- [Male Host] Ladies and gentlemen,
please welcome back to the stage
the Martin H. Harris Chapter president,
Todd Freeze.
(music) (applause)
- Good morning and thank you.
The Martin H. Harris Chapter is AFA's local chapter
here in Central Florida.
35 years ago, we established this great symposium
along with our folks at headquarters, AFA.
And have been working closely with AFA to keep it as one
of the premiere, professional development events
for our airmen.
Today, is it our honor to participate in continuing
that great tradition by hosting this next session.
I am pleased to announce our speaker, who will discuss
innovative leadership in space operations.
He is the commander of air force space command.
As commander, he is responsible for organizing,
training, equipping and maintaining
mission-ready space forces and capabilities
for the North American Aerospace Defense Commands,
U.S. Strategic Commands and all other combatant
commands around the world.
Please help me in welcoming General John Raymond.
(applause)
(dramatic music)
- Thank you, thanks son.
Good morning.
How's everybody?
Thanks.
First of all, Todd, thank you.
Todd and I had the privilege of being stationed together
Yokota, back in 2011 with the great earthquake,
nuclear reactor disaster and tsunami
and he did an absolutely spectacular job
leading Yokota airbase through that
low-level radiation environment.
So thanks for your leadership, continued leadership.
Also wanna thank AFA.
Thanks for the privilege of being here and being able
to talk a little about something that I'm really
passionate about.
This is an extremely exciting time
to be in the space business.
That's an understatement.
About three weeks ago,
I was at home and my daughter, Christina,
who lives up in Minneapolis, St. Paul,
sent me a text and said, "Dad, you're going viral."
I said, "What do you mean I'm going viral?"
"They're doing a Netflix show about space."
And I said, "Really?"
I said, "You've gotta be kidding me."
So I got on and sure enough, there is.
And she calls me back and says, "Hey dad, if they ever did
a show about Air Force Space Command,
who do you think would play you?"
And I came up with all these, you know,
folks that I would like to have play me.
And then she humbled me and sent me,
this is going around, this is going viral in the family now,
this is the, I don't know how to do this.
That's who's playing me.
(audience laughing)
I'm pulling for Bruce Willis.
But it's not just an exciting time.
It's an absolutely critical time.
Critical time to be in the space business.
We're the strategic inflection point.
Where we are reliant across
the joint force on space capabilities.
There's nothing we do as a joint force.
Nothing, zero, that isn't enabled by space.
But yet, we can't assume that we're always
gonna have space superiority.
That's what's changed.
It's also changed, look at the national security strategy,
look what it says.
It says, assured access to space and freedom to maneuver
in space is of vital national interest.
The last national security strategy didn't say that.
Now the President of the United States saying,
"Space is a war-fighting domain,
just like air, land and sea."
The national security strategy goes on to say,
and I'm paraphrasing here, if anybody messes with that
vital national interest, we're gonna respond
at a place, time, domain and manner of our choosing.
Look at the national defense strategy.
It talks about global competition, multi-domain,
multi-functional, that's what we do.
So some people tell me when the future and say,
"Man, that task is just daunting."
The challenges that are ahead are so great.
I completely disagree,
and I'll steal a line from our chief.
Our chief says, "Every challenge, there's an opportunity."
As I look forward, there's nothing but opportunities.
Absolutely nothing but opportunities.
And those opportunities, the reason I can say that,
and the foundation of that assertion
is the innovative nature of all four segments
of the space domain today
and the innovative nature of our airmen
that operate in this domain.
It's part of our DNA.
It is embedded in the space DNA.
Let me introduce you to one of these airmen.
- Hi, I'm Colonel Nick Hague, Air Force officer
and NASA astronaut.
I'm currently in Star City, Russia,
making final preparations to launch
to the International Space Station in the coming weeks.
During my seven month mission, I will live and work
in the ultimate high ground.
Conducting experiments to advance what we know
about how the human body responds in space,
so we can safely explore the moon, Mars and more
in the coming decades.
