ACT PAO
Published on 03 April 2015
Supreme
Allied Commander Transformation (SACT), French Air Force General
Jean-Paul Paloméros attended the International Conference on Air and
Space Power (ICAP) 2015 at the Turkish Air War College, 2 April.
ICAP is an international conference,
organized in Turkey for the second time, and hosted by the Air War
College with contributions from the Turkish Air Force. The aim of the
academic discussions at ICAP 2015 is to ensure that the 'principles of
change' within Air and Space Power are 'clearly understood'.
During his speech,
SACT pointed out that future Air and Space power will be challenged
externally by very adaptive competitors and adversaries, and internally
by corrosive effects of budget constraints. "Major powers outside NATO
have been developing modern fleets of interceptors for some time. They
are also producing long-range missiles that can threaten specifically
high-value assets. In fact, they are developing a mix of innovative
concepts and technologies that can offset [NATO's] military
superiority," SACT said.
After having elaborated on a number of
threats, SACT affirmed that the key is innovation: "This new environment
offers indeed a great potential to increase our operational agility. In
the future security environment, I believe that we must focus less and
less on developing dedicated [and] specific means, equipment for a
single purpose," General Paloméros said. "Through innovation, we need to
unleash the creativity of all stakeholders, taking into consideration a
lot of very constructive inputs from Industry, innovative companies,
and end users. We must adopt a pragmatic approach in our equipment
design and acquisition. We must find the right balance between quantity
and quality," he added.
General Paloméros added that training
and exercises "will remain the capstone for ensuring the desired level
of preparedness of our air capabilities"..."Exercising helps to bring
together Allies and partners to test their interoperability from
doctrine to equipment, find solutions to problems identified in
operations, define how to react – and continue the mission with degraded
capabilities." SACT also used the occasion to remind the audience of
"the biggest exercise NATO has conducted for a very long time." Trident
Juncture 2015 will assemble no less than 36.000 troops,with most of the
exercise taking part in Italy, Portugal and Spain.
In conclusion SACT thanked the Turkish
Air Force for "providing us this unique opportunity to share new ideas,
to candidly exchange points of view on how to continue transforming our
Alliance's Air Power and honing [NATO's] cutting edge for the
foreseeable future."
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