This article was originally published at 10:32 a.m. EST February 1, 2016.

Gen. David Goldfein took over as vice chief of staff of the Air Force in August 2015. Goldfein assists the chief of staff with organizing, training and equipping more than 660,000 active duty Guard and Reserves airmen and civilians.

Goldfein sat down to talk with Vago Muradian, editor of Defense News, a sister publication of Air Force Times.

It's the 25th commemoration of the start of Operation Desert Storm, the first Gulf War. Tell us a little bit about what your experience was like during that war 25 years ago.

I was a young captain and …The squadron commander stood up and said the secretary of defense is out negotiating for basing rights right now so we're going to make sure that you have the approach plates for all of the middle east because we're not sure where you're going to land and ... the F-16 engine has actually never flown this long and so we're not sure the oil pressure is going to last.

So you were guinea pigging it on two fronts…whether or not they could get clearances while you were still in the air and whether your engine would last.

That's right. So there it is…we all launched and went off into what was the great adventure. We arrived in Abu Dhabi and essentially opened up essentially what has become Al Dhafra and established operations there.

The other thing that I will always remember is that first mission. We crossed the line on that first day and I remember seeing anti-aircraft fire for the first time AAA, and my squadron commander who had been in Vietnam pointed it out like it was just a walk in the park. "Hey guys … AAA right at 2:00. You know … 24 F-16 pilots stared at the AAA and then he said … Hey, that’s an SA-2 left 10:00" and sure enough we looked up and there was our first ever surface-service to-air missile. Then we heard on the radio that there was a MiG-29 taken out by our F-15Cs and I remember as a young captain what I have come to call confidence in the air which was … Okay, I can do this.

In this time of budgetary constraints, how would you contrast the resource and the readiness, training and all the opportunities you had at the time compared with the amount of resources, readiness and the training opportunities that exist today?

A couple things … number one, we were a much bigger Air Force back then. Just in my business in the fighter community, we had 134 fighter squadrons when we went into Desert Storm. Today we have 54. There is a capability that just comes with capacity so we were a much bigger Air Force and that bigger Air Force provided us more opportunities to train in a contested environment.

So by the time we went to Desert Storm, we'd actually been [trained in Red Flag exercises] in that scenario a number of times because that was the focus of the Air Force at that point.

But this much smaller Air Force … hasn't actually afforded the time for folks to go out and get that same kind of training. Our training today as you might imagine is very tailored and focused on the deployments that we're going to in the Middle East to a large extent so it's a changed availability of training for this smaller force that we have today and it's a changed focus a little bit because we have been in such an uncontested environment for so long.

Just as obviously Desert Storm was seen as sort of a step change in warfare, for air warfare what is the future and what is the best way to prepare in terms of where you guys have to be in 2020…2030?

I think for one it's to understand the various challenges that we face as a nation and that they're transregional in their nature, that there will be varying degrees of contested versus uncontested environments that we'll have to operate in and that they'll be much more networked than before. What I mean but that is that the way I operated in the F-117 for instance. In the F-117 most of it was closed system. We would essentially turn off the world, we would turn off everything, go into a closed environment and we would go across the line and we would do our work. Very, very single domain centric…

And very, very missions controlled.

The environment of the future is going to be more networked in the way we approach the future of joint warfare and how we fit into the joint team. Unlike the F-117, the F-35 opens up into the network, starts doing machine to machine dialogue starts determining through air, space, cyber…and it starts doing algorithms that start looking at within just the machine to machine environment, placing symbology on the visor of the pilot and that same symbology is replicated in command and control and across the network of those that are operating within the fifth generation environment.

And so, working together with machine to machine dialogue, human machine collaboration...it's multi-domain by its very nature. It's a networked approach to how we do warfare and I think it's central to how we do business as an Air Force.

What are the lessons from Desert Storm that apply to the ISIS fight and what are the lessons that don't?

Well, the first I would say is that as any adversary that operates more and more like a conventional army becomes more and more vulnerable to the application of air power and I say air power in both a conventional and unconventional sense.

There are continuing to be opportunities that the enemy presents and so working through one of our smartest airmen that we have in the fight right now…Lieutenant General [Charles] Brown…what he does is he offers up to the CENTCOM Commander, who then offers up to the change of Secretary of Defense continual options.

But if you look at China and Russia obviously seeing the capabilities of the U.S. Air Force and as you look at that anti-access/area denial future, is the US Air Force working on the right kinds of capabilities and concepts of operation to be able to counter those systems?

It's about looking at…what happens when you actually pair together the machine capabilities that we have and the increased training and we put that together. When you actually start thinking about…truly thinking about a multi-domain environment, ISR is a class example.

Traditional ISR would be…Okay, I need to understand some number of bridges in a particular area that I want to catalog and look at as potential targets. The traditional means would be to put something either from a space based, or air based, or high altitude…whatever…we would put some full motion video and catalog it, we would do the processing, we would turn that into a target deck of some kind and some decision maker would be able to use that as part of some kind of campaign. The future actually is far more networked and multi-domain.

An option today that's available to planners is to go online, ask for folks with cellphones to go take pictures of bridges in the local area, catalog those through a blog site…

Crowd source your strike package.

That's right. For us, it's about how do you take a look at all the domains…air, land, sea, space, cyber…how do you pull that all together in a way that actually allows us to go into an area that needs to…and hold targets at risk.

We never want to lose sight of the fact that what we believe the Air Force does for a nation which is we have five missions that we were given in the National Security Act of 1947, and those missions really haven't changed significantly over time.

They've morphed and we've got to think about them but air and space superiority is something that we as an Air Force do that's central to what we're bringing the nation, rapid global mobility…being able to move things and people where they need to move is something that we do for the nation, integrated ISR…we talked about holding targets at risk…prompt global strike, and then the foundation of what pulls it all together is multi-domain command and control.

We think that's the future of the Air Force. We think that those missions are what we do for the nation and that's what we're investing.

All of this depends on the budget. A-10 is a platform that the Air Force did want to sunset, there was a lot of political resistance it appears the Air Force has said 'uncle' on that. What are other tradeoffs that have to be made…if the A-10 remains in service, what else has to go in order to accommodate it?

For the last 15 years, as we've focused very heavily on the violent extremist threat, the investments that we've made and some of the trades we've made as an Air Force have been heavily into global vigilance. We retired 10 fighter squadrons just to put it in perspective…over the same time frame.

When we made decisions on retiring the A-10, we made those decisions prior to ISIL. We were not in Iraq, we were coming out of Afghanistan to a large extent. We didn't have a resurgent Russia at the timeframe that we were talking about retiring the A-10 and so when the assumptions change and they don't pan out, we've got to be agile enough to adjust.

Gen. Goldfein has flown combat missions over Iraq, Afghanistan and Serbia, according to his Air Force bio. Prior to his current Pentagon assignment, Goldfein, a 1983 Air Force Academy graduate, served as director of the Joint Staff and commander of U.S. Air Forces Central Command.✓ .

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