Air Force’s personnel shortage
Tom sends us a link to Fox News which reports that the Air Force is suffering severe manpower shortages – 700 pilots and 4,000 mechanics – as well as fighting time with their aging fleet;
“We’ve got a geriatric Air Force,” said retired Lt. Gen. David Deptula. “We’ve got bombers and tankers that are over 50 years old. We have [training aircraft] that are over 40 years old, and we have [fighter jets] and helicopters that are over 30 years old. So this is a terrible place to be in when you have a world of ever-expanding threats.”
Air Force officials say they need forces to bolster nuclear, intelligence, space and maintenance jobs.
Earlier this year, Goldfein called the pilot shortage alone a crisis.
Yeah, well, that’s what happens when you balance the budget solely on the back of national security. If they had their way, there would be no A-10 to provide close air support to troops on the ground in Syria. The Department of Defense threw good money after bad into the F-35 money pit betting on systems that wouldn’t work.
And, oh, yeah, the Navy needs more ships, the Marines and Army need more people. The needs don’t disappear just because you don’t want to spend the money.
Category: Air Force
But parties and fielzguts stuffs are more important, aren’t they? I mean, if you don’t spend money on things that make you feel good, what else is there?
I don’t get it.
We have so much money that obama is inviting in illegals with no threat of deportation and fast tracking muslim “refugees” at a blazing and non vetting speed. With full benefits.
The military votes Republican and illegals and muslims vote Democrat. But I am sure that has nothing to do with it.
Quite a few officers vote democrat.
Some, but I see a lot of Obama tee-shirts walking around the PX on Soldiers that I know are enlisted or retired too.
Not infantry officers.
The AIR FARCE strikes again! Not that long ago, they let obozo make them discharge all types that wanted to stay in, now the whiners are short handed? DUH! Why didn’t they scream and shout and jump up and down to the media back then? too busy sucking up to obozo?
Maybe they (AF) should provide a “transgender” option for those “individuals” inserted in stepping over from the Army.
Or something more along the lines of “Green-to-Light Blue” or some shit.
A lot of folks saw this coming….
To bad Senior NCO’s and Flag Officers missed this one.
The more I think about, I do not think I would want to join under all of this bullshit.
Where are we gonna get the money for modernization, and buildup of forces? When Reagan took office in ’81, and infused massive funds into rebuilding the military, our debt to GDP was around 32%. Today our debt to GDP is well over 100%. I know PEOTUS Trump has been talking w/ much bravado about massively rebuilding the greatest military in the world, but I fear he is gonna face some harsh realities.
We could start by canceling the corporate welfare like the half billion handed to Solyndra, cease and desist the federal Government’s green fuel nonsense (@$26 a gallon jet fuel) and shitcan the 0bamaphone program along with welfare cutbacks.
HEAR HEAR!!
Amen.
Word.
The Gov also needs to review the food stamp program as well. I am really tired of going to Wal Mart and watching the people on EBT cramming their carts with non essential items and then filling the other cart with 55″ TV’s, X-Box One games, power drinks, beer and paying cash.
And shut down the communist N.E.A…and disband Jimmy peanut carters Dept of no energy! Then start in on the numerous agencies that have NO FUNCTION, the employees show up, have coffee, go home! Then cut off the retirement for leeches that serve one term and get a lifetime retirement and health care….OH the list is endless on where to save the money!! NO LIFETIME SECRET SERVICE FOR THE ILLEGAL ALIEN MUSLIM COMMUNIST OBOZO!
The N.E.A. hasn’t crossed my mind in a few years. Yeah, I’d cut those slugs off at the knees. Not. One. Damn. Dime.
I heard once that the highest paid person in the Air Force is the AFA’s football coach. Maybe General Mattis can help realign priorities.
Correction, looks like all three branches are guilty of that.
http://dailycaller.com/2013/06/18/three-highest-paid-pentagon-officials-are-all-football-coaches/
The football teams including coaches are funded through sponsorships, tv revenue, merchandise sales and bowl game receipts. Same as any other college program. No federal dollars. So there is that.
That is true at most major sports schools. Head coaches make money we can only dream of… NCAA priorities and rules are as screwed up as our national priorities. Teachers get paid crap and coaches get paid millions, pro athletes make mega-millions for playing kids’ games while enlisted folks draw food stamps. Face it, we need a re-alignment of national and personal priorities.
This is the Air Force trying to leverage more out of the defense budget. Along with the Navy, they feel they’ve gotten the short end of the stick.
This along with ‘Air Sea’ battle is their way of highlighting the fact that they want to expand and modernize.
I won’t weigh in on the F35, but I do know that the A-10 is as old as hell and won’t be survivable against a peer or near peer enemy with any type of modern air defenses.
