Flight Check

But any celebration of the central role of air power in today's engagements is muted. Service leaders are too busy scrambling to keep cockpits full, maintain aircraft and meet the needs of regional commanders in chief, who seem to continually tap the Air Force for its ability to quickly reach out and strike targets on short notice. Cuts in personnel, budgets and overseas bases have combined with a fourfold increase in missions to create an atmosphere of frequent, unplanned deployments intolerable to more and more airmen. Increasingly, they are deciding to leave service for higher pay, better working conditions and more stable home lives in the private sector.

The personnel losses have serious consequences. In late April, barely one month after NATO unleashed its air campaign against Serbian forces in Yugoslavia, the Air Force issued an order prohibiting airmen with critical skills from leaving service. Even before NATO launched Operation Allied Force, Air Force leaders were openly worrying not only about personnel losses, but falling combat readiness rates, insufficient spare parts and plummeting morale among overworked troops.

After a decade of paring down the military, Defense Department officials now are beginning to wonder if they'll have enough men and women left in uniform to carry out military missions in the near future. In the Air Force, which has cut more than 200,000 airmen from the ranks since 1989, when the service numbered about 570,000 active-duty troops, the stress is particularly acute, as what began as short-term missions in the Persian Gulf and the Balkans have taken on an aura of permanence.

"The world has changed," says Maj. Gen. Donald Cook, who spent most of his 30-year career preparing for war against the Soviet Union. No longer does the Air Force maintain the large number of overseas bases it did during the Cold War, where forward-deployed troops lived with their families, trained full time and only occasionally deployed for missions. Now troops are largely based in the United States but participate in frequent "temporary" deployments to hot spots and humanitarian emergencies around the world. Such deployments, usually to austere outposts far from family and the comforts of home, often turn into months-long rotations, putting tremendous stress on airmen's families and base operators, who have to work overtime when support personnel are deployed.

"We will be in deployment mode-expeditionary if you will-from now on," says Cook, whose current job is to turn the Air Force into what service officials have dubbed the Expeditionary Aerospace Force, or EAF. As the Air Force begins implementing the EAF plan this month, service leaders hope to carefully manage the frequency and duration of deployments and lay the foundation for a lighter, streamlined Air Force able to project more power more quickly. EAF plans call for reshaping the service to deal more effectively with the contingency missions in which the Air Force is actually engaged, not just to be prepared to fight two major wars nearly simultaneously, as is stipulated in the national military strategy.

Stretched Thin

In the early 1990s, the Pentagon eliminated more than 30 of the 50 bases the Air Force operated overseas. So the Air Force has had to set up what Cook calls "temporary permanent" bases at 18 remote locations to be able to handle ongoing operations in Bosnia and Serbia and to enforce UN sanctions against Iraq. These bare-bones bases, says Cook, have been created "at a time when our force structure has been going down, our personnel accounts have been going down, but our [operating tempo]-our requirements to be everywhere-has been going up," says Cook.

"Therefore we need to be very mobile, we need to be expeditionary, we need to be rapidly responsive to provide the national command authority with that air capability that all the [theater commanders in chief] require," he says.

In an interview with Government Executive, acting Air Force Secretary Whitten Peters said the shift to expeditionary mode, which has been many months in the planning, is born of necessity. The current pace of operations "is just not sustainable in the long run without dramatic changes in the way we organize for peacetime missions," Peters says. When Air Force manpower planners last year looked at the forces required to sustain ongoing operations in Bosnia and Iraq, as opposed to just looking at what would be needed in the event of two wars, shortfalls in critical jobs became readily apparent, Peters says-and that was before the Air Force committed nearly 1,000 aircraft and the affiliated personnel to Operation Allied Force.

Restructuring the Air Force to handle such long-term missions will have two immediate benefits, Peters says. First, while it won't lessen the pace of operations overall, it eventually will help individual airmen by spreading the burden of current operations more evenly across the force, including the reserves. Second, it will allow the Air Force to shift resources to bolster overworked units and better manage day-to-day operations.

The air campaign launched against Serbia in March brought some of those shortfalls into sharp relief. Personnel shortages in intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets, strategic airlift, air refueling, search and rescue units and satellite communications were most severe, resulting in a "stop-loss" order from the Air Force preventing airmen with those skills from leaving service. In total, Air Force manpower officials have determined 17 career fields are likely to remain short of a 90 percent staffing requirement for the foreseeable future. The stop-loss order coincided with the call-up of as many as 33,000 reservists, needed largely to help fill those critical shortfalls.

