Wynne speaks out

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news/2008/07/airforce_wynne_interview_071408

Tell-all interview covers Iraq withdrawal, nuclear report, procurement and more

Posted : Wednesday Jul 16, 2008 13:46:16 EDT

The June 5 forced resignations of Air Force Secretary Michael W. Wynne and Chief of Staff Gen. T. Michael Moseley — the first time in U.S. history the top uniformed and civilian leaders of any service were ousted simultaneously — shocked the Air Force and highlighted deep fissures between the Pentagon and Air Force leadership.

Wynne sat down July 9 for a wide-ranging discussion with Military Times editors and reporters, explaining why he was really fired, what went wrong with the nuclear enterprise, what can be done about Iraq and how he sees the future of the Air Force.

Discuss the interview on our forums

The questions, answers and order of questions have been edited for clarity.

Military Times: Why were you fired? Was it the accidental transfer of nuclear weapons from Minot Air Force Base, N.D., to Barksdale Air Force Base, La., in August and the mistaken shipment of nuclear warhead fuses to Taiwan in 2006, or were there other factors?

Michael Wynne: Secretary [Gates] and I had some long-standing disputes about the funding for F-22. ... We had a dispute about the future. We had a dispute as to whether or not you should spend your time worrying about the strategic effects of the future, or you should spend your time on the war as it sits. So I think [me] going out and viewing a little bit about what’s the future was construed as the secretary of the Air Force distracted from [his] duties.

We moved missiles between Minot and Barksdale. We did. In 2004 began the odyssey of the missile parts to Taiwan, which was not in the watch I was on, but nevertheless the results occurred during the time I was [secretary]. And so ascribing it to my tenure is interesting. ...

So you look through that and you say to yourself ... if [Gates] didn’t want somebody on his staff, the secretary should pick the time and the place and tell [me] to leave.

I’m just amazed at the circumstance. Why didn’t [he] just call me in and say, “Time to go”?

MT: So you think the report by Navy Adm. Kirkland Donald detailing the Air Force’s nuclear problems was just a convenient excuse to fire you?

MW: I think it was.

MT: The Air Force has faced criticism for being reluctant to send more unmanned aerial vehicles into the war theater. Was that another area of dispute with Gates?

MW: Actually, we didn’t have a dispute about the fielding of the unmanned air vehicles. Although it’s been characterized as a dispute, we were actually on the same side.

Finally the Army really understood the benefits of having situational awareness to the battlefield commander. This started an insatiable demand for ... ISR assets. ... Less than two or three years earlier we had been turned down from increasing the Predators because there was no bona fide requirement coming out of the Army.

MT: Wasn’t Gates brought in to fix Iraq, and not as much to worry about the future?

MW: I would say it this way: He was hired to be secretary of defense. ... One of the things he has been doing very heavily is managing the war, but I wouldn’t say that was why he was hired. He was hired to be secretary of defense.

MT: How did you and Gates envision the future, and where was the disconnect?

MW: He thinks the nature of our engagements is going to be these insurgent wars for the next 20 years, and that we ought to maybe focus our resources to provide all the equipment and all the means and methods to combat this insurgent war. And if you need money, where you should go for that money is in that strategic margin that I think he would characterize that we have against all the competition that you could surmise.

[Editor’s note: The ‘strategic margin’ refers to the U.S. air and sea power advantage over other nations.]

I made a big deal about maintaining the strategic margin ... and that we’re going to be out of Iraq pretty soon and we better figure out how not to have an upset whereby we erode the strategic margin to the point where somebody thinks they can take us. ... The way we came at the subject clearly set up a policy differentiation.

MT: Is Gates too closed-minded?

MW: I would offer only that when I was in sessions with him [my] views were not accepted. ... As secretary of the Air Force, I didn’t really feel engaged in the [war]. Everything was a straight line of command and control right through the combatant commanders, and sort of our contribution was a byproduct.

MT: Why has the Air Force held so few senior joint staff positions in recent years?

MW: There’s been an imbalance on the joint staff and there’s been an imbalance in the secretariat in having Air Force ideas brought forward for debate and for implementation. ... I accuse myself of being a poor salesman from the standpoint of being unable to foster the Air Force ideas or being able to bring Air Force personnel into joint staff positions of prominence and even into the secretariat positions. ... There has been little or no progress in that regard.

MT: What should be done about Iraq?

MW: This is now a police action ... and the question is, when does this police action stop? ... I think the Army has done a marvelous job of corralling the insurgency, reducing the strife, creating auras of stability in many of the areas. And I think now is probably a good time to start taking advantage of that. ...

