Air Force downsizing plans and Pentagon base-closure recommendations
that would eliminate several Air National Guard facilities have
raised concerns about the future of the service.
Guard
officials, particularly, fear that they will not be able to execute
their missions with fewer aircraft and bases.
“This could become a real mess,” said Lt. Gen. H Steven
Blum, National Guard Bureau chief, describing an internal Air Force
transformation plan called Future Total Force at a recent meeting
with reporters. “I’m determined not to let that happen.”
The man responsible for keeping the service moving in the right
direction is Lt. Gen. Daniel James III, director of the Air National
Guard. The former combat pilot, with two Distinguished Flying Crosses
to his credit, is responsible for policy regarding 106,000 Guardsmen.
He is overseeing the Air National Guard at a time when many worry
that the amalgamation of active and Guard wings, the retirement
of workhorse aircraft and closure of bases will hurt its effectiveness.
“Some of the states don’t see the need to change because
they performed so well. It’s kind of the ‘why me?’”
James noted. “What I’m trying to get them to focus on
is, ‘what now?”’ and most importantly, ‘what
next?’”
The atmosphere surrounding the Air Guard’s role in a transformed
military is tense. Blum said that the Air Guard had not been consulted
during the BRAC process. “I don’t know why the Air Force
chose to do it the way it did it,” Blum said. “We’re
dealing with BRAC through the rear-view mirror.”
The Future Total Force effort, meanwhile, has come under fire in
recent months. In a strongly worded letter to Congress and Air Force
Chief of Staff Gen. John Jumper, the National Guard Association
of the United States in April warned the service could be damaged
“to the point of irreversible deterioration” if FTF
were implemented as it currently stands.
For James, dealing with yet-to-be-finalized plans such as FTF and
BRAC is a challenge.
James said he would not oppose decisions by the independent BRAC
commission to overturn Pentagon recommendations to shut down Guard
bases. He stressed, however, that he is working under the assumption
that the cutbacks will stand, and that those Guard members left
without jobs will have new missions to which they can transition
their skills.
He added that new tasks must be found so that the Air Guard doesn’t
lose people, “because they don’t feel they haven’t
got a mission or got a job, or feel that they aren’t really
providing some valuable service to the nation.”
Of most concern are the states that may be left with no flying
units, said James. “I am a proponent of every state having
a flying mission. And some states—under the BRAC proposal,
I think there are four or five of them—will lose their only
flying mission.”
Other gaps caused by reducing air assets would also have to be
addressed. Protection of the airspace and firefighting—particularly
in areas such as Montana and Idaho—are key missions that should
not be compromised, said James.
James said he has assigned a brigadier general to concentrate on
identifying projected requirements that the Air Force does not have
the manpower to staff or cannot afford. “We are already starting
to look at re-missioning,” he said. “We want to be engaged
across the board. We don’t want to just get stove-piped into
one or two missions.”
Identifying new missions and organizing training is a tough challenge
given the rapidity of the changes being thrust upon the Air Guard.
“Synchronizing all that’s happening—and it’s
happening faster then we originally envisioned—makes it even
more stressful,” James said.
Those missions likely will involve information warfare, operating
unmanned vehicles and conducting operations of space-based assets,
he said. “The emerging missions are going to be more technical
missions rather than some of the flying missions.”
This year, the Air Force announced that Arizona, Texas and New
York will have Air National Guard unmanned aircraft operations,
as well as a Predator drone center in North Dakota.
The Predator aircraft will be based at Grand Forks and controlled
by former F-16 pilots at Fargo, he said. Unmanned aircraft operations
eventually will incorporate the Global Hawk high-altitude surveillance
UAV, which would help monitor the nation’s northern border,
James said.
Supporting space-based platforms is another growth area, if not
in manpower than in importance, he said. “They are not necessarily
labor intensive, so if you get a space mission versus a flying mission,
it’s probably going to be a third or a quarter of the size
of what operation you had before,” he said. “But that’s
no reason not to get involved with it.”
