Air Force Reserve

Chief of Air Force Reserve Lt. Gen. James Jackson

Air Force Association Air and Space Conference, National Harbor, Md., Sept. 17, 2012

Mr. Secretary, thank you very much for coming today. I appreciate you taking the time to go ahead and visit with me. Of course you'll correct me. You'll [inaudible] I'm sure. That will be all good. But I appreciate you taking the time to be here today, sir. Thank you very very much.

I'd love to make a couple of introductions real quick. Of course everyone knows Secretary Donley. I don't need to introduce him. But if I could get Chief Master Sergeant Buckner to stand up, please. Chief Master Sergeant Kathleen Buckner is my Command Chief. [Applause]. She does an outstanding job of connecting with our members out in the units. And to be honest, we'll get into my little spiel in just a second, but if you've looked at my bio, the bottom line is I couldn't hold a job until I got this one, and I've been to a lot of different places but what I think I need to do most is being able to go ahead and get out to the units, to the men and women that are within the Air Force Reserve Command and find out what's going on at their units, at their organizations, and what's on their minds.

I've been in the Pentagon for the past 18 months as the Deputy Chief of the Air Force Reserve. So the bottom line is I've not been connected with all that I should be out there, and Chief Butler's going to help me out with that. We've already made a couple of great visits out to units. We're going to continue to do that.

So if you're from out of town in one of our units or one of our organizations, okay, we'll be coming to a theater near you pretty soon. [Laughter].

If I can just have a couple of opening statements real quickly. As the introduction stated, I've only been in this job for about a month and a half. I'm learning a lot of things. But the good news is I've got a great team.

If you're familiar, I'm the Chief of the Air Force Reserve so I have a staff up here in the Pentagon of about 95, 98 people, as the advisor to the Secretary and the Chief I can talk about. In addition to that I have a command staff, a major command staff down at Warner-Robins Base, Georgia, of about 1,100 people down there.

That means we're pretty busy and we shuttle back and forth a lot, but I have a great team in both locations to help me go ahead and monitor as the Chief and also as the Commander of the Air Force Reserve Command. We'll get into that in just a little bit.


For anyone that was here this morning you heard some great Airmen and some great stories. I was honored to go ahead and present four awards this morning to our units out in the field. Of course two of those were Citizen Airmen awards. If you picked up on that, the bottom line is that they had two employers up there with them -- Boeing and Southwest Airlines. Both of those extremely important to our Air Force Reserve members and we'd like to go ahead and recognize them.

In addition, of course, our Outstanding Unit award and our Outstanding Enlisted and Officer awards. All of those, we're very proud of those members and we're happy to go ahead and help the Air Force Association recognize those members.

This is just to show you the transition, and we all know when it's occurred. Basically, if anyone did not know, back in 1968 was the very first time that the Air Force Reserve associated on an active duty aircraft at Scott Air Force Base, Illinois. You can see there have been a lot of changes since then. As you go top to bottom you can look and see how everything's changed also after 9/11. We're all very familiar with that. We know that we've got sustained IW going on at this time, and we'll talk about how the Air Force Reserve Command contributes to each one of these.

We are a seamless total force. We see that every single day. If you go to a deployed location or if you stay here and you go into the space wing or you go into any organization here, and we'll talk about a few of them that we have associations with, you will know that there is a seamless operation going on with different components. Of course the active duty, the Air Force Reserve, which I'm very proud of, and the Air National Guard.

All three of those bring something special to the organization. All three of those bring something that the Air Force needs to have with their associations. And we need to continue that effort. As the Secretary spoke this morning, we have approximately 115 sir, I think is what you stated, and the bottom line is we need to continue to look for those opportunities because they mean the betterment of our Air Force.

As you go down the whole chart down there, we're pretty much an interdependent organization between those three components, and of course you could make the discussion about the joint fight also, and we're strategically prepared and operationally ready.

Probably the biggest bumper sticker you see almost every single day is the one down at the bottom. It says we have 17 percent of capacity for the Air Force and we do it on 4 percent of the budget. That's a very proud thing to say, but of course every time you bring up that bumper sticker you've got people talking about it differently. That's where we have probably our largest discussions is what we can do for the Air Force in an efficient, effective, capability capacity that we can bring to the nation. That's what we like to go ahead and say, that we are part of the solution and we should go ahead and have those type of discussions.