The Air Force would love to get out of the CAS business, but unless and until the Joint Chiefs make some major changes to the Army/Air Force agreements that will not happen- the Army doesn’t want the headache of taking on a fast mover fleet, and the Air Force wants the capability as a Peter (so they can rob him to pay for Paul’s expensive fighter jets).
IN the meantime, the Army needs to replace the Bradley and Abrams, develop an air droppable/asaultable fighting vehicle and better heavy vertical lift for the Airborne and Light community, get some more long shooters, and most importantly reinvigorate our ADA capability. All of these are relatively cheap solutions compared to the F35…
That “cant survive” argument seems specious.
The A-10 is not a fighter. It is not a wild weasel. Its job is ground attack. It does it superbly, and is far, far more survivable against ground fire than any fighter.
You cover them with fighters to sweep the air, and weasels to sweep SAMs and triple-A.
Saing “do CAS with high-performance fighters” is saying “we wont actually do CAS, just kinda sorta throw stuff at it while we Talk about win the air war”.
A modernized A-10 is going to look a lot like the current one, because it fits the mission parameters of: low, slow, and long-time.
Don’t get me wrong, I think the Air Force is full of it. However, the future Air Force war fighting concept is built around the F-35 and the F-22. This concept has no room for low, slow, and long-time. They want to go in high and fast and get out quick, and they absolutely do not want to do what the Army needs them to be, which is be a ground support service providing CAS, AI, and strategic, operational, and tactical lift. I am not making this up, go read what the Air Force thinks it will be doing in the future.
I am not going to defend the Air Force’s war fighting concepts. I think they are all wrong. No matter how wrong I think they are, T]the fact is that the A10 has no role in their future concept; the way the A10 operates is incompatible with how the USAF wants to operate in the future.
I’m a ground guy, and I won’t pretend to understand what they are saying. I do know that our future adversaries have designed and built their militaries in large part around anti-access/area deniability (A2AD) concepts that are explicitly intended to nullify our air supremacy, at least for critical windows in the battle
Should the Army take the A10? Absolutely not. We don’t have the institutional knowledge to keep a bunch of jets flying We don’t have the airfields, pilots, or mechanics. No one in the Army knows how to employ them, fix them, or fly them. It would take years and billions to figure it out. Why do that when the Air Force is required by law to provide CAS?
They should give CAS to the Army, then give the A-10 to the Army; and problem solved.
The Navy’s been throwing away the dollars as well. LCS is all but failed, the Zumwalt’s ammo is too spendy to shoot even if it could leave port, and the $13B (yes, B!) USS Gerald R. Ford is having major teething pains.
Our tax dollars to work.
How about putting some serious money into maintenance and training, first and foremost?
How about upgrading current aviation platforms to be stronger but still as flexible as they’ve been, e.g., the A-10?
These zoomie people are still thinking in the WWII mindset, that there will be one-to-one dogfights, which is not the case. More aircraft were lost to anti-aircraft artillery and accidents in Vietnam than were lost in one-on-one combat. Shot down, shot down, shot down – repeatedly shot down from the ground. Those two Russian warplanes that were recently shot down by the Turks were not in dogfights. They were hit by AAA.
New Navy ships are nice, but so far, they mostly sit and go nowhere, or the ammo is too expensive to use for anything so no one gets anything except imaginary practice.
Seems to me as thought the Air Force kind of severed its own left arm by cutting people it needed, who are now employed in better-paying jobs and have no interest in returning to an ungrateful employer. Ditto the Army, Navy and Marines. Either improve training, equipment, clothing, provisions and accommodations, or give up.
General Goldfein wants to increase the Air Force by 30,000 personnel. This reminds me of the rebuilding of the early ’80s, when the country figured out we got rid of too many people in the post-Vietnam draw-down. And yes, pay got a huge jump then.
This is the same Air Force that forced out mechanics several years ago, forced pilots into RPV duty, and now their short.
Fire their leadership, then lets talk how to fix.
It won’t do any good to recruit new members to replace those who left and took their skills with them. If those people refuse to re-up because they were dumped in deference to attrition, their attitude would most likely be ‘Stuff it!’, and I can’t say that I’d blame them.
This is the future of aerial combat. This is a USNavy X-47B.
https://youtu.be/kw3m7bqrQ64
This is posturing, pure and simple. The Air Force feels left out because the Army grew during the wars, and they were perceived to be a supporting arm.
I am sure there are a few Air Force enthusiasts on this board, and I am equally sure that they can explain the concept of Aerospace power.
As an Army guy I think they are full of crap: You start with the Infantry, the only combat arm that can hold ground, then you add Armor and Artillery that can HELP sieze it. After that, everyone else is support. That makes the Air Force, Navy, and even the Marines (cool guys, and I have much respect, but they simply don’t have the ass to win a war) support services.
