Of Glass Houses …
“We need to move quickly. We need to accelerate [space] acquisition. We need to innovate and prototype new systems faster … stop studying things to death, and get capability in orbit for the warfighter. … The US built a glass house before the invention of stones. The shifting of space [from] being a benign environment to being a warfighting environment requires different capabilities.”—Secretary of the Air Force Heather Wilson, Reagan National Defense Forum, Dec. 2.
… and Tortoises
“I’m worried about the future because, I don’t know how it happened, but somehow this country just lost the ability to go fast. And we have adversaries that go fast. We take four years to study a program before we do anything. We do four years of risk reduction for technologies we built fifty years ago. Why do we take that much time?”—USAF Gen. John E. Hyten, head of US Strategic Command, Reagan National Defense Forum, Dec. 2.
End Stage
“We’re getting close to a military conflict [with North Korea]. … We’re running out of time. … I’m going to urge the Pentagon not to send any more dependents to South Korea. South Korea should be an unaccompanied tour. It’s crazy to send spouses and children to South Korea, given the provocation of North Korea. So I want them to stop sending dependents. And I think it’s now time to start moving American dependents out of South Korea.”—Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Senate Armed Services Committee, on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Dec. 2.
Reassurance You Can Hear
“Owning the … high ground is continually going to be important as we go forward. Air superiority is not an American birth right. It’s actually something we have to plan for, train for, fight for, and win. I see it as nothing short of a moral obligation that, when any soldier or airman hears a jet noise overhead, they don’t look up. They know it’s us.”—Gen. David L. Goldfein, USAF Chief of Staff, airforcetimes.com, Sept. 18.
Crystal
“I … sent a note to Qasem Soleimani [commander of Iran’s Quds Force]. I sent it because he had indicated that forces under his control might, in fact, threaten US forces in Iraq. … What we were communicating to him in that letter is that we would hold him and Iran accountable for any attacks on American interests in Iraq by forces under his control. We wanted to make sure he and Iranian leadership understood that in a way that was crystal clear.”—CIA Director Michael Pompeo, Reagan National Defense Forum, Dec. 2
Lead or Die
“Rapid advances in artificial intelligence—and the vastly improved autonomous systems and operations they will enable—are pointing toward new and more novel warfighting applications involving human-machine collaboration and combat teaming. These new applications will be the primary drivers of an emerging military-technical revolution. [The US] can either lead the coming revolution, or fall victim to it.”—Robert O. Work, former Deputy Secretary of Defense, Washington Post, Dec. 3.
Lost in Space
“To attack a satellite probably does not require nation-state space capability. Due to cost saving measures, the command and control channel to the satellite is unencrypted. The security is little more than a password. To hack such a system would require sophisticated and proprietary equipment, although with today’s Digital Signal Processing systems, it is becoming trivial. By the time it was noticed that a bird was put into a spin of death, the fuel is shot, there is very little fuel, … and there’s a $75 million dollar paperweight spinning in space.”—Stephen Northcutt, SANS Technology Institute, Los Angeles Times, Nov. 13.
Legal and Illegal
“Some people think we’re stupid. We’re not stupid people. We think about [use of nuclear weapons] a lot. … If you execute an unlawful order, you will go to jail. It applies to nuclear weapons. … I provide advice to the President. He’ll tell me what to do and, if it’s illegal, guess what’s going to happen? I’m going to say, ‘Mr. President, it’s illegal.’ And guess what he’s going to do? He’s going to say, ‘What would be legal?’ And we’ll come up with options and a mix of capabilities to respond to whatever the situation is. That’s the way it works.”—USAF Gen. John E. Hyten, head of US Strategic Command, Halifax International Security Forum, Nov. 18.
Root and Branch
“It [creation of a separate Space Corps] is going to happen. It’s inevitable. … By segregating those space professionals in the Air Force into a separate organization, segregating the resources, [with] an educational system for space professionals, we can develop a culture that focuses on the No. 1 mission, which is space dominance. … We are going to have to rip this out by the roots.”—Rep. Michael D. Rogers (R-Ala.), House Armed Services Strategic Forces subcommittee, Reagan National Defense Forum, Dec. 2.
Game Changer?
“[The US has] developed a sustained air interdiction campaign and, for the first time in this war, a counter-threat revenue campaign. Using airpower, we have been able to target the Taliban in their so-called safe zones, command and control nodes, illicit revenue-generating ventures, and their logistical networks …. Keep in mind that this is the first time we have persistently used our airpower in this interdiction role. The Taliban narcotics leadership was absolutely caught off-guard …. The Taliban have never had to face a sustained targeting campaign focused on disrupting their illicit revenue activities. And it’s not over. In fact, it’s only just begun …. With the air interdiction campaign, we are able to go after the Taliban’s support structure …. We’re able to go after their weapons cache sites, their revenue generation, and their C2 nodes. All the areas where they thought they were safe and they are no longer so …. That is our new strategy going forward and it’s definitely been a game-changer and the Taliban is definitely feeling it.”—USAF Brig. Gen. Lance R. Bunch, chief of future operations in Afghanistan, Kabul news conference, Dec. 12.
