Marine Corps Aviation: Today's Military Readiness Crisis, Tomorrow's
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AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE MARINE CORPS AVIATION: TODAY’S MILITARY READINESS CRISIS, TOMORROW’S CAPABILITIES DISCUSSION PARTICIPANTS: JON DAVIS, US MARINE CORPS DAVID DEPTULA, MITCHELL INSTITUTE THOMAS DONNELLY, AEI 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM FRIDAY, JULY 28, 2016 EVENT PAGE: http://www.aei.org/events/marine-corps-aviation-todays-military- readiness-crisis-tomorrows-capabilities/ TRANSCRIPT PROVIDED BY DC TRANSCRIPTION – WWW.DCTMR.COM THOMAS DONNELLY: This is likely to be one of the final events at AEI’s current headquarters. As you all may have heard, we’ll be moving around the corner very shortly, very shortly. Looking forward to that very much. And this is a great turnout. And I’m very pleased to host this event at this time. The format — by the way, my name is Tom Donnelly. I’m the director of the Marilyn Ware Center for Security Studies here at AEI. And I’m very pleased to partner with Dave Deptula and the Mitchell Institute to bring you this event. The topics today, the current readiness crisis and the question about fielding new capabilities, is kind of a microcosm of where the US military as a whole stands, sort of in a Scylla and Charybdis position between the deeds of the high pace of current operations today and the shrinking size of the force and the long-delayed modernization and recapitalization of that force at the same time. So I’m very much looking forward to having both a very specific and a broad-ranging discussion. The program will proceed as follows: I’m going to introduce Dave, who’s going to give a further introduction of General Davis. I’m sharing the podium with two very distinguished fighter pilots. So the best thing for me to do is land my plane as fast as I can before I get either some rounds or a missile up my tailpipe. So in that spirit, I want to introduce my friend, Dave Deptula. I’ve known Dave for — my gosh — it must be about 25 years now. LIEUTENANT GENERAL DAVE DEPTULA (RET.): I’ve forgotten. MR. DONNELLY: Yeah. That’s right. Dave first rose to prominence as a principal planner of the Gulf War air campaign and as one of the leading theorists of modern airpower. But the thing that we most need to know about him is that he’s a lifetime F-15 pilot with more hours than God in various cockpits. His final job in the Air Force, not too long ago, was the head of the ISR Office there, so Dave has really in many ways, again, been the leading theorist and an architect of modern airpower. So I’m going to share much of the questioning with Dave, and I’m very pleased to do so. So, Dave, the microphone is yours. LT. GEN. DEPTULA: Thanks very much, Tom. And I’d like to add the Mitchell Institute to that welcome to all of you to this session. I promise you I won’t take too much away from our principal speaker, General Davis, but I’ll just give you a little bit of a brief overview. All of you know, he is currently the deputy commandant for aviation in the Marine Corps. And in the course of a very distinguished career, he’s flown over 4,500 mishap free hours in the AV-8, the F-5, and the F/A-18 and F-18EF. I don’t know how much EF time that you have. LIEUTENANT GENERAL JON DAVIS: (Off mic.) LT. GEN. DEPTULA: In addition — and this is kind of interesting — he’s also flown as a copilot in every type model series of tilt-rotor, winged and air refueler aircraft in the Marine Corps inventory. He’s commanded at a variety of levels. He’s held a multitude of staff jobs. You know, if you want the specifics, you can go online. But I don’t want to take too much away from his time. But it’s also interesting to note that he dabbled — I don’t know what it is about our service leadership but, you know, they take us out of having fun — maybe I need to reconstruct what I just said — and then put us into the intelligence community. So he served in his — one of his previous jobs, as deputy commander of the United States Cyber Command. So, General Davis, with that, we look forward to your remarks. We’ve basically given him carte blanche but readiness obviously is an issue as well as integration of F-35 and how it is dramatically changing the way we conduct aviation activities in the military. So, dog, over to you. LT. GEN. DAVIS: Thanks. Thanks. MR. DONNELLY: Pleasure. (Applause.) LT. GEN. DAVIS: I haven’t talked yet so I’d hold the clap until I’m done. Why did I go to Cyber Command? I think that just shows that God’s got a sense of humor, that a guy who could fail college math could do — I did two tours up there, once as a deputy commander for General Keith Alexander as the deputy commander of Joint Functional Component Command Network Warfare, kind of the offensive side of the ledger, and then went back for a (reattack ?) a few years later to be a deputy commander for United States Cyber Command. So I’ve got a lot of respect for the hardworking folks up there, both at Cyber Command and NSA and all the components that come together to bring that really essential mission forward. I’m going to talk about — today, I’m going to talk about the future as well. You’ve read and I’ve been very open about what we’re doing for the readiness challenge in the United States Marine Corps unique in the Marine Corps. The 82nd Congress laid it out and recently revalidated by the last Congress that the Marine Corps is a force in readiness. So our design is small, small number squadrons but all those squadrons are supposed to be fully manned with people, with airplanes for express purpose, being ready to go, you know, break glass, go, we got out there, we’re ready to go. After 15 years of hard fighting, the numbers of aircraft in up status aren’t where they need to be for that small force, small but very powerful force. So we’ve for the last couple of years been on a trek, I would call it. It’s a very focused mission to recover the readiness for every type model series we have in the United States Marine Corps. And I was in with the commandant this morning. You know, he’s got a Gantt chart that shows you that what we’re doing. We’re on glideslope right now to bring all those airplanes back. We first start with what they call the T-2.0, which is how we can train to get ourselves, to make sure that every single Marine, aviator, crew, squadron is ready to go out the door to meet our task and then also do what we need to get our war fighting formations back because that’s what you have. The Marine Corps is designed to fight our nation’s wars, be that forces in readiness, and it’s a function of recovering the old and get — extracting maximum value out of the old and then also to bringing in the new platforms, which I’m going to talk about next. On the recovery effort, we’ve had great allies in Congress. They’ve actually helped us out. We told them exactly what we’re trying to do. We’ve asked for help in only amounts of money that we could execute, and we’re doing exactly that. I came off the vaulted T-2.0 of the United States Marines Corps because we couldn’t execute that right away with the inventory we have so we rolled some of that money back, we’re going to fund our money back into buying the parts we needed to bring the airplanes back up. And we’re about — we started last summer at about 378 airplanes. We’re about 80 airplanes better than that right now, OK? So we’re absolutely, 100 percent on glideslope to recover. It’s not high science, but it’s darn close to it. And what’s important in this town and where I work and with the partners I work with is to be credible. And our recovery model is very credible right now. We’re doing exactly what we said we would. And I look at it as a lifelong Marine rifleman, but also an aviator. The thing that I measure at the end of the day, I can go down look at flight hours per pilot and are we where we need to be? Yes or no because we’ve got training and readiness manuals designed to do that, and today we are better than we were last month and we’re better than the month before and the month before that and the month before that. So we’re getting better. We’re getting our guys to look at the ball they need, to make sure that they are that force in readiness when they go out the door. It’s the not just the guys that are getting ready to deploy. It’s every single unit in the United States Marine Corps ready to deploy. All right. So that’s our goal and that’s what we’re working on.