Even before the Air Force was cast in the lead role in Operation Allied Force, the force was beginning to fray. In a February speech at the Air Force Association's Air Warfare Symposium in Orlando, Fla., Peters outlined several disturbing trends:

• Overall readiness rates have declined by about 18 percent since 1996.
• Cannibalization rates-robbing parts from one aircraft to replace those in another-have increased 100 percent since 1995.
• While war plans require the Air Force to maintain a 75 percent mission-capable rate for the C-5 Galaxy airlifter, the actual mission-capable rate is about 60 percent. Across the force, mission-capable rates have fallen nearly 10 percent since 1991.
• Due to a chronic and growing shortage of pilots, the Air Force will operate with fewer, less experienced pilots for most of the coming decade at least.

Pilot shortages have been well documented. In testimony before the House Armed Services Committee's military personnel panel in March, Mark Gebicke, director of military operations and capabilities issues at the General Accounting Office, said that last year the Air Force was 648 pilots short of the 13,986 it said it needed. In the next few years, the shortage could grow higher than 2,100 pilots. The biggest shortfalls are likely to be among pilots who fly tactical airlift, fighter and bomber aircraft.

Two factors have contributed to the pilot shortages, said Gebicke. First, during the military downsizing earlier this decade, the services hired fewer pilots, meaning they didn't have enough to fill vacancies. Second, multiple surveys show that pilots are unhappy with quality-of-life issues, namely the frequency, length and unpredictability of deployments. The strong economy and the fact that pilots can usually make much more money in the private sector have also contributed to the falling retention rate.

"When we asked aviators to provide us with the single change that would encourage them to stay in the military . . . Air Force aviators requested a relaxation of their deployment schedules, followed closely by better pay and more choice assignments," said Gebicke. Air Force pilots were also particularly unhappy with the frequency of deployments to Southwest Asia, where living conditions are austere and training is severely limited.

The frequency and unpredictability of deployments are the very problems the Air Force hopes to solve with the EAF.

'Zero-Sum Game'

The Expeditionary Aerospace Force plans are modeled after the Navy's carrier battle group structure, in which Navy forces are grouped and deployed on a regular, rotating schedule to give theater commanders a continuous, wide range of naval force options. The predictable rotation of carrier battle groups allows sailors to plan accordingly and maintain more stable personal lives, something airmen have been complaining they lack under the current, more random system by which airmen are tapped to respond to contingencies, says Cook.

Under EAF, by next January most airmen, including reservists, will be assigned to one of 10 force packages, called aerospace expeditionary forces, or AEFs. Each AEF will comprise a range of equipment, personnel and aircraft from which units can be tailored to quickly deploy to support the scope of contingencies from humanitarian relief operations to war. Reservists' two-week annual training will be scheduled to fill overseas mission requirements, further lessening the burden on active forces. In addition, members of the Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve will know long in advance when the AEFs to which they are assigned are on call for possible deployment, allowing them to keep employers informed and plan their civilian work schedules to allow for participation in operations more easily.

The biggest change may be for airmen in support units, says Lt. Col. Scott Borges, deputy chief of the base support division at the Air Combat Command. In the past, support personnel who wanted to stay put could usually engineer their careers to do so. Under EAF, that will be much harder as the burden of conducting ongoing operations is spread more evenly across the Air Force.

The AEFs, each of which will include a cross-section of 120 to 150 aircraft and 10,000 to 15,000 personnel, will operate on staggered 15-month cycles that include a 90-day deployment window, during which troops and equipment will be available to respond quickly to whatever needs arise. The remainder of the cycle will include 10 months of training, two months of deployment preparation and a short stand-down period. Two AEFs will be on call at any given time and a lead wing in each AEF will provide tactical-level leadership during deployments. The 10-month training time built into the cycle is critical, say Air Force planners, because many ongoing operations do not give pilots adequate opportunities to maintain their readiness for combat operations.

One important part of creating the AEFs, Air Force officials say, will be filling shortages in support functions. In its fiscal 2000 budget request, the Air Force identified 2,641 open support positions. The positions won't be filled by new authorizations, however, but by cuts in other areas, especially in the headquarters staffs, says Cook.

"We're doing exactly what I think Congress told us to do: Reduce headquarters and give more to the field to help our people with this [personnel tempo] issue," says Cook. In its 2001 budget, the Air Force will request an additional 3,200 authorizations to further beef up support staff in the AEFs.

The personnel shuffling comes as the Air Force is under orders from the Pentagon to identify about 54,000 positions, both civilian and military, for privatization over the next six years. The order is part of a massive departmentwide effort to target 230,000 jobs that could potentially be turned over to the private sector. "Outsourcing is one of our concerns," says Cook. "We have put the brakes on some [attempts to privatize jobs]. For instance, in the civil engineering area, we can't go all civilian and outsource everything. In some areas here we really need to take a break and reassess how far we want to go down that road.

"This is a zero-sum game. We have to make sure we get the right authorization at the right place with the right person in that authorization. On the first of January, we're not going to raise the flag and declare victory."

