airplanes and all the other things. We're saying that the responsibility for the Executive Agency for Space is the entire Air Force's responsibility. Therefore, in this headquarters leadership group of myself, the chief of staff, the under secretary and the vice chief of staff, we all will take the space responsibility seriously. Only, in this case, the IPT lead would of course be the under secretary -- he'll worry about space on a more daily basis. But we all have to support him, and in fact, any one of our functions on any given day is part of that. Our acquisition community is certainly going to be supporting him in trying to work with our space programs, our personnel community, in trying to have robust and self-fulfilling careers for our space officers.

All of this is to say we're trying to master the duality of relationships we have, both between the management of the department, and the preparation and support of people who are out fighting in conflict at the time. This makes it easier for us -- we have lived, in many cases, like this, we've had a great pilot program in our financial world this budget session, where the people who do the programming and the people who are doing the budgeting have worked hand-in-hand so that, when the decision is made in one case, it's automatically picked up by the other, and the teaming relationship has been terrific. We're seeing this applied in a number of areas, and if we're going to transform the Air Force and how it thinks, and make it more agile, which is our goal, then we wish to be able to have people working together and not creating work for each other. And that's the basic point.

Now I'd like to invite Gen. Jumper and Gen. Keane to join Tom, myself, and any questions you might have.

Q: (inaudible), three part question for you, Mr. Secretary. Can you be specific as to the personnel and dollar savings that you expect to achieve from the realignment that you've announced? And secondly, how does this plan that you just briefed differ from the plan that you sent up to the Hill that the Senate Armed Services Committee had concerns over?

White: Let me deal with the second question first, and then we'll show you -- I've got a chart, I think, that talks about the specifics of that.

First of all, Senators Levin and Warner sent me a letter and raised three concerns.

The first concern was the executive office concept and their opinion might put the chief and the vice chief in the chain of command of the assistant secretaries. We have inserted language that says that that could very well happen, and it'll happen on a case by case basis that I specifically authorize. And they're comfortable with that. And I could foresee a number of instances when it will come up and it will arise, and I would expect the assistant secretaries to be responsive to the chief and the vice, and we discussed it with all them, and they will. Senators Levin and Warner are happy with that language, as is their staff.

The second is the business of dual-hatting. The Army staff principals -- G1, G2 and so are -- G4 -- as military deputies to the assistant secretaries. Their concern was it would inhibit the chief and the Army staff in developing independent views. Two subjects on that.

First of all, the G2 and the G3 don't have an advise and assist mission to one of the assistant secretaries because they are the principal elements of the staff that support the vice and the chief in their joint responsibilities, which are unique and outside the Title X responsibilities of the department. Inside the Title X responsibilities the relationship is advise and assist, and we did not title them military deputies as dual hat to the assistant secretary. And again, I think the Senate Armed Services Committee is happy with that.

And then finally, they were concerned about integration of the secretariat and the Army staff. That is physically completing a combination, and we have stopped short of that. The Army staff and the secretariat are distinct entities. What we've done is cleaned up, as Jim Roche talked about, the overlaps between the two of them, eliminated the overlaps and focus the secretariat on what it does for a living, mainly policy, and what the Army staff does in its case for a living.

Let me see the back-up chart on bodies. We got it back here someplace. Hang on. Let me see what this -- yeah, here we go.

Okay. We have so far reviewed actually the headquarters and 20 of the 48 field operating agencies. About 16,000-plus spaces. We've taken 10,000 of those spaces and transferred them to MACOM responsibility.

This is largely the Recruiting Command that's been placed in a new accessions command that will be a responsibility of TRADOC.

We've targeted 1,200 of the remaining 6,000 headquarters spaces for elimination. That's both military and civilian spaces.

As you know, we received guidance from the secretary of Defense to achieve a 15 percent headquarters reduction as a part of the buildup of the '03-07 program, and this accomplishes that goal for us. We'll have to see how the requirements end up, but we'll probably end up with 7(00) or 800 spaces in savings between the military and civilian side. And all of the military spaces, at least, will be given back to the field commands, to fill requirements on the field command side. So we'll be transferring people out of the headquarters into the field commands, which is a major thrust of the reorganization.

Next question, please. Yes, ma'am?

