Toward new air and space horizons

These Airmen live our core values, especially the one that says service before self. And the ones who don't we're asking to leave. There are those out there who only want to stay at one place and not move, and when you ask them to relocate for the good of the Air Force they resist doing so. That is not a part of our core values.

We're asking people to be fit, and the fitness program has taken root throughout our U. S. Air Force and it's going to get tougher, not easier. We're going to report fitness as a part of the evaluation system. We're going to hold squadron commanders accountable for the fitness of their units. And today we're developing the tools to be able to track that and to do that. The payoff will be huge.

So we continue in our human strategy to develop Airmen that demonstrate the core values of our Air Force day in and day out. Sometimes we have deviations, and in the press you will find people who are talking about the Air Force Academy or this problem or that problem within our Air Force. The issue of sexual assault. The issue of religious tolerance at the Air Force Academy. The reason that they are writing about it is because we are visible out there attacking it and not hiding it. We're taking it on head-on. Some choose to depict it other than that, but the fact is the reason it's visible and in the press is because these are problems that we're addressing and not hiding.

When people break the core values they will pay the price. One acquisition executive highlighted in the news lately is in jail. And those who think at the Air Force Academy you can break the rules or somebody's not going to look, or you can call your relatives, your powerful friends and get you out of it--not going to happen. We will maintain the standards of our U. S. Air Force, those standards will be high, and we're not going to back away from the glare of reporting that puts it in another light. We're taking it on head-on, it's not going to change.

The next one I'm going to talk about a little bit, from CORONA, is the principle of what I call "rut management." Make no mistake about it, it's easy to get into a rut. And I've spent most of my tenure as Chief of Staff of the Air Force, along with my four-star leadership right before me here, blasting things out of ruts.

But it's like the old Predator story I've told many times that the minute you turn your back on it, they're going to take the laser designator off the Predator or they're going to take the Hellfire off the Predator, because it wasn't in the program.

There's an analogy out there in each one of our career fields where we tend to drift back into ruts. I started talking many years ago about the need to integrate. Let me congratulate the industry partners we have arrayed before me here today for the job you've done in creating Centers of Excellence for integration. You've done that. It's enabled us to do some marvelous things in the course of battle and to do them quickly.

If you look at what we've done with things like the Rover, the television set that sits in sort of a laptop sort of a screen that takes streaming video direct from a Predator and from pods that are mounted on aircraft directly into the hands of people on the ground. An enormous leveraging capability.