This article appeared in the July 1999 issue of Code One Magazine.
Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Michael E. Ryan is responsible for organizing, training, and equipping 750,000 active duty, Guard, Reserve, and civilian members of the US Air Force in the United States and overseas. As a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he serves as a military advisor to the secretary of defense, the National Security Council, and the president. Ryan entered the Air Force after graduating from the US Air Force Academy in 1965. He flew combat in Southeast Asia, including 100 missions over North Vietnam. He has more than 3,400 flight hours in a variety of aircraft, including the F-4, Mirage III, and various blocks of the F-16. He was one of the first pilots to transition to the F-16 from the F-4 in the late 1970s. He was later the wing commander at Misawa AB, Japan, when that unit transitioned from the F-4 to the F-16. More recently, he commanded the 16th Air Force and Allied Forces Southern Europe in Italy, where he directed NATO air combat operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Before assuming his current position, Ryan was commander of US Air Forces in Europe and commander of Allied Air Forces Central Europe. Code One editor Eric Hehs visited with Ryan in his Pentagon office in April.
You began your Air Force career as an F-4 pilot in 1966 and later transitioned to the F-16 in 1979. Describe that transition, which was relatively common for many fighter pilots at the time.
I first flew the F-16 at MacDill AFB, Florida, which was a transition-training base for the F-16. I had come from an F-4 squadron, the 61st Tactical Fighter Squadron at MacDill, when Tuck McAtee, my academic and flight instructor, conducted the first class. My assistant operations officer and I were the validation class for subsequent pilots going through transition training. The transition from F-4 to F-16 was relatively easy. We didn’t know as much about the new airplane as we thought we should know. We learned a lot about the F-16 in the first few years of flying it. My most memorable initial impression of the F-16 was its ability to turn very rapidly. The thrust-to-weight ratio was excellent as well.
How will the transition from the F-16 to the Joint Strike Fighter compare with the F-4 to F-16 transition?
The transition will be even easier. The flight envelopes of the aircraft will be very similar. Both are single-seat, single-engine airplanes. And both have a lot of avionics capability. The biggest difference will be the stealthiness of the Joint Strike Fighter. The F-16 has kept up with avionics improvements. The Block 50 is so much more capable than the Block 10 that it is essentially a different airplane to the pilot. The transition from the F-16 to the JSF will be more in terms of information management. The integrated avionics of the JSF will make it more user-friendly.
You have been working hard on something called the Expeditionary Aerospace Force, which is a new organizational structure for the service. What is the Expeditionary Aerospace Force?
The Expeditionary Aerospace Force concept focuses the Air Force on our business of rapid forward deployment in conditions ranging from completely set-up bases to austere bare bases. EAF involves conducting missions across the full spectrum of operations. That means being prepared to provide humanitarian support, fight a major theater war, and do everything in between. It’s a mindset and operational concept that says we are an Air Force that can deploy very rapidly and on a global scale. So, the Expeditionary Aerospace Force is a concept that says who we are.
To support this concept, we’ve taken the Air Force and divided it into ten deployable pieces called Air Expeditionary Forces, or AEFs. At any given time, two AEFs will be deployed or on call to meet the needs of existing contingency operations, like Southern Watch, Northern Watch, and follow-on requirements for our current operations in the Balkans. A portion of these two AEFs will also be on standby to respond to other contingencies that pop up. We’ll schedule AEFs in a way that supports commanders-in-chief around the world, providing them with forces that are trained to a task and ready to fly any kind of mission. AEFs are essentially a way of rotating our forces while maintaining a contingency force.
From an airman’s point of view, the new organizational structure makes life more predictable. Predictability also helps us leverage the capability of our Air National Guard and Reserve forces. If we can give Guard and Reserve personnel and their employers a year’s lead time, we can use them more effectively. The Guard and Reserve are integral parts of our Total Force team. The AEF organization requires us to equip these forces with the capabilities needed for major contingencies and for day-to-day operations.
How did this organizing concept originate and evolve?
