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US Air Force Contingency Operations
Posted 9/29/2011
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9/29/2011 - NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. (AFNS) -- Gen. Mike Hostage, commander of Air Combat Command; Lt. Gen. Burton M. Field, commander of U.S. Forces Japan; Maj. Gen. Margaret H. Woodward, commander of 17th Air Force and U.S. Air Forces Africa; and Brig. Gen. Roy Uptegraff, commander of the 171st Air Refueling Wing, remarks during a panel at the Air Force Association's 2011 Air & Space Conference & Technology Exposition, National Harbor Md., Sept. 21, 2011.
Below is the transcript:
Good morning. Most of you know I spent the past two years over in the Middle East as the Air Component for Central Command, Commander of USAFCENT, formerly known as CENTAF. During the course of that time we shifted from Iraqi Freedom to New Dawn, and we went through the surge in Afghanistan and now we're in the transition phase out of New Dawn into whatever the next phase will be in Iraq. In Afghanistan, as you all listened to the direction we're taking there, we're working through the plan to get to 2014 and a drawdown in Afghanistan.
I just spent yesterday on Capitol Hill introducing myself and taking the sense of what some of our Members are thinking about the direction these days, and I was open with each one of them saying I've gone from being a consumer and I emphasize the fact that as a consumer over there I got anything and everything I needed. All I had to do was pick up the phone and call General Fraser. Now I've got the other end of the line, and I have to figure out how to actually make that happen. So I get payback now for two years of pretty much anything I needed, to go to the hard part of figuring out how to produce that.
With that, I'll hand off to my buddy here, Burt Field.
Lt. Gen. Field: Thank you, sir.
Good morning. I'm here to discuss Operation Tomadachi if questions come up on that. On March 11th, 1446, there was a 9.0 earthquake that occurred off the coast of Japan. It generated a huge tsunami that devastated several hundred miles of the coastline of Japan. It knocked the earth off its axis slightly. It changed time because our days are a little different than they used to be. And the nation of Japan sunk about a meter into the ocean.
I was in a staff meeting at the time and we felt it to some extent at Yokota Air Force Base which is on the west side of Tokyo. The first indication we had that something was seriously wrong was when we got a phone call saying that there were 11 American-flagged airline carriers coming to Yokota to land because Narita Airport and Haneda Airport in Tokyo had closed.
Shortly after that we were talking, trying to track down the Ambassador because they had evacuated the embassy and in fact they thought the embassy had been damaged so much they weren't going to be able to reoccupy it. I talked to our Chief of the Japanese Joint Staff, General Oriki, who was their CHAD, to find out, and assure him that he had our total support, and we started mobilizing forces within all of the components of the USFJ to get them moving up toward the island of Honshu which is where Tokyo and the disaster occurred.
Over the next several weeks we worked through some humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, consequence management with the interesting nuclear problem the likes of which we hadn't really seen for over 20 years.
So the combination of all of those created a lot of great challenges that we were able to provide some measure of support to the Japanese government, the Japanese Self Defense Force and the Japanese people.
While answering questions there are a couple of things that I'd just like to emphasize. First off, these kinds of operations in a first world country like Japan are different than operations that we normally conduct when we are going to third world countries.
Second, Japan was certainly able to handle all of this without our help, and in fact they were the lead across the board. So the United States Air Force, the U.S. military, the U.S. government, were in support of the Japanese efforts. They did I think a magnificent job.
Third, although we were a support agency, like always your airmen were awesome. As were the sailors, the marines and the soldiers that were part of that team that made things happen out there in Japan and supported that effort.
Maj. Gen. Woodward: Good morning. It's great to be here today and I appreciate the opportunity to talk to you all about the great work our airmen did in the U.S.-led campaign over Libya.
