Air Force, Navy Downsizing Troops To Pay For Hardware

Team Infidel

Forum Spin Doctor
Kansas City Star
November 13, 2007
Pg. 1
By Scott Canon, The Kansas City Star
Getting in the Army is getting easier, with recruitment of more who are high school dropouts, who scored lower on aptitude tests or who have minor criminal records.
Those staying in uniform now qualify for record bonuses.
Yet while the Army hunts for more soldiers, the Air Force and the Navy are telling 50,000 that their time in uniform has come to a premature end.
"It's like I've been shot right in the heart," said one Air Force major, afraid that talking publicly about his impending layoff would complicate the waning months of his military career or jeopardize prospects in the civilian job market. "Here you've got somebody who wants to serve their country, and I'm being told that I'm fired."
Air Force generals wagered that cuts in manpower would free up money to buy more planes. As the costs of producing new F-22 Raptor fighter jets climbed, the service banked on cutting personnel costs to make more room in its budget for the ever-pricier planes.
Instead, the White House and Congress took the savings - although some were wiped out by rising fuel costs and escalating costs for new ships and planes - without agreeing to buy more of the jets.
"The Air Force said, 'We've got to protect the F-22.' So they cut every cost they could," said Cindy Williams, a defense analyst at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the editor of Filling the Ranks. "That's why these jobs are going away."
Brass in the Air Force and the Navy have essentially decided to spend more on hardware and less on troops.
The Navy is counting on technology to float more lethal ships manned by smaller crews. A World War II cruiser, for instance, needed more than 1,100 sailors. A comparable ship built in the 1990s gets by with fewer than 400 aboard. The cruiser of the near future - with the effective firepower of what once required a fleet of ships - is imagined with a crew of just 150.
In the midst of a largely unpopular war, Army recruiting is proving more difficult. Thousands of soldiers are locked in uniform beyond their scheduled discharge dates. Not since the 1970s have so many West Pointers bolted at the end of their five-year obligation.
The ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan put a premium on ground-pounding soldiers and Marines able to secure areas village by village and block by block. That demands less of the firepower of an aircraft carrier group or a bomber squadron.
Rather, thousands of sailors and airmen have been lent to the Army as "augmentees," temporary ground troops.
Meantime, the cost of putting people in the military is climbing. Congress now grants reservists health care for longer periods than in the past. Premiums for the Tricare system that provides health insurance to military families and retirees were frozen a decade ago. That drew more people into the subsidized coverage as private insurance rates skyrocketed.
"The only way you can save money quickly is to reduce personnel costs," said John Allen Williams, the author of U.S. National Security and a military scholar at Loyola University Chicago. "It costs money to close a base in the short run. They're locked into long-term contracts on weapons acquisitions. But you can use attrition. You can kick people out."
The Air Force is in the middle of eliminating about 40,000, a transformation that will bring its uniformed force down to about 328,600 people in the next year. The Navy is shooting for a total force of 322,000, down about 16,000 from earlier this decade.
The Marines are cleared to grow to 189,000 in uniform, and the Army is authorized for 525,400 active duty soldiers, up from the current 519,000 (a number that balloons to about 1.1 million when the reserves and National Guard are added). But a recent report by the Congressional Research Service concluded that "based on recent experience" it may be hard to muster that larger force.
Some Air Force personnel were offered bonuses or enhanced retirement deals to leave early - at risk of losing out on as much as $100,000 in severance pay if they passed on the buyout and were later pushed out involuntarily.
"There are certain career fields where we are over the strength we need to do the mission," said Capt. Tom Wenz, an Air Force spokesman at the Pentagon.
Some airmen are able to rescue their careers by shifting to other specialties, going to the reserves or moving to another service. Nurses, for instance, remain in great demand in all the services. Others, however, have risen too far in rank to justify their retraining or don't have the background needed to make a shift.
In 2004, the military launched Operation Blue to Green, offering incentives for people to transfer from other services to the Army. But only about 500 people have used it to shift from the Air Force. In the Navy, fewer than 20 shifted to the Army.
"Part of the hope is that some people will shift over to the services where they're needed more," said David R. Segal, at the Center for Research on Military Organization at the University of Maryland. "That's not really happened."
Throughout the Afghan and Iraq wars, the Marine Corps has continued its traditional advantage in recruiting over the Army - partly smaller manpower needs and partly because young people seem more drawn to its hard-charging culture.
Analysts cite many reasons why the Air Force and the Navy have no trouble reaching their goals and why people are reluctant to leave those forces for the Army.
"By and large, people are attracted to a particular service," said Lawrence Korb, who specialized in manpower issues as an assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan years. "It's not easy to shift them especially when the Army has the most casualties."
 
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