Q: I've got a question for Secretary Roche and General Jumper. You mentioned CONOPS generation, and Secretary White mentioned the logistics command that they are setting up in the Army. Can you talk a little bit about how these integrated product teams will interface, if at all, with the program offices and their Air Force Materiel Command and then in the PEO structure? And also in terms of CONOPS generation, how is that going to filter up into these product teams?

Roche: They're both very good questions. AFMC is an organization that really has two parts. It also has duality. One is as a builder and as a sustainer. The part of AFMC that worries about building deals with the assistant secretary for acquisition, primarily. Sustainer would be dealing with the assistant secretary for installation logistics, as well as the DCS for logistics. Two, each of us have these dualities, so that the PEO process still reports to the assistant secretary for acquisition.

But we find increasingly we don't -- nobody is isolated. You can't do that alone without understanding the implications on personnel or the implications on CONOPS.

To the CONOPS point, we're trying to start there, and we're trying to have a sense of what do we want, so that we don't try and build every system to, as they say, solve world hunger. We don't need every system to do everything. We're thinking more of portfolios of systems, and therefore not trying to stretch the requirements to the point where it's almost impossible to build something, but to build it so it fits into a larger architecture and therefore possibly be much more efficient in how we allocate our resources.

To that end, the C2ISR center at Langley Air Force Base will be reporting directly to John, myself, and the undersecretary and the vice chief, as well as to the three major commands who it should serve, which is the ACC Command, Air Combat Command, the Mobility Command, and the Space Command.

So we're trying to hook them together so that we don't design something that doesn't fit into an architecture, which doesn't have sensible count-offs. Those operating commands, those major commands that are also dual-hatted in that they serve CINCs separately, will have inputs in and be part and parcel of the developmental concept of operations for what they need. What we are trying to do is integrate across various concepts of operations by having the war integration role.

John?

Jumper: And the second part I'd say, Amy, is that we're trying to get out of this habit we've been in over the years of writing out perfectly punctuated long and wordy requirements that we throw over the transom to the acquisition community and wait for a large number of years before we see the result. The plan is that the requirements people will be integrated in the day-to-day business of the program office so that as technology moves -- and this is what we've been seeing is technology moves at the pace that we see, an ever-increasing pace, you can be doing trade-offs with the requirements, more or less on the fly, and satisfying everyone at the same time.

So it's led by concepts of operations that turn into requirements, the requirements into specifications that we hand over to the acquisition community, with everybody being involved every step of the way. The testers are included in that, too. We hope then to achieve some efficiencies, cut down acquisition time, create an environment where spiral development can flourish, and we get to the results a lot quicker.

White: Questions, please. Sir?

Q: Mr. Secretary, your integration of the Army Reserve and the National Guard -- is that going to cause some heartburn on the Hill? They're a little sensitive about the reserve component, particularly the Guard. You know, they just elevated their commanders to three-star rank to give them additional pull. Are you now going to sputter them inside your organization?

White: No, because we're going to retain the Office of the Chief Army Reserve as a separate entity and the Chief of the National Guard Bureau, Tom Plewes and Roger Schultz. And what we're going to do is fully integrate reserve component officers into the Army general staff as a reflection of the fact that we're all one Army and to better integrate those headquarters. And I think that the Reserve component leadership and the Congress that so actively supports them will be happy.

Jack?

Keane: Well, when we assign Reserve component or National Guard officers to the Army staff now, what they primarily work on is their own functions, and that's going to dramatically change. What they're going to work on is Army business, period. So you could have a branch chief or division chief or director who would be from any one of those three components, and that's dramatically different than anything we've done in the past.

White: Other questions, please? Sir?

Q: Yeah, I wanted to ask about information management in the Army, and specifically how that is going to change the command structure. I've heard a little bit about a NETCOM or Network Enterprise and Technology Command?

White: Right.

Q: I was wondering if you could explain a little bit about this.

White: Well, just -- and I'll let the vice chief follow up on it. But the purpose of it is to get better control out of our -- over our infrastructure so that -- we've come up with a solution that stretches across the Army and is not fragmented by command and on a local basis. So we are looking for strategic control of the Army's information management. And that will be the chief information officer's responsibility to that command.

Jack?

Keane: What we're doing with information management is similar to the other major businesses that we're changing.