Spreading the Pain

Col. Robert Elder, assistant director of operations at Air Combat Command headquarters in Langley, Va., says the stabilizing effect of implementing the EAF plan will have many payoffs. The average deployment, now 120 days, will be reduced to 90. Also, by knowing ahead when their units are on call for deployment, airmen can schedule their professional schooling accordingly.

"I don't want to oversell this. Not everybody is going to be happy with this, at least right away," says Elder, an EAF planner at the Air Combat Command. Some airmen many initially find they are deploying even more often, while others will more quickly see the benefits of long-term scheduling, he says. Even so, airmen, and especially their families, are optimistic that the program will eventually work. "You're not going to see everything fixed the first year. But at least we now have an orderly process," he says.

Retired Gen. Merrill McPeak, the former Air Force chief of staff who led a major reorganization of the Air Force in the early 1990s, says the EAF should significantly improve the service's ability to manage ongoing commitments. But he cautions that ultimately, the Air Force will need a bigger share of the Defense budget so long as air power is the preferred weapon in the U.S. arsenal.

"The budget has to grow if you're going to rely on air power as the basic instrument of national power," McPeak says. "If the American public is not interested in committing other types of forces that can be subject to high attrition rates, then we must simply put more budget share against the Air Force."

One congressional staffer who has reviewed the EAF plans agrees that the Air Force needs more money to manage ongoing operations-but so do the other services, he says. The EAF, while it may have some positive effect, will not cure what is ailing the Air Force, he says. "The idea that [the EAF plan] solves the problem rather than just manages it is a fallacy. You're just spreading the pain," he says.

The EAF also does not solve the problem of shortages in certain overly taxed units in each of the services that are required to conduct most operations. These units, called "high-demand, low-density" because of their insufficient numbers and near constant use around the globe, tend to have specialized intelligence and reconnaissance capability, such as the Air Force's Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) and the U-2 spy plane.

Because the stress on these units is so great, Defense Secretary William Cohen must personally authorize their use beyond 120 days a year. While the Air Force has increased the number of pilots and crews in training in the units, it will be years before crews are robust enough to significantly reduce stress levels.

One of the potentially significant long-term affects of the EAF on the Air Force could be in acquisition. To be a truly expeditionary force, the Air Force must be equipped to operate on short notice from remote locations.

Air Force officials point to development of the new Small Smart Bomb-a 250-pound device that packs the punch of a 2,000-pound bomb-as an example of the kinds of weapons it will need in the future. Through miniaturization technology, the Small Smart Bomb will allow fighters to carry much more firepower with a smaller logistics tail.

Hard Choices

Not everyone is convinced the Air Force is serious about creating a truly expeditionary force. Retired Rear Adm. Eugene Carroll, a former Navy pilot and now deputy director of the Center for Defense Information, says the service's prized F-22 fighter program doesn't fit with the new approach. "We're building our equipment now at such sophisticated levels that it is neither robust nor maintainable. Here we are trying to build one fighter plane that's better than two generations of Soviet fighters which will never be built, and in the process aiming so high that we're overshooting our targets wildly."

While Carroll says he believes the expeditionary force plan is a sound concept and he agrees the Air Force needs more robust equipment, he doubts the F-22 will fill that need, and in the meantime will consume precious modernization dollars.

Ultimately, more than the relative attributes or shortcomings of future Air Force weapons, it will be the people who drive the success of the force, say service leaders. And keeping people in uniform will cost money. Besides the obvious costs of better pay and retirement benefits, both of which Congress is poised to grant, airmen must believe the Air Force is an organization worth serving in, says one Air Force colonel, who asked not to be identified.

"That's a tough nut to crack, because it's more than just money. It's having the tools you need to do your job, whether that means having enough of the right spare parts to keep your aircraft running or the time you need to train and develop professionally. It's also having enough time with your family so they remember who you are when you walk through the door at night," he says. "I don't know if the EAF will give us these things, because it seems to me what you really need are more bodies to do the bigger workload. I don't see that happening."

Even if the transition to an expeditionary force does solve many of these problems, it will likely be years before the benefits of the transition are realized, say service leaders. In addition, the transition itself will take years, because moving troops and equipment into the AEFs will necessarily be hampered by the escalation of NATO operations in Yugoslavia and other factors beyond the control of the Air Force.

Peters agrees. And when he visits airmen in the field, he is continually reminded of the strains on the force, how urgently relief is needed, and how hard it will be to fix a complex problem that has been so long in the making. On a visit to Moody Air Force Base in Georgia last summer, he discovered a security forces unit there had 40 airmen eligible to re-enlist, but only two said they would stay. Scenarios like that are playing out across the Air Force, even if delayed under the current stop-loss order.

Nonetheless, Peters says he is optimistic: "What's encouraging is that so far, everything suggests we're going in the right direction."