Historically speaking, Odyssey Dawn was an incredibly short campaign. Just 21 days for planning, 13 days for execution, and an additional couple of days to transition over to NATO. However during that period our airmen led a joint/coalition force that included 12 countries, meeting every objective that we were given. We conducted humanitarian relief missions while planning for conflict. We offloaded over 17 million pounds of fuel; executed over 2,000 combat sorties without a single coalition loss; released thousands of pounds of munitions with minimal collateral damage; eliminated the Libyan Air Force and integrated air defense systems a threats; and within 36 hours of authorization, completely stopped a regime assault on Benghazi seizing the initiative from Gadhafi, and I would submit an initiative which he never regained.
Certainly there were challenges, and I hope to talk about those today. For example, we had very little actionable intelligence on Libya when we started the planning. The timeline between the conflict as I already mentioned, was extremely short and loaded with changing strategic guidance throughout. And resources were initially limited to those that were most readily available, rather than those that we believed might be the most effective for the campaign.
Nonetheless, Odyssey Dawn proved once again that air power provides our leaders sovereign options they simply can't get anywhere else. Every Air Force distinctive capability was reaffirmed every day from the earliest days of planning through the last days of transition.
Our equipment performed nearly perfectly and our Air Operation Center, our command and control network, and our ability to find, fix and target regime forces at will were standout enablers in a list of enablers a mile long.
But at the end of the day I think it was the flexibility, professionalism, dedication, and courage of our airmen that saved thousands of Libyan citizens from massacre. It was on their backs that global strike missions lasting as long as 26 hours were executed. It was on their backs that all across Europe and the United States operations were flawlessly supported 24x7. And it was on their backs that split second decisions were made to dynamically strike targets or withhold weapons based on an ever-changing tactical environment. And it was on their backs that the unique flexibility, agility and responsiveness of air power was successfully brought to bear on the nearly limitless set of challenges that the fight presented to us.
Almost as quickly as it began, it was over as we successfully transitioned over to NATO. I think as everyone's seen, we still have work to do in Libya and NATO continues to effectively lead the coalition. As a member of NATO we have been providing support through our unique U.S. capabilities.
I will say as we get into questions, though, that I would rather not answer any questions on ongoing operations that might jeopardize what NATO is doing today. But I will, however, be more than happy to talk all day about Operation Odyssey Dawn and the success of the coalition comprised of professional airmen led by the world's greatest Air Force.
As I said yesterday, I don't know if there's a hero amongst them, but I know collectively what they did was heroic. They saved lives, they made America justifiably proud, and in so doing I think they changed the course of history. I look forward to talking about what they did.
Brig. Gen. Uptegraff: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It truly is a privilege, it's really an honor to be a representative of the 3/13th Air Expeditionary Wing which is still in Western Europe and still I believe is saving lives and promoting a better world for us to live in tomorrow.
It was on the evening of March 17th that I received a phone call from Scott Air Force Base. They just asked one question. Can you go somewhere far sometime soon? [Laughter]. I recognized that as a leadership moment and I said yes. I said yes because, like most of you, I was watching the news, and I knew that Libya was bubbling into something significant. But I did say yes on behalf of my wing.
So the next morning at a staff meeting I posed that question to my staff. Can you go somewhere far sometime soon? I was delighted with their answer. Of course they said yes.
There began an enormous volunteer effort that spread across the Air National Guard and the Air Force Reserve to form a team, a team of terrific airmen, that could come together and with very little notice put all the things together to go over to Western Europe and stand up an operation that would provide the bulk of the air refueling for Operation Odyssey Dawn.
It was Saturday by noon when we first got the word to deploy. So we left that night. We left with as much equipment, as much [inaudible], and with enough backfield support for maintenance that we could get in the jets that we took over, and when I arrived at [inaudible] base, we immediately went to work. Throughout that week more aircraft came in from all three components -- active, Guard and Reserve. I will tell you that it was an outstanding example of total force integration. It was an outstanding example of response. And of course we faced a great deal of uncertainty, but we made the mission happen.
Today the [CALENDA] Wing, I coined that term because when I looked across the ramp one morning the tail [flashes] of all the different aircraft from various wings, the patches on the flight suits were all so different, but yet all of those airmen came together for one common cause, and it was remarkable.
