thedrifter
07-02-05, 05:03 AM
06.29.2005
Flying Hours Cutback Is a Dangerous Sign
By Paul Connors
By any accounting standards one cares to choose, the costs of the war against terror and the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq have placed severe strains on the budgets of each of the U.S. armed forces, and the Air Force is no exception.
Recently, The Newport News Daily Press, which covers the huge southeastern Virginia military complex including Langley Air Force Base, disclosed that Air Force officials had slashed the flying hours for the 1st Fighter Wing based there.
The wing lost a total of 2,723 hours to generate $29 million in savings in the current 2004 fiscal year budget (a major portion of an overall $35-million budget cut to the wing), the newspaper revealed last week. Fortunately, Air Force numbers-crunchers worked some more, and on Monday officials announced that they had been able to restore 1,335 hours to the Langley unit's flying budget – roughly half of what the unit originally planned to have.
Despite the happy ending – if you can call a 50-percent restoration of essential operating funds "happy" – there is a lesson and a warning here. (The newspaper reported that 1FW had received approval for another 500 flying hours before the budget turnaround this week but it remains unclear whether that will be included in the 1,335 hours or added to it.)
Most military observers know that defense budget shortfalls can hinder critical daily operations. During the first year of the war in Iraq, President Bush had to request an additional $87 billion from Congress to pay for wartime operations, additional supplies and the first stages of Iraqi reconstruction. Now, additional bills are coming due and the inevitable cuts are hitting hard all over the service.
Langley AFB is not only home for the 1st Fighter Wing. It is also the Headquarters for Air Combat Command (ACC), the service's force provider for fighter and bomber aircraft, crews and maintainers used by multi-service combatant commanders such as the air component of U.S. Central Command, which is still engaged in two major conflicts.
Daily Press correspondent Jim Hodges wrote on June 22 that Air Combat Command officials had informed the 1st Fighter Wing that it faced a $35-million cut in its current $382 million budget, a 9 percent reduction. Such cuts are difficult to absorb, especially in a wartime environment where the wing remains a key player in the service's Air Expeditionary Force rotation plans.
Air Force officials at Langley told Hodges that the budget cuts service-wide were to be made based on the respective unit's ability to pay. Because the Air Force as a whole is $3.7 billion short, Air Combat Command's reduction was originally $825 million overall with $35 million of that total coming from the command's pre-eminent fighter wing. Currently equipped with F-15Cs and earmarked as the first operational wing to receive the F/A-22 Raptor, the slashed budget was expected to have an immediate impact on the number of flying hours available to the wing's individual fighter squadrons.
Lt. Col. Jennifer Kleinschmidt, commander of the First Comptroller Squadron, the wing's bill payers, said last week that most of the financial cuts would be made by reducing the number of flying hours. The 1 FW was directed to achieve $29 million in savings through the flying cuts, with an additional trim of $6 million through other programs such as deferred military construction and restrictions on non-essential military travel.
At the fighter squadron level – the firepower in any fighter wing – such cuts would have the deepest impact. The average cost for an hour of flying time for the F-15C (including fuel costs and maintenance time) averages between $11,000-12,000.
Squadron commanders and operations officers readily admitted that cuts in flying time equate to lost training opportunities. Lt. Col. Matt Fenton, commander of the 71st Fighter Squadron, told the newspaper last week that from May 1 through Sept. 30, his squadron stood to lose 60 percent of its planned flying hours. Those hours can never be recovered, nor can the lost training opportunities that non-flying aircraft do not provide, he noted.
Thus, Langley officers were relieved to see the flying hours partially restored early this week. Col. J.J. Blessing, Deputy Operations Group Commander for the 1st Fighter Wing, told the newspaper that the restored flying hours will "allow us to fly the hours we were scheduled to fly in July, August and September."
But what if this scenario were to happen again?
The only alternative available to actual flying is to use less costly flight simulators. Pilots and the commanders also agree on one key element: simulator time does not give pilots the same experience as real flying.
Moreover, even with lower costs per hour, simulators themselves are not cheap, and the wing would likely be forced to ration the number of hours pilots get to "fly" in them as well. Fighter squadron commanders around the service have concluded that more experienced and higher time pilots can get by with less "sim time." Consequently, the more experienced pilots defer to those with less flying time in the hope that should the need arise, their experience will allow them to recover from forced inactivity more quickly.
