McGILLICUDDY: Well good morning, and. introduction. I'd also like to thank General Grass, Clarke, and all the members of the Guard, both Army

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1 McGILLICUDDY: Well good morning, and as they say in Hawaii, aloha. VOICES: Aloha. McGILLICUDDY: I'd like to thank General Danner. Thank you very much for everything you're doing, and thank you for the kind introduction. I'd also like to thank General Grass, General Ingram, my good family friend, General Clarke, and all the members of the Guard, both Army and Air National Guard. I'm here today on behalf of General Carlisle, the commander of the Pacific Air Forces, and it's an honor to be here. I've got to tell you, I've never had an entrance where I got to walk down a red carpet and everybody stood and applauded before I've even said a word. I do need to throw one more thing out that's not in my bio, and it's for the Army members in the crowd, and I like to tell my Army brothers that I was born at Fort Bragg, North Carolina and Womack Army Hospital, and my dad was in the Army for

2 31 years. (Applause.) McGILLICUDDY: So I'm Army, and these are real airborne wings on my chest. I went to Fort Benning in 1983, after having lived there for seven years growing up. First and foremost, I'd like to start by saying thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you for what you do, thank you for who you are, thank you for your service to your state and to your nation. I'll never know what it's like to be a Guardsmen, but I can certainly understand the hardships of being a Guardsmen. The missed promotion opportunities in your civilian jobs, the deployments, the weekend work and all the sacrifices that you make, and I honestly don't think that our civilian counterparts understand the role of the Guard, both the Army and the Air Force Guard, and the fact that we could not do our missions without the Guard. So thank you very much for everything you do. In the next 20 to 25 minutes, I'm going

3 to talk to you about the role of air power in the Pacific, and try and weave in how the National Guard fits into that picture. Next slide, please. PACAF is comprised of 45,000 men and women, and we have Guard units, Air Force Guard units in Guam, Alaska and Hawaii. If we start with the history of our air power in the Pacific, you can see in the top left corner of that picture, that's the Flying Tigers that started in 1937 with the Chinese. And in fact, you know we talked about a rebalance and a pivot to the Pacific. The fact is air power's never left the region. While over time the tools have changed, the distances have remained the same. But at the end, it's going to be our airmen that are the cornerstone of stability and security in the Asia Pacific theater, and the Guard has been there with us every step of the way. In Korea, 80 percent of the Guard, the Air Guard was mobilized and flew in Korea, and they flew over 39,000 combat sorties and ended up with 39

4 kills. In Vietnam, we had 30,000 sorties and 50,000 hours in several fighter units participating in Vietnam. So the Guard has been there with us every step of the way. Next slide, please. I'm sure General Brooks and General Moore touched a little bit on the strategic environment. It's filled with rogue nations, non-state groups, organized criminals and we also have illicit crafting, persons, drugs, weapons, and then there's territorial disputes. You throw in the world's sixth largest armies in five of the seven countries we have mutual defense treaties with, and you can see it's a complex and dynamic AOR. Next slide. In addition to the man-made problems, there's also the vastness of the AOR. 8,000 miles from the west coast of the United States over to India, 9,000 miles from Alaska down to Antarctica, and it goes from Hollywood to Bollywood, from polar bears to penguins. It's 100 million square miles, 15 time zones and encompasses 36

5 countries. It's 52 percent of the earth's surface. The Pacific is so big that you can take every land mass on the globe, put it in the Pacific and still have room for another North America and an Africa. But besides the distances, we also have to contend with anti-access and area denial capabilities of potential adversaries, and air power is going to be the key. This is not to slam our Navy partners, but what it takes them in days to get to we get there in hours. As you can see on this slide, Guam, Alaska and Hawaii perform a strategic triangle. Whether it's man-made or natural, all of these crises we're going to operate from here. Next slide, please. On the tactical level, we're also seeing some additional trends that will affect our ability to project air power in the Pacific. Although this slide depicts China, it could just as well be Russia. Both of these countries are willing to export advanced military

6 technology to the highest bidder, which means advanced technology could eventually get in the hands of other nations, potentially hostile to our national interest. These emerging technologies reshape the security environment of the Pacific. They include, but are not limited to, electronic attack, and most of you all know out there there are some pretty good jammers out there that could potentially work against our airborne radars and our C-2. Space and cyber are rangeless, and they put our satellite systems at risk. We used to know that we would own the high ground, and that our systems were defended. Today, that's not likely the case. Then of course, the land attack missiles. These threaten air fields within the region, and challenge our ability to project power in the Pacific. Additionally, North Korean missile technology continues to improve, and while it's

7 destabilizing for the region, some day they might even be able to reach Alaska. So all of these factors, the strategic environment, the size and scope of the Pacific, the A2AD, which is Area Access and Area Denial technologies, provide the framework for where we came up with our Pacific strategy. Next slide, please. In President Obama's 2012 strategic guidance, he stated "While the U.S. military will continue to contribute to security globally, we will of necessity rebalance towards the Asia Pacific region." Former Secretary of State Clinton in 2011 highlighted the Asia Pacific's cultural, intellectual and economic importance by calling this decade the beginning of America's Pacific century. This rebalance is not targeted against any one nation. Rather, it's meant to encourage the shared responsibility of all nations for security and stability across the Asia Pacific region. I want to point out that our Pacific strategy is less than U.S. PACOM's and ultimately our