The Army since World War II has always fought decentralized. So it's natural for the leaders then and after then to organize the business side of the Army decentralized. Well, in today's war that makes no sense. You've got to be centralized. Information management (is) one of those. What we have done with information management, and we have let all of our commands by and large do what they want to do out there. So we've got 6,300 networks. And it makes no sense in an organization like this to have that kind of decentralization. And we are going to centralize this and have one major portal that we operate on. Every soldier in the Army, whether active, Reserve, or Guard, will have access to that portal. Over 600,000 of them today have access. They'll do their personnel business there. They'll do their finance business there. They'll do their travel business there. And just the general business of the Army will be conducted there.

Right now we have more archival data on that portal than the Library of Congress has. Right now today. So we've made some huge progress. And we'll continue to make it.

White: I think another example is our relationship with a big strategic player -- say, Microsoft. We literally have hundreds of separate contracts across the Army by various types of products from Microsoft. And if you rolled that up into a strategic relationship, you would get the leverage of becoming one of their biggest customers and could get the Enterprise architecture instead of Aegis, as an example. And we would expect the CIO to attack that type of challenge.

Other questions. Sir.

Q: This is for the Air Force. The new deputy chief of staff for warfighting and integration, a couple of questions. Do you know who that's going to be yet? And how is he going to or she going to interface with the other deputy chiefs? I don't know if that new position will be taking staff from the others, or, if -- you know, if the XO will be giving up certain responsibilities to this new person.

Roche: He or she will be named in due course. We recognize that this is something very new. We have met with all of our DCS's and assistant secretaries, and we're all on board. Our program is being implemented today, because we've been doing a lot of this and we've been trying to operate in this way. This part of it, we've told everyone, we're going to try and we're going to look at again in about a month and a half, look at it again in three months to keep working it. But it is clear that the notion of command and control, the architecture for that and for intelligence-surveillance-reconnaissance is key to our belief in air and space forces, is key to our belief in global reconnaissance and strike, that office, the reason we haven't designated a person yet is because it can't just be a facilitating office. In fact, that office has got to have some clout, and it may be clout over certain designs of our systems and how they fit together. But if we can get the concept of operations from the major commands through our XO, through ops people, and then try integrating it among other things, then the acquisition community will be a heck of a lot better off because they're not, as John says, something thrown over the transom to them.

There may have to be some yielding of power, but in IPT fashion, you yield power to gain much greater rewards for everybody. And we've shown that in the case of our financial managers, who really have done this through this whole budget process, and I think they'd be the first to tell you that it's been terrific, because they can spell each other, they can worry about the second order consequences before they get faced with it.

John?

Jumper: The key word here is "integration." If you go through a typical kill cycle -- find, fix, track, target, engage and assess -- the problems we have are at the seams, between and among those functions. The main charter here will be to attack those seams through what we call the horizontal integration of manned/unmanned in space. And the challenge will be to make sure that we don't spring to a solution that is stovepipe-centric, if you will -- is it all space, is it all air, is it all manned, is it all unmanned -- without looking at the trade-offs and the interfaces that would have to take place to make it as beneficial as it can be to commanders. That's, after all, who we're trying to do this business for.

And then to team them up with the CIO, as the secretary of the Army has said, does us the great benefit of taking advantage of the information technology that's already out there. And I -- we have seen in Afghanistan the blending of systems that exist -- the Predator UAV with the AC-130, in an effort that put the Predator video onboard the AC-130. Seems like a simple step, but that's the integration of stovepipes that just a few months ago would probably not have even spoken to one another in a direct link on the battlefield.

It's these sorts of things we're trying to close the seams and improve.

Roche: A lot of this has come about because we dialog most of the day. I was very concerned about intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance because I think the Air Force transformation in this era really faces two major challenges, and Afghanistan has only made them more real to us.

One is the ability to have twenty-four-hours-a-day, seven-days-a- week, day, night, good weather, bad weather, persistent intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance per year. The second is the ability, once a target is identified -- and it may be moving -- to discern it from others, and then have what I might call almost instantaneous attack. That's our long-term goal.

What we've recognized in the first part is, no one system can do the job. You can't do it all with video, you can't do it all with synthetic aperture radar or hyperspectral or IR or EO -- it is the integration of these things that becomes terribly important. And that's what we're driving to, to be able to solve those problems.

Q: Isn't that what -- Secretary White, if I'm a commander at a far away installation like Fort Drum, what does this mean to me?

White: In the installation management business?

Q: Yeah.

White: That means that just like if you were the commander of one of the forward-deployed divisions in Europe, the day-to-day concerns of installation management and all the details of that will not be something that you or your staff will have to be directly involved in.

You will have an installation management structure there, funded and resourced to meet your priorities and run your installation so that you can focus on preparing the 10th Mountain Division for war. And it's -- the structure will be very similar to what we have experienced in practice with -- in Europe over the years.

Keane: Now to follow up on that, is that's probably the most controversial part of this reorganization, because it changes how our field commanders are apportioned the dollars to run their installations. In the Army, an installation commander, in most cases, is also a commanding general, and he has a garrison commander who works with him to run the installation. But it's through the installation commander, he receives the dollars to run the installation, as well as do his mission; his mission is to train that force that he's responsible for in combat.

What we intend to do is to split that out; he'll still receive the mission money, but he will not receive the money to run his installation or what we call base operations accounts; that will go through another headquarters, and he will not touch that money. He will only receive the mission money that will help him train his force. And the installation will be run with the money allocated to another chain of command, and that's very different for us.

Q: John, do you anticipate, then, that the problem that has dogged the Army through the '90s of migration of operational optempo funds in to fix problems on installations will be obviated by that step, so that a two-star commander at Ft. Campbell or wherever is no longer going to have to balance those two challenges -- that every cent of the money he gets, he can spend on his operational missions and on his tactical responsibilities, rather than on base ops and so forth?

Keane: That's the intent. I mean, the problem, frankly, that we've had -- just to put all the cards on the table here -- is that we have had declining budgets for years and a lack of adequate resources to both --that is, the mission and the operational support for our installations.

As a result of that, our commanders have had to make some pretty tough choices out there. The mission account always comes first, so if you look at our Army installations, you can recognize what's taken place out there; they've been depressed through the years. And we think we can gain some efficiencies, financially, doing it this way and establish, if you will, Army standards for those installations and prioritize the dollars against those standards, based on need.

White: And the money gets there more direct, so it's not filtered through a bunch of intermediate headquarters on the installation side. And not only the money, but the standards for execution, and the tracking of it will be set up on a much more direct line.

Yes, please, ma'am?

Q: To follow up on the last question that General Jumper and Secretary Roche answered, you mentioned clout for this new deputy chief of staff. Is that going to be provided through -- would he have more stars than the other deputy chiefs of staff? Would he be equal to the XO? And how would he weigh in the Air Force Council in board meetings? And are you planning to send this up -- you mentioned a phased re-looking at it. Are you sending it up sooner, later? Will it affect the '04 POMs?

Roche: Okay. I think I'll try and John will fix anything I may screw up there, Amy. (laughter)

One, we're going to do it soon. We're going to do it soon. He or she will be called upon to set up something that is new. He or she will be of equal rank to the other DCSs. He or she will have an equal position in the Air Force Council. He or she will be dealing with the CIO as equals.

And the clout has to do with making sure that we don't ask an officer to try to persuade only, but to in fact have some role in saying this fits, this doesn't fit, or this program that we're developing does not fit the overall C2ISR program. If we're going to put a new radar in an airplane, we want that radar to be able to fit in with the larger program. That's -- if we are learning anything in Afghanistan -- we knew it intellectually, but what we're learning on a day-to-day basis is the power of multiple sensors that can be fused; that can pull and build a mosaic, and from that mosaic have an understanding of the -- break through the opaqueness of the battlefield and understand it far more. We want to make sure all of our systems fit.

And worry about things like bandwidth. We have built this UAV, this UAV, that UAV. Each one had its own controls like when we were little kids with each one controlling one plane. But when we go to the world of unattended combat vehicles, we're going to have to learn how to operate these things in swarms. The bandwidth could be huge. So we want to make sure we don't start down a path in acquisition that's just going to not fit with everything else we're doing.

So the clout that we're sort of thinking first and foremost will be, this is a person that can say this passes the test for sensible war-fighting architecture, just as our CIO has the power to say, no, you cannot start a legacy system, to try and get people to do good supply chain management, hopefully push us, along with the rest of the services, because we're doing this together, in an area where we can have good enterprise architecture and get the benefits from it.

Sir?

Jumper: We're doing this mainly also because this is the main leg of our transformation is to integrate. And the reason that this person will have clout is because the secretary has decided this is what's going to happen. (laughter) And all he said is true, too. (laughter) But we're going to, by God, do it. That's the bottom line to all of us.

Q: You said sooner, but can you tell us a date?

Jumper: Soon. (laughter)

Roche: It will be, I think, announced in terms of weeks, rather than months.

Jumper: Right.

Q: Okay.

White: Sir?

Q: A question about the headquarters. Previously when you've talked about the headquarters reorganization, you've also talked about possibly reorganizing Army combat formation, like divisions, brigades. Is there any progress on that?

White: Well, as you know, we have laid out very clearly how we intend to transform the Army, and the -- with selected recap and modernization of the existing force, the interim brigades, of which we have announced six -- and they'll be fully funded in the program that we send to OMB -- and then, finally, the future combat system. The objective force design and what we do to combine the interim brigades into some sort of divisional structure are all issues on the -- really on the operational side of the department to consider as we go forward.

Jack, do you want to --

Keane: Sure. The -- you know about the interim brigades and the objective force. How we group those formations is under study and review, and we'll have some answers for the secretary here in the upcoming months.

White: But that's a key question.

Yes?

Q: I feel as though I've eaten several rich desserts and missed my meat and potatoes, and you will forgive me for asking you to do this, Secretary. Could you please explain, in words of one syllable, what the major changes are here and what the dollars savings are?

White: I don't think we've cited a dollar savings, because it depends on exactly how the manpower spaces come out and how much of it we get because we have vacant -- spaces that are vacant, how many people transfer to the field Army from the headquarters Army, and so forth. But we will provide that over the next weeks, as Jim Roche would say, as the details of implementation come up.

What we're really doing here is, I think, two principal things.

Number one is, we're going back to the basics after a number of years of an ever-growing secretariat while the Army staff has been cut or the Army of the field has been cut by 40 percent. We've put the secretariat on a diet and refocused them on precisely what the secretary ought to be doing, which is first and foremost civilian control of the department and policy. And they had crawled into a lot of operational areas over the world. So that's the first thing.

And the second thing is, is -- I guess I'll go to three.

The second thing is alignment. So that we have a deputy chief of staff for programs. Now the G8. That person for program development will align with the assistant secretary for financial management, so that we can integrate POM and budget. We just had a combined cycle for this year. So that that product goes forward, either to the comptroller's shop in OSD or the J8 in the Joint Staff. And so that those products fit very well, as the second major thrust.

And the third major thrust is to centralize and to clean up the lines of authority in a lot of areas where there has just been many cooks in the stew and we have too confusing and complicated a structure that leads to fragmentation, information operations and management being one, installation management being another, acquisition being a third. And that's kind of in a nutshell what we're doing.

Roche: I think I'll summarize as follows. Our first order of business is to become more agile, to be able to work faster, have fewer chops, has less bureaucracy. First and foremost. Now, deriving from that will give a position of efficiency. We have to complete our reduction in headquarters staff, and this will help us do it right.

But the most important point is we believe that we're having the opportunity to structure following strategy. We had a strategy first of what it is we need to do to have an Air Force that made sense in this era, and we have a headquarters structure now that will point us towards that strategy, which again is to have exquisite intelligence- surveillance-reconnaissance, global reconnaissance anywhere we are asked to go, and then the ability to strike almost instantaneously as time goes on.

White: Anything else?

Q: I have an Air Force question.

Roche: Sure.

Q: Is there a number we can put on how many people here in the Pentagon might answer to the new assistant chief of staff, or -- ?

Roche: For warfare and integration?

Q: The new deputy chief position for warfighting and integration, how many people might answer to --

Roche: Well, we're going to have two parts to it. There'll be a group here in the Pentagon, but we're also going to rely on something that Mike Ryan and John Jumper started, which is down at Langley, our C2ISR center, which will report here so we have a place to try things and a place to experiment and do simulations and to get a sense of what's right, and then bring it up and have a voice for it worrying about the rest of our programs. But in terms of the size of the actual staff, no. We know it'll be neutral in terms of the total combined headquarters Air Force staff. We're not adding a big component there.

Q: And right now the center down at Langley, they -- do they answer up here? Do they answer to ACC?

Roche: Well, it would change. They originally started answering directly to the chief. It would seem to make much more sense to have that group respond to ACC when John was the commander of ACC, because he has a -- (laughter) -- you have to understand, Frick and Frack have the -- he's the UAV guy, I'm the ISR guy, and we cross a lot in terms of we both have each other's interests.

But the sense was, we both had this burning desire -- I was complaining that we had no one on the staff. He said, "Well, I will bring this up." And it'll both -- brilliantly, because he did it -- report to us personally, but also not just ACC, but to Air Mobility Command and Space Command, our war-fighting components.

White: Yes? (inaudible) -- oh, I'm sorry.

Q: Let me make sure I understood. I'm sorry. Is AFMC going to change in size or role at all?

Roche: No, ma'am, this will be basically transparent to the field. Now we are asking AMC to -- excuse me, AFMC -- to be more cognizant of their duality of both a builder and a sustainer, and to possibly take a look, should they be reorganizing within themselves, to sharpen those lines. And we've asked General Lyles to take a look at that and to get back to us, because we're trying to make this more specific, to have -- again, get rid of the bureaucracy and focus on the different parts.

White: Sir?

Q: If the old DCSPRO, the new G8, is responsible for sort of the analysis of future forces --

White: Right.

Q: -- why is the requirement responsibility going to the G3? Why not put it in the G8?

White: Jack, you want to talk about that?

Keane: In the United States Army, the G3, not only at this level, but at all levels, is a prioritizer. He determines the priority of requirements. And it made sense to us to keep that requirement function in the hands of the G3. And after he establishes that priority, then it's passed to the G8, and he resources it and ensures its future development.

White: Now there's obviously a crosswalk here, because if the G8 comes back and says we can't resource the requirement, then there has to be a re-prioritization. And we have set up the structure so that that'll happen.

Any other questions?

Q: Sir, on the new centralized system, will corps and division commanders still command the installations? And what will the role of the MAJCOMs be in the installation management?

Keane: Yes, there'll still be installation commanders. The garrison commander will have the same role that he's always had -- or she's always had -- in the past. And there'll be a regional director under the first option that we're looking at, which will pass through the financial allocation of the money to the various installations that are in that director's region. So that's the concept. Installation commanders still will be, in most cases, a commanding general, and in some cases, he'll be a colonel or she'll be a colonel -- will be responsible for the overall health and welfare of that installation.

White: And that also tracks the UCMJ responsibility and other things -- why that's appropriate.

Other questions?

Please.

Q: How far along is the Air Force in meeting its headquarters reduction goals?

Roche: Oh, we are a good seven-and-a-half percent there -- seven-and-a-half to eight (percent). So we have about another -- pardon me? Out of 15 (percent). And we have about another seven to seven-and-a-half (percent) to go.

Q: Do you know about how many manpower slots?

Roche: I'm sorry. I don't have it off the top of my head.

We have a larger issue; it's not so much here in the Pentagon, but our places like Air Combat Command people who are listed as headquarters -- they area actually are serving directly in support of the conflict. What's happened with the modern communications is you don't have to move staffs to the theater anymore. That's why General Franks, who, by the way, has been fantastic to us in these experiments in ISR; he's just been wonderful to us -- he's able to do so much from Florida, and we're able to do so much from remote locations.

So you have situations where you can do a lot of back shop work at Langley -- (CIA) -- and here in the building to support people directly. And that's in addition to our normal goals of worrying about how many of what type of bombs are you using, how many are we producing a month, or when will we run out if we don't change production, et cetera, et cetera.

Q: What are the --

Roche: So we've asked people in OSD to please help us -- a better definition of what is a headquarters person, what is a person who -- it isn't easy, direct and indirect. (laughs)

White: One last question, anyone?

Jim, thank you very much. Have a wonderful, merry Christmas and happy New Year. It's good to see you.

Roche: Happy holidays. Thank you.

Roche: Thanks for coming.

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