The Air Force has always been an expeditionary force. We had airplanes chasing Pancho Villa in an expeditionary mode before World War I. Air forces were expeditionary during World War I, as they were during World War II and Vietnam. We have always been able to deploy rapidly because of our mode of transportation. Aircraft get us there fast. Throughout our early history, we would pick up and deploy rapidly to locations that were often very austere. We got away from this concept during the Cold War when we had well-established bases with munitions, fuel, and facilities to host the force. We no longer have these facilities, so we have had to revisit and codify how to deploy to bare bases.
Force protection plays a big role in this planning. We have to protect the force as it deploys and once it is deployed. We have to manage security forces, construct secure billeting, and lay out facilities to protect our forces against terrorist attacks.
What is the status of this reorganization?
We are pretty much there. I think the EAF is an acknowledgement of what we have been doing over the past ten years. We have been conducting expeditionary operations since Desert Storm. We just haven’t formally organized ourselves for these operations. We have been operating as an expeditionary force because we had to, not because we planned to.
Right now we have units from different places coming together at different times that haven’t trained together. We’re going to change that. Forces that go into a location will train together before they get there. They will know each other before they deploy so that, when they hit the ground, they are ready to go. We are going to train to task for all of the units that participate. They may still come from different locations in the Pacific, Europe, and the United States, but they will know each other and will have trained together during the cycle. This approach is better than trying to work up and train forces after they arrive in theater.
The F-16 makes up about sixty percent of today’s Air Force; it will be the predominant fighter aircraft for the service through 2010. What part will the F-16 continue to play in the tactical air force?
The F-16 is like the utility infielder in baseball. The aircraft’s capabilities cover a broad range of missions—close air support, forward air controller, interdiction, counter air, and air defense. Because of its range of capabilities, the F-16 will always be involved in some aspect of our operations. It is very versatile. It is the backbone of the Air Force.
What plans does the Air Force have for acquiring new F-16s and upgrading older models?
We are trying to bring all of our F-16s from the active duty, Guard, and Reserve forces to a similar level of capability. We want all the aircraft to have the capability to use precision-guided munitions like GPS-guided munitions, joint direct attack munitions, and joint air-to-surface standoff missiles. We are working this issue in the budget process. We want all F-16s to be able to be effective in future conflicts. We will still focus our capabilities on certain blocks. The Block 40, for example, is LANTIRN capable. We are trying to put that system or a similar system on earlier models of the F-16. We are buying Litening pods and LANTIRN pods to put on those airplanes. We’d like to put the night vision imaging system on all of our aircraft. NVIS improves the safety of flying and combat effectiveness at night. We are trying to raise the level of all of our forces so we can mix and match them more easily. Every member of an AEF will be expected to carry its weight. And today’s operations require precision-guided munitions and night capability.
The Joint Strike Fighter represents the next-generation fighter aircraft for the Air Force. How important is it to the service to field the JSF on its current time schedule of 2008?
We see our older model F-16s reaching the end of their useful life at the end of the next decade. We need to bring on a replacement for these F-16s and the A-10. That replacement is the Joint Strike Fighter. JSF will slowly become the bulk of our force. But newer-model F-16s are going to be around for a long time. We will continue to improve the capability of the F-16 as well.
The general public and even some policymakers seem to misunderstand the relationship between the Joint Strike Fighter and the F-22 Raptor. Are these aircraft best viewed as a continuation of the "high-low" acquisition strategy the Air Force used successfully, beginning in the 1980s, with the F-15 and F-16?
That’s one way to think about them. But both of these airplanes will be multirole aircraft. The F-22 will come into the inventory as a multirole aircraft even though its initial focus will be the air-to-air role. The F-22 represents the high end of the capability spectrum. It has capabilities that the JSF just won’t match. Its speed, range, ability to supercruise, and its avionics package put it at the high end. Furthermore, the reason we can build the JSF at a cheaper price is that the JSF makes use of technologies matured on the F-22 program, particularly the avionics and the low-observable technologies. The F119 engine core is another example of technology made possible for the JSF by the F-22 program.
What part will uninhabited combat air vehicles play in tomorrow’s Air Force?