Commanders are quick to point out, however that there is no real substitute for realistic training and the lack of it ultimately has a negative effect on combat readiness.
Given the 71st Fighter Squadron's prominent place in the Air Force's rotation schedule for the fall of 2005, officials need to keep unit readiness at a high state. Logic would dictate that a squadron facing imminent deployment should receive a higher priority for training, including flying hours.
That is not happening. Instead, the partially restored cuts in flying hours raise the specter that the 1 FW's readiness level could decrease, posing additional problems for the commander and his personnel when they do deploy, if a similar financial crunch were to occur in the months ahead. And the 71st Fighter Squadron is not alone. Throughout the Air Force and its two reserve components, every flying unit remains under the gun of having to curtail flying hours and training should the fiscal crisis continue or worsen.
While flying hours and fuel costs have an immediate and visible impact on any unit with a flying mission, many of the other cuts – which remain in effect – are base-wide and less visible. Officials have had to defer or cancel upgrades to computer equipment. They have been forced to delay or cancel routine maintenance and upkeep such as painting offices and replacing furniture and carpeting. At bases throughout the continental United States, Air Force comptrollers hope that the cuts will not be too apparent so as to degrade morale.
Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. John Jumper, told the entire service in a recent memorandum that the financial strictures mean "that we will all have to accept degradations to quality of life," although other senior Air Force officials believe that budget cuts will not be as visible as everyone first feared. The Air Force, known for a historically high quality of life for its members and dependents, has used other methods to further reduce costs, including a reduction in the total number of airframes by 500 and a cut in personnel end strength by another 18,000 from the congressionally mandated level of 369,000.
The recommended budget cuts come right on the heels of the Pentagon's release last month of its list of bases recommended for realignment or closure under the 2005 BRAC process. The DoD recommendations have hit hard throughout the Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve Command. While only two major Air Force Bases in the lower 48 states are on the recommended closure list, numerous ANG and AFRC units at local, regional and international airports have learned that they will lose their flying missions. Even units co-located on active duty bases have felt the axe. The units that lost their aircraft saw, in many cases, their aircraft assigned to other units or sent into retirement at the AMARC at Davis-Monthan AFB outside Tucson, Ariz.
Budget cuts coming after the end of increased wartime spending are well known in the military. What is especially painful for commanders and their comptrollers is that the current round of cuts are hitting during a time of war and are impacting units even as they prepare for additional deployments.
What further complicates the funding losses is that U.S. military aircraft are becoming increasingly aged. The average Air Force fighter is more than 20 years old. In fact, the service took delivery of its last brand-new F-16 last November. The increasingly high costs associated with the F/A-22 Raptor program have led Congress to cut procurement funding (and numbers of Raptors to be purchased) several times since the aircraft was selected as the replacement for the F-15 Eagles currently in service.
As I mentioned last week ("Air-Defense Collapse: Blame for Everyone," DefenseWatch, June 24, 2005), neglect during too many defense procurement cycles, along with poor planning for the aftermath of the conquest of Iraq, have led us into perilous waters. During its eight years in power during 1993-2001, the Clinton administration both neglected and severely curtailed procurement of new aircraft, weapons and other vital military systems. At that time, DoD routinely transferred funds for parts and maintenance to other accounts to pay for the useless "meals on wheels" and social engineering programs conceived by civilians at the Pentagon who by and large had no military experience themselves.
The current administration, overzealous in its belief that regime change and post-combat occupation in Iraq would be a snap, have finally realized that things did not go as planned and that the government doesn't have enough money to pay for all of its grandiose schemes. Since money is not a limitless resource, something has had to give. That something, as far as the Air Force is concerned, includes its operations and maintenance budget.
Current DoD civilian leaders, comprised largely of former business executives, have tried (and failed) to run the services as if they were for-profit corporations. The men and women selected by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to run DoD are not the same people who will have to live with their stupid and shortsighted decisions.
The folks who will have to live with those decisions, now and in the foreseeable future, are the men and women of such units as the 71st Fighter Squadron of the 1st Fighter Wing and other ACC fighter and bomber units.
Once again, politics seems to have won out over what is best for the nation. Meanwhile, fighter pilots in the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps back here in the states will have to confront the nasty reality that flying and training time remain vulnerable to the accountants because the politicians can't seem to balance the checkbook.
And for Air Force units across the board – active duty, Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve Command – the uncertainty of day-to-day operational funding adds an entirely new ingredient of stress to an already stressful environment.