The Air Force has been at the forefront
of space exploration since 1954,
building some of the first rockets
that took Americans into space,
supporting the nation's launch and range infrastructure,
providing search and rescue for human space flight
and tracking thousands of objects
in Earth orbit to keep astronauts safe.
It is my honor to be part of that tradition.
And I want to thank all of my fellow airmen
and our partners in the aerospace industry
for what you to do continue to advance exploration in space.
- Nick may have remembered back on 11 October this past year
and launched, in fact the chief, the secretary and I
at ---, had an opportunity to do a conference call
with him out in Colorado Springs.
He was in Russia getting ready to launch
and we talked to him, wished him well,
and then he took off.
And shortly thereafter, the rocked aborted.
And he survived.
And he's back on ground and he's going back up again.
It's a great Air Force family.
His wife, Katie is in ROTC.
The leader of ROTC down at the University of Houston.
And like he said, he's in Russia getting ready to launch.
Well I'll tell you, what's exciting is this year,
we're gonna launch humans from the United States.
And in fact,
(applause)
And in fact, for those that are here,
if you wanna get up at about midnight
and drive about an hour south,
at about 2:20 this morning the Sharks of the 45th Space Wing
(cheering)
Where are ya?
Stand up.
(clapping)
Thank you.
The Sharks of the 45th Space Wing are gonna support
the launch of a Space X vehicle,
launching the Dragon Crew capsule,
to the International Space Station.
The last test, if you will, before we launch humans,
currently scheduled this summer.
So, again, in all segments, whether it's the
civil segment that we just talked about,
whether it's the commercial segment that's so vibrant
and alive and well, whether it's the
national security segment, which is alive and well,
and also I had another segment, and that would be,
the international partners that we're developing.
There is a lot going on in the space business.
Where did it all begin?
So the very first Rand study done back in 1946
talks about the preliminary design
of an experimental world circling space ship.
You know what that is?
That's a satellite.
That was the name for a satellite back then
and they posited in that report, in that study,
that it was feasible to put a satellite in orbit.
About 300 miles high, it could orbit around the Earth
about every 90 minutes.
You had to have a power plant that could put that
into orbit going about 17,000 miles an hour.
And they said you have to do that with a rocket.
They said you had to put that rocket
probably down somewhere by the equator.
Guess who chartered that study?
Uh-oh.
How do you, go back please.
There we go.
Curtis LeMay.
Probably not the person that you and I
would've thought about.
But our Air Force has had very, very visionary leaders
in this business.
And he was the one that started that report.
So, unfortunately, the Soviet Union, in October of 1957,
beat us to the punch and go that world's first
world's circling space ship on orbit.
Then October of 1957, Sputnik was launched.
That sent a significant shock wave, if you will,
through the United States
and we needed to figure out a way to track it.
We didn't have a way to track it.
There was no such thing
as the Space Situational Awareness Network at the time.
Yeah this radar, it was a prototype
for a ballistic missile early warning.
And some smart engineers figured out a way to track Sputnik
with that satellite, or with that dish.
And the very next day, we as a nation had tracked Sputnik.
Again, a national imperative, innovative thinking,
taking existing technology and coming up with con-ups
that are relevant to meet that challenge.
What's interesting though, and what I didn't realize
until just recently, that Sputnik actually,
and this began, the foundation
of the space situational awareness business
that we do today.
What I didn't realize was that Sputnik also had
a pretty significant tie to this next program.
GPS.
There's a gentlemen at Applied Physics Lab
named Frank McClure.
And so there's a group of people,
when Sputnik was first launched,
we were looking at how can we track this better?
And they figured out if you knew exactly where you were
on the ground and you could measure the doppler wave shifts,
you could then determine the position of a satellite.
Well, again, Frank McClure, a innovative thinker,
said, "Hmm, I wonder if we could do it the other way.
"I wonder if you didn't know where you were on the ground,
"but you knew where you were in space,
could you determine where you were
on the ground from space?"
Hence, the GPS satellite.
GPS satellite, and I'm gonna talk to this,
this first segment I'm talking about is all about
the period of time of where we built space.
So everything from, I'll take that report,
1946, all the way up to about 1991,
just go with me and say that's the period of time
where we built all of our space capabilities.