He said that even as technology reduces the number of people needed
for jobs, it also creates new ones. “There are so many missions
out there.”
He stressed that the Air Guard will seek opportunities in areas
that are close to existing space control centers, such as Colorado
or Florida.
James said that earlier efforts at trimming the Air Force make
the current downsizing easier. “When I first came in three
years ago, I started looking at our force and what I saw for the
future. And I saw a smaller, more capable Air Force that we would
have to either modernize or obtain new equipment,” he said.
“Or have different relevant roles and missions that we didn’t
possess—for example in areas such as space, information operations,
information warfare, air operations centers and what we can provide
to intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.”
The Air Guard established the Vanguard Engagement Strategy to take
a look at the options before someone else imposed changes on it.
However, the scope and pace of transformation surprised James. The
Future Total Force effort alone has been “much bigger and
much quicker than we had envisioned in Vanguard.”
Vanguard was instructive in that “it was a way of getting
the states to think about transforming. And out of that came some
interesting information and proposals from some of the states that
helped us try to articulate the proper equities of the Air National
Guard and the total force,” James said.
As an example, he cited a budding relationship between the 192nd
Fighter Wing at Richmond, Va., that flies F-16s, and the 1st Fighter
Wing and Langley Air Force Base, which would be the first operational
wing of F/A-22s. A concept of operations and memorandum of agreement
will allow Guard pilots and maintainers to go to Langley, Va., to
fly and maintain the F/A-22s.
“We (the Air Force) saw the need not only to go and look
at associations for the Air Guard on active bases, but also about
a situation where we have active crews and maintainers and other
folks come to Guard bases,” he said. “We saw that as
more of a two-way street.”
One source of worry is a decrease in Air Guard fighter wings. A
bulk of the Air Guard’s tactical fleet would be retired by
2015, with F-15 and F-16s among those hardest hit.
“We will have fighter assets that are coming in that are
so much more capable that we won’t need the numbers that we
have, supposedly,” James said. “And that’s for
the really smart people in systems and analysis to determine.”
New technologies will boost the ability of the Air Guard to conduct
surveillance and other homeland-defense missions in U.S. airspace.
James maintained that air-sovereignty missions to protect the United
States would remain an Air Guard mission, by necessity. “If
you look at a map of the active-duty wings, and you look at a map
of the Air National Guard squadrons, you can see we are well suited
to doing that mission,” he said. “So we will still be
heavily vested; exactly how many (fighter) wings we will have, I
don’t know that.”
He said that Navy Adm. Timothy Keating, as the commander of Northern
Command, ultimately will determine the air-sovereignty requirements,
but noted that Air National Guard F-15s and F-16s often fill up
to 80 percent of that mission set.
In justifying the decrease in fighters, James invoked a predecessor,
Maj. Gen. Winston P. Wilson, the first Air Guardsman to serve as
chief of the National Guard Bureau, from 1963 to 1971. Wilson is
known as the influential leader who maneuvered to have the Air Guard
units directly integrate into Air Force missions and meet the same
training standards as the active force.
“Although it was really exciting and exhilarating to fly
the fighter mission, he knew that our relevance was going to be
as a more balanced force,” James said.
Being part of the total force has been made easier by organizational
changes within the military at large, he added. “I was really
gratified to see that the Army is starting to look at modularity,
and using that kind of a concept to engage the combat teams and
other structures, similar to what we use in the Air Force,”
James said.
He also said the Air Guard is “heavily involved” in
plans for future expeditionary missions. James said that high percentages
of Guard and reserve aircraft deployed to current battlefields are
a testament to the service’s level of engagement.
“Many folks in the rank and file don’t hear of the
story enough of about what we do, what we bring to the fight,”
he said. “There are still people today who think the Air National
Guard doesn’t leave the United States.”