PACAF Hosts Inaugural Air Sea Battle Forum

by Master Sgt. Matthew McGovern
Pacific Air Forces Public Affairs

3/10/2014 - JOINT BASE PEARL HARBOR-HICKAM, Hawaii -- 

Pacific Air Forces and U.S. Pacific Fleet held their first Air Sea Battle Forum here, March 6.

 

The forum served as a venue to promote camaraderie and spark discussions between the air and sea components.

 

Gen. Hawk Carlisle, Pacific Air Forces commander, and Rear Admiral Robert Girrier, Deputy Commander and Chief of Staff of U.S. Pacific Fleet, made opening remarks before Mr. Steve Diamond, the PACAF historian, gave a presentation on the historic Air Sea battle perspective.

 

"The intent of this Air Sea Battle Forum is for us to get together and talk; the discussions that you have in places like this, the sidebars, the relationships, invariably is the most valuable way to get things done," Carlisle said. "Sometimes fiscal constraints drive people to think separately; we need to fight that urge and think more cooperatively. At the end of the day, our job is to provide the United States with the greatest military possible with the resources they give us and the only way to do that is if we do it together."

 

Girrier spoke next, holding in his hand a newsletter from the Pentagon's Air-Sea Battle office.

 

"At its core the Air Sea Battle concept seeks to develop a pre-integrated joint force built from habitual relationships with interoperable and complimentary cross domain capabilities," Girrier read from the newsletter. "There are a lot of words in there, but the key pieces are pre-integrated, interoperable, and cross-domain, and what we are doing here is a step in that right direction," he said.

 

After Girrier spoke, Diamond and his staff delivered a presentation to nearly 300 Airmen and Sailors on past Air Sea operations.  One such operation was the Doolittle Raid, a response to Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in which Lt. Col. "Jimmy" Doolittle and 79 other Airmen launched 16 B-25 Mitchell bombers from the deck of the USS Hornet on April 18, 1942.

 

Air Sea Battle is both a natural and deliberate evolution of U.S. power projection capabilities toward more networked and integrated operational solutions. The Air Sea Battle Forums are now scheduled to occur quarterly.