AF Sec. Schwartz answers a question for Defense News on long range strike.
Q. What's your view of long-range strike?
A. I think the innovation in the Quadrennial Defense Review was - and it's something I agree with - that long-range strike isn't 100 percent defined by an Air Force platform. It is a family of systems.
The issue is: you have tactical aviation, you have long-range aviation, you have stand-off missile capability, you have penetration capability, you've got potential prompt global strike in a conventional intercontinental ballistic missile or conventional Trident missile, you've got electronic attack, you've got ISR pieces of it.
Fundamentally, the question is: Do we as an Air Force need to have a lone wolf? Or can we, like we suggest to other elements of the joint team, rely on other means to support our mission so that our platform doesn't have to be quite as exquisite? Again, that is an advantage of looking at this as a portfolio, as a family of systems that may allow us, at least up front, to have a machine that will accomplish the tasks required but not be so well-equipped that it can do it exclusively by itself.
The independent variable on all this will be cost. What I am trying hard to do is to move us beyond - and to move both our acquisition community, our requirements community - beyond wishful-thinking mode. The reality is that cost is going to be an issue. It may be that, to some degree, we will have to design to cost.