8 country's national security strategy. Next slide, please. Additionally, as this slide depicts, the PACAF strategy draws from both PACOM's guiding principles and USAF priorities. As it were, we have two bosses, and we've shaped our strategy to meet both PACOM's and the USAF principles. Next slide. This is our Pacific Air Forces strategy. We will expand engagement, increase combat capability and improve war fighter integration to posture for contingency ops, ensure stability and free access to deter aggression and defend the U.S. interests, and we're going to get there along five lines of operation, which you can see in the center of the slide. The first tenet, expand engagement. Deterring aggression and defeating enemies is not a job we're going to accomplish alone. Our allies and partners are to varying degrees ready and willing to help share this burden, to maintain peace and security throughout the region.

9 However, engagement is not limited to just our partners and allies, if we're going to engage with other PACOM components, headquarters Air Force and other departments in the D.C. Beltway. The second tenet is to increase combat capability. It's going to be a challenge in these fiscally constrained times, let me tell you that. We must also assist our allies and partners and enhance their capabilities. Together, we will ensure freedom of movement in the global commons, mitigate the tyranny of distance and counter growing A2AD capabilities. Finally, we have to improve warfighter integration. This includes crossed and maintain integration throughout many diverse operations and organizations. Next slide, please. To expand on this topic, we're going to have to energize old alliances and foster new partnerships. We're going to have to move from bilateral, unilateral to multilateral, and when we say we're going to engage at home and abroad,

10 that means not only in this AOR, but we've also got to engage back in the -- back in D.C. The National Guard is going to be there with us on all of these. At the end of the day, relationships are going to be the foundation to access and success in this AOR. Next slide, please. Looking back, in 2012, we had over 200 engagements with 28 nations, including -- and they range the gamut from Red Flag Alaska, which is a full-up exercise, to subject matter exchanges. Next slide. In 2013, we got hit a little bit with sequestration, and that exercises and engagements you see up there in red are ones that we had to cancel altogether, and the ones in yellow are the ones we had to cut back on. I'd like to point out Operation Balikatan in the middle there, where we had 12 members of the 254th Security Forces Squadron participate, and they integrated Philippines Air Force security into their flight line security plan.

11 Next slide. Here's what 14 looks like. 41 engagements, 44 engagements from 41 countries, and it's looking good right now. But as you know, we haven't taken into account sequestration, and this is going to change. General Carlisle has given us clear direction on this. We're not going to cancel. We're going to try not to cancel anything, but we will have to scale back. We might have to go from a full-up exercise to a table top, and we might have to go from deploying a 12 ship down to a six ship. At the end of the day, General Carlisle would like to get at least one air show in, one Red Flag Alaska and one COPE exercise. But we know it's going to be -- it's going to be different from this. It's just going to be a difference of degree. Next slide, please. Let me talk to you a little bit about Pacific Angel. Pacific Angel is now in its sixth year. It's a joint combined humanitarian assistance exercise, and it's not necessarily an exercise. We send CE security forces

12 doctors out to different countries in the AOR. Last year, we sent them to Indonesia, Philippines, Cambodia, Sri Lanka and Vietnam, and we go there and we help folks with medical and dental care, engineering, and we're basically building partnership capacity. In June of this year, the 154th Security Forces Squadron from the Hawaiian Air National Guard supported PACANGEL in Vietnam. You can see in the bottom right-hand picture, there's a picture of Captain Mitsagna, and he was the security forces squadron from the -- He was the security forces squadron commander, and he was about to go out on a one mile hike, providing security to doctors that are going to a village to provide care for a newborn infant that barely survived birth. This wasn't his first PACANGEL. In fact, he's been -- he went to Nepal last year and did pretty much the same thing. In August, we held one in Sri Lanka, and there we sent the 176th CE Squadron

13 from the Alaska Air National Guard. That wasn't there for PACANGEL either. In 2014, we're going to do four PACANGELs, and in every one of them, we're going to have Air National Guard support. So at the end of the day, the National Guard plays a vital role in Pacific Angel and our expand engagement core tenet. Next slide, please. I don't think I have to explain the state partnership program to this crowd, but I'd like to highlight the fact that General Carlisle would like to expand our already robust program we have in the Pacific. I think we've just signed off on the New York and Tonga state partnership program. These are three great pictures of the state partnership program in action. At the top left, you've got a subject matter exchange between Idaho and Cambodia. On the top right that's in Oregon, where we invited the Vietnam delegation. On the bottom, that's Senior Master Sergeant Kenneth Joyce from the Alaska Air National Guard with Mongolian Air Force at