These are the Air Force enduring contributions and we're going to talk about those from a Reserve perspective. But as you can see right here, this is what the Air Force brings to the fight and this is what your Air Force Reserve brings to the fight also. We cannot do any of these without your Air Force Reserve members in the units that you have. And we'll talk about those in just a second.

We have units, personnel, equipment, in every single one of the enduring contributions to the Air Force and we're very proud of that. Very proud of that.

The fact that we can go ahead and be a part of every one of these enduring contributions for the Air Force -- domain control in air, space and cyberspace. And we know that cyberspace is a growth industry, not just for our service but for our nation. We've had the opportunity to go and help with that and we've had discussions with the Chief and the Secretary, at every level, to go ahead and make sure that everyone knows that there will be opportunities for your Air Reserve Component, Air Force Reserve, Air National Guard, to go ahead and participate in those type of endeavors.

ISR. We have global mobility and global strike. Every single one of those we have a piece of as the Air Force Reserve.


These are the Air Force Reserve contributions in each one of the ten major MAJCOMs. As I briefly stated earlier, I am a Title 10 MAJCOM just like Air Mobility Command, Air Combat Command, AETC, USAFE, you name it. So as you go down that list and you start looking at it, within Air Mobility Command we have C-5s, C-17s, C-130s, C-21s, KC-135s. So we're in every MDS within Air Mobility Command and you can see there is the largest partner we have with the active-duty Air Force.

Now if you're going to do math in public, which I can't do, add all this stuff up, this is the SELRES part of the Air Force Reserve component. It is not the non-participating or inactive reserve. But this is where the units, where the IMAs, where the traditional Reservists are, where the AGRs are, where our Air Reserve technicians are.

AMC, like I said, is the largest partner for those aircraft. Within Air Combat Command we're the second largest partner with 11,000 approximately. F-16s and A-10s in both those organizations. We have an associate unit up at Seymour Johnson in the F-15E. So we're proud contributors in every one of these major commands.

AFSPACE. You can't do any operation without the Air Force Reserve component. We run the GPS satellites for the active duty Space Wing, the second wing you saw this morning getting presented an award today. We're an integral part of that wing with our 310th Space Wing out at Colorado Springs, Peterson Field and Shriever. We do basically the space-based missile warning and also space control in AFSPACE.

Within AETC, undergraduate pilot training, flight training, A-10s, F-16s, T-38s, T-37s. Every piece of that the Air Force Reserve has members and equipment.

Air Force Global Strike Command is probably the largest growing contributor that we have right now, about 1400 members. Our newest association down there at Barksdale includes the B-52 at the FTU schoolhouse and also the combat coded B-52 squadron down there.

Once again what we are seeing is that we bring together the two components, the active duty and the Air Force Reserve, we have seen the benefits from that association. We have Air Force Reserve members on PRP. That's never happened before, but we've knocked down all the road blocks to go ahead and be able to do that. We have Air Force Reserve members teaching them and flight training them like I mentioned. When you have that Air Force Reserve member the experience that stays there on that location for a long time, you accrue all the benefits of that.

We like to look at Barksdale pretty much as a force development lab also. I can get an Air Force Reserve member in the wing and the unit there in B-52s. Then we can move them to 8th Air Force and get them numbered Air Force experience. Then we can move them to Air Force Global Strike Command and give them MAJCOM experience. And for a participating traditional reservist, that might be a very good equation for them. They stay at one location almost the whole time and get all the pillars of development we need them to have.

We have the same thing going on in Colorado Springs with our Space Wing. Being able to put them in the unit, being able to take them into a Numbered Air Force or MAJCOM, and being able to give them the development that they need at NORTHCOM in a combatant command type environment. So we look for those opportunities as we're looking at places to go ahead and associate.


These are the Air Force Reserve contributions that I was just talking about. You'll notice we own 100 percent of some of these. Aerial spray being one right at the top of the list. If you're familiar with Deep-Water Horizon, that unit was an Air Force Reserve unit that went down there which initially responded to that requirement down there in the Gulf of Mexico and is the only unit that does that type of mission.

So that is the capacity and the capability that the Air Force has that we're able to retain and keep in the Air Force without having to pay for it every single day.

Now truth in lending, let's see what the 130 unit does in support of Air Mobility Command and TACC and deploys and does all the other things you want to see C-130 units do. But when it comes to that little mission set, we're able to keep that for the nation and provide the response that it needs.

