SECAF discusses current, future personnel issues (40,000 to be cut)

Air Force Print News ^ | 4/28/2006 | Master Sgt. Mitch Gettle

[El Gato]

The days of the ball and waist gunners,navigators,flight engineers, and bombardiers have passed.

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.

[FlingWingFlyer]

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.

[Wristpin]

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.

[ran15]

I also am a numbers guy who likes looking at the facts. I remember the government was crying about paying some skilled soldiers more to keep them.

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.

[managusta]

Snapshot of the Air Force

- 347,521 individuals are on active duty

-- 71,526 officers and 275,995 enlisted personnel

- The Air Force has 13,648 pilots, 4,432 navigators, 1,370 air battle managers and 35,467 non-rated line officers in the grades of lieutenant colonel and below.

- 21.5 percent of the current force is assigned overseas (including Alaska and Hawaii)

-- 10,913 officers and 63,739 enlisted personnel(Total 74,652 - That are fighting the WOT in Afghanistan and Iraq and manning all the US Air Force bases around the world.)

That leaves 272,852 personnel in the US, and the scheduled
force reduction calls for 40,000 over 5 yrs.

As for my prediction about the JDAM... development is being focused on Aided GPS...Inertial navigation and GPS,
Time of Arrival systems,Angle of Arrival systems, and Ultra wide-band technology including various combinations of all mentioned, in addition there are programs to add a terminal seeker.The JDAM is not a guided weapon but depends on free fall to steer. Current accuracy is about 3 meters.


Progress is not about accepting new ideas but about rejecting the old ones.


You need to join the old Colonel Blimps club with the likes of Ralph Peters and David Hunt where you guys can suck air through your teeth and scratch your heads and tell us how we cannot achieve,
1.Victory
2.Better weapons
3.Manpower reductions.
However, I thank you and respect you for your service.

[P3pilotJAX]

The military is doing crazy stuff right now because of a personnel shortage and we are looking at cutting jobs? They are taking Navy pilots, sending us to Fort Bragg to learn how to shoot M-16s and march around, then sending us to Iraq and placing us in army units. Over a million bucks to train us as pilots and now there are many of us on the ground in Iraq.

[OKIEDOC]

Thanks for the explanation.

"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."

I knew that Dubai was part of the UAE just a grammatical screw up on my part.

[CWOJackson]

DoD doesn't dictate how each service allocates it's money, it provides the budget and oversight only.

People are making way too much out of this story.

[El Gato]

The JDAM is not a guided weapon but depends on free fall to steer. Current accuracy is about 3 meters.

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.

[El Gato]

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.

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.

[El Gato]

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.

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.

[Mind-numbed Robot]

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.

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.

[El Gato]

The military is doing crazy stuff right now because of a personnel shortage and we are looking at cutting jobs? They are taking Navy pilots, sending us to Fort Bragg to learn how to shoot M-16s and march around, then sending us to Iraq and placing us in army units. Over a million bucks to train us as pilots and now there are many of us on the ground in Iraq.

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?

[El Gato]

Bush and Rumsfield are trying to change that and do it within the current political restraints.

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.

[El Gato]

DoD doesn't dictate how each service allocates it's money, it provides the budget and oversight only.

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.

[CWOJackson]

Yet it remains the services themselves that set the direction of their budgets.

[Mind-numbed Robot]

People are making way too much out of this story.

I agree, which in turn makes me wonder why it was posted.

[JCEccles]

My main objection to Rumsfeld (apart from acquisition) is that he is trying to fight the war on the cheap

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.