14 Ghengis Khan Airbase in March of this year. Next slide. But expanding engagement isn't everything we do. It is essential for security and stability in the region, but if we stop there, we'd be more like the Peace Corps, not war fighters. So as we're seeing right now in other parts of the world, you've got to have the capacity if you want any type of credible deterrent. Which brings me to our second core tenet of increased combat capability. This means increasing our own capabilities and enhancements with our allies and partners, to ensure that we can have freedom of movement, and also grow in A2AD capabilities. We've also got to procure the next generation of munitions, and have the most capable platforms in the Air Force, including fifth generation fighters. We've got to deploy those new systems to this AOR first. It's not enough to have the latest and greatest, though, if we don't defend it. So we're

15 looking at active and reactive ways to protect the resource that we have. Whether it's hardening our resources, dispersing our resources, we've got to have an active defense. We've got to be able to take a blow and keep on operating. Finally, we've got to get the most bang for our buck. Next slide, please. This is a laydown of the forces in the Pacific theater. It's 350 aircraft. When you add in the 50 aircraft of rotational forces, which are highlighted in those red boxes up there, it's 400 aircraft. It's essentially nine bases with some JTACs out of McCord. Six in WESTPAC, three in the EASTPAC, with Guard, with active Air National Guard up in Alaska, Guam and in Hawaii. Next slide, please. This is an example of how we increase combat capability through Operation Deep Freeze, and this is a shout out to our New York Air National Guard out here that fly the LC-130s. These guys have been flying this mission accident free for 25 years. Outstanding.

16 (Applause.) McGILLICUDDY: When General Carlisle talks about places, not new bases in the AOR, this is what he's talking about. We have a long-standing relationship with Christchurch in New Zealand, and then we send in our guys with the skis, and they go and open airfields in the Antarctic. Simply an amazing mission. Next slide, please. To improve war fighter integration, we've really got to work on fusion and synergy, and by doing this, we put all our capabilities together and the sum is bigger than the whole. We're going to do this through joint integration and allied interoperability. Next slide, please. One of the ways we do this is through Red Flag Alaska. We've got a picture up there of the Alabama National Guard, who just participated in 13/3, and the A-10s from the 163rd Fighter Squadron. But we also have the 168th at Eielson up there, the 210th Rescue Squadron and then our JTACs.

17 This Red Flag Alaska 13/3 was historic, because in that bottom picture you see a picture of a Japanese F-15 and a Korean F-15, and it was the first exercise they've ever flown side by side. Next slide, please. Here's a great story about improved war fighter integration. I love that top picture. The top picture -- I don't know if you guys know this, but in Hawaii we have an active association, which is the 199th fighter squadron, and then we bring in some active duty pilots from the 19th fighter squadron. This picture at the top is taken at their arrival ceremony, and the pilot is an active duty pilot, and next to him is his wife, who's also a member of the Guard, who's a crew chief for the F-22. That just epitomizes our total force integration. The F-22s just achieved FOC in April of this year. But before they even achieved FOC, they were out doing exercises such as Pacific Rim and deploying to Red Flag and Nellis. This is a little-known fact, but the

18 Hawaiian Raptors also have the record for most sorties generated in a single day by an F-22 unit, and that's 48 sorties. That's pretty dang amazing. Next slide, please. (Applause.) McGILLICUDDY: Then of course we need resilient airmen, and that picture I know it looks like some young kid with his face painted. But it's actually Lieutenant Dennis Kirkland of the 254th Air Base Group of the Guam Air National Guard, and that face paint he received in the line of duty. He's there at Anderson assisted on man days, because of the absence of active duty chaplains. Because of what he's doing, our airman at Anderson have exceptional pastoral care. The individual on the lower right is Staff Sergeant Johnna Soja. She's a Guardsmen working on the PACAF staff, A-1 on an MPA tour. She's what I call a quiet warrior. There's nothing flashy about what she's doing, but because just about every airman in that

19 office is deployed or at the Senior NCO Academy or NCO Academy, she's in there doing strength accountability, she's updating PACOM with casual reports, and she's validating our taskings that are levied to us by our AEF. She's literally the glue that's holding that office together. Then in the bottom, we've got another National Guard member, Master Sergeant Charles Kobiyashi, and what he's doing is -- Senior Master Sergeant, I apologize. But he's filling in as the F-22 functional FAM for maintainers in the F-22 community out here at Hickam. So on the far left, we've got somebody filling in where they're needed. On the right hand side, again filling in where they're needed, and then in the middle, giving us the expertise that we need in the active duty that will be gained from the Guard. Next slide, please. In a nutshell, this is our brief on PACAF, and while we're rebalancing, we're fully engaged with the strategic shift.

20 Sequestration is slowing us down, but you know what, it's not stopping us. In the Pacific TFI, we're all meeting. We're all meeting the challenges and we're meeting them together. Finally, it all comes down to airmen, and they are the critical enabler to accomplish the mission. Next slide. Thank you very much. (Applause.) McGILLICUDDY: Thank you very much.

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