The same thing for the weather reconnaissance. The Weather Reconnaissance Wing down there, you've probably seen our super stars the A&E channel, the hurricane hunters. That's an Air Force Reserve unit down there at Keesler. Okay, some are better looking stars than others probably, but the bottom line is that we get great participation from down there. We have a great group of warriors down there doing the weather reconnaissance for our nation down there. And once again, that is capacity capability that does not reside within any other component. Solely within your Title 10 Air Force Reserve component.

As the Chief of the Air Force Reserve it's my responsibility to go ahead and look for the opportunity to expand some of these TFI opportunities. If you look at the mass firefighting, and I think everyone is familiar with what was going on this summer. We share that responsibility with the Air National Guard. But once again, only your reserve component has both the capability and capacity within that firefighting requirement. And we own within the Air Force Reserve approximately 25 percent, I think is what we've got up there.

The 302nd out at Petersen Field is an outstanding organization, and one of the most outstanding pieces of that story is it's an active association on the C-130s out there. You've got an active duty association squadron associated with that plane, with Jay Pittman, the wing commander out there. They're seamlessly integrated. They've got folks in the back shop, they've got folks in ours. They share the same facility. They share the same aircraft. You have force development both on the active duty side and on the Air Force Reserve side. So we look to that organization as an example of a good association and as we work our way through other associations we're using them to go ahead and knock down some of the barriers that we see in some of those locations.

Aeromedical. I think you see that almost every single day here in the news. Obviously we own approximately 60 percent of that capacity capability. It's more responsibility for our Air Force to take care of our members. Just like combat search and rescue. We need to do that. We do that every single day. We think we do a very good job of that. And if you go into the area of operations you will not get on an airplane that does not have at least two, probably three different components flying the aircraft, taking those wounded warriors and the injured back to Landstuhl and then bringing them back here to the United States. And of course up in Dover we have the very solemn duty of our organization up there to go ahead and assist with the fallen warriors out there. So once again we feel very proud of the mission that we do with AME.

When it comes to the Air Operation Center, which is something you probably don't talk very much about but you can see we have about 15 percent of that capacity within the Air Force Reserve Command. Probably one of the best stories, we currently have three combat operation squadrons which for lack of a better name are AOC squadrons. They lay in on top of the AOC. They go out, they exercise. The most recent example is Unified Guardian over in Korea, USFK. And the 7th Air Force Commander sent me a note back after that saying hey, you guys showed up and we gave them the keys. They've been here every single year. They know how to run the place. They do everything we need for them to do and they allow us to actually go ahead and fight the war and go through the exercise, and of course as we would have to in a real battle.

So we're very proud of that. And once again, it's an organization that allows us to go ahead and develop our people. It's a command leadership opportunity. And if you've not been to an AOC you don't know what the Air Force does. Command and control. That's where the rubber meets the road. And we really feel that that's an important mission for us and we'll continue to develop opportunities there for our folks.

So when you go down this list you can look at any one of them, you can pick out pieces that we contribute and what our enduring contributions are.

These are our Air Force Reserve guiding principles. If you don't mind, I'm going to spend just a little bit of time on these because I think it's extremely important. I'm also going to go ahead and tell you that we just came up with these recently in the Executive Steering Group that I was very proud of. This is our way ahead. This is what we're going to be doing for the Air Force Reserve. This is how we look at mission sets and requirements within the Air Force and how it will best match with the Air Force Reserve and how we can tell our story just like everyone here within the Air Force Association forum. We need to tell the Air Force story. Part of that is the Air Force Reserve story and the Air National Guard story.

Combat ready, cost effective, and experienced force. Reservists are trained, equipped and ready to meet daily requirements. We've got no argument with that.

Recruiting, retention and [inaudible] to maximize prior service experience. We keep readiness up. We know we can do that and we attempt to do that every single day.

Integrated operations to ensure infrastructure and support cost efficiencies. We as an Air Force, we need to be looking at that and we know that. We currently have 34 wings within the Air Force Reserve Command. We have 56 different locations. But we only own 10 bases. The story I'm trying to relay there is, bottom line, there is efficiency and effectiveness at consolidated locations and we need to continue to look at those.

We provide both operational capability and strategic surge capacity. We are operational [inaudible], but we do provide the surge capacity when you need it in a Title 10 reserve component. We have assured access to a sustainable, predictable, operational reserve force that the nation can use every single day. And if you're familiar with the recent changes to [12304AB], we're going further down that road of being able to use Reserve Title 10 members for both daily and operational requirements and in support of defense authorities.