And I'm gonna use GPS as an example.
But GPS, what we did was,
we had several different prototypes systems.
The Navy had a system called Transit.
The Navy had a system called Timation.
The Air Force had a prototype system as well.
None of them could compete well enough to get funded.
This was critical to the cold war.
This is very similar to the conversation of the story
that the secretary told yesterday with the hypersonics.
The Department of Defense said, "Okay, come together
and figure it out."
So in a meeting in 1973 in the Pentagon,
services got together and they took the best
of each program.
They put it underneath a colonel,
Colonel Bradford Parkinson Air Force colonel,
and said, "You're gonna run it."
And last week, we celebrated the 41st anniversary
of the GPS satellite.
In fact, a couple months ago, several months ago,
back in October of this year, 45th Space Wing, go Sharks.
Supported the launch of the first ever GPS satellite.
Has three times better accuracy,
and eight times more protection against jamming.
Again, all of our satellite programs that we have today
were all largely started with prototypes, innovative,
put in the hands of operators,
developing innovative con-ops,
to meet a national imperative, and that's what we saw.
That provided us great advantage.
Integrating or those space capabilities
provide us great advantage.
Desert Storm happened.
1991.
For those that were alive or for those
that have studied Desert Storm, what happened?
The ground forces did what?
A left hook.
How do you do a left hook in the desert, at night,
without street signs telling you were to go?
Do it with GPS.
Although even at that time, that we didn't even have
a full constellation of GPS satellites up.
We had these satellites up.
Anybody know, anybody non-space person,
know what a DSP satellite does?
What's it used for?
Strategic missile warning.
What was the big issue in Desert Storm?
Scud missiles.
These satellites were designed to detect big,
intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Scud missiles were smaller, shorter burning,
shorter flight time.
Innovative folks figured out that if you took that satellite
and processed that data in stereo
and optimized the communication links,
to bring that communication link direct to the war fighter,
we could provide tactical warning.
And so, we got so good at it that our operators could
detect tactic warning, turn on the TV
and hear the sirens going and we could warn people to duck.
Space-based invisible sensor.
This is a prototype for SSA.
The satellite upgrade out in the upper left,
is called MSX, it was an experimental satellite.
There was a sensor onboard.
We were trying to figure out if you could do
space situational awareness from space.
There's a lot of nay-sayers.
People thought that wasn't the right way to do this.
Costs a lot of money.
Wouldn't be effective.
We put an optical sensor on that satellite,
and after that satellite finished doing its experiments
for a couple years, we started using the sensor.
We put it in the hands of operators.
There's a common theme here.
We put that technology prototype in the hands of operators
and what we thought we were gonna get,
50 observations a day, we figured out,
the operators figured out, that if you looked
at pinch points in space, you could track a lot more.
We actually tracked about 350 objects a day.
This became the foundation for what we have today
at space situational awareness, ORS 5,
which does, operation responses phase five,
which does space situational awareness
and our GSSAP,
Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness program.
This became the foundation.
But again, an innovative approach,
there's a of nay-sayers.
Everyone of these programs.
There was a lot of nay-sayers with GPS.
GPS was going to cost a billion dollars
to get that up on orbit.
Last example in this operationalizing.
So we built space all the way up through 1991,
Desert Storm happened, now we're in this period of
how do you take those capabilities that we've built
and how do you use them for the war fighter?
We had built an Air Force weapons school
down at the warfare center, for space, a space division,
we started training space operators to be weapons officers.
We built an AOC, we built something called
the Director of Space Forces.
We've built all this infrastructure, all this capability,
to be able to bring space to the fight.
I was privileged to be deployed in 2006
as the Director of Space Forces.
By that time, the Air Force is about to drop
the first ever small diameter bomb.
And the small diameter bomb is small, hence the name,
250 pound bomb.
It needed to be accurate.
And there was a thought that we were gonna do
differential GPS to make sure that that small bomb
had the best GPS that you could ever have.
So it would hit precisely where we needed it to hit.
Have the effect it would have,
and not cause collateral damage.
And we were gonna do that.
We were gonna put towers all over the place.
