Air Force To Surge Personnel, Re-Evaluate Airlift In Support Of Army, Marine Corps In

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InsideDefense.com
June 19, 2007 The Air Force is poised to increase its ranks of battlefield airmen to roughly 10,000 by fiscal year 2011 and possibly surge its total number of strategic airlift tails to just over 300 aircraft in order to support an anticipated troop increase for the Army and Marine Corps, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. T. Michael Moseley said today.
The increases to current Air Force personnel and airlift levels, cited by Moseley during a media round table at the Pentagon, were based on the anticipated 66 or 76 brigade combat teams the Army and Marine Corps expect to field as a result of a total end strength surge of 92,000 troops.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced the personnel increase in January, in a bid to increase combat capability and relieve stress on U.S. ground forces stretched thin by the high pace of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
To that end, Moseley in April ordered the Air Combat and Air Mobility command chiefs to conduct studies on how the Pentagon's plan to grow the Army and Marines will impact the Air Force. The total force increase expected for the service's battlefield airmen ranks was a result of those studies.
"The Army and the Air Force are inextricably linked in this business, so when their brigade combat teams go up, our battlefield airmen [have] to go up," Moseley said. "We are committed to fleshing out the numbers of battlefield airmen . . . to cover the 76 brigade combat teams by FY-11 [and] Air Combat Command is on a glide path to make that happen."
In September 2005, the number of battlefield airmen -- or the cadre of service personnel tasked with pararescue, tactical air control, battlefield weather and communications missions -- deployed with Army units came was about 3,500 according to Moseley. In contrast, the current number of battlefield airmen supporting ground forces now total 9,000 without taking into account the impact of the pending end-strength surge, he added.
"We have . . . got battlefield airmen in all brigade combat teams right now. Those are our air support operational squadrons and our air support operational groups, so they are out there," Moseley said. "But as new brigade combat teams form, new sets of battlefield airmen will have to be trained and deployed to match that growth."
However, the service's decision to bolster its numbers of battlefield airmen comes at a time when the Air Force is drawing down their overall personnel end strength by 40,000.
Moseley said that service officials will not reconsider that force reduction in order to supplement the surge in battlefield airmen, noting the increased for those specified personnel would be offset by decreases in other billets.
"It would be always be nice to be a bigger [force], it would always be nice to be more robust, but at the end of the day we are living inside our allowance," Moseley said.
Aside from upticks in the service's personnel ranks, Air Mobility Command chief Gen. Duncan McNabb is teaming up with U.S. Transportation Command's Gen. Norton Schwartz and members from the Pentagon's Program Analysis and Evaluation shop to re-evaluate the service's airlift capabilities in light of ground troop growth.
"What does that mean to us, relative to airlift, if the Army and the Marines get that much bigger, " Moseley said.
Any potential growth in the service's airlift capabilities will be dependent on whether the 76 combat teams will be "direct fighting brigade combat teams - or whether they represent "growth inside the Army to streamline [the service's] rotation rates or [its] mobility base," he added.
"So does the delta between 66 and 76 brigade combat teams mean ten more fighting, fielded units or does it mean robusting your mobility base, so that you are not as onerous on your people," the four-star said. "If it is the latter, then you may not need anymore [airlift assets] because that is not a surge. If it is the former, then you do perhaps need more strategic airlift."
The pending results from the strategic airlift review also could have a significant impact on the Air Force's decision on whether to invest further in its modification and re-engining efforts on its aging fleet of C-5 Galaxy aircraft
The Pentagon, TRANSCOM and AMC officials are working from a 300-plane strategic airlift baseline, which is slightly higher than the 292-plane threshold defense officials agreed upon in the 2005 Mobility Capability Study. If the Army and Marine Corps decide to stand up 76 "combatant, forward-deployed units," Moseley estimated the services' strategic airlift requirement could be as much as 335 total aircraft.
"So if you do not have the most stressing scenario, you do don't have all of those units being combatant fielded units . . . then we are about where we need to be," he added. "Of course, you could make that scenario so stressing, you could make the scenario so onerous, that you would need hundreds more [airlifters] but I do not know that the analysis will take us there."
-- Carlo Munoz
 
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