Ellie
Flying Hours Cutback Is a Dangerous Sign
By Paul Connors
By any accounting standards one cares to choose, the costs of the war against terror and the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq have placed severe strains on the budgets of each of the U.S. armed forces, and the Air Force is no exception.
Recently, The Newport News Daily Press, which covers the huge southeastern Virginia military complex including Langley Air Force Base, disclosed that Air Force officials had slashed the flying hours for the 1st Fighter Wing based there.
The wing lost a total of 2,723 hours to generate $29 million in savings in the current 2004 fiscal year budget (a major portion of an overall $35-million budget cut to the wing), the newspaper revealed last week. Fortunately, Air Force numbers-crunchers worked some more, and on Monday officials announced that they had been able to restore 1,335 hours to the Langley unit's flying budget – roughly half of what the unit originally planned to have.
Despite the happy ending – if you can call a 50-percent restoration of essential operating funds "happy" – there is a lesson and a warning here. (The newspaper reported that 1FW had received approval for another 500 flying hours before the budget turnaround this week but it remains unclear whether that will be included in the 1,335 hours or added to it.)
Most military observers know that defense budget shortfalls can hinder critical daily operations. During the first year of the war in Iraq, President Bush had to request an additional $87 billion from Congress to pay for wartime operations, additional supplies and the first stages of Iraqi reconstruction. Now, additional bills are coming due and the inevitable cuts are hitting hard all over the service.
Langley AFB is not only home for the 1st Fighter Wing. It is also the Headquarters for Air Combat Command (ACC), the service's force provider for fighter and bomber aircraft, crews and maintainers used by multi-service combatant commanders such as the air component of U.S. Central Command, which is still engaged in two major conflicts.
Daily Press correspondent Jim Hodges wrote on June 22 that Air Combat Command officials had informed the 1st Fighter Wing that it faced a $35-million cut in its current $382 million budget, a 9 percent reduction. Such cuts are difficult to absorb, especially in a wartime environment where the wing remains a key player in the service's Air Expeditionary Force rotation plans.
Air Force officials at Langley told Hodges that the budget cuts service-wide were to be made based on the respective unit's ability to pay. Because the Air Force as a whole is $3.7 billion short, Air Combat Command's reduction was originally $825 million overall with $35 million of that total coming from the command's pre-eminent fighter wing. Currently equipped with F-15Cs and earmarked as the first operational wing to receive the F/A-22 Raptor, the slashed budget was expected to have an immediate impact on the number of flying hours available to the wing's individual fighter squadrons.
Lt. Col. Jennifer Kleinschmidt, commander of the First Comptroller Squadron, the wing's bill payers, said last week that most of the financial cuts would be made by reducing the number of flying hours. The 1 FW was directed to achieve $29 million in savings through the flying cuts, with an additional trim of $6 million through other programs such as deferred military construction and restrictions on non-essential military travel.
At the fighter squadron level – the firepower in any fighter wing – such cuts would have the deepest impact. The average cost for an hour of flying time for the F-15C (including fuel costs and maintenance time) averages between $11,000-12,000.
Squadron commanders and operations officers readily admitted that cuts in flying time equate to lost training opportunities. Lt. Col. Matt Fenton, commander of the 71st Fighter Squadron, told the newspaper last week that from May 1 through Sept. 30, his squadron stood to lose 60 percent of its planned flying hours. Those hours can never be recovered, nor can the lost training opportunities that non-flying aircraft do not provide, he noted.
Thus, Langley officers were relieved to see the flying hours partially restored early this week. Col. J.J. Blessing, Deputy Operations Group Commander for the 1st Fighter Wing, told the newspaper that the restored flying hours will "allow us to fly the hours we were scheduled to fly in July, August and September."
But what if this scenario were to happen again?
The only alternative available to actual flying is to use less costly flight simulators. Pilots and the commanders also agree on one key element: simulator time does not give pilots the same experience as real flying.
Moreover, even with lower costs per hour, simulators themselves are not cheap, and the wing would likely be forced to ration the number of hours pilots get to "fly" in them as well. Fighter squadron commanders around the service have concluded that more experienced and higher time pilots can get by with less "sim time." Consequently, the more experienced pilots defer to those with less flying time in the hope that should the need arise, their experience will allow them to recover from forced inactivity more quickly.
Commanders are quick to point out, however that there is no real substitute for realistic training and the lack of it ultimately has a negative effect on combat readiness.