Well back in 2006, you couldn't go put towers
all over Iraq and Afghanistan.
It was a war zone.
So some innovative thinkers
thought, hey, back at Schriever Air Force Base,
where the control center is for GPS,
coming off my computer, I have better accuracy
than what's coming off the satellite,
'cause it's what we call, "zero age data."
It's perfect, there's no latency in it.
And if there's a way to get that data,
into that weapon, hanging on the wing of an F-15E,
then we'll have the best GPS available.
And so weapons officers, three in this picture,
Colonel Endicott's in the middle,
space weapons officer assigned,
he's currently the wing commander brigadier general
wing commander up at Buckley Air Force base.
Cheese Gerber, who's on the left is another
Space Weapons Officer
and Ramsey Traberski is the weapons officer at the time,
from Lakenheath,
got together and figured out
that if they could get that data, in a link 16 format,
they could broadcast that throughout the theater
over link 16, straight to the weapon.
And that's what happened.
First small diameter bomb dropped in general north.
The CFACC came to me and said, "Hey, where is this program
called ---?"
And that's what we called it.
Well, we just dropped the first one.
And so I said, he tasked me to brief them every week
on the status of --- at --- theater.
I never had to give a briefing.
Because innovative airmen, that were trained
in joint war fighting figured out how to do that.
And they put a box out at the ---
they put a box out at --- and the ---
and broadcast that over the link 16 broadcast
and by the time the second small diameter bomb dropped,
- -- was up and running.
That gave us great advantage,
spectacular advantage.
All that work that we've done since Desert Storm,
which some have called the first space war,
provided us with an advantage that nobody else has.
The challenge is, our competitors, our adversaries,
Russia and China, specifically,
are developing capabilities to keep us
from accessing space and to keep us
from gaining that advantage that that access provides.
And so it is clear today
that space is a war fighting domain
just like air, land and sea.
And on this stage last year, right here,
our Chief stated, and I quote,
"Now is the time for our service,
regardless of specialty badges,
to embrace space superiority
with the same passion and sense of ownership
that we've embraced air superiority."
And we are.
What we're doing at Air Force Space Command now,
first was building space,
second was operationalizing space,
and this third part I'll call space superiority.
And what we're doing is reaching out
to get innovative, game-changing capabilities
into the hands of joint war fighters
that are trained and steeped in both joint war fighting
and space, and putting them in an environment
where they can test, train and fail.
And I wanna tell you, this is a bad word to use
in the space business, but there is an explosion
of new capability coming.
Two days ago, I think,
OneWeb, a company that's located just down the road here,
just launched their first seven satellites.
They have a new network that's gonna have
hundreds of small satellites.
We tracked 23,000 objects today.
A little over 23,000 objects.
Of those 23,000 objects,
only about 1,400 are satellites.
A little over 1,400, approximately.
OneWeb, SpaceX,
SpaceX has a constellation they're building
that's gonna have 4,000 satellites.
Just think what that can do for us.
If we put those capabilities into the hands of operators,
and figure out how use those for our advantage.
What I'd like to do is close up
with three things that we're working
that I think are gonna be game-changers for us.
The first is standards.
Any operational commander that's gonna operate
in a domain has to have the ability
to command and control their forces.
And so we reached out to the Air Force RCO
and we asked them to build a prototype
of a battle management command and control system
called ESBMC-2.
And using open standards that they used
when they built the CMCC.
And Dr. Roper and I signed a letter mandating
that everything that's coming to space
will be compliant.
And that prototype work is going really, really well.
And I appreciate those in the consortium
that are helping pull that across the finish line.
Some of the things you heard Mark Cuban
talk about yesterday, and other speakers talk about,
machine to machine dialogue.
It's gonna help us with speed.
If you look at the space domain,
speed and scale are something we're gonna have to address.
Machine to machine, speed, it's gonna allow companies
to innovate to those standards.
They're not gonna have to worry about that.
They're just gonna have to build their payloads,
that's what we want them to focus on,
and innovate to those standards.
The other thing that we did then,
it's one of those things, you know I've stayed
at Holiday Inn Express before,
so I'm not an expert but I've stayed there.
