And max, depending on briefing on the air force budget and operations. A Senate ForeignRelations Committee hearing on the negotiations concerning your brands and Nuclear Program irans Nuclear Program. Book tv in American History tv take you on a trip across the country for the history and there during the life of man is locales including the beauty of Point Roberts in washington and the oyster industry. History of the music and the restoration of the f 100 jetfighter. Hear the voices of the mormon choir in salt lake city. Today at 2 p. M. Eastern on American History tv on cspan 3. Silvia is our guest on this weeks q a. She was so beautiful and so witty that she was always irresistible to men. Richard cohen a room washington columnist was at the party and they had coffee. She began to stroke his beard. Heavens, he said. I never met an 80yearold i want to go to bed with. She had this quality her entire life. Silvia morris on the life and career and sharing the personal relationship during her final years tonight at 8 p. M. Eastern on cspan. The air force recently held a press briefing. Addressedh lee james air force readiness. General mark welsh provided an update about a body found on a plane. He says that raises security concerns and that they would review protocols. This is one hour. What we are going to do today is secretary james and general welsh will invoke their remarks and we will open it up for questions and answers. Please, state your name and affiliation when asked. We will do one question and one followup and then depending on how much time, we will see if we can get to other questions. If there is any other questions, you are more than welcome to call the air force press room. Without any further ado, secretary james. Thank you for joining us and spending some time this afternoon. As thebeen on the job 23rd secretary of the air force for about seven months. During that seven months, i have spent my time here in washington focused on working with our congress, working on budget matters, a variety of budget issues. The other part of my time i have focused on getting out and around and seeing our air force in action. I have seen all of our five including 30ork, nine different bases across the United States and 22 of our states. Ive been overseas twice. Afghanistan, kuwait, and germany. Covert, i did establish bright from the beginning three priorities that are critical for all of us as we go forward. These three priorities are taking care of people. Number two, shrinking the right balance between the readiness of today and providing for our readiness and modernization tomorrow. A very tight budget environment, we need to make sure we make every dollar count because the tax fire dollar is precious and we need to spend all of those dollars wisely. What i would like to do is give you my take, my update on how i think we are doing against all three of these priorities. Beginning with taking care of people critically important and there are many elements to the people in the air force. My take is we are very blessed because we have really impressive ehrman. They are smart, dedicated, motivated. They are tough. Fortunatee been very to have and continue to have solid recruiting and retention. For the most part across our air force, morale is high. That is very good news. I do feel that our airmen are feeling some strain. The biggest reason for this the Biggest Issue on the minds of our airmen i know this because i do calls everywhere i go is the uncertainty that they are facing because of the downsizing and the uncertainties of budgets and where are we going with our air force. General welsh, when i yield to him, he will give you an update on that downsizing and how our course management. Now and il say for speak for both of us, our mutual desires to get where we need to go as quickly as we can to get it over with as quickly as we can and then to move on to the future of our air force. Beyond that, there are two special topics i would like to talk about. There are two others i would like to touch upon an the first one is Sexual Assault. Very important topic. Go, eache i installation, i always ask and i have met privately with our Sexual Assault response coordinators around the country and around the world. I be with them in private and i asked him to give me the utmost candor. The question i am is asking is do you think we are in the right path . Are we in the right progress . My take on this after seven months and all of my discussions, plus my discussions with other leaders, the general, is that we are making good progress. Our reporting is up. We reports andeased preliminary reports for fy 14. That is good news because i believe it means our victims are feeling more confident, theyre feeling more comfortable in coming forward and explaining what happened to them. We do not yet have our Prevalence Data which will be coming later in the year. We do not yet know the progress we have made or not made when it comes to prevalence, but we will know later this year. I am hearing from the field of that they believe the commanders are in top of it, they are taking it seriously. It is a serious matter across the air force and it is viewed as such. Im hearing our training has been improved. I have gone through the training myself it is terrific training. It is improved over the last year. We are constantly looking at the care that we give to victims. Tweak it this way or treated that way to make it the most important we can. Proposition al rededicated ourselves of the last few months to what we call core for valiums our values which reinforce over the entire for the entire. Air force. We are making progress in this front. Progress is not good enough. We have to keep on it. Focused,for system persistent leadership, and persistent lacks in action. The chief and i are fully committed to doing that. We are going to be assessing are forced to see what we can put in the future into the guard and reserves and we believe we will have 80 of that force look at between now and the end of the year. We do not know how that will turn