Strategic surge capacity. Reserves for a managed approach and a balance of volunteerism and mobilization. We have to do that. We have not changed, we are approximately 75 percent part time, 25 percent full time within the Air Force Reserve, so we cannot break that model, nor do we want to do that. But it means we've got to offer our members flexibility for participation and the ability to participate and also have career paths no matter what status they may be.

Predictable and equitable participation management to sustain recruiting, retention, and readiness.

As I've looked at all the different things up there and it shows you all the list of areas that we're in, one of the things we have to look at hard when we get into new missions is whether we can improve that required skill set and location where we'll be asked to go ahead and lay in our force structure.

Sustainable, professional military force. We need flexible organizational type units that we can go ahead and allow our members to go ahead and participate, and we need alternatives of a full time, like I mentioned, as the 75/25 mix. So we do have the IMA force structure. We do have the traditional reserves within the units. We do have the Air Reserve Technicians and the AGRs. And every single one of them is an important piece to the Air Force Reserve and to our Air Force.

Accountable and disciplined leaders who understand the Reserve culture is what we'd like to grow, who can articulate the total force story. We're a little bit different, and I'll put this right up front, in the Air National Guard, because the Air National Guard recruits their leaders and develops their leaders for the state. We recruit our leaders and develop our leaders for the nation, for the Title 10 across state lines. That is different. I'm not saying it's better or worse, I'm just saying it's different. So our force development construct is different from the Title 32 Guardsmen, particularly for our part-time members.

Support from our employers and families. I don't think I need to go into any of that. Basically we have a triad that the Air Force Reserve must maintain. When we ask somebody to deploy the stool on that triad gets a little bit bigger so their family obviously gets a little bit less time and of course their employer gets a little bit less time. We need to be able to take care of all three of those legs of the stool and make sure that we're able to equally engage in every one.

So we want to be and we will be a viable and a relevant force. We need organizations that are agile and proactive in supporting our new missions. We need to be flexible towards our new missions. We need reservists to keep positions so that they can help tell our story and also go ahead and help develop the requirements for the nation. We need management structures that are optimized to balance manpower and cost and mission effectiveness and we can do that with the different statuses that we have.

We need leaders that understand and can communicate the dual nature of the Air Force Reserve as a different component and the active duty and the Air National Guard. Each one of us brings something significant to this nation and we need to go ahead and appreciate all of them.

We have a strong connection to the civilian community which is very similar to the Air National Guard, and we have elected leaders and military associations such as this that want to go ahead and keep in contact with us.


The vision of the Air Force Reserve is to remain an integrated, flexible and combat ready force, providing successful, sustainable capabilities as an Air Force component, one of three, supporting our national security.

The Constitution gives the responsibility to Congress to go ahead and raise armies and navys and provide for the militia. They're responsible with the Title 10 force, the Title 10 Reserve force and obviously the Title 32 militia force. All three of those bring something to this organization and bring strength to the Air Force.

Our Airmen, I think the Secretary mentioned earlier, will get us there. They just need to know what we're doing and where we're going. We can do that. We can provide them that information. We can share that with them. We can help them make choices. And we plan to do that within the Air Force Reserve.

So once again before I go ahead and go on too long, I'd like to go ahead and thank Secretary Donley for coming in today. I appreciate it very much, sir. And I'm ready to open it up to any questions. If I get any hard ones, I'm going to ask the Secretary to help me out with those. [Laughter].

Question: Is there any way that we can overcome some of the issues related to firefighting. Being from Colorado Springs, we were unable to get C-130s in the air for almost two days when we could have used them because of the contract issues with the contract for firefighting. I don't know whether that's an administrative issue [inaudible], but it sure would have helped.

Lieutenant General Jackson: I understand, sir. Having visited the 302nd recently you're right. There was some delay in the execution piece of that. Part of it goes directly to the requirements to go ahead and go through the civilian capability and capacity before turning to Title 10 and a request for forces from NORTHCOM.

I'll tell you, as they looked through that they were able to go ahead and put together some pieces of that puzzle which will improve the process in the future. I will also tell you that we've looked at NORTHCOM and that process for firefighting as an example of how we need to go ahead and execute that 304A and B I mentioned to you in support of local authorities to meet that construct, and we think that the tabletop exercise we need to be looking at that NORTHCOM model for firefighting to go ahead and look at how we can get access to the rest of [inaudible]. I'll take that back, and like I said, give you some more details if I can when it comes to what the road blocks were. But we've identified some of those and particularly Jay Pittman the commander out there and he's put those on the table for NORTHCOM and us to go ahead and make sure that we can do better in the future. The loss of life and property out there obviously was regrettable.

