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Posted on 04/28/2006 9:16:37 PM PDT by El Gato
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This is just like during Gulf War I, only then there was the excuse of the fall of the Soviet Union, Warsaw Pact, etc. Now there is the modernizing Red Chinese, in addition to the Iranians and other Muzzies who just want to kill Infidels, especial the Great and Lessor Satan (the US and the Jews respectively), even if they make martyrs of their entire country.
At some point, you do less with less, not more with less. We are already doing less than we should be doing, IMHO.
I think this will drop the AF under 300,000 personnel. They better hope that we don't get caught in a real big shoot'n air war, or we may find ourselves get spread too thin.
My main objection to Rumsfeld (apart from acquisition) is that he is trying to fight the war on the cheap.
Maybe it is just me, but I haven't been part of very many overmanned units during my USAF career. And the regular deployments take a toll.
So now we're cutting 40,000 people, and trying to get rid of planes with a lot of service left in them - because otherwise the Defense budget might go over 4% of GDP? Maybe even hit 4.1, or 4.2%?
Well, those things happen in a war - but most Americans don't know anyone involved in the war. And most haven't sacrificed squat all.
"Adminstration is talking of cutting 40,000 Air Force positions"
This article is interesting but it doesn't really explain how these constraints are coming into effect over the next five years. From the article it appears that it's the Air Force that is planning to make these personnel cuts, not the administration.
What this article doesn't explain is what exactly is driving the budget "constraints". Since this is Air Force planned I'd say it's more likely that the Air Force is looking at major weapons system purchases and plan on partially paying for them our of hide...personnel hide.
There are several aspects that one must laugh at.
First...here we are cutting 40,000 bodies...after the last round of BRAC, which is simply the cart before the horse. With 40,000 less bodies...I could have cut at least 10 more bases off the list (either overseas or state-side)...but these guys aren't smart enough to think of that.
Second...in the vast number of cases...the requirements of the 40,000 don't really go away...they simply become contractor requirements which you end up paying in some fashion later. Always remember...contractors cost more than Airman Snuffy.
Third...there are AEF or deployment cycles with mandatory fill's required...so who will fill these? Answer...instead of 8 cycles...we go with 7 cycles...which means just a faster chance of you going for 120 days deployed...every two years.
Fourth...historically speaking (because we've seen it over and over)...they will get the cream of the cream amongst the guys who want to get out...who become highly paid contractors. The guys who typically stay in or fight to stay...have a higher percentage of "catfish" (guys who swim at the bottom of the pond and really don't contribute much to the air force).
So its a lose-lose-win situation...a term which only Rummy would use. He has to save money somewhere...so why not just cut? He isn't really planning for the next war...he is simply against the next budget cut...so don't think for a minute that this 40,000 is the end. By summer of 2007...we will be working on the next cut dream...probably another 40,000. The Chinese and Iranians have little to worry about.
It's not the Administration, Congress or Secretary Rumsfeld driving this personnel reduction...it's the Air Force itself.
You notice the article doesn't say anything about budget "reductions", it talks about budget "constraints" over five years.
The services work on a five year zero based budget process. Each annual budget is zero based (no growth) and extended out five years in advance, then they adjust the current fiscal year to reflect the actual budget given them.
It's the Air Force that is saying they will have to cut 40,000 to meet "constraints"...in other words, they're putting some major additional spending priorities into their budgets that bust the bank and they have to come up with an in-house way to pay for it. It's also a form of coercion that works sometimes (this is nothing new); they make unpopular threats in the hopes that Congress will relent and chock up additional funds to pay for their new toy.
A good example is the way the Coast Guard used to deal with anticipated budget "constraints". They would announce that in order to meet these "constraints" they were going to have to close down Air Station Chicago (two whole rescue choppers but to a budget the size of the Coast Guard's it added up) and a few other high profile units...always in the districts of Congressmen with clout and vocal constituents.
It usually worked.
God help us if the Democrats ever hold power then you're gonna see the shit hit the fan with more entitlements & high taxes like back in Jimmy Carter days!!
Oh, please. They are making these plans based on guidance from DoD, which means guidance from the SecDef (and the SecAF, who is the one making the statements, who is also a political appointee of George W. Bush.
I work on an Army post, and we recently got notice that they are cutting the janitorial service. Now the contractor who provides that service can't be paying those little Korean ladies (mostly GI wives and/or former wives) all that much. They are cutting back from cleaning (floors only execpt in the latrines) once a week, to every other week, and now only cleaning the latrines.(Little Army lingo there, the Air Force, at least the units I was in, calls them "heads" just like the Navy). They already require the much more highly paid engineers, operations analysts and so forth to carry out their own trash. There will no longer be any periodic (about quarterly) carpet shampooing either. It's just penny wise and pound foolish. I sort of expect them to ask my contractor team to be reduced from 3 people to 2. Guess who's the most recent "hire"? (ALthough I wasn't hired for the job, I was drafted by my manager at the parent company,for which I'd worked for 5 1/2 years at that point).