[My withdrawal plan] turns out to be the use of the reachback ... to begin to extract administrative personnel out of Iraq. Essentially if I take a battalion of administrative people out of Iraq, I now take the force protection requirements for that same battalion. And if I can run it all using the Internet in a distance place, why not?

In the same vein that the way the Air Force is currently running unmanned air vehicles from [the continental U.S.], why can’t I run some of the administrative attributes?

It does worry me that we’re beginning to sell 52-inch TVs in the Green Zone. How long are we going to be there? And where is it in our psyche that we must occupy the capital of a country? ... How do we begin to reshape ourselves so that we can maybe steer a course that allows us to reduce our forces but not reduce the firepower that is so necessary for stabilization and governance?

MT: What should you have done differently about the nuclear parts that got shipped to Taiwan?

MW: In 1991, the parts that were shipped ultimately to Taiwan were downgraded from being nuclear controlled to being just security controlled. ... It wasn’t really characterized and controlled as a nuclear item. That having been said, I think one of the things ... I could have done differently is gone back and [looked at] that as to whether all of those parts that were essentially taken off of the nuclear control list should have been re-entered.

MT: What could have avoided the Minot-Barksdale nuclear incident?

MW: I think enforcing “train as you fight” would have helped. ... If we would have managed that and the discipline characteristics as if we were going to war, we would have probably saved ourselves the embarrassment.

MT: What did you think of the Donald report about the Air Force’s nuclear management?

MW: He looked at us from a Navy perspective. ... I think his guys, because of their nuclear submarine background, did not see a shop with things on the floor as being a very good shop because on a nuclear submarine everything has a place and needs to be in that place. So I think they just see things very differently than we do. The fact that we have 500 sites with nuclear components, and they don’t, leads us in different directions about how we delegate responsibility. I think all of that played into the report.

MT: Why do you think the Air Force should buy more F-22s when we have no close competitors for air superiority?

MW: Right now, when ... you’re not sure if the F-35 is going to work, [ending F-22] is a bad decision. It’s introducing a little too much risk into the strategic environment. I’m concerned that [F-35] has not yet gone through testing and that it is at the very point where the F-22 was when it was delayed 10 years. ...

There was a time in a conversation when I was asked about the fact that we’re not going to have peer competitors. ... The likelihood of us engaging a peer competitor is very low. The likelihood of us engaging a peer competitor’s [weapons or equipment, though] is very high, because the market is very rich with sales.

And so I worry about our ability to escape and evade an integrated air defense system in the future if you’re going to restrict the number of fifth-generation airplanes that we might have.

MT: Do you think the drawdown of the Air Force by 40,000 airmen was the right decision?

MW: We had to do it because we would never have gotten started on the issue of recapitalization without showing some pain and strain on behalf of the Air Force. We could not be big and new. We had to be smaller and arguably newer.

MT: How did the Air Force botch the tanker selection process so badly?

MW: I think the Air Force overcomplicated it. They really wanted both competitors to be almost even so everybody had the best chance of [winning]. ...

I think here is one of those cases where Boeing had probably assessed that their prospects were dimming. ... I would say they systematically began to build a case [for a protest], and I’m not sure that they shared everything that they could have shared with the Air Force along the way and essentially were building ... a ‘Pearl Harbor’ file that could be used later [in a protest]. ... There’s a feeling in the Air Force that maybe we were as transparent as we could be and maybe Boeing wasn’t.

MT: How can Air Force procurement be fixed?

MW: My sense ... is we became overcomplicated, and we actually need to go back to ... where you have a lot more subjectivity. ... If the products are in fact similar price and similar character, why can’t the customer then choose a best value? ...

I would basically get rid of life-cycle procurement and go back to hard dollars. What is the government contracting for? ... Now all of the sudden it involves military construction, it involves [environmental factors], it involves all these aspects that I don’t have any control over in the future. Fuel usage and fuel costs in 2025? I can’t even predict them for August.

MT: As part of Air Force Smart Operations 21, you launched a major effort to save fuel. How significant are the operational changes underway?

MW: It’s huge. It’s huge from the standpoint that we use some $6.6 billion worth of fuel [annually]. ... Our energy push is way above and beyond. ... We partnered with the airlines to tell them what we were doing to save fuel and to ask them what they were doing to save fuel. ... It’s got to be a huge part of our operations in the Air Force. ... We have stripped a huge amount of weight out of our airplanes by essentially tailoring to the mission we’re going to. ...

All of this needs to be holistically looked at. It’s going to save the Air Force an incredible amount of money downstream. My guess it that they could probably save themselves 10 percent of the fuel usage. It’s going to be $600 million [annual savings], and I think they could get it over a billion.