Pacific Air Forces

It involves the 12th Air Force Headquarters building being haunted by the war dead of Pearl Harbor.

The Pacific Air Force's PACAF command is also located in this building, so it is a very important place that requires strict security.

There are manned security posts on the premises, as well as state-of-the-art laser and camera systems blanketing the property.

Anyway, a little historical background on the building.

Great.

So my topic actually came around, we read MacArthur's Airmen by Griffiths, and I really liked the story of General, uh, George C. Kenney, you know, and how he really helped the Pacific Air Forces during World War II.

And so that really led me down the path of, hey, I love reading all these stories about, you know, these pivotal characters, and so who is somebody in space that really helped bring space about today, and who have we, like, is lesser known in the space community? And so that made me think of the Gulf War.

I saw that as a turning point for space, where we leveraged, you know, our space capabilities and we were able to use them at the tactical level.

And he was really struggling with the death of George Floyd.

And in the conversation was the commander of Pacific Air Forces, better known as PACAF within the Air Force.

And in that conversation, he said, Dad, what is PACAF going to say? And so what he was really asking was, Dad, what are you going to say? It was pretty emotional for me and my wife because we're in Hawaii, he's in Washington, D.C., and if you could hug him through the phone, we would.

And so I came to work on Monday and I was told by my staff that you're probably going to get confirmed on Tuesday.

And Tuesday came and went, that wasn't confirmed.

And so on Wednesday, I decided I was going to record a video.

And it was really focused to the Airmen of Pacific Air Forces.

And that was partly because there was some chatter on social media about, I wonder what General Brown's thinking, what he's going to say.

From our combined air ops directors that we had in place to our division, CAOC division leads, it was almost...

Because there's lots of problems with RIMPAC having a bunch of allies and partners come in and take over what's regularly a Pacific Air Force ops center.

There's always challenges.

But every time somebody would come to my door, I had a little kind of closet office in the back of the CAOC.

I know the Air Force has parts of units, if not whole squadrons, deployed to the Middle East.

And General Schneider, Pacific Air Force's commander, recently said that they couldn't conduct exercises on the scale that they had been doing this past year in the upcoming one.

I'll just say that one thing, though, that came out of this war, which I suspect the Chinese knew, but when you see it, it has a greater impact.

They get, I guess, was it a third of their oil from the Gulf? I guess I think about half or two thirds of their oil comes from abroad and about half of that's from the Gulf.

And we're used to seeing participation in bigger exercises with fighter jets and ships and aircraft carriers and that kind of thing.

I think there's no question that those allies will participate in close discussions with Admiral Papparo, with our Pacific Air Forces, with our army units in the Pacific.

and begin to think about what extent they need to be able to create this.

Of course, Japan going through a big process of how they want to be able to carry out offensive, defensive operations.