Gen. Jumper: time to change traditional program advocacy.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.
• Position: U.S. Air Force chief of staff John P. Jumper

The chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force wants the service to stop doing business by advocacy" and to take a fresh look at funding priorities in its weapon procurement budgets.

That has been the persistent message from Gen. John P. Jumper during the last several months. As it plans its modernization budgets, the Air Force must change some of the old "tribal" approaches to funding programs, he said, because the top priority now is "integration."

"How many budget lines and dollars are dedicated to integration?" Jumper asked during a recent industry conference. The answer, he said, is zero.

The Air Force today is a "community of stovepipes," he said. "We have formed antibodies to integration." Each aircraft program constitutes a tribe that fights for dollars and clout, and speaks its own language. Tribes, said Jumper, are not necessarily bad things. But they are not conducive to the type of "horizontal integration" that Jumper wants to achieve. He describes horizontal integration as the ability to fuse data from every Air Force platform into a single repository of information, such as crews, planes, targets and loads. The idea is to be able to accomplish the entire "kill chain" from a single source of information. The kill chain, according to Jumper, is a combination of "find, fix, track, target, engage and assess."

The lack of integration lengthens the time it takes to plan combat missions, he said. "We have a 72-hour ATO [air tasking order] planning cycle, because we aren't integrated very well," Jumper said. "Instead of using Post-it notes, why can't we input the data digitally?" The Air Force often rakes a bad rap for the 72-hour cycle, and the bureaucracy gets all the blame. But the reality, Jumper said, is that the way the Air Force funds programs is one fundamental reason why it's difficult to compress the "kill chain."

The integration that Jumper envisions is "all within today's capability," he said. "Instead, we budget by a system of advocacy." Typically, program officials who brief Jumper start their presentation by saying, "We've already briefed this to Speedy [Gen. Speedy Martin, commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe] and Homburg [Gen. Hal Homburg, chief of Air Combat Command], and they loved it." Such statements, said Jumper, imply that "if you don't [love the program] you're a scumbag." This system of advocacy hinders the integration that Jumper advocates.

"There is a 0 percent chance that we have this 100 percent right," he...