That said, I have been to enough Joint schools to learn that the Air Force and Navy both think they can win wars through aerospace and maritime power, respectively. In my humble opinion, having seen a few wars up close, you have to have an Army to win them. Navies and Air Forces can help prevent and win them, but you need a strong Army to win. In the process of winning a war, the Navy and Air Force are purely in support.
I’m sure I’ll hear from the Airmen and Sailors on this board after that…
I think a nuke would give the Army a run for their money.
A combined effort by all of our armed forces are needed to win wars, not one.
True enough, but the Army is the essential force, especially against a modern nation-state with an army of their own.
If only we could convince all those modern nation-states to limit their military to armies…then the US Army would have no need for those supporting personnel. They could engage on battle fields like they did centuries ago. But then they couldn’t call themselves very modern.
This really isn’t a well chosen pissing contest to get into, reddevil. In the first place, there is no need for it. But, since you seem to want it anyway, have you ever considered how easy it would be for any branch of service to win a war without the others supporting their efforts? Perhaps the Air Force would indeed be the easiest one to do that if we had to do it alone. Pick a few targets in the morning, go nuke them in the afternoon and everyone meet in the club later.
My point is that if an enemy sub is targeting ships, the infantry is rather useless in defending those ships. Likewise, if the objective is to take that hill, my C-130’s might be most useful in bringing bullets and rations to the infantry.
It takes all of us to get the job done. Pretending otherwise is just silly.
For those bawling about money, let’s start by slashing welfare spending and other handouts like shitcanning the 0bamaphones!
You know, its amazing. How many meetings I’ve sat in where we ‘try’ not to reinvent the wheel and to learn from history, yet here we are again.
Regarding the F35, every day I see another boondoggle, the M247 SGT York (prototype #2) from my office. The DoD had the good sense to kill that.
Where has the “good sense” gone? It sure isn’t in DC.
Don’t be so sure that DoD had the sense to kill the SGT York. Based on what I’ve heard from someone who was involved in the program near the end, that wasn’t the case.
What that individual told me was that the York was on short final to getting final approval and going into production until a copy of the classified test report detailing its shortcomings was sent – bypassing official channels and at huge personal risk – by mail to a certain Senator with a huge interest in Defense to accomplish that. The Senator allegedly then called someone in the Pentagon (might have been the SECARMY) and said something to the effect of, “Kill it, or I’ll go public with the facts.”
The York’s cancellation was announced a few days later. The folks in the program office were reportedly stunned by the announcement. They’d rigged the hell out of the process and hidden all the system’s shortcomings, and were sure they were “in like Flynn”.
I really don’t care about the who or how of its demise. The important thing was the money pit project was killed off.
Continually throwing money at a bad weapons system meets Einstein’s definition of insanity.
No argument regarding the absolute need for bad weapons systems to be terminated during development – the earlier the better.
My point was that the termination of the York wasn’t exactly DoD’s doing – they were forced to do that. Had some knowledgeable “insider” not risked their career (along with possibly risking some time in jail), we’d likely have been stuck with that abomination for years if not decades.
The Comanche IMO would have been a better example. It’s my understanding that the Army and Pentagon leadership actually did decide to kill that one without being forced to do it – and did so because it just wasn’t “making the grade”.
Of course, if I recall correctly it also took close to two decades and billions of dollars wasted before the Army and/or Pentagon “powers that be” came to that conclusion.
25 days and counting down. I believe change is coming. Seen this shit for a long time-some of you have seen it longer. Be strong- not blind faith, but see who’s coming into the gov’t. We can and will make changes- We’re the Good Guys.
This is not a money issue. DoD is awash in cash.
This is an abject failure of senior leadership. No one learned a damned thing during the 1990s drawdown. Nothing.
No real assignment methodology, toxic leadership, narcissists in senior positions, and a boat load of dipshit policy…gah.
Add to this the joke that is PME and developmental schools and you get this….smart folks pulling the rip cord and dumbasses reenlisting for indef status.
Many of us watched the bad old days start again and realized we just did not have the heart to go through it again…so we’re gone! Taking our knowledge with us because no one…not one single idiot in the pentagram…even realizes that we have any knowledge to share…let alone retain and package for those who come behind us.
The day I realized that literally–to the last GO/FO–no one in senior leadership gives one damn about war fighting skills was the day I dropped my packet.
