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Donley marks year as top Air Force civilian

Air Force Secretary Michael Donley knows every commander doesn’t agree with every decision he makes or supports, but he doesn’t think anyone is going over his head trying to get things changed.

Donley made the assessment at a June 26 news conference marking his first anniversary as the service’s top civilian.

Since taking over in June 2008 after Defense Secretary Robert Gates fired his predecessor for poor job performance, Donley has had to both fix old problems — a nuclear mission in shambles, for example — and focus on the priorities — doing more with less is a big one — of a new commander in chief, President Barack Obama.

And Donley has made progress on both fronts, though he has come under fire himself — from some airmen, defense experts and lawmakers for supporting the termination of the F-22 Raptor program, and from Gates for not getting new spy planes to the war zones fast enough.

One defense expert, though, thinks airmen are critical of Donley for more than just the F-22 decision.

“The view among the officer corps is that he isn’t really reflecting their priorities,” said Loren Thompson of the Arlington, Va.,-based Lexington Institute.

Donley took his cue on the F-22 from Gates, who wants to streamline the procurement process as well as refocus the military on winning unconventional wars such as the one in Afghanistan. Gates sees the spy planes and unmanned aerial vehicles as key to successfully battling insurgents, not the F-22, which has yet to fly a combat mission.

Reaction to the F-22 decision was swift and strong.

Less than a week after Gates gave reporters a first look at his fiscal 2010 budget in early April, Donley and Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz defended the decision to cut the F-22 in an op-ed, titled “Moving Beyond the F-22,” published in the Washington Post.

Donley and Schwartz called the Raptor “unquestionably, the most capable fighter in our military inventory,” then proceeded to explain that the Air Force simply couldn’t afford 187 more Raptors, each with a price tag of $140 million, and meet all of its other priorities. Put simply, the men wrote, “Buying more F-22s means doing less of something else.”

The backlash died down a little until mid-May, when Congress began dissecting the budget in a monthlong series of hearings.

The lawmaker who has been perhaps the loudest supporter of the F-22 is Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, where the Raptor is assembled.

Just before, or at the start of the hearings, Chambliss asked Gen. John D.W. Corley, head of Air Combat Command, to weigh in on the decision to cut the F-22.

In a letter dated June 9, Corley told Chambliss that cutting the F-22 would put the nation at risk.

Donley made it clear at the June 26 news conference he knew about Corley’s assessment and doesn’t see the letter as an effort to circumvent the F-22 recommendation.

“I don’t think Air Force personnel have been lobbying behind the scenes or in a way that is inconsistent with the direction they get from the headquarters and Air Force-level decisions,” Donley told reporters.

“Gen. Corley knew our position, and we knew his position,” the secretary went on.

“And, he didn’t just volunteer or lobby, not at all. He was asked for his opinion directly from a U.S. senator.”

Donley remains unwavering on Raptor, despite the criticism. He repeated the White House’s threat to veto any defense budget that included money for the F-22. Panels in both the House and Senate have added funding for more F-22s.

“If additional F-22s come through the congressional process, that would be grounds for a potential veto,” he said. “I think that has been pretty clear.”

Fighting the F-22, though, isn’t all that Donley has done since he reported for work June 23, 2008.

From Day One, Donley’s top priority has been reshaping the service’s nuclear enterprise.

Gates fired Donley’s and Schwartz’s predecessor, Michael Wynne and Gen. T. Michael Moseley, for two high-profile mistakes in the handling of nuclear weapons and components.

One was an accidental flight in 2007 from Minot Air Force Base, N.D., to Barksdale Air Force Base, La., of a B-52 armed with nuclear weapons.

The other was the discovery that nuclear warhead fuses had accidentally been shipped to Taiwan in 2006.

Since taking the helm, Donley has overseen the creation of the Global Strike Command, which is scheduled to stand up in September. The Air Force’s newest major command will oversee the service’s nuclear units except those based in Europe.

Major changes were also seen in the way the service inspects its nuclear units. Donley approved reinstituting no-notice nuclear surety inspections.

After a spate of inspection failures, the Air Force has passed 17 of its last 19 nuclear inspections.

Donley is pleased with the progress so far.

“This is going to take some time to sort of get back to the level of nuclear expertise that we had had in the past and to sustain that going forward,” he said. “There is a lot of manpower and training and personnel related activities going on behind the scenes to not just find the nuclear expertise in the Air Force but to beef it up.”

Under Donley’s leadership, the Air Force also has increased its intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Today, the service flies 33 MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper orbits — or round-the-clock combat air patrols — over the war zones, nine more than when Donley came on board. The goal is 50 by 2011.

“We have focused on ramping up the UAV capability,” he said.

Donley also helped launch Project Liberty, a $461 million program to deploy 37 MC-12W spy planes and about 1,000 airmen by 2010 to supplement the MQ-1 Predators and MQ-9 Reapers already in theater. Unlike the Reaper and Predators, the MC-12Ws don’t carry weapons.

MC-12Ws, twin-propeller Hawker Beechcraft King Air 350 airplanes outfitted with high-tech ISR sensors, are designed to track terrorist leaders and find roadside bombs.

Their deployment for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq was a top priority of an ISR task force stood up by Gates in 2008 to get more ISR assets to troops in war zones.

The Air Force recently got in hot water after the first MC-12W deployed two months late. Donley, though, deflected the criticism, pointing out the delivery time was commendable considering the program didn’t exist when he started.

“There was no MC-12 program when I arrived. So we went from a standing start to first deployment into theater in less than eight months,” he said. “We didn’t meet the six-month goal we set that was highly aggressive, but we met a very aggressive schedule to get the first bird downrange.”

Despite Donley’s record so far, airmen remain skeptical