But today we've flown over 2,500 sorties; 22,000 flying hours; and nearly 130 million pounds of fuel have been offloaded. We're still there. Hopefully we're still providing the hope for Libya. Thank you.
Moderator: I see General Hostage has something for General Fraser. "Don't call me anymore." [Laughter].
General Woodward, if you could just share with us, you mentioned you didn't have a lot of actionable intel in the beginning, and is that a failure of a system? Is it poor planning? What do you think needs to be changed? Maybe it's already changed as we move forward.
Maj. Gen. Woodward: I wouldn't say that it was poor planning or failure of the system, I think if we look around the globe, how much can we look at at any given time? And we weren't looking at Libya as an adversary. In fact just several weeks before we started planning on Odyssey Dawn I had literally changed a senior leader engagement that I had with my counterparts in the Libyan Air Force where I was going to go to Libya and meet with them and work a theater security cooperation event. We had literally just changed that because my schedule didn't permit it, not because we didn't want to go to Libya. I don't think they're going to invite me back any time soon, but -- [Laughter].
But I think the real issue here is when something pops up at this stage we can't keep target sets on everything that's out there, so it was a little bit of a surprise, and it's a challenging location. Thankfully it's close to Europe and being in Northern Africa, so we had a little bit more flexibility there and were able to build the target sets we needed based on the national technical means.
Moderator: How did the 17th Air Force Mission change when you got the call?
Maj. Gen. Woodward: For 17th Air Force we just retained some of the U.S.-unique capabilities. We retained collection operations management authority on ISR and we also retained responsibility for personnel recovery forces, and we're still doing all that today. We provide a lot of expertise to their CAOC as far as the ISR [need] and the target area piece to supplement NATO's capabilities.
Moderator: General Field, what were some of the lessons learned, if you can share with us?
Lt. Gen. Field: There's some individual leadership lessons learned and then there are some overall lessons learned that we had in Japan.
The first is no surprise, they're lessons relearned. Communicate more and communicate more often than you think you should. How you act and the demeanor that you present as a commander has great effect on the people you lead and the organizations that you're involved with. And you can never underestimate the value of calm and measured responses and thought.
Organizationally the big thing that we learned in working with the Japanese is that we have to work harder on our information, in this case information sharing. That requires a lot of effort and it requires some changes in the way that we have in policy and in the systems that we employ.
What we did eventually as our organizations got big enough, we actually had very large LNO organizations in each headquarters. In my USFJ hat I had sent my Deputy and a team down to the Japanese Joint Staff, and then in return they had sent a two star general and several Japanese up to the USFJ headquarters.
On the Air Force side we did a similar LNO engagement with their Air Defense Command which is essentially the folks that run their Air Force operationally.
So while those LNOs did a great job and it really engendered trust and it facilitated communication, we have to do better in terms of policy and our daily interaction and in the systems that we use to share information and ultimately in the case of a kinetic type operation, intelligence.
Moderator: Were you in charge of the actual American assistance?
Lt. Gen. Field: I was in charge of the effort for about a week and a half. After that Admiral Woolard, who is my boss on the joint side, decided that he wasn't, if he was to really support the Japanese 100 percent he needed to use all the resources he had available. One of those resources is the JTF-519 which is a standing joint task force commanded by the Commander of Pacific Fleet. So he decided that he wanted to send that group out there to work the relief effort. So they stayed for about two to three weeks, stood up what we called the Joint Support Force. About half of them went back home and I became the commander on that side.
On the Air Force side it started out with, the 5th Air Force is not a [CNAR]. For Japan, the plan in place right now is 13th Air Force Commander, who is Lieutenant General [Kaymar] Kresge, is the JFACC and several other functional leads in terms of Japan and supporting USFJ. So we started that way with [Kaymar] and I on the phone. He sent his deputy, Brigadier General Scotty West, out with a group of people and they set up what essentially would become a JACE organization out there to help with the command and control on the Air Force side.