We already have a huge amount of uninhabited air-to-air vehicles in the form of AMRAAMs and cruise missiles. The reason we are looking at new unmanned air-to-air vehicles is to overcome the downsides of manned aircraft in certain missions, like long endurance missions. We should focus our UCAV efforts on missions in which we don’t want to put humans at risk. Reconnaissance is another example. We have deployed the Predator to Tuzla and we are using it there extensively. We are looking at technologies that will allow unmanned vehicles to be used as combat aircraft as well. We don’t have that capacity now. UCAVs will be used more in reconnaissance and interdiction roles; they may also play a role in the close air support mission.
What are the most significant changes the Air Force has seen in the last ten years?
In the last ten years, we have gone from a force with separate pieces—a strategic piece, tactical piece, airlift piece, air defense piece—to an Air Force that is one force. We no longer categorize the force on the basis of weapon platform. The missions are more important. We can use a wider variety of aircraft to perform these missions. B-52s can perform close air support. F-16s can fly strategic attack. Surveillance and reconnaissance assets are integrated with attack and defensive forces across the board. We train and fight as a team. This integration is the biggest change.
Are you seeing more integration among the services as well?
Yes. That integration has occurred as a matter of design and necessity. As the services have drawn down, they have become more dependent on each other. The trust among the services is the best I’ve seen in my career. The services are more willing to operate together.
Pilot retention has been a growing concern for the Air Force. What are the trends and how is the Air Force dealing with them?
The airlines are hiring. That’s a fact that affects us directly. When the airlines are not hiring, our retention rates are great. We have also experienced a very high operations tempo over the last ten years. And that workload has taken a toll on the overall force as well as on the pilots. We are losing pilots who have spent nine years in the Air Force. They are wonderful people and they have done everything we have asked them to do. They have gone to war. They have lived in the desert. They have been stationed overseas without their families. Their choice to leave the service is often based on family reasons. Obligations to the family outweigh their desire to stay in the Air Force.
We have been losing our pilots at a faster rate than we have been replacing them. We reduced our pilot training rates during the drawdown and we didn’t ramp up training fast enough to deal with the lowered retention rates. So we are losing a lot of our more experienced pilots. We are going to be between 1,500 and 2,000 pilots short by 2002 if the trend continues. At that point, though, our increased training rates improve the situation.
But we will be short of pilots for three to seven years, depending on several variables. That shortage is going to have some effects. Since we’ll keep cockpits filled, that’s 1,500 or 2,000 pilot slots that we won’t have to put in headquarters, operation centers, or other places where we need pilot expertise. We will have to work our way around that shortage in the next few years.
We’ve done some things to improve pilot retention. We have increased the bonus and we are looking at a bonus beyond the current fifteen-year bonus point. We have tried to provide some down-time following operations to give pilots and other personnel a chance to recover. We have tried to make the separations less strenuous on the families left behind when forces deploy by providing better support networks.
We’re trying to improve retention levels through retirement pay as well. I think Congress is ready to step up to the plate, as the Administration has, and increase retirement pay to fifty percent of base pay after twenty years of service, up from forty percent. We are trying to increase pay levels and improve promotion rates. The pay gap makes it more difficult for us to compete with industry.
Your father was the Air Force Chief of Staff in the 1970s. Describe his influences on you and how those influences affect the leadership style you bring to this position.
My father got me interested in aviation. He gave me my first ride in a military airplane at Carswell AFB in Fort Worth. He took me up in a B-26 Marauder and had me let go of a pencil as he performed a zero-g maneuver. The pencil stayed right where it was in mid-air. Carswell was a B-36 base at the time. I remember flying kites behind the fence at the end of the runway as the bombers warmed up their engines.
I don’t know how people come to these jobs. This isn’t a position people plan their careers around. My father and I arrived in this office through different routes. He came up through the Strategic Air Command. I came up through the tactical air force. I think he was surprised when he was appointed chief of staff. I know I was surprised at my appointment.
He was a great officer and a great father. One lesson he continually taught was integrity. You have to be honest—not just with those in your chain of command, but with yourself. I think that was the most important lesson I learned from him.