out but i will ask that at that out of that we will come up with additional missions, additional capabilities that we will ask our guards and reserves to resume. I see the future of the people to be more reliant, not less reliant on our National Guard and reserve. Shifting down to the balance between readiness of today and the modernization of tomorrow. Years of war 13 and most recently coming off this sequestration i will say we are not where we need to be or want to be in the air force when it comes to our full spectrum of readiness. Certainly, if you look back over the last month, it has been an extremely volatile world which makes me concentrate even more on our readiness. I am talking about the ukraine and russia. We are talking about the situation in iraq with isis. You can go on and on. It is a volatile world and readiness is key because anytime we can be asked to step up to the plate and conduct serious missions. That is why we chose to put more money in the Budget Proposal to get those readiness levels up in our air force, fullspectrum readiness. This includes investment in training, range infrastructure, maintenance. All of these things play into readiness. Know, we have to figure out how to pay for this sort of initiative and among other things, we suggest retiring from older aircraft to pay for this priority as well as tomorrows modernization. It has been difficult to get some of these proposals approved through the congress. Is not done yet but it has been a difficult road. That we will not be provided with the authority to do another round of closures base closures. The message we keep taking the congress at every stage we can it is congresss prerogative to rearrange priorities. Do not carve money out of our readiness account as these priorities need to be paid for because readiness is key and meaning to get those levels up. Congress, please, lift sequestration because these choices daschle on to your hats, it will get worse and more difficult in fy 15. This is the message i want to repeat and i think it is very important. Now that i talked about todays readiness, let me shift to the future. Tot is our air force going look like 10, 20, 30 years from now . Were ready told you i think will have greater reliance on our reserve because our numbers have been coming down. We are going to leverage the reserve more. We have to maintain that technological edge. We have to remain ready with topnotch people as we have today. We need to become more agile, more quake and everything we do. What is all that mean . It means a lot of things. We need to keep working diligently on our top three programs the new fighter, the new tanker, the new bomber and general welsh will give you some updates on those three in a few moments. There are the technical investments as well. We would need to invest more, in my opinion, on cyber as we go forward. Your survey you have heard me say this we need to continue and invest more in the nuclear enterprise. Waited to get the focus on readiness and people Going Forward. All of this is tricky business because we are back to that story of the budget which is likely to remain flat, i think, if we are likely. It could be going down do to see which nation was raised into the third priority and that is make every dollar count. As it isainly focused, general welsh, getting the absolute best value of the taxpayer. This goal, weieve have to do a number of things we had to keep our programs on track and delivering on schedule, not overrunning to the very best of our abilities. We have to build affordability right from the beginning into our new programs whenever we have the opportunity to do so. By the way, that is what we did with the longrange strike bomber, with combat rescue helicopters, we need to keep that up. We have to attack had coders spendings. Reduced 20 to be in one year, not five so we are address will be going after that. We are going to after contract spending as well. Spending on contractors. This has artie been happening and we want to take afresh fresh look at that and see if we can do better. We are bubbling up ideas from the field we have uninvited airmen to come in and give us ideas about what they see from their Work Environment has ways we can do things differently, save money, save time. Make every Dollar Count Campaign and we have gotten thousands of ideas from our airmen. Moment toidea is a mobile we are reviewing the ideas and implementing some. Projecting 76 million in savings from the ideas we have already approved. This is our way to get everybody involved with making every dollar counts. Before iraq and yield to general welsh, just a few more words about the air force of the future. We are rolling out today a new strategic framework. We are calling it a call to the future. Roadmap tosents a help guide our longrange Planning Efforts and will also help us, this is very important, make smart money and policy choices Going Forward. Through withollow the choices and policy choices. Mya was going through confirmation process on capitol hill, i would do my Courtesy Call to senators, i would frequently year they felt the air force seem to lack consistency in our policy choices, resource choices, one year we would say this and another unit would say that. That was this perception i here heard. This kind of a framework should certainly help us have better results and consistency. The document is a third in what you would call a trilogy. The first is our vision document. It tells who we are our airmen. This sector 1 global vigilant, global power. This is a document that talks about the Core Missions and what we do. The third one is what we are rolling out today talks about where are we going . We have the who, what, and where. National a new security strategy. It doesnt replace current doctrine. Rather what it is, it is a framework which is intended to help guide us in our title x responsibilities for our air force which is organizing and training and equipping Going Forward. We basic premise is that never ever seem to accurately predict the future. Therefore, we will have to