I know data, and data management is important.
So we hired the first ever Chief Data Officer
for Air Force Space Command.
We're building a data strategy.
We're also lucky that the Chief and Secretary
assigned Major General Kim Crider as my IMA.
And she was acting as the Chief Data Officer
for the Air Force.
Between those two, we are moving,
we've already got three cases that we developed.
And it's already providing us capability.
If you look at what we just did,
this enterprise space battle management command and control
you can think of the analogy as the iPhone with apps.
We said, let's figure out how quick
we can get an app onto a phone.
So we did a VQ Prize.
And we did that in concert with AFRL,
and we just did our first one.
We said, we wanna have an app that give our operators
on the floor the ability to display
and have better situational awareness
with data that's coming in.
We went out into non-traditional partners,
universities, students.
26 entries came back in, and last week
we gave dollar awards for eight.
And our goal is to take those eight
and put them on the floor, whittle those down
and put the best ones on the floor and ---.
We see great benefit in this.
The other thing we're working hard with
is innovative partnerships.
We've built partnerships with the intelligence community,
we're doing joint programs with intelligence community
that we haven't done before.
We're doing programs with our allies,
we're putting hosted payloads
on our coalition partner satellites.
In fact this April at the National Space Symposium
the Chief is going to host
and Cir Chiefs conference on space.
We've got air chiefs from around the world
that are coming.
And I will tell you that every one of those countries
are partners, want to partner with us,
and are doing great things in space.
Also, as I talked about, we're partnering
with the commercial industry,
not just the traditional commercial industry
but the broad commercial industry.
The last thing that I would highlight
is we're developing space war fighters.
And this is a two-part problem.
This is developing space operators
that have a better understanding
of joint war fighting.
How many pilots do we have in this room?
Raise your hand if you're a pilot.
You'd better understand space.
And you don't to the level that you need to.
And you don't to the level that you need to
for you to be a success,
and you don't to the level of detail
that we need for us to be successful in space.
Space superiority is a joint war fighting problem
that's going to take all of us,
from all domains, working.
And so we're working very hard to develop this.
We've stood up GPS --- environment trainers
so we can train on that.
We just went down to NASA last year,
NASA developed what we call
rendezvous proximity operations.
Getting close to things.
That's what they had to do for the Apollo missions.
They developed it.
They have spectacular trainers.
We have a space situational awareness satellite
called GSSAP that can get up close to things
and characterize them.
So why are we trying to build trainers?
Why don't we just buy NASA's?
So we're doing that.
We've developed a space flag.
Very analogous to red flag.
We participate in red flag.
But we didn't have an exercise to go deep and steep
in what space war fighters need to have.
So we built space our space red flag.
This April in Washington D.C.,
we're holding our sixth space flag.
We went from crawl to run pretty quick.
And the next one, in August,
is going to be our first coalition space flag.
We're seeing great, great opportunities with this.
Let me introduce you to the lieutenant.
This is 1st Lieutenant Carl Black.
He's assigned to the 50th Space Wing
out at Schriever Air Force Base.
Every year, we go to Webtac at Nellis.
And every year is --- Webtac.
I give General Holmes a lot of credit for this.
We do a Webtac and other major commands do a Webtac.
We brought in folks from our Webtac to brief
at the --- Webtac.
And this 1st Lieutenant got up in front of an audience,
maybe not quite this big but pretty doggone close
to this big.
Had the Chief, had every commander in the Air Force there,
120-some general officers,
and this 1st Lieutenant got up there
and schooled the Air Force on the mod that he lead
with 53 different people,
including fighter pilots, air battle managers,
on what we're going to have to do
to command and control a fight that extends to space.
I was like a proud dad.
I was sitting right there,
and the Chief got up at the end of the conference
and he said, "Lieutenant Black, come on up."
so he gets up and he walks up to the front of the stage,
and the Chief said, you know, one of the things
that I get to do as the Chief,
I have the prerogative to give call signs.
And I don't know if you have a call sign.
And he did, I can't remember what it was,
and it's irrelevant now because the Chief said,
hey, guess what, I'm just gonna give you a new call sign.