Question: Sir, I don't mean to put you on the spot in front of your boss but I'm going to ask the same question of General Wyatt tomorrow.

I've been doing a lot of reading recently in a lot of the professional journals about the three component Air Force and maybe it's time to look at why do we need both an Air National Guard and an Air Force Reserve. Can you give us your opinion on what the Air Force Reserve brings to the game that the Air National Guard does not? And does the nation need the redundancy that both components bring?

Lieutenant General Jackson: That's a good question. As I mentioned briefly, the Constitution says that you'll go ahead and put together an Army and a Navy and supporting militia. You need Title 10 force structure and you need Title 32 force structure. There's plenty of things that the Guard has to do and can do and should do for the Governors, and the Title 10 force structure should be the force of last resort. We now have the tools to be able to do that when the Governors and the Guard within the states are overwhelmed and they need Title 10 forces to help them out with it.

There are different roles and missions that we should be looking at which may be a better fit. If you can go ahead and support the dual role, the Governor and the federal requirement, and possibly that's a better Guard mission than it would be for a Title 10 Reservist.

I'll tell you when it comes to force development once again, as I mentioned, we develop our folks across the United States, and we're not basically akin to having them do something within each state. For the Governor. And when it comes to throwing out a general officer, that's a pretty good example of that. Basically all the general officers are able to go ahead and plug and play almost anywhere we want to within the Title 10 status and you don't have to change the status when you do that.

There are mission sets that should be possibly or have to be in a Title 10 status. So with the Air National Guard convert from a Title 32 to a Title 10 status. With an Air Force Reserve Title 10 reserve unit, [inaudible].

Now truth in lending once again, there are plenty of pieces to that. You've got MPA requirements, you've got mandate type requirements that you have to go and put together. And of course you must have the training every single day to make sure that you're able to do that mission.

So I think that all three components bring a very good piece of the pie to the Air Force and the nation and we need to draw on the strengths of every component, not necessarily look at trying to combine two of them. That won't work.

And you're probably well aware, we tried to do that on several occasions before, and due to politics, but mostly due to expansion [inaudible]. We looked at that and decided that we still needed the three components that we have.

Question: Do the Reserves have a large role in the mission of homeland security?

Lieutenant General Jackson: We have those tools right now with the new statute. Should they have a larger role in that, I'm not sure that we should. If it includes a dual-use type of requirement. Homeland security could be for our nation obviously and we should be able to go ahead and do that just as well as every other component. But the bottom line is that if you've already got a mission set and you've got training members that can do that and there is no issue with having them in the correct status to do it, I don't think that we need to go in that particular area.

I think there's more opportunity elsewhere that the nation needs us, rather than supporting --

Question: I was just wondering, you were in a boatload of mission areas before. As we look ahead, are there certain mission areas that you see the Reserves going into or phasing out?

Lieutenant General Jackson: I think I know what some of the requirements for the nation are, cyber being one of them. Okay. Cyber and ISR, just two examples, where that could be, for lack of a better word, a black hole. You can put a lot of money into it, you can try to make a determination of where we need to be. But there's no guarantee you'll ever get there, so you have to make hard choices. That's where I think cyber could be an opportunity for us in addition to ISR. And as we make the determination on what the CAPs have to be and what the orders have to be for the ISR regime, on the back end of that you've got a capacity and capability that you probably need to retain. So whenever you use that ISR platform and surge up to 65 CAPs or above, that you can call on those people to go ahead and do all that's required. But you don't want to pay for that every single day.

So within the cyber and the ISR domain, I think there's growth opportunity. I think in addition there's a good opportunity within the training environment. Within combat coding units, you've got all three components doing that mission. That's fine. You need to have all three components doing that mission. But if you're going to be in the training environment like we are within pilot training in FTU, that might be a good fit or a better fit for some members than others.

And we want to offer all of our members that flexibility to be able to change or be able to get into the mission set that fits them so they can continue to participate for our nation, so that they don't just make the decision to retire or to separate. We want to retain every Airman that we can as they move from the active component into the Air Force Reserve or Air National Guard.

Any other questions?

I definitely appreciate your time today very much. Mr. Secretary, thank you very much for coming out today. If you don't have any other questions I'll go ahead and turn it back. Thank you.

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