best airplanes in the world? And my response is, my son wants to be a fighter pilot when he gets a little older, and I don't want him going into combat in one of the best planes in the world, I want him to be there in the best airplane in the world.

And so I come here ready to support the requirements of this Air Force and its personnel, and I know that this subcommittee feels the same. And I just look forward to their testimony.

AIR FORCE ACADEMY INVESTIGATION

Mr. LEWIS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Secretary, and General, before we turn to you specifically, I wanted to raise another subject that has been in the media a lot of late that relates to our academies. I think you may know that I had the privilege of serving for a while on the advisory board to the Air Force Academy, and it was a privilege to have that opportunity. The men and women who made up the forces, I saw them as students, are magnificent indeed, and the mix of talent is incredible. It is true of all of our academies. But a bit of controversy, not a small bit, has arisen here of late, that I know that both of you are personally involved in, evaluating and attempting to get to the bottom of it and make recommendations to us.

This hearing is not going to be dominated by that subject if this Chair has his way, for you are about that work this moment, and all of us are feeling the pain that is a part of it. In the meantime we are dealing with the fiscal year 2004 budget, and I would like to have us spend most of our time on that. I mean, the members have their own free will, but in the meantime, I wanted you to know that at least that is my feeling about this subject, for now. It will not be the end of it, but for now.

Mr. Secretary.

SUMMARY STATEMENT OF SECRETARY ROCHE

Secretary ROCHE. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and Congressman Murtha and Chairman Young, members of the Committee, it is my great honor to join General John Jumper today to represent the 700,000 Active, Guard, Reserve and civilian airmen who are engaged in defending our Nation, serving our interests around the globe. We are very proud of their achievements this past year, from combat operations in homeland defense, to their daily efforts to guarantee the readiness, health, security and morale of our force.

In our travels around the Air Force, we have been impressed and humbled by their creativity, commitment, and professionalism. And as we appear before you today, we have more than 40,000 airmen serving at some 50 expeditionary bases in over 35 countries, plus another 60,000 airmen permanently assigned overseas.

We are fighting the war on terrorism and defending our Nation's interests. Mr. Chairman, if the President decides to order our forces to combat in Iraq, they are ready.

Secondly, Mr. Chairman, I told you last year how proud I was to have the opportunity to serve alongside an officer whom I deeply respected: General John Jumper. I wish to tell you that my respect continues. He holds me in my job when there are days when I feel

like not doing it. He is the reason I come to work, along with the other airmen, and I commend him to you as a simply spectacular military officer and an unbelievably great American.

TRANSFORMATION

Sir, as we prepare for the future, we fully support the Department's continuing efforts to balance near-term readiness and operational requirements and the long-term transformation of our Armed Forces. Our challenge is to fight the global war on terrorism while simultaneously transforming. We must do both. And while we face near-term budget pressures, we nevertheless must invest for the future; otherwise we may be forced to pay more later in dollars, perhaps even in lives.

Of utmost importance to us is our continuing focus on warfighting and delivering a full spectrum of air and space capabilities to the combatant commanders. Through the efforts of this committee, your colleagues in the Congress and the Department, I am proud to report that we are currently meeting these objectives.

OPERATION NOBLE EAGLE

There has been some good news, Mr. Chairman, that we would like to share with you. The year 2003 provides us with a number of examples. For instance, we continued our expanded homeland defense mission, providing 25,000 fighter, tanker, and airborne early warning sorties, something that was brand new to us in 2001-in September of 2001. This was made possible only through the mobilization of 30,000 airmen from the Air Force Reserve and National Guard-Air National Guard. They conducted over 75 percent of all the Noble Eagle missions.

Today we continue this effort with more than 200 military aircraft dedicated to providing combat air patrols or on-call support to high-risk areas, cities, and key facilities across the United States. I commend these Reserves and Guardsmen to you, Mr. Chairman.

OPERATION ENDURING FREEDOM

In Operation Enduring Freedom, we made joint operations in a landlocked Nation possible. We flew more than 40,000 sorties just in 2002 alone. Plus, you know, all the sorties we flew in 2001, over 70 percent of coalition air operations. And of our 8,000 refueling missions, 55 percent were to Navy and Marine Corps aircraft.

In Afghanistan our Special Operations teams developed new ways to bring air and space power to bear in a variety of engagements. Our combat controllers integrated new technologies and precision weapons to do close air support from 39,000 feet using the B-1 and B-52 bombers and at lower altitudes for our Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps fighter bombers. And now we are developing better processes to target and engage time-critical and moving targets.

B-1 CONSOLIDATION

Continuous improvements in readiness and technology made these successes possible. With the support of your Committee, the Congress, Secretary Rumsfeld, we successfully consolidated our B

1 bomber fleet and improved overall fleet readiness. Its mission capability rate increased 10 percent from last year. It is now over 71 percent, the highest in its history.

SPARE PARTS

The increased spares funding that this Committee and this Congress has supported have paid off dramatically; 16 of 20 weapons systems improved mission-capable rates last year. The C-5B achieved its highest mission-capable rate since 1994, and it is now at 73 percent.

The B-2 improved over 33 percent, the A-10 was up eight percent, and our F-15s were up over five percent. Some of our oldest F-15s are suffering from age and from structural problems, and they are difficult, but the young men and women who do the maintenance on them are extraordinary. They are doing sometimes depot-level maintenance in the squadron level, and they are keeping these planes together in a beautiful way.

MISSION CAPABLE RATES

These are the best mission-capable rates we have experienced in five years and the best annual increases we have achieved since the mid-1980s. Clearly there are challenges. While we are making great progress in adapting the Air Force, we face challenges to our continuing air dominance. The increasing proliferation of advanced surface-to-air missile systems threatens our ability to gain and maintain air superiority in potential conflicts. Manned portable surface-to-air missiles have proliferated extensively. Tactical ballistic missiles and cruise missile technology is spreading.