Now you can keep the one you have,
or you can have the one that the
Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force
decided to give you.
So he's now called Boyd.
John Boyd.
Because he's a visionary.
And he's helping us lead the Air Force
to where we need to go.
And Chief, I really appreciate it.
You've given an extra bounce in the step
to all those in Air Force Space Command.
We've got really great airmen.
I'm privileged.
Absolutely privileged to lead a group of folks
that are committed to this domain,
committed to making sure that the space capabilities
that we rely on as a nation are always there
and the space capabilities that we rely on
as a joint force are always there.
This is a quote that came out of that Rand report.
I'll tell you, when you put technology
in the hands of operators,
and you innovate and you train,
you don't know where it's gonna go.
But I guarantee it, you're gonna get more out of it
than what you thought.
And that's what we're all about as airmen.
Let me just say to all the airmen that are here,
thank you.
For all of us old folks that sit up front,
we leave here with an extra bounce in our step.
'Cause we get to hang out with some really cool people.
None of us stay in the Air Force to sit behind our desks
and do the things that we get to do everyday.
What keeps us in the Air Force is
getting to hang out with airmen.
And getting to be part of something bigger than ourselves.
This event, and the one in Washington,
are the events that do this the best.
So thank you to AFA, Chief, thank you
for the opportunity to be here and privileged to lead,
and I've got a couple of minutes
if there are any questions.
Thank you.
(applause)
(music)
- Thank you, General Raymond.
The questions are coming in,
and I'm going to start off with,
I think you'd be interested that a lot of people
in space operations, and there are cadets in this room
from the University of Central Florida, Go Knights!
There you go!
What are the important skills, what should someone know
who's considering the life of a space operator,
enlisted or officer?
- First, let me just say, all the cool kids
are coming to space these days.
(applause)
I just had the privilege of speaking
to the Air Force Academy.
4,000 cadets, no kidding.
I've had some Air Force Academy cadets
send me emails saying, "Sir, I'm scheduled to be
a whatever officer, and I don't wanna do that,
I wanna come to space.
Can you help me?"
last year we had 13 Air Force Academy cadets,
this year we have 31 coming.
It's a really exciting time to be in our business.
I will tell you, it's completely shifted.
It's not just sitting at a computer
operating in a benign domain.
It used to be, as long as you could launch a satellite,
if that satellite survived the launch
in what we call infant mortality,
if it didn't die in the first couple of days
while it was on orbit, you were good to go.
Then you had to worry about things hitting each other.
And as the Air Force we act as the space traffic control
for the world,
and a little trivia fact,
about once every three days, a satellite maneuvers
to keep from hitting another piece of debris.
Anybody see the movie Gravity?
The debris problem is real.
That was a little exaggerated but we do all that tracking.
So that's what it used to be.
That's not the space operations that you'll come into.
You're gonna come into space operations
that are steeped with the war fighting mentality.
You're gonna come in to the space operations
as a war fighter, as a recognized war fighter
and I couldn't be more excited.
For those who are interested, we need you.
I'll be hanging out here, I'll give you my card,
and send me an email and I'll be happy to help.
- All right.
General Raymond, do you think a space war
is in our future.
- I don't like the term space war.
There's no such thing as a space war.
It's just war, right?
And for some reason, two countries or two enemies
decide something is up with their national interest
that they need to go to war over.
And those countries can decide to fight that war
on the ground, maritime or in the air, or in space.
Or in cyber.
And so it's just a means of warfare.
I need to say this, although space is
a war fighting domain just like air, land and sea,
we don't want this fight.
This is not a fight that we want to fight.
So how do we keep that from happening?
We deter it.
How do you deter it?
You deter it by being ready to fight and win
and gain space superiority if deterrents were to fail.
The question is a good question,
but I just look at it differently.
Same thing with deterrents.
People say, how do you do space deterrents?
It's just deterrents.
You have to change the deterrents calculus
of who you're dealing with.
That's not just nuclear deterrents,
that's all the strategic capabilities
we've brought together.
