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New Air Force leaders lay out top priorities

In their first briefing with reporters as the Air Force’s new leadership team on Tuesday, acting Air Force Secretary Michael Donley and Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz preached accountability and attention to detail, and pledged to get the Air Force back on track.

“My pledge to all today is that the Air Force will keep the promise to our teammates and to our families and to all our partners that rely on us every day,” said Schwartz, who took over as chief Tuesday morning. “Precision and reliability is our standard regardless of job or specialty, and we will return the vigor and the rigor to all the processes and missions for which we have been entrusted.”

Donley said he and Schwartz’s top priorities in the months ahead will be supporting the war on terror; fixing the nuclear enterprise; placing a greater focus on getting more intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance to the war zone; fixing the Air Force acquisition system; and modernizing and recapitalizing the aging fleet.

The acting secretary also said senior officers fingered in a report by Navy Adm. Kirkland Donald on the Air Force’s nuclear problems could be fired or otherwise disciplined within weeks. He said a review of senior leader accountability is due to him during the next couple weeks, and that he will decide how to proceed shortly thereafter.

The Donald report is ostensibly what led Defense Secretary Robert Gates to force the previous secretary, Michael W. Wynne, and chief of staff, Gen. T. Michael Moseley, to resign June 5. Gates ordered the report in response to an incident last August in which the Air Force inadvertently transported nuclear weapons across the country on a B-52 and the accidental transfer in 2006 of nuclear warhead fuses to Taiwan, a mistake not discovered until March of this year.

Schwartz told reporters the Air Force will return to more rigorous nuclear standards.

“It is a mission where anything less than perfection is not acceptable,” he said. “I think the bottom line is we lost focus, and that focus is coming back.”

The Air Force will renew that focus by re-emphasizing basic procedures that have been refined over the past 60 years of the Air Force’s nuclear program.

Donley said he will introduce a roadmap for fixing the nuclear enterprise within the next month or two. The nuclear task force assigned to come up with a plan is due to report next week, he said, and that task force’s recommendations will be reviewed along with a report being prepared by former Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger.

The Air Force will then take about 30 days to formulate its roadmap, Donley said.

Schwartz appeared to backtrack on the Air Force’s plan to stand up its new Cyber Command by Oct. 1. He said the mission will go forward, but that the organizational structure of the mission and how it will integrate with the Defense Department and U.S. Strategic Command are still being considered.