No Time To Sit On Their Laurels

Even as deployed airmen return home from Operation Iraqi Freedom, Air Force officials are focusing on what they need to do to reload the service for the next contingency.

According to Lt. Gen. Ronald E. Keys, deputy chief of staff for air and space operations, the three priorities in reconstituting the Air Force are people, units and the overall Air Force.

“In the people category, we need to give our people the time to reunite with their families, take care of personal things and decompress,” the general said. The service is also committed to helping airmen get their career progression requirements back on track, Keys said.

“We have to give them a chance to study for their promotion exams and get them into professional military education classes or other professional training,” he said. “We’ll make sure they don’t lose those classes by virtue of having answered the call to go to war.”

Unit reconstitution will consist of getting local training programs back on track, restocking supplies, and repairing and maintaining equipment.

At the Air Force level, Keys said senior leaders would have to face challenges ranging from personnel management to completely reloading the air and space expeditionary force rotation schedule.

Ready For Anything

“The AEF construct is a crisis-contingency mechanism for scheduling people to (deploy),” he said. “We froze AEFs 7/8 in place, added 9/10, then added parts of 1/2 and 3/4. There are a lot of people over there, and the AEF is not in sequence.”

Keys said he expects the AEF cycle to back on track by early 2004. In the meantime, the Air Force will weave together interim AEF pairs to meet upcoming deployment requirements.

“We’ll take the (people who did not deploy) from AEFs 5/6, 1/2 and 3/4, and package them into a temporary AEF,” Keys said. “As we get the force reconstituted, we’ll come off the interim AEF and start the normal rotation with everyone back into an AEF window.”

The AEF Center at Langley Air Force Base, Va., is a key component to the reconstitution effort, because they are the ones charged with keeping track of people, equipment and deployment requirements, the general said.

”The AEF Center is absolutely critical because they know where all the people are and what the capability is,” he said. “They have a tough job, and the world doesn’t stand still. We still have requirements in the Pacific, (for) the global war on terror and in the Balkans, so it’s not as simple as just focusing on Iraq.”

It is the service’s commitment to meeting the challenges of those and other potential requirements that are driving the Air Force to reconstitute as quickly as possible, Keys said.

“The people of the United States expect us to be ready when called upon,” he said. “The longer you wait to reconstitute, the more difficult it becomes. For every day we lose, down the line there’s some training event that’s been missed.”

Surge Operation Needed

Keys said a highly coordinated “surge” operation would be required to work through the training backlog caused by instructors and equipment being deployed. Part of that coordination includes working with the various major commands to address their unique concerns and requirements.

“We have to go through this whole gamut -- people, units and big Air Force,” he said. “You can’t do any of them in isolation because everything you do in one place causes a ripple effect. You have to coordinate; you have to have a policy across the force.

“The end game, where we’re going, is to get back into the AEF battle rhythm,” Keys said. “The AEF is the way we do business in the Air Force. That’s the way we provide forces to the combatant commanders.”

ANN expresses a special thanks to Master Sgt. Scott Elliott, Air Force Print News

FMI: www.af.mil