They had to get the Commanding General's permission to backfill a secretary's position after the incumbent retired! There seems to some sort of hold on new service/support contracts as well. They, the Army, also cut one project by about 1/2, in order to continue to fund another. IMHO, the project cut was showing more promise than the one retained. Plus they are always getting cuts and witholds during the year, some of which get restored later, but the cuts cause replanning efforts, which further delay the project(s) concerned, not to mention eating up $$ for no return.
Well not necessarily, they are cutting support contracts as well. They did what you indicate some time ago, although most of the jobs the contractors do would have been done by civil service employees, not uniformed troops. With some exceptions, such as gate guards and some maintenance activities.
Personally I would rather see more young men in uniform.
Not quite, the company that made those parts is being sold to a Dubai concern. Not quite the same thing, the parts will likely continue to be made where they were before,just under different, foreign, ownership. BTW, Dubai is a country, sort of, it's actually part of the United Arab Emerites. In some sense it's like a state under the old Articles of Confederation.
If you remain locked into fighting the last war then you may have a valid point, however, the Air Force is being dragged kicking and screaming into the new century where the service faces dramatic changes in technology,tactics and geographical locations.
1. The F-22 and the F-35 will be the last manned Fighter/Ground attack aircraft to be manufactured in the US.
2.Within 10 yrs UAV's(Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) will rule the skies.
3.Given the above time frame the accuracy of JDAM will increase and enable the penetrator to strike a quarter from 65,000 ft.
4. The locations of current US air bases such as Italy,Germany,Turkey,UK,Japan and Korea are money pits. Time to move on.
5.The close air support role will revert to the Army and Marines.
After you climb out of your B-17 to buy a camel saddle and Meerschaum pipe at the Eskeshir Px, take a pause.The days of the ball and waist gunners,navigators,flight engineers, and bombardiers have passed.
Then you may squint your rugged eyes at the horizon were you will see changes,new aircraft,reliable robotics, increases in productivity and damn fine young men and women ready to implement them.
Those constraints come in the budget guidance that comes down to the services from DoD. It's not at all the same sort of thing as threatening to close Representative Foghorn's pet facility. These cuts will be scattered through out the force. Old Foghorn won't much care because the pain will be spread out so much, he'll likely not notice, unless one of the programs that gets the axe was in his district
Not necessarily. Contractor costs are one time and up front. Airman Snuffy is likely to become Tech Sgt Snuffy, with a wife and kids for which medical costs will have to be paid, and Master Sergeant Snuffy probably expects to retire someday as well, with an ever increasing retirement pay. (Contractors have medical coverage and retirement too, both usually stinky, especially for support contracts which are periodically re-competted). Contractors retire too of course, but at much older ages. Too, MSgt Snuffy is likely to become one of those contractors after he retires, and may be willing to take less pay and benefits since he has his military retirement.
It's not all cut and dried, and it's complicated by the way Airman's Snuffy's costs are budgeted and paid out. Airman Snuffy may appear cheaper, but that's because all of his costs aren't charged to whatever task is being considered, while the contractor's are.
The whole thing stinks, because the DoD budget, once the dominate portion of the Federal Budget, is now justove 1/3 of the "entitlements" portion.
Correction, I was going from memory. In FY 2004, the last for which I have data, the entitlements were 1,404.2 Billion $ while Defense was only 473.8 Billion, which is almost exactly 1/3 the entitlements amount.
I was active duty USAF from 1990-97 and disagree that Airman Snuffy is cheaper than a contractor for certain duties. Food, Payroll, and most logistics can be handled just fine by contractors. If they don't do the job, another contractor can be found. (but there is always the danger of sweetheart deals and kickbacks). On the other hand, Airman Snuffy may become Tsgt. Snuffy after 20 years of mediocre service and retire.. the taxpayer is on the hook to fund him for another 20-40 years in retirement... it's cold hearted, but that is what smaller government entails. Transformation is painful, but it is needed.
If the rest of your observations are as accurate as this one, then they aren't even worth that quarter. There all sorts of constraints on a JDAM, some of them due to physics. GPS guided munitions will never be that accurate, and command or beam rider types probably won't either. Altitude has little to do with the accuracy of guided weapons, which is determined by end game effects.
Being a "wild eyed" optimist (so my employers have always told me), usualy involved in the development of those new weapons and/or support systems, rather than as a direct support contractor, as well as having served as a USAF officer back in the dark ages, and then as a reservist under Ronald Reagan, I think I'm probably as qualified to judge such things as you are likely to be.
Not only that, but I've seen this syndrome before, during the Carter years, and to a much lessor extent during the later part of Bush I. The cuts, which lead to a hollow force, are always justified pretty much as you have done. Yeh the new systems are good, but their numbers are way too small. It's not just a bunch of Mad Mullahs and Angry Ayatollahs we must be prepared to fight and overcome.
So would I, but the cost comparisons are not as simple as some would have it. Even the military and DoD civilians green eyeshade types at the lower levels don't always appreciate that they are comparing apples and mangoes when they compare the costs of contractors verse uniformed military or (their preference) civil service employees.
