On track for success
This month, The Gazette sat down with Air Force Space Command leader Gen. William Shelton to learn about his 37-year career and the airmen and programs in his care.
Shelton has been on the job in Colorado Springs for two years and oversees a command that spans the globe with scores of satellites and includes 40,000 airmen, civilian workers and contractors.
One of the command’s top duties is running and maintaining the Global Positioning System, a set of military satellites with uses including guiding bombs on target and getting lost minivan drivers to the grocery store.
He’s a 1976 Air Force Academy graduate and is on his eighth Space Command assignment in Colorado Springs.
Headquartered at Peterson Air Force Base, Space Command also houses the Air Force’s computer warfare experts.
This is the second installment in a periodic series of question-and-answer articles with top local military commanders.
The Gazette: Has there been a favorite part, a favorite time for yourself, in this 30-year evolution of Air Force Space Command?
Shelton: When I was commander of the GPS squadron — then it was Falcon; it’s now Schriever (Air Force Base) — but when I was the commander out there, I can remember it plain as day. In January (1991) — GPS was being used even though I think we had 16 satellites — we didn’t have even a full constellation. But you’re talking about a very featureless terrain (in Iraq for Operation Desert Storm) … we’re trying to go through an enemy’s air defenses, and GPS led the attacks on the first night.
They literally taped them (GPS receivers) to the windscreen of Apache helicopters, and the Apache helicopters led the fighters through the defenses where we knew we had gaps in the Iraqi defenses … That was pretty special to be the squadron commander and to watch that all go down.
RELATED: Shelton talks space, cyberspace
Q: Last year, at the 28th National Space Symposium … you mentioned that operationally, satellite programs are coming along nicely. But in some areas, the ground operations are lagging a bit. Where are you at right now with that?
A: The ground systems — we get criticized for this all the time, and it’s unfortunate — but they’re independent programs.
So we’ve got the satellite program, and we’ve got the ground system. And that’s just kind of standard way of procuring things. And trying to keep them in phase is very difficult. … Trying to deliver those on exactly the dates required is just a real acquisition management challenge, and we do our best.
But for example, we will launch GPS III without the GPS III true ground system — the one that we’re building to control those satellites; it won’t be in place yet. We’ll launch GPS III in ’15; we’ll probably not deliver the ground system until ’16.
So in the interim, we’ll have kind of a Band-Aid-ed ground system that will be adequate to the task, but it won’t have the full capabilities that we want.
Q: As far as successful launches go, you have quite the streak. … Is it 90 right now?
A: If you count all of the evolved expendable launch vehicle launches, it’s 90. If you talk about just the national security space launches, it’s 57. And that’s unprecedented in the history of space flight.
(He knocks on wood.)
Having said that, it’s expensive. The United Launch Alliance, which is headquartered up here in Denver, their operational capability and performance is second to none. But it’s getting to the place where it’s difficult for us to afford that kind of cost.
So we’re looking at new entrants into the launch business — SpaceX, Orbital Sciences (Corp.), others. … We hope they will be successful. We will have to go through a rigorous certification program to get them certified for national security launches. But assuming they’ll be successful, they’ll be good strong competitors to ULA.
Q: Last year at the symposium, you said you were handling budget pressures well. But you were worried what could happen under greater budget constraints. Well, you’re now operating under a continuing resolution, and sequestration hit March 1. Where are you at now, and what is the breaking point?
A: I’ve been at this business for almost 37 years. This is the worst thing I’ve seen in terms of a fiscal climate.
We are struggling to get to the end of the year, frankly. If sequestration stays in place, if the continuing resolution stays in place, we are going to have to cut somewhere between $250 million and $480 million out of our budget for just this last six months of the year.
That is a tremendous challenge for us.
I spend just — no kidding — almost every waking moment thinking about this problem. It is stressful for our people. It is particularly stressful for our civilians, who are about to take a
20 percent pay cut through the end of the year (through furloughs). It is a meat ax approach to deficit reduction.
It is a very constrained process because sequestration (and a lot of people don’t understand this; there are a lot of people out there who are very critical of the kinds of things that we have talked about cutting) … goes after every appropriated line item and cuts a percentage out of that line item. … It is very prescribed on how you will apply these cuts.
… And it will have an operational impact. If it didn’t have an operational impact, that would say that I was very fat in my budget. And that’s just not true.
Q: Will this affect satellite operations?
A: Satellite operations are relatively cheap. The expense of a satellite program is in building and launching the satellite. But in terms of operating the satellite, it’s cheap. …
So you have to go after some fairly big ticket kind of things and operations. And a lot of that is things like utility bills and running a (missile tracking) radar.
So the big radar in Alaska, the big radar in North Dakota, we’re talking about reducing the operations in those two radars just to save utilities. And that big utility bill — the one in North Dakota for example — is $50,000 a month.
So at $50,000 a month over six months, we can get a lot of money back. So it’s those kinds of things we have to go after to get to the target, the budget target that we’ve been given.
Q: I want to be sure we talk about this, too. This year you also said you want to make some inroads into cyber. We’re halfway into this fiscal year. … How is that going?
A: What do we really mean when we say cyberspace operations? What do we mean when we say a cyber operator? What kind of skill sets do we want those people to have?
What are the lanes in the road between headquarters Air Force, headquarters Air Force Space Command, 24th Air Force, our operational arm for cyber; where do all these responsibilities appropriately lie?
So you can tell we’re relatively immature in the cyber operations business, but we’ve got to get down to basic definitions and foundational knowledge, and then we can start to make real progress. And we’re doing that.
Q: What led us to be at this point?
A: Two things. One, we have just been recently assigned — I mean, kind of the longer view — recently assigned the cyber mission. And number two is this is a very dynamic business.
If you’re following in the press — hear about concerns about cyber attacks and all that kind of business — we don’t have the legal regime in place, we don’t have the policy regime in place.
We’re still working our way through how would we respond if we came under attack. Which part of the government has that particular responsibility? Is it Homeland Security? Is it U.S. Cyber Command? Is it the Department of Defense writ large?
So this is not unique to Air Force Space Command. This is the entire nation trying to get its arms around this whole cyber business.
Q: As far as cyber goes, how will the current budget issues play into your plans of getting the command back up to speed?
A: Because we have tried very hard to make progress in the cyber domain this year, I have pretty much excluded them from some of the sequestration targets, continuing resolution concerns, all that.
I’ve set them aside and said there’s some administrative kinds of things that we’ve pulled back in terms of funding.
But in terms of operational capability, I’m not touching that. And I won’t.
Where we will have some impacts, however, is we’re trying to build capability in the cyber business.
U.S. Cyber Command (at Fort Meade, Md.) is really trying to stand up some teams. …
I’m not sure were going to be able to make as rapid a progress given hiring restrictions, given less funding, so on and so forth. I think that will slow us down a bit.
U.S. Air Force Gen. William Shelton, right, the commander of Air Force Space Command, and Air Force Col. Chris Crawford, the commander of the 21st Space Wing, salute as Defense Secretary Leon Panetta leaves Peterson Air Force Base, Colo., after visiting with leaders at North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command. (DoD photo by Tech. Sgt. Jacob N. Bailey, U.S. Air Force/Released) Photo by 1st Combat Camera Squadron
Ge. William Shelton greets a airman at Al Udied Air Base in Qatar. (U.S. Air Force photo) Photo by (U.S. Air Force photo)
Air Force and Department of Defense leaders testify before the Strategic Forces Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee March 15, 2011, in Washington, D.C. (From left) Erin Conaton, the Under Secretary of the Air Force; Gen. William Shelton, th Photo by