After the joint support force was established, PACOM changed the C2 arrangements a little bit and put General north as the theater JFACC as the JFACC supporting the operation.
Moderator: General Hostage, what budgetary challenges do these kinds of events represent? Especially the Libya course. How do we, not having budgeted extensively for the gas support structures, how does that affect our operations? How do we cover it?
Gen. Hostage: As you know, we fund military operations such as these with, the operations that I was in command of were all funded with OCO funds, so that's not money that comes out of any of the budgeted process.
The challenge for us, especially with an enduring operation such as has been going on in the CENTCOM AOR for 20 years now, as you fund with OCO you start building a level of infrastructure that becomes somewhat steady state. At some point the OCO funding gets turned off, and all of a sudden you have a [step] function impact to your budget that you either have to shed a lot of pieces and parts for [inaudible]. So one of the things we'll need to look at very carefully as we start to shape the overall AFCENT mission back down to a steady state base, zero op, somewhere in the next several years, is how to make that transition from -- I talked about earlier, the OCO spigot is intoxicating. You can get done anything you need to get done because all you do is ask for it and it shows up. As a taxpayer I was a little sensitive to our ability to do that, but I was not going to fail in mission due to that sensibility.
But the challenge we face is as we taper down these operations, how to go smoothly back down to steady state baseline from the OCO, the crack cocaine of OCO money.
Moderator: General Uptegraff, tell us about the challenges of refueling coalition nations, coalition partners. Did you have extensive work in that area?
Brig. Gen. Uptegraff: Typically we air refuel American aircraft and the way our fueling is done with a boom, and certainly the aircraft have a receptacle in them. But when we found ourselves predominantly refueling coalition aircraft, it's a slightly different system using the probe and drogue.
The KC-135 can be drogue-equipped [inaudible] --
[Background noise].
I feel like I'm back at the 3/13th. But anyway, the allied aircraft, the NATO aircraft primarily use a basket air refueling system, but as much as we think we've standardized our air refueling across the spectrum of the free world, we really haven't.
Our aircraft have what's called a hard basket, that is the basket itself is made out of metal. The KC-10, for example, has the ability to refuel both with a probe and a drogue and that basket is like fabric material, it's a soft basket.
NATO tankers are really an interesting collection of modified commercial airliners as well as some pack and produce tankers such as the French KC-135 and the Italian KC-767. But nevertheless, we had a real challenge in balancing the type of equipment which we had to install on the ground and place it in the air.
It was a dynamic mission. Target sets changed. And there was a lot of movement up there. Certainly from a command and control standpoint it truly was work to make sure that the right aircraft configured with the right air fueling equipment would get to the right NATO receiver. Of course the training, NATO just did not have a great deal of training with us. You have to remember, these countries were coming from all across Europe, from Denmark, Belgium, France, England, Italy and so forth. So it was a variety of receivers and we did have some problems with them. We did have some confusion up there, just because of the configuration of the aircraft.
Now I will tell you that AMC did everything to equip us with the right aircraft. There are KC-135s out there who have what we call [members] pods which are multi-point refueling systems that are on the wing tips. We brought KC-10s in with [work] pods which are additional drogue type pods on the wing tips and we employed those aircraft heavily. Also National Guard and primarily Air Force Reserve pilots aren't well trained with those systems because we don't have them in our inventory. So we did have to do some over-the-shoulder flying to get the crews spooled up to operate those kind of systems, which really wasn't that difficult. But it was a limitation in terms of meeting the enormous demand, particularly in Operation Unified Protector.
Gen. Hostage: We had three CENTCOM countries join the operation -- Qatar, the Jordanians and the Emirates. Even though Meg's operation wasn't part of my responsibility, we invested pretty heavily in time and energy to make sure that those coalition partners were successful. The last time they partnered with us was Iraqi Freedom, so they were a long time out of the saddle in any kind of operational capability.
One interesting one was their proficiency at [tanking]. The only way to make Libya from the Middle East was with tankers, so we spun up from Al Dafrah, getting the Jordanians, the Emirates and Qataris proficient, and then helped flow them across, and actually put 40 AFCENT folks across their headquarters and in their forward cells to connect them to the command and control infrastructure, both at NATO and their home countries. These guys really don't do deployed operations as a normal course of business. So the process of projecting air power was fairly new to them.
Moderator: For the entire panel. The operation that we were just talking about now as well as others, starting with General Hostage, the most recent time, what in your view is the most significant thing that your organization did or that you saw that didn't get into the news?
Gen. Hostage: The organization of air power and presentation of those forces to the joint commander is probably the most important thing we got done in the time I was in AFCENT. Whether we've heard the term ACCE, Air Component Coordination Element, we use different terminology depending on the circumstances. Fundamentally, it's putting an airman with a joint force commander or whatever the force commander happens to be, whatever that entity is called, to provide the airman's perspective to help ensure that airmen are connected to the full operation. Because of our centralized command and control, decentralized execution, we don't necessarily have our headquarters sitting right next to the joint force commanders, depending on the geographic layout of the AOR.
So in the AFCENT arena we had ACCEs, Air Component Coordination Elements, two stars who lived and worked in the force commander's headquarters, but over time the perception of the force commander as to the ability of that ACCE to do anything to shape air power or produce air power for him on the battlefield, became suspect. Invariably the force commander would say get the CAOC on the phone, I want this or I want that. And the ACCE had challenges being an effective force element forward for the CFACC.
What we did is we created a sub-air expeditionary task force in the CJOA, the Combined Joint Operating Area, for each of the what was then Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom, and so the two-star became a sub; 9th Air Expeditionary sub task force commander, owned all the air in that particular CJOA. So it was General Russ Handy. General [Carly] was up in Afghanistan, I'm trying to think of General Handy's predecessor. Anyway. General Handy is the sub-expeditionary task force in Iraq, owns all the air in there and if the four star wants air moved, placed different on the battlefield to support his ops, he has the authority to move that around. He basically owns that air up to the point at which the mission is written on the ATO. At that point it's handed back to the CFACC and the Air Operations Center for execution.
So for execution air power it's still the centralized command and control of the CAOC. But for planning, and we robusted the staff of the sub-expeditionary task force so that he would have planners enmeshed across the CJOA commander's planning apparatus so that airmen are standing shoulder to shoulder with the ground forces, they plan their operation, shaping whatever would be most effective; and ensuring it was on the ATO as it was promised to the ground force commander. Then during execution we would respond to the exigencies of the battle. We set that up for both Afghanistan and Iraq.
The key there is that as the CFACC I still owned the overall OpCon of the air so that as the theater commander, as General Maddis decided that he needed to shift emphasis or changes of weather, changes of mission, something brewing in the Persian Gulf, all that air still belonged to him and I could put it where he needed it regardless of whether, at the time General McChrystal and General Odierno thought that air needed to stay with them.
So the theater commander still owned the air through his CFACC but for daily execution to support the two separate CJOAs those sub-air expeditionary commanders could be immediately responsive to the CJOA commanders.
It doesn't get a lot of press, and when you hear all those acronyms floating around the media's eyes tend to glaze over and they don't pay a lot of attention, but that reorganization was very important in capturing the belief on the part of the Army and the joint force that the airmen were all in and were fully supporting their fighters on the battlefield.
Moderator: Thank you, sir.
Lt. Gen. Field: I would say that there's two areas that got attention from the press but they didn't understand all of the effort that went behind it.
The first one is measuring and trying to measure and establish risk after measuring and establishing radiological environment. Trying to figure out the amount of radiation and the effect of the contamination that was coming from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant was a monumental effort and certainly not something that we had resident in Japan. We had resident in Japan on the U.S. side some, we had nuclear-trained naval officers and we actually had some personnel from Navy reactors on Japan when the disaster hit. But there's a lot of other capability resident in our military. The AFRAD in the Air Force, they have an AML in the Army, they have a CPERF that does the rapid response here in the United States. We were able to get all of that capability pushed forward into Japan so that we could measure the radiological environment and try to figure out a way to assess risk -- risk to the mission, risk to the force -- and make grounded decisions on how we were going to deploy the force that way.
So that's one. The second area was when they authorized the voluntary departure of DoD civilians and dependents. The effort to move 20,000 people off the island of Japan in less than a week was I think monumental. PACAF actually took the lead in that, coordinating back with TRANSCOM and NORTHCOM and in less than about a two week period they had that organized and executed. They made it look easy. They made it look like no big deal. But the way we executed that was essentially as if it was a NEO-type operation using NEO-type systems, and frankly, they're outdated. The systems don't marry up with the fact that while this is not a NEO, it is in fact just somebody going from Japan back to the United States, that all of the regulations that they face when they hit the States are still in place. They have to have a passport that's current; you may have to have a visa, depending on your status; you may have to have a system so you can keep accountability of all of those dependents when they get back to the States. None of that was easy. All of that was handled by our airmen at Yokota and Misawa in a fabulous way.
Maj. Gen. Woodward: I think the thing that I've been frustrated about that hasn't gotten attention is our air crew and what they had to deal with and the challenges that they faced and how they stepped up and did such a phenomenal job. Realize, going into this operation we hadn't been given U.S. AWACS, we didn't have JSTARS, we didn't have any FMV, all of the things that we've all become used to having on hand to help us with command and control and dynamic targeting. So a lot of responsibility fell on the individual air crew members as we had to use SCAR tactics, and they had to make the decisions. We gave them an awful lot of responsibility because we had to, to determine whether to release or withhold weapons. I think they did a phenomenal job as evidenced by the great lack of collateral damage that we had, despite some pretty challenging circumstances. I think it was just amazing when you look at the time -- I mean we had air crew members, especially on that first night, that were literally getting briefed, had their first view of what we were going to do as they were briefing up their missions that evening, as they were launching from Lakenheath or other locations. Coming together and putting that all together on that short notice, the amazing professionalism and dedication of the crews, and the skill and talent, I think has not gotten the attention that it should. And what it takes to do that.
I also would like to just kind of add on a personal note my frustration over some discussion I've heard about can air power win a war alone, which I think is a very silly question. We have joint forces for a reason, and I've never heard anybody ask the question, can ground power win a war on its own. And we've never asked them to do that, or at least not in a very long time.
So that's one of my frustrations, that we have joint forces for a reason, and when we deploy them together effectively is when they're most effective.
Moderator: Great statement.
Brig. Gen. Uptegraff: To add a little bit more about the air crews, think about this. We just celebrated the 10th Anniversary of 9/11. So when you think about the second lieutenant who was commissioned ten years ago, or the airman who came out of basic training, look at where they are now. Look at where they are in all three components of the Air Force -- active, Guard or Reserve. Those are the airmen that came to me in Europe, they're highly experienced. The last ten years has given them a great deal of combat support operations. So when they came to us we didn't even have to give them an over-the-shoulder flight down to the Gulf of Sidra. They were well trained across the spectrum.
I think for this audience another piece of news that probably still should get out is the tremendous collaborative effort that supported our wing. That collaborative effort was between TRANSCOM, EUCOM, AFRICOM. Between the 18th Air Force, the 17th Air Force, and the 3rd Air Force. I've been in other conflicts, but this is the first one that truly impressed me with communications technology. Every day, for example, the 18th Air Force got us on us sort of a chat system, the military version of Skype I would say, and we had direct communication with our leadership back in the United States on a daily basis. But we did the same thing with 3rd Air Force and 17th through VTCs. So the good news is how much support you can get so fast in today's world of advanced communication technology.
We had our difficulties maintaining aircraft that are five decades old. But another piece of news I would share with you is the tremendous support maintainers gave us from around the world. They found parts in Japan, they found parts in the United States and Europe, and kept those airplanes flying. It's truly remarkable the readiness rate of those aircraft.
Moderator: General Hostage, what are your thoughts on the Air Force moving to a construct of one AOC providing support to multiple JTFs?
Gen. Hostage: I don't know that we'd necessarily committed to a single AOC. As a matter of fact we have AOCs in the primary theaters. What we're finding, let me speak to what I know. The AOC in AFCENT, we have a magnificent [inaudible] built there [inaudible]. 1200 folks operating a CAOC that spans 2,000 miles across the SJOA. Combat operations in two locations, and then operational commitments in the rest of the AOR. All [inaudible] control that out of one building by about 1200 folks. That's the CNAF, as well as the Air Operation Center.
With the new commander, General Maddis, coming in, coming from the world he came from, he's a little jaundiced at the concept of high bandwidth communications and our heavy reliance on that for execution of our mission. So he was very interested in our ability to deal with triage of that. Taking out some of our bandwidth, taking out some of our connectivity. So we had to walk in very carefully through our COOP capability, Continuation Of Operations.
In so doing and in building that COOP capability, I came to believe that if I ever had to do it over again I would not build a 1200 man CAOC out in the middle of a threat theater, because fundamentally I was operating that CAOC 1500 miles away from the center of the fight in Afghanistan, quite effectively, and once you're 1500 miles you can be 9,000 miles. As far as the individual on the ground, given the kind of connectivity we have at the fight, I could have been operating that same CAOC from the shuttle.
Now there still needs to be a forward footprint. That's the unknown, how big that footprint needs to be. I think it can be in the range of 150 to 200 people. What I would do is put that as close to the JTF commander as I could put it, because there's great value being able to look him or her in the eye and say here's what I can do for you, here's the limits of my capability, here's what I need to make your plan effective. Then have that footprint mobile enough that if the JTF commander moves I can move with him. I can't move that CAOC. That's pretty much fixed in place.
So having built our COOP capability, recognize how that connectivity works across the AFCENT theater, I think there is a model for a smaller forward footprint with all the attendant requirements. You've got to pay to protect all those folks forward. It's a lot easier to deal with that smaller number.
So I don't know that I subscribe to the contention of the question, going to a single AOC, but I do think the increasing collaborative capability of our AOCs can support each other will drive us to a model where we can distribute or federate some of the grunt work that's done in an AOC across the greater enterprise so that the forward element can focus on the specific needs of the [inaudible] commander.
Moderator: General Woodward, the initial effort [inaudible] the Americans the British and the French. Can you discuss as the coordination element how quickly that occurred? Did you have any difficulties dealing with your counterparts? Did you find tasking orders an issue? And so forth.
Maj. Gen. Woodward: Thanks for the question. It gives me a good chance to talk about the phenomenal coalition partners that we had the great pleasure to operate with.
When you talk about pulling a coalition together with that kind of speed, it says an awful lot about how we all train and work together before having to come together and do a contingency like that. Including not just our NATO partners but also as General Hostage talked about, our CENTCOM partners as well. An amazing capability to have everybody come together, understand the same tactics, be able to talk the same language. It really was seamless, with the only complication honestly being communications interoperability.
I was amazed at the very beginning, we were still trying to deal with adjusting our plan for the protection of civilians' caveat that was thrown into the UN Security Council Resolution when I was getting phone calls from the UK higher headquarters saying hey, we're going to send you a one star to talk about our targets. I said okay I'll meet him [inaudible] because that should help. They sent a two star from the French headquarters over. We all literally sat around my table that night looking at their target list, looking at ours, and trying to deconflict and literally, if you would, on the fly deconflicting through timing what the three of us were going to do the next day.
Interestingly enough of the 19 targets the UK had, 16 were on our target list, so we ultimately decided just to strike it twice. [Laughter]. It worked.
I think what really worked was they all recognized that the U.S. had the best ability to command and control the fight. And they also had a great understanding of unity of command and its importance. So amazingly enough, they came together with no question whatsoever about who was going to lead the fight. We never ever had a discussion about that piece of it. They all just rolled in as if I was the designated CFACC. They let me run every piece of it. They all, if you would, voluntarily subordinated themselves to the JFACC or the CFACC command structure and it worked absolutely brilliantly.
I think the key there was just that we all worked together so often prior to this. A lot of us knew each other before this. Everyone had trained and exercised together. So there was a great understanding. The only issue we really had to deal with was the different national caveats that each of our partners was dealing with from their political constraints and that was very easily dealt with and we put that up front in our targeting process. We had some brilliant [SATOS] and [SITOS] on the floor taking those national caveats into account as they were doing dynamic targeting. It all worked very well together.
Moderator: We really are out of time but I can't let General Field off the stage without having a comment about the nuclear challenge. How did you protect the forces? Share with us some of those issues.
Lt. Gen. Field: Like I said, as the disaster unfolded we knew there was going to be a problem at the nuclear power plant Friday night. Then that was confirmed Saturday afternoon when the first of the nuclear reactor buildings exploded. So we did not have a lot of capability resident in our headquarters. Yokosuka which was the headquarters of the 7th Fleet, and Nuclear Forces Japan, sent some of their nuclear-trained officers up. And simultaneously back here in the States the Department of Energy had a team of people that they sent over with some equipment that would help us measure the environment.
Our problem was making sure that we understood what was coming out of the reactor and how far it was spreading and what was going to be an effect of that contamination?
The DOE has this equipment that you can put into an airplane and it's a box roughly three feet long, two feet wide, a foot high, and we actually have some UH-1s and some C-12s at Yokota, so that squadron bolted them onto their aircraft and started flying essentially search patterns in the vicinity of the reactors.
This can measure the radiation on the ground, right on the ground. But it was a very uncertain environment and nobody knew what radiation was in the air or how bad it was going to be.
Along with that, the Japanese have a series of sensors around the country that can measure radiation as well. So we had to figure out a way -- and they put that out on the web. It's for anybody to access.
So we had to figure out a way to measure the environment, and then characterize that in terms of how we were going to either go, how close we would be able to go to that contaminated environment. And ultimately we made some interim decisions, interim decisions were made a PACOM in terms of essentially rings around the reactor, distances we would go close to. We were allowed to go close without commander approval, or we would have to get higher than me even approval to go near the reactor itself.
Finally what we did, we had some very smart guys team up with the Google office in Japan and what they did is they figured out a way that they could use Google Earth and the results of this DOE measurement and the [MEX] data which is the Japanese system of how they measure the environment, and put it up on a Google map that we could share with everybody -- the Japanese, us, across the effort.
The way we did that, because trying to get Google programmers onto Air Force systems or military systems is not really the most -- Most people don't think that's a good idea. [Laughter]. So what we did is we found two guys in 5th Air Force, a 2nd lientenant and an A1C that spoke python, which is the language of Google. They went down to the Google office downtown and they figured out how to do it with those guys and they came back and programmed it into our systems.
So what we had to do for Google in exchange for -- They did some other things for us, but it cost us. We had to give those guys a tour of Yokota. [Laughter]. That's what they asked for in return for all the help they gave us in this environment. That's kind of how we did it.
The last thing I'd say is that because we didn't have a lot of expertise early on, we reached out very quickly. The AFRAD team that's stationed out of Wright-Pat now came out and we were able to send people around to all of the bases and then the embassy and other places where American citizens were so we could measure the air, the soil, the water, and try to characterize that environment to see and ensure that it was safe for us to stay and ultimately for those dependents that decided to leave, to come back to Japan and guarantee that it was safe. The air was safe, the water was safe, the food was safe, the environment was safe for them to come back.
Moderator: Thank you, sir.
A marvelous panel. I wish we had so much more time but we don't, we're out, so thank you so much panelists.
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