But the days of maintainers will always be with us. Those are the bulk of the operational Air Force personnel. It's something the Army guys don't understand either. These days even those maintainers are becoming trigger pullers, and becoming more like Army or Marine maintenance personnel.
I saw this commercial. I like the part when the guy says "Let's get some lunch in here huh?" and he calls the only guy left working in the office.
Just an observation as a ex Navy aviation maintainer who has worked along side the Air Force during many a deployment. I gotta say the amount of personnel the Air Force uses to support an aircraft is absolutely staggering compared to the Navy. That huge footprint is costly.
The Navy is taking a hit too. I thought these billets were being moved over to the Army and the Marines. Those guys need help.
Before I get flamed...every 10,000 personnel costs ONE BILLION annually.
But when I started doing the calculations it would be a miniscule amount of the federal budget. For instance say there are 1.4 million military workers. And we gave them all an average of a 10,000$ raise. The total additional cost is 10 billion dollars. Thats not even a drop in the bucket of the federal government's 2.7 trillion dollar upcoming budget.
As we descend into socialism however, there will each year be less and less money for the military personnel. As social security, medicare and medicaid keep increasing.
People are making way too much out of this story.
Of course it's guided, that's what the GPS set does. What it isn't is powered.
GPS aided inertial will help some, but not down to quarter size. There are some technologies, one of which is called cycle counting, that will allow much higher precision, but which will require much higher precision targeting systems as well. You have to be able to locate the position of the target relative to that of the bomb or missile at some point, usually before launch, then via the cycle counting technique you navigate from one to the other.
The problem is not just to accept new ideas and reject old one, you can waste a lot of money and get lots of kids killed that way, but to know which of the new ideas to accept, and when to do it, and to know which of the old ideas to let go. That is a job best done by the likes of Ralph Peters and John Boyd than a bunch of politicians and bureaucrats, uniformed or not.
So you are saying that a cut of 40,000 out of 347,521 is no big deal, and you may be correct, but your analysis is somewhat flawed. For example you say the days of waist gunners, etc are over, but you ignore that from the numbers you post, the vast majority of the Air Force is already made up of non-flying personnel, and that the cuts will presumably be at least proportional to the fraction of them already in the force. I say, at least, because I suspect the cuts in support, including maintenance, base defense, and other support functions will probably be higher proportionally than among the fliers.
I've seen it too. It was very painful to watch. But the attitude of the manager is not all that far from reality, in some cases. Which is what makes it funny of course. Like the Dilbert cartoons.
Indeed they do. Just today there is a story in the local paper about the Army support money being cut, which bears on the my "janitors" comment above.
But I'd rather the money was moved from other parts of the budget, especially those parts that are not under the authority granted the federal government under the Constitution.
I gotta say the amount of personnel the Air Force uses to support an aircraft is absolutely staggering compared to the Navy
I've heard that observation before, most recently by a co-worker who is like you an ex Navy electronics tech, working with several of us ex Air Force types at least a couple of which were maintainers before they went to OCS. Some of that is differences in the way the maintenance is organized. Navy maintainers are more broadly trained, but all those Air Force maintainers are each "touching" more aircraft. Navy maintainers cost more to train, and if you lose them at the end of their first enlistment, you won't have gotten as many working months out of them, since their training costs less. The differences in the working environment, shipboard verses land based, drove those differences in organization.
That is true of government in general. However, many politicians and bureaucrats are working against good business practices and doing it on purpose. The left wants to handicap the USA and free enterprise as much as possible. Any bureaucracy, public or private, attempts self-preservation and growth.
Historically, we have been fighting the last war, rather than the present or future one, with outmoded ideas and equipment and playing catch up while doing so. Bush and Rumsfield are trying to change that and do it within the current political restraints.
All us armchair generals can argue all we want about the proper way to do it but we don't have all the information nor the responsibility. Yet, we do have opinions and this is a good place to express them.
Just a redirecting of no longer needed resources, just ask the "throw out the old ideas" crowd. You just have to learn to "accept new ideas". The Jihadies, which seems to all that anyone is worrying about right now, don't have many submarines after all.
Never mind all those subs with 
On them. And the many with 
on them as well.
But never mind that, the wise heads in the Pentagon, the White House, and especially the Congress, know what they are doing. .. don't they?
But to some, and only some, extent, they are the ones who set those restraints. They are supposed to be leaders. That said, they are battling powerful forces in the MSM, academe, and Congress. I just wish they'd fight a bit harder and more in the open, rather than trying to dress up the pig.
Budget requests go up from the services to DoD, get scrubbed and reworked there, and then they go to Congress. Congress doesn't just set the top level number. They determine how much can be spent on each major weapon system, both for support and new procurement. They, the budgets, determine how much can be spent on R&D, how much on procurement, and how much on operations and maintenance. Within each of those categories there are many "buckets", and the ability of the services to transfer money between them is quite limited.
Yet it remains the services themselves that set the direction of their budgets.
I agree, which in turn makes me wonder why it was posted.
The problem is, defense spending is discretionary and can be reduced. The far larger part of federal spending is non-discretionary and cannot be touched including social security and medicare. It's a political problem pure and simple.
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