General Johnson looks back on high-flying career

  • Published
  • By Chuck Paone
  • 66th Air Base Wing Public Affairs
HANSCOM AFB, Mass. --  The young boy chastised by teachers for drawing airplanes while he should have been paying attention in class could never have pictured the long, illustrious career his fascination with flying would lead to.

For Lt. Gen. Chuck Johnson, who retired Nov. 7 after relinquishing command of the Electronic Systems Center to Lt. Gen. Ted Bowlds, that career picture is vivid and multi-faceted. It spans more than 35 years -- nearly 40 if one counts his time at the Air Force Academy -- and a diverse wealth of assignments.

After graduating from the Academy in 1972, then-2nd Lt. Johnson went immediately off to Undergraduate Pilot Training at Randolph AFB, Texas.

"I'd always dreamed of flying jets, but there was a great need for helicopter pilots at the time, and when the Air Force asked for volunteers, I raised my hand and said, 'OK sign me up for that,'" he said.

It was the first of many times over the next three and a half decades that General Johnson would raise his hand, and as a result, he wound up doing many things he never thought he would. Looking back, the man who came to fly both helicopters and jets, and to work in operational, acquisition and logistics jobs, as well as a bevy of command assignments, counts himself richer for the experiences.

"I've really been incredibly fortunate to have had the chance to do so many things," he said. 


The journey begins

Growing up as one of five children in an Air Force family -- his father was a non-commissioned officer -- General Johnson knew early on that he wanted to fly; but he wasn't sure exactly how he'd ultimately take flight.

"Could I be a crew member?" he recalls asking himself.

No member of his family had previously attended college, and though this was something his parents encouraged, they didn't have the money to pay for it. So a young Chuck Johnson started looking into the possibility of becoming a military aviator and an officer, while allowing Uncle Sam to help with the tuition bills.

"It was, as my grandmother would say, high cotton," General Johnson said. "In my family, an officer was looked at as something very special, and going to college was, itself, a pretty big deal."

Not only was he thinking of college and a commission, but about attending one of the nation's prestigious service academies. It was 1964, and the Air Force Academy was still in its infancy, so he looked first toward Annapolis, knowing that many Naval Academy graduates went on to aviation careers.

He did eventually think about the Air Force Academy, too. The problem was that, with his dad being in the military, his family didn't live in its official state of residency, so it was hard to obtain the congressional support he needed to apply. He wound up attending the University of Florida instead, joining the Reserve Officer Training Corp program there.

It was his ROTC professor who convinced him not to give up his academy dream, prodding him to re-apply, under a Presidential appointment available to him as the son of a military member. He eventually mailed off his application and nervously waited months for a response.

"I got one of those little yellow cards at my dorm that let you know you have a package to pick up, so I went to the Post Office," General Johnson said. "But when I got there, they said I had to go to the main Post Office downtown. Well, I didn't have a car, so I had to hoof it there, and it was several miles." He did so, hoping he wasn't doing all that walking only to find rejection at the end of his journey, and he was a bit wary of opening the envelope even when he got there.

"Finally, on the way back to campus, I just sat down on a bench somewhere and tore it open." The news, as it turned out, was good, but he had no one to share it with and not even enough money in his pocket to make a phone call home. He had to wait till he got back to campus, where he was able to beg some spare change off of friends.

"My dad was just thrilled; it was such a big deal for him, and my mom was really happy for me, too," he said. "It was a very special moment in life."

And the start of something that turned out to be pretty special, too, a stellar Air Force career that presented him with great opportunities, and some nearly insurmountable challenges.


Going global, quickly

One of those challenges came during his third day on the job as director of the C-141 System Program Office at Warner Robins Air Logistics Center, Ga., when the entire fleet was grounded due to wing cracks.

"I had 91 planes parked on the ramp and just about any other place we could find to put them," said General Johnson, who was a colonel at the time. He needed to get the fleet back in the air -- fast. "The team came up with some incredible solutions, and everyone just worked their butts off making it happen," he said.

General Johnson demonstrated this to Gen. Ron Fogleman, the Air Force chief of staff at the time, in the best way possible, by suiting him up and crawling into the cramped space within one of the wings. There he got to see for himself how workers meticulously diagnosed and solved the problem.

"I ran into General Fogleman again just the other day, and he told me how he'd always remembered that, about how it gave him such an appreciation for the work maintainers do," General Johnson said.

General Johnson also recalled the efforts of another Air Force giant, Gen. Robert "Dutch" Huyser, who as commander in chief of what was then the Military Airlift Command, pushed for development of the C-17 Globemaster. He commended the now-deceased general for his foresight, in envisioning the types of scenarios for which fast, nimble and durable transport jets would be needed.

"'What if we had to go to war quickly in the Middle East, or in North Korea," he would ask. What if we needed to move lots of troops and heavy equipment into a theater very quickly?"

