Despite recent accidents, Air Force says readiness is on the rise

In the wake of another Air Force fatality due to an aircraft accident, the service contends readiness is improving.

June 22’s A-29 Super Tucano crash, which killed one pilot, is one of many recent Air Force mishaps in the past year.

But despite the crashes, Air Combat Command chief Gen. James Holmes said readiness improvements from 2017 and 2018 are starting to pay off in personnel, but equipment issues are not there yet.

“The most significant thing we’ve seen is the impact of adding additional end strength for the Air Force and we targeted quite a bit of that into our aircraft maintenance career fields,” Holmes said during a June 28 meeting with reporters in Washington. “Across the Air Force we are seeing units that have holes in them where they did not have maintainers. Those holes are being filled up.”

The Air Force plans to increase to 322,000 active duty by the end of 2018.

Just a couple of years ago, the Air Force was down 4,000 maintainers. It now expects to shore that gap by 2020.

“That hole was growing by 40 maintainers every month because as we were bringing in F-35s; an F-35 requires 20 maintainers each to maintain. We were bringing two per month in, so the hole was getting bigger. Our Air Force is committed to fix that, we recognized the problem,” Lt. Gen. John Cooper, deputy chief of staff for Logistics, Engineering and Force Protection said last year.

Holmes said the main issue now is the new maintainers do not have a lot of experience. Many of the new maintainers are still not able to work without being supervised, but Holmes said the increase in personnel is still allowing pilots to fly more.

When it comes to the readiness of other parts of the force, Holmes said the 2018 money is just getting to the Air Force.

Holmes said the service received its 2018 funds last month and has not seen benefits from it yet.

“I think the people effect is there and is having an effect and as the 2018 dollars and we get into the the 2019 budget we will see a continuing impact,” Holmes said.

Readiness has been the Defense Department’s main concern since Secretary Jim Mattis took office.

Mattis used the 2018 budget to address pressing programmatic shortfalls and rebuild readiness. That included building programs for advanced capabilities as well as buying critical munitions and funding facilities sustainment at a higher level.

The military told Congress it was dealing with a readiness issue last year. That issue was exacerbated by multiple continuing resolutions.

“It’s the cumulative effect. We’ve been doing CRs now for eight years and a shutdown in [20]13,” Army Chief of Staff Mark Milley told Congress last year. “It’s like smoking cigarettes. One cigarette is not going to kill you, but you do that for eight, 10, 20 years, 30 years you’re eventually going to die of lung cancer.”

Cyber changes

In addition to increasing readiness, the Air Force is also making changes by placing the 24th Air Force, which deals with cyber issues, under the control of Air Combat Command.

To prepare for the change in July, the Air Force created a mission analysis and found ways to add people from the 24th into Air Combat Command’s intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance and operations  areas to integrate cyber.

Air Combat Command is currently working on moving staff to Langley, Virginia, but will have a temporary annex in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where some airmen will move from, to ease the transition.

Air Combat Command’s next step is to see how the 24th fits within the larger combat enterprise and preparing the command to bring together conventional weapons, cyber and intelligence.

Holmes said moving the 24th to Air Combat Command will help the Air Force think more about how it can integrate cyber into the Air Force’s combat capabilities.

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