continue to be able to step up to the plate and do a range of missions and also that we need to get ahead of the curve when it comes to the enormous and very rapid change that were seeing in a world. I am sucking on changes in technology, changes in different nations and groups requiring weapons, changes in how we communicate with one another. Whoever saw facebook and twitter 10 years ago . These are enormous changes in a short amount of time. The hallmarks of the strategic environment that we will face. Therefore, instead of focusing on us in civics threat, we are trying to focus and recognize this quick pace of change and we have to recognize ourselves the imperative that we should be able to change more quickly as well. Strategic agility is what we are shooting for. Strategic agility should allow us to rapidly adjust to evolving threats in the environment, factors in our adversaries encounter some of these great uncertainties. Tos whole concept is going take time obviously to instill and to big institutions like the air force because i do not think we are known for being and honestly agile at the moment. We have to start somewhere and so this is where we are going to get started. We just reorganized our headquarters in order to take these points and ultimately over time make these decisions and policy decisions to make this strategy real. As we move forward, i will predict that you will see us imb ed this concept into a lot of key areas that we will be working on. Inn it comes the people training which is a title x responsibility, you will see us embed into policy decisions the concept of more empowering for our air force. The more continuing of service, the flow between active guard and reserve and back in a more seamless way. More live, Virtual Training so we can train in different ways. Diversity of thought Critical Thinking for airmen. These are things we will work out when it comes to people and training. In acquisitions designed agility into our requirements across processes do have more pivot points which will mean more opportunities to modify or abandon the colleges within programs and be able to harness rapid prototype into design ideas into service more quickly. You will see us continue to elevate affordability in these programs as well as export ability. We want allies, we want interoperability. What kinds of things that we exports and build requirements . When it comes to investments, i think you can see us talk about things you are well of or maybe some other things. We have to invest more in our nuclear deterrence. We will continue one that. Isr will continue to be extremely important and we will continue to invest. I already mentioned the importance of space and cyberspace. Technologies that could be game changers, we dont know yet. Things like hypersonic, directed energy, to name a few. The last point i will see is we talk about the multidome in approach. This is the idea that we have three domains that we operate in. We operate in the air, space, and in cyberspace. For any new challenge that we might encounter, in may be the not correct answer that requires a new plane or new munition. Maybe there are ways to leverage cyber in order to address the problem. We have to open up on reince much more to what we are calling the multi domain approach. As i conclude, the bottom line myt would give you after first seven months on the job our air force is in good shape today. We are feeling some strains. The future depends, i think in large part, on how well we plan and execute some of the things we have talked about today and how well we do that consistently over the years. We certainly hope and expect and continue to work with congress to help us in this regard, to support us. We will continue to talk about lifting sequestration and protecting readiness. I want to thank you for your time today. I will yield to general walsh. Thank you for being here. It is a fastening time to be in the u. S. Military and it is always a good time to be an american airman. We have operations all over the world everyday whether it is Ongoing Operations in afghanistan, counterterrorism and africa, ensuring friends in eastern europe, the american midwest, building missile defenses in the pacific, standing watch in korea, or sending defense alerts at home. Commandersto provide with air power options to handle any contingency they may face. Were pretty good at our job. Andill continue to do this we have responsibility to our airmen to maintain the balance between being ready to do the job today and being able to do it 10 years from now. The is not an easy task in best the Financial Times but in these days, it is getting difficult. We prioritize three acquisition programs this year. Kc 36, and the longrange bomber because we believe they are Operational Imperatives to 2035 and beyond. If we expect to be the worlds leading airpower nation, distinction that gives us the undeniable advantage today, we must recapitalize our aging fleet. Let me start with the fighter fleet. Answer thatthe only will ensure future air campaigns are not a fair fight. There was good news to report. We are reaching important milestones like an air force base that the delivery of 36 f 35s and may. It has its full complement of aircraft. Fleeet. A major t. Well down costs are and testing and Training Programs are moving forward steadily. The recent engine fire has gotten a lot of attention. It will completely understand. A restricted flight onboard which were made in effect until we understand the cause completely. Too think it is important remember that engine fires happen when you fly highperformance aircrafts. This is not the first one and not the last. I think it is important to keep this particular fire in context. 8700s now flown about flights. This is the first time we had a major engine fire. Respect ever other engine and we didnt find anywhere in tear in those. I am confident this program will remain on fact ontrack. This fire is not going to affect that. Our air force refueling fleet is a life saver. Kc46 pegasus is an operational imperative. Andill