Given the 71st Fighter Squadron's prominent place in the Air Force's rotation schedule for the fall of 2005, officials need to keep unit readiness at a high state. Logic would dictate that a squadron facing imminent deployment should receive a higher priority for training, including flying hours.
That is not happening. Instead, the partially restored cuts in flying hours raise the specter that the 1 FW's readiness level could decrease, posing additional problems for the commander and his personnel when they do deploy, if a similar financial crunch were to occur in the months ahead. And the 71st Fighter Squadron is not alone. Throughout the Air Force and its two reserve components, every flying unit remains under the gun of having to curtail flying hours and training should the fiscal crisis continue or worsen.
While flying hours and fuel costs have an immediate and visible impact on any unit with a flying mission, many of the other cuts – which remain in effect – are base-wide and less visible. Officials have had to defer or cancel upgrades to computer equipment. They have been forced to delay or cancel routine maintenance and upkeep such as painting offices and replacing furniture and carpeting. At bases throughout the continental United States, Air Force comptrollers hope that the cuts will not be too apparent so as to degrade morale.
Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. John Jumper, told the entire service in a recent memorandum that the financial strictures mean "that we will all have to accept degradations to quality of life," although other senior Air Force officials believe that budget cuts will not be as visible as everyone first feared. The Air Force, known for a historically high quality of life for its members and dependents, has used other methods to further reduce costs, including a reduction in the total number of airframes by 500 and a cut in personnel end strength by another 18,000 from the congressionally mandated level of 369,000.
The recommended budget cuts come right on the heels of the Pentagon's release last month of its list of bases recommended for realignment or closure under the 2005 BRAC process. The DoD recommendations have hit hard throughout the Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve Command. While only two major Air Force Bases in the lower 48 states are on the recommended closure list, numerous ANG and AFRC units at local, regional and international airports have learned that they will lose their flying missions. Even units co-located on active duty bases have felt the axe. The units that lost their aircraft saw, in many cases, their aircraft assigned to other units or sent into retirement at the AMARC at Davis-Monthan AFB outside Tucson, Ariz.
Budget cuts coming after the end of increased wartime spending are well known in the military. What is especially painful for commanders and their comptrollers is that the current round of cuts are hitting during a time of war and are impacting units even as they prepare for additional deployments.
What further complicates the funding losses is that U.S. military aircraft are becoming increasingly aged. The average Air Force fighter is more than 20 years old. In fact, the service took delivery of its last brand-new F-16 last November. The increasingly high costs associated with the F/A-22 Raptor program have led Congress to cut procurement funding (and numbers of Raptors to be purchased) several times since the aircraft was selected as the replacement for the F-15 Eagles currently in service.
As I mentioned last week ("Air-Defense Collapse: Blame for Everyone," DefenseWatch, June 24, 2005), neglect during too many defense procurement cycles, along with poor planning for the aftermath of the conquest of Iraq, have led us into perilous waters. During its eight years in power during 1993-2001, the Clinton administration both neglected and severely curtailed procurement of new aircraft, weapons and other vital military systems. At that time, DoD routinely transferred funds for parts and maintenance to other accounts to pay for the useless "meals on wheels" and social engineering programs conceived by civilians at the Pentagon who by and large had no military experience themselves.
The current administration, overzealous in its belief that regime change and post-combat occupation in Iraq would be a snap, have finally realized that things did not go as planned and that the government doesn't have enough money to pay for all of its grandiose schemes. Since money is not a limitless resource, something has had to give. That something, as far as the Air Force is concerned, includes its operations and maintenance budget.
Current DoD civilian leaders, comprised largely of former business executives, have tried (and failed) to run the services as if they were for-profit corporations. The men and women selected by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to run DoD are not the same people who will have to live with their stupid and shortsighted decisions.
The folks who will have to live with those decisions, now and in the foreseeable future, are the men and women of such units as the 71st Fighter Squadron of the 1st Fighter Wing and other ACC fighter and bomber units.
Once again, politics seems to have won out over what is best for the nation. Meanwhile, fighter pilots in the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps back here in the states will have to confront the nasty reality that flying and training time remain vulnerable to the accountants because the politicians can't seem to balance the checkbook.
And for Air Force units across the board – active duty, Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve Command – the uncertainty of day-to-day operational funding adds an entirely new ingredient of stress to an already stressful environment.
Ellie