All branches of the service are starting to suffer – lets see why. Maybe it’s the fact that you’ve screwed us out of the old retirement system and people are wising up. Maybe it’s the wonderful fitness program – you know, the one where a 50 year old with a bad back and bad knees is expected to do almost the same fitness test as a 20 year old – even though the 50 year old does a desk job 99% of the time. Maybe it’s the morale – you know, that word you keep tossing out saying it’s not so bad – but you never really listen to the enlisted force that’s saying that it’s crap. Maybe it’s the fact that you’ve wiped out a lot of the benefits – the lifetime medical after retirement for free. You want a volunteer force, but you don’t want to give them much of anything to show for spending a huge section of their life in support of the country, then you wonder why? I’m just glad that I retired a few years ago – the military is NOT the same force that I joined back in 1977. 30 years, and no one in senior leadership gave 2 shakes about the knowledge that I had – only that I wasn’t able to pass their asinine fitness test.
I watched the same scenario happen to quite a few of the folks that I worked with, and sadly they all did the same thing – punched out before it got any worse. Now they are reaping what they have sown for so many years..
I agree with you 100% Duane. Leadership only hears what it wants to hear, not what they need to hear. If you are a “yes” man, then you shoot to the top. If you make waves, then they stick you in the back shop to never be seen. They were all about the well rounded Airman, and not so much focused on the job. I went from seeing my career field as a bunch of specialists who came from a maintenance career to one that was opened to people just coming in the military. Then, they went ahead and merged us with a totally different career field just because we had some areas of our jobs in common. I am so glad I got out when I did. I tried to pass knowledge on, but am not sure how far it went.
It’s not that they don’t want to spend the money. They’d just rather waste it on silly shit.
After all, our troops have too many benefits as it is, right?
They should use it as a enlistment bonus/option: Gender Reassignment Surgery.
Makes you just want to sign up, huh?
Your manpower shortage ain’t due to the equipment. Wake up and smell the coffee, dipshit.
Priorities aren’t priorities until resources are cut. The USAF decided that their priority was an unrealistically expensive airplane with questionable capabilities, not people. I have to assume, given my experience with other service’s resourcing programs, that the pros and cons of the decision were laid out to the senior civilian and uniformed USAF leaders before it was made. Either the staff was incompetent when developing facts and assumptions in the decision making process or the senior leaders made a poor decision. Either way, it’s on the USAF to unscerew itself, not the Joint Staff, the other services, or the taxpayers to fix it for them.
When you don’t spend money on infrastructure, and you treat your personnel like shit and don’t honor your commitments to them the results can often look like this. Older equipment and a shortage of qualified workers…no one should be surprised by this. The funny thing about workers with options is that after a while they often tend to exercise those options whether it’s convenient for the current employer or not.
Keep fucking people and hoping it gets better, no doubt that’s a sure fire way to build retention.
Re: personnel shortages.
The Corps dealt with this for decades prior to 9/11 and that build up.
It’s an easy fix in concept and execution.
Your personnel are military, not unionized civilians.
That means personnel get shuffled to where they’re needed while they’re needed there then shuffled off to somewhere else when needed somewhere else. Work is on until the job is done. If it means 16 hour days then it’s 16 hour days. If it means a 30 hour stretch then its a 30 hour stretch.
Then, when your contract is up, if its all too tough for you, then buh bye. No one’s owed a career. What you have left after that is a good solid corps of personnel who know how to work hard and upon which an effective force can be rebuilt.
Personally, I suspect the AF is in desperate need of a hard shakedown to rid itself of bloat.
Big problem I saw in the AF is that they love to put certain areas on 12’s at the drop of the hat. Unfortunately it was usually for stupid crap, and it only accomplished one thing – destroy the morale of the lower enlisted troops. You do that enough times, the level of productivity takes it in the rear, and trying to lie to the troops doesn’t work so well. You screw with their livelihood enough times, you reap what you sow. I know – I saw it in action way, way too much. When you’re deployed and the mission is staring you in the face, it’s one thing to play the games to get it done. But when you’re home and the same crap continues for worthless reasons? Not quite so much.
It’s not about if it’s too tough for you, it’s about whether or not you are compensated for your efforts in a fashion comparable to the effort required of the job at hand.
In a volunteer force no one has to stay on after their first contract expires, if you don’t make it attractive for them to stay on, they won’t. That’s fine for some occupations, but when the military invests hundreds of thousands of dollars in training and then shits on those receiving the training no one should be surprised when those intelligent individuals decide to capitalize on the training and go somewhere they are compensated properly for their abilities.
I don’t blame anyone for looking to better their personal fortune by working where they get the most dollars back on their efforts. It’s better for them and better for the nation. Someone has to foot the bill for the military and it’s certainly not anyone working for the government.
General Deptula complained about 50-year old bombers & tankers, 40-year old trainers, and fighters & helicopters over 30.
He forgot to mention the B-1, the B-2, and the new tanker coming online, not to mention the F-22 and F-35. He forgot a lot.
He also forgot that the Air Force ran off a bunch of tech support guys a few years back, and still insist on requiring trained pilots to operate mostly-autonomous drones. Not the best way to encourage retention.