RUSSIAN SU-37 AIRCRAFT

An advanced fighter has already been produced, specifically, the Russian SU-37, that is superior to our best fighters. But our airto-air world is increasingly dominated by how shall we deal with the cruise missile threats.

We are now facing the undeniable reality that other nations are investing in advanced American military technologies and fielding the best our aerospace industry has to offer in their air forces. While the investment of our good friends and allies is of great value to our alliance industrial base, superior capabilities are now or will shortly be present in American-produced airplanes that don't fly the American flag.

And by the way, Mr. Chairman, on the side, I have been researching what happened in the late 1930s, and at one point a similar thing happened where American industry was supporting foreign airplanes with much greater technology than they were providing to either the Department of the Navy or the Department of War.

AGING AIRCRAFT

Now, while other nations are modernizing, we continue to employ aging systems that are becoming more difficult to operate and more expensive to maintain. The average age of our operational air force is over 22 years per aircraft. And even with planned aircraft pro

curements, the total fleet average age is expected to increase to 27 years by the year 2020.

We sometimes jokingly put forward a histogram of our age of aircraft and note which ones were in service that are flying today that went into service before I was commissioned into the United States Navy, and I would hate to tell you how many planes that are in service today were in service before my colleague and dear friend John Jumper was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the United States Air Force. We have some old aircraft, sir.

MODERNIZATION

Our proposed 2004 budget addresses a number of our challenges and supports the Department's priorities. It accelerates our modernization and joint capabilities and maintains the gains of readiness and people programs we achieved last year. Most important, it gets money into our procurement program and funds essential capabilities our warfighters need. I strongly request that you support stability in our major programs.

PERSONNEL AND READINESS

Our number one investment priority remains our people. The budget fully supports our authorized total force in strength, funds our education to force development initiatives, puts us on track to eliminate inadequate housing, and reduces out-of-pocket housing expenses on schedule with the Secretary's objectives. We appreciate your continued support of pay raises for our uniformed and civilian airmen.

Our readiness budget increases by six percent. It funds an expanded $6 billion flying hour program and sustains the positive trends we have achieved in our readiness rates. Our proposal increases our infrastructure investment above the 2003 requested level and keeps us on track to meet the Department's goal of a 67year recapitalization rate by 2008.

F/A-22 PROGRAM

Finally, I am proud to report our proposed budget increases investment in new technologies by five percent over last year. Next year we will fund 22 F/A-22s if the budget is approved, continuing our move to a sustained production rate. We are attempting to get stability in this program so as to replicate what occurred with the C-17 where we can bring costs down and increase reliability.

Mr. Chairman, you remember very well the C-17 and some of the terrible days it went through, and it barely survived. And yet today when we receive a C-17, within 48 hours it is in the area of operations doing its mission, without any additional work.

The F/A-22 program is improving. It is currently meeting or exceeding all key performance related requirements. We have restructured the upgrade spirals to focus on developing the system's air-to-ground capabilities and recently delivered our initial production aircraft to Nellis Air Force Base.

We are experiencing some ongoing issues with software integration but having nothing to do with the flight controls, and we face the classic challenge in transitioning from development to produc

tion, something that you know, Mr. Chairman, I lived through on the B-2, in great agony.

It is not unusual to see these problems at this stage in the aircraft program because, more and more, what we do in the Armed Forces is software-based. But one of the things I would wish to say is that John and I have spent eight months—and eight months ago we got into this program in great depth. Over the period of time, Mr. Chairman, and with discussions with you and some very good encouragement from you, we are proud to say that the planes are now being delivered on time, and, in fact, we may have the first one that is early.

We have had a dramatic improvement in meeting the test points in the envelope for tests. We have gone back and fixed the production problems in which foreign object debris, FOD, damaged a couple of our engines. Key performance parameters have been met. It is stealthier than it was intended to be. The radar exceeds the requirement. We fired at supercruise a series of missiles. We have fired guns. We have taken care of canopy howl and we are fixing the fin buffeting problem. We have a situation with the spares that were not funded previously as they should have been, are finally starting to catch up. And we are now working on the assembly line and the station-to-station work on the assembly line is better than it has ever been.

But there are still some things, and the one that stands up is software, which will plague this program. It is plaguing an intelligence program that you know very well, Mr. Chairman. We should tell you the airborne laser is going to suffer the same thing, and we are now trying to hunt ahead of time to see how many of our programs were not properly funded for the period of integration and test, because the assumption that everything would go together correctly the first time simply is not borne out in reality.

We found that in the past, monies that were allocated to fund a second systems integration laboratory for software software integration laboratory-were cut to save money. We found that in linking up places within the program that were supposed to have been done so software could be developed was cut in order to save money. We found that there were programs associated with classified parts of the program where the contractor thought that they weren't allowed to collect data so as to be able to do better diagnosis. It was a misunderstanding of the rules.

We are fixing as many of these things as we can, and each time we make an investment, like we are investing in the software integration lab, it is to do something for this program and for the F35, because so much of the F-35 depends on this program functioning well. For instance, 55 percent of the engine for the 35 is really based on the F/A-22.

To work the software issue, we are going to take one aircraft and make it our flying-proof aircraft for software. We were able to go in December from under two hours of stability in software in the lab to well over eight hours. We moved to the airplanes because they were in initial production in some instances, experiencing difficulties again when we bring everything together, including all of the antennas. So we will take one plane, make it as close to production configuration as possible and make that plane work, and