Fiscal Year 2015: Air Force Posture Statement, Presentation to the Committee on Armed Services United States Senate

Publisher Marketing: America's Airmen and Air Force capabilities play a foundational role in how our military fights and wins wars. The Air Force's agile response to national missions - in the time, place, and means of our choosing - gives our Nation an indispensable and unique advantage that we must retain as we plan for an uncertain future. Whether responding to a national security threat or a humanitarian crisis, your Air Force provides the responsive global capabilities necessary for the joint force to operate successfully. It takes the combined efforts of all of our military Services and the whole of government to deny, deter, and defeat an enemy, and over the last decade this integration has tightened. Just as we depend on our joint partners, every other Service depends on the Air Force to do its job. Whether it is Global Positioning System (GPS) information to navigate waterways, airlift to get troops to and from the fight, manning intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) silos to deter aggression, or reconnaissance and satellite communication to tell forces where enemy combatants gather or hide, the Air Force provides these capabilities, as well as many others. Here at home, our Airmen patrol the skies ready to protect the homeland and are integral to the movement of people and lifesaving supplies when disasters, like Hurricane Sandy or the California wildfires, strike. This capability to see what is happening and project power anywhere in the world at any time is what Global Vigilance, Global Reach, and Global Power are all about. The current fiscal environment requires the Air Force to make some very tough choices. When making decisions about the best way for the Air Force to support our Nation's defense, the abrupt and arbitrary nature of sequestration created a dilemma between having a ready force today or a modern force tomorrow. To best support national defense requirements, comply with the Defense Department's fiscal guidance, and meet defense strategy priorities, as updated by the 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), we attempted to preserve capabilities to protect the homeland, build security globally, and project power and win decisively. To do this the Air Force emphasized capability over capacity. We worked hard to make every dollar count so we could protect the minimum capabilities for today's warfighting efforts, while also investing in capabilities needed to defeat potential high-end threats of the future. Moving forward, we seek to maintain a force ready for the full range of military operations while building an Air Force capable of executing our five core missions: 1) air and space superiority; 2) intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR); 3) rapid global mobility; 4) global strike; and 5) command and control, all against a well-armed and well-trained adversary in 2023 and beyond.