Comments on: Failure to score on shifting goalposts

By: Chris Taylor

Chris Taylor — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 13:34:48 +0000

The Air Force is pushing back because it has (in my opinion) well-founded concerns about the integration of UAVs flown by non-certified pilots and manned aircraft flown by certified pilots in the same airspace. Which I also mentioned in my post.
That, combined with the SecDef’s tone-deafness to other AF concerns has not made him particularly popular in that community.
If he were to get behind some of the recapitalisation efforts with gusto, that would probably go a long way to allaying the concerns of the average man or woman in blue. The fact is that the AF is receiving fewer new airframes now than it ever has in almost the entire the post-WW2 period. Those new airframes take 20-30 years to design, develop and deploy. And instead of developing 4-5 at a shot it is down to 1-2 every 20-30 years, which means there is zero margin for error. Those airframes have to work because there is no fallback. You well know where that kind of thinking got the CF a decade ago. And we are still not out of the woods yet. USAF started down that long, dark road in the 90s as well, but they had many more assets and could manage to retire the older, creakier ones without having a huge impact in mission capability. Now, that is no longer true.
Then there are silly things like the Pentagon authorising massive increases in end-strength for all services (particularly the combatant ground forces), while insisting that no additional air mobility capability is required to move those new ground troops around. The Pentagon has only recently changed their thinking on that. Examples like that just don’t add up and, combined with the recap shortfalls, it causes a certain level of concern when the answer is inevitably more micromanagement from the top.
In that respect Gates is not terribly different from his much-maligned predecessor.
EDIT: To be blunt I think he owes the AF some assurances on the recapitalisation issues. The Air Force has been forced to do more combat with less inventory for the past 17 years. At a certain fast-approaching point it may be fine for asymmetric warfare, but will lose all deterrent capability. And then your problems become much, much worse.
We have the luxury of fighting non-existential threats overseas in OIF/OEF because we are not presently weak enough to pose an attractive target to those who might wish to pose an existential threat. That won’t always be the case, and we hasten that day by letting air forces rust out. Particularly when that force is the security guarantor for quite a few others.

By: Damian

Damian — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 12:53:24 +0000

While your interpretation may be correct, I'm not sure this SecDef's history supports that conclusion. Look at what happened with the MRAP task force. Gates threw a pile of high-level attention behind what he perceived to be a problem, he got inter-service cooperation and sacrifice to push a solution, he got authorization for administrative short-cuts to streamline the process, and he got more funding from Congress for his solution. In the case of UAV's the bottleneck isn't production, as it was with the MRAP. According to this article, it's actually training Predator crews. We won't know what solution the UAV task force will come up with until it's proposed, and it's tough to speculate on what that solution might be. But if we look at the MRAP task force, which Gates himself said was the template, I'd guess it will involve finding out the true obstacles to this mission imperative and removing them one by one within the constraints placed upon his department by his superiors. I suspect he'll ask for (or likely demand) sacrifices from across all services if need be for this Air Force project, and that he'll lobby for additional funding from Congress, as he did with the MRAP. I suspect he'll also take a scythe to any administrative obstacles or fiefdom-building that he finds going on - an inevitability in any large bureaucracy, including the U.S. military. I'm actually a little surprised Gates is getting so much push-back on this from the Air Force community. This is an opportunity to push an Air Force program to the front of the line, get the resources and attention needed to make the required contribution to the missions, and come out on the right end of a can-do initiative. I still believe this is an over-reaction to perceived criticism by the Air Force partisans, and that with the right attitude it could be a huge opportunity instead.

By: Chris Taylor

Chris Taylor — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 11:50:45 +0000

His comments on the sacrifices of men and women in blue are encouraging. Otherwise I find his remarks disingenuous in light of the fact that the Air Force is presently making a supreme effort to meet UAV CAP requirements from the unified combatant commanders. There is no failure to move aggressively.
The unwritten subtext is that he is pissed the Air Force brass don’t want to give up chunks of F-22 or F-35 program funding to cough up more UAVs, and this, in his mind, necessitates the “speaking truth to power”.
Entirely absent is the concept of the Pentagon’s civilian leadership lobbying aggressively for all USAF’s unfunded requirements (for they are well beyond the point of being mere “priorities” now) when funding is allocated by Congress.

By: Damian

Damian — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 10:50:18 +0000

We note that of the top 11 positions at Joint Staff, none of them are filled by Airmen. Too true. But I'd hope that the fact that the SecDef himself was commissioned as an Air Force officer would carry some weight there. And it's instructive to note that while the media focused in on the UAV remarks made by Gates, they missed a couple of points of context which become more clear with a complete reading of the text of his speech. One is that his speech is filled mostly with praise for the Air Force, including the degree to which they have adapted to a new role, and the difficulty of that adaptation, given how dominant they were at the old role. I find it interesting that you chastise the Secretary using both airlift-replacing-convoys stats and ILO taskings, when Gates specifically mentioned both of those examples in a positive light in his speech that day: In the invitation to speak here, General Lorenz asked me to talk about challenges that you, as Air Force officers, will face as you become senior leaders. The Air Force has been in the process of constant change for decades, with a steady drumbeat of expeditionary air operations. Perhaps uniquely among the services, the Air Force has been at war more or less constantly for 17 years, since the launch of Desert Storm. Since September 11th, the Air Force has flown nearly a million missions in the war on terror, with an average of 300 sorties per day, ranging from lift to medevac to close air support. The contributions of airmen have made a real difference for those fighting on the ground. Survival rates for those injured are up to 90 percent, in part due to aeromedical evacuation. During Desert Storm, it took about 10 days to medevac wounded to the United States. Now it takes about 3 days. As Secretary Rice mentioned from this podium a week ago, the Air Force is doing some missions it would never have imagined in 2001, such as Air Force officers leading provincial reconstruction teams. In addition, there are about 14,200 airmen performing "in lieu of" tasks on the ground, where an Air Force civil engineer might replace an Army heavy construction engineer. And then there's the example of Air Force Tech Sergeant Jeremy Sudlow of Pandora, Ohio, who logged more than 430,000 miles on Iraq's roads as the convoy commander of a medium truck detachment. And in one month alone, C-17s helped take nearly 5,000 trucks off dangerous roads in Iraq. The other point that the media seems to have missed is that Gates' task force to look into UAV issues is actually very similar to an earlier task force that dug into issues surrounding the MRAP - a ground force problem. So Gates is hardly singling out the USAF here. So when you say "Where in these contributions is the Air Force failing to pull its weight, Mr. Secretary?" I'd answer that it doesn't seem to me like he does feel the Air Force isn't pulling its weight. His concerns seem broader than that: "My concern is that our services are still not moving aggressively in wartime to provide resources needed now on the battlefield." And because he was speaking to an Air Force audience, he used an Air Force example. Later that day, speaking to an Army audience at West Point, Gates admonished the cadets to always provide blunt, frank advice to their superiors, regardless of what the superiors want to hear. Reading both together, especially given his widely ignored remarks about USAF innovator Colonel John Boyd, it's clear to me that the over-arching theme for the day was about speaking truth to power, and not letting bureaucratic concerns get in the way of results. I think those who see this as a directed slight on the USAF are mistaken.