General Johnson, who managed the program in the earliest stages of its development, from 1986 to 1990, lauded General Huyser's prescience. "Some people said we didn't need the C-17, but he knew we did," the general said, noting the critical role it played during Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, and before that, in Bosnia, where the ability to land at very small airfields in any weather was essential.

"When you have a Navy admiral saying the most critical air power asset in the AOR was the C-17, that's really an amazing thing," he said.


Focusing on requirements

General Johnson's work on the Globemaster helped hone the acquisition portion of his career. But it was his earlier efforts as part of the team developing the jet's requirements which would come to shape one of his major focus areas.

"We built the very first requirements document that focused on going to war in a time-designated sequence," he said. The team knew the Air Force couldn't afford to design a plane without first envisioning exactly what it would need to do. "Going in to that, I didn't really know what requirements meant, but we figured it out, and we got it right."

To this day, General Johnson has concentrated on making sure the requirements are right, and on pushing back with operators until they are. He's also sounded a cautionary voice against the rather instinctive desire for large, up-front requirements. His famous Rs/rS PowerPoint chart, showing the inverse relationship between requirement size and delivery speed, has helped keep ESC and the Air Force focused on carefully managing requirements to get capabilities to the field faster.

At ESC, that's just one of many elements destined to form the general's legacy. He'll also be remembered for invigorating the center's efforts to provide essential support to combatant commanders, helping them resolve the need for fused, real-time intelligence data. At the same time, he oversaw a complete restructuring of the center, into the wing-group-squadron construct used by operational Air Force units.

"That was an awesome and incredibly bold step (taken by Air Force Materiel Command)," he said. "It made perfect sense, because we're executing mission; we're not staff. I was so impressed with the way the workforce handled the change here at ESC, with all the planning, mapping and analysis that went into getting it right."

He'll also be remembered as the first ESC commander to also serve as program executive officer for the Air Force's command and control and combat support portfolio.

"It makes an awful lot of sense for the PEO to be where the work is actually being done," he said of that arrangement. "It's a lot of work - a 24/7 job - and since you're not right there with the (service acquisition executive) you work for, you've got to fly back and forth to Washington quite often; but it can be done, and I think it really is the right model."

The general also brought some basic leadership traits to Hanscom that are bound to resonate for years to come. Known for his adherence to 'Five Ws' - workforce, work tools, work place, workload and warfighters - General Johnson connected all the essential ingredients of organizational success.


What about tomorrow?

He also repeatedly asked a seemingly simple question.

ESC has provided "war-winning technology in Afghanistan and Iraq," General Johnson said upon taking command of ESC in December 2003. And then, in the next breath, asked: "But what about tomorrow?" Again and again over the next four years, he challenged his staff to keep looking ahead, to envision those things that would be needed for warfighting success 10 or even 20 years down the line.

Among the things he saw coming was a need to focus more heavily on information security. He applauds the Air Force for declaring cyberspace a warfighting domain.

"We need to think of it almost the way we think of missile defense," he said.

The U.S. should be able to kill an incoming cyber threat just as it strives to defeat a kinetic threat, the general noted. "And we need to build preemptive strike capabilities, too."

ESC, he said, is bringing, and will continue to bring, an awful lot to that fight. Speaking about the center's accomplishments, he said: "I thought about the term electronics when I took the assignment here, and I thought, okay, I get that, but here it's way more than [the traditional definition implies]. It's about software and about networks. That's where the magic occurs - but it's not pixie dust that creates the magic; the magic comes from the incredible skill and knowledge of the people who work here."

Of his tenure at Hanscom: "I've loved it," he said with the sort of genuine enthusiasm staff members have come to expect. "Marilee and I have had a ball."

He spoke of the "incredible friends" he and his wife had made at his previous assignment at Tinker AFB, Okla., where he commanded the Oklahoma City Air Logistics Center, admitting that they wondered if their experience here could match up.

"Well, it did," he said. "It was awfully hard to leave Tinker, and it's going to be even harder to leave here."

The general isn't sure where he and Mrs. Johnson will ultimately settle, but in the short term, they plan to move to D.C., which will bring them closer to their daughter, Andrea, a young Air Force officer and medical doctor now doing her residency at the Bethesda Naval Medical Hospital.

"I'm incredibly proud of her," General Johnson said. Noting that she took her time to choose military service, because her primary focus was on medicine, he said he was glad she'd taken such a deliberative decision path. "That's good. We always taught her to take her time and make informed decisions."

He also stressed that it's okay for her, or for anyone, to change their minds later and go in a different direction. Too often, he said, people get hamstrung by the feeling that they "have to make a decision for life."

He acknowledged considering other options himself, such as leaving the Air Force to fly commercially. But in the end, he never regretted anything about his decision to serve - and to continue serving for so long.

"I got to fly all over the world. I've been on every continent and on both poles. I've done so many interesting and challenging things and served with so many incredible people, and I've made so many friends for life. I'm really grateful for all the great opportunities I've had."