- All right, General Raymond, you mentioned OneWeb,
and the large constellation,
and these numbers of constellations
with hundreds of satellites is growing.
With the 4,000 satellites already there,
what sort of capabilities are coming along
to monitor those satellites
and to keep them from hitting each other?
- It's a great question.
We do that today.
What's interesting, OneWeb and other companies like that,
like SpaceX and there are others that are out there.
It's not just the fact that they're building
large numbers of satellites,
they're doing it with production line mentality.
It's a different business model.
Most of our satellites are built
like the one-off wooden shoe that takes years.
These are production line.
So that's gonna change the game.
We have spectacular space situational awareness
capabilities across the globe.
We also have partnerships, international partnerships,
that are also helping us feed into that
space situational awareness.
We are about to activate the new Space Fence
out in Kwajalein that's going to provide
some situational awareness as well.
And then one of the things we're doing
is we're partnering with the Department of Commerce.
There's a difference between space situational awareness
and space traffic management.
Space situational awareness is a military necessity
to make sure you have the situational awareness you need,
or the domain awareness you need to conduct operations.
Space traffic management, I'll use the analogy
of the air traffic control function.
Hey, Todd, you're about to hit me,
move out of the way.
We're going to transition that
to the Department of Commerce.
And so we're going to transition the
space traffic management to
the Department of Commerce,
we're gonna focus our airmen, our war fighters,
on the space situational awareness we need
as a joint force.
We've got spectacular capabilities, partnerships
and new capabilities coming.
- Excellent.
Okay, you have to answer.
Clemson or Crimson?
(laughter)
- Are you gonna ask a stupid question like that?
Any Alabama fans out there?
(crowd responds)
I'm sorry, I'm really sorry.
Go Tigers!
Harvard of the South.
It's pretty tough when one of your bosses
is a Harvard guy, but he works for Alabama.
So it's been a great year.
It's just been a great year.
- On a personal level, as an Air Force officer,
Senior Air Force officer,
what was the best day of your Air Force career,
and what was the worst?
- I can't say just one good day, there's a lot of good days.
If you're in this Air Force and
you're not having good days then you
should probably go somewhere else.
There's no more exciting time to be in our Air Force
than right today.
(applause)
I think when I'm all said and done,
there'll be a handful of things,
more than a handful,
but things I'll look back on and say,
it was really cool to have been there.
One of those was having the privilege
to serve with you in Japan.
I remember sitting there, I had just gotten to Japan,
the earthquake happened,
I think the base shook for six or seven straight minutes,
we went outside, the road was doing this.
It stopped and we went back inside
and it started shaking again
so we went back outside.
I said, I'm gonna go check on my family
and I run outside to my house
my kids are all sitting in the front yard
with eyeballs about this big.
I went back to the office and all of a sudden,
a wide-body United Airlines and Delta Airlines
landed at Yokota.
And I thought, man, this is big.
Because Narita airport shut down.
And to see the response from airmen,
and from sailors and soldiers, to provide support
to a great ally was something I'll never forget.
And it's something that I brought back with me to space.
We didn't have the partnerships we needed in space.
We didn't have to.
Space was a benign domain.
As I said, as long as you can launch a satellite
and it didn't die on launch, you were good.
That's not the case today.
And I remember when I came back into this job,
I said, hey, I saw the value of partnerships in Japan.
Why don't we have that here?
And with the Chief's help and the Secretary's help,
the Secretary's really pushing this,
we're expanding more to our allies and partners.
In fact, this August, Space 300 is gonna be opened up
with allies in it, I talked about space flag happening.
We are working really hard to develop those partnerships,
and I will tell you the strides that we've made
in that area over the last couple of years
has been really, really, really significant.
But I really appreciate the opportunity to be here.
I can't thank you enough for the privilege
of being able to talk a little bit about
a really passionate subject,
and if you have any other questions
I look forward to chatting with you
out in the hallways.
Thanks very much.
Todd, thank you.
- Thank you very much, General Raymond,
on behalf of the Air Force Association,
we'd like to present to you the
Airman for Life coin.
(applause)
(music)
- Give us a few minutes while we re-set the stage.