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Retirees practice mobilizing for war

An Air Force exercise put 140 retired airmen through the motions of getting ready to go to war.

The biannual push-pull exercise, which started Monday and ends Friday at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas, lets the service check out its processes for re-activating airmen. The dry run included transporting them from their homes to base, in-processing, medical checks, housing, assignments and payment.

“We have a small test population that we work with [to] go through processes to activate people,” said Lt. Col. Steven Cramner, the reserve adviser at the personnel readiness division at the Pentagon.

The exercise costs less than $100,000 to bring the airmen to Lackland, Cramner said, plus the cost of their paychecks for a week.

In the past, a select number of the retired airmen have been evaluated on their Air Force Specialty Code skill levels and then assigned and transferred to functional units across the service. The Air Force dropped that portion of the exercise this year to save time, money and disruption to participants.

Retired airmen haven’t been involuntarily activated since Operation Desert Storm in 1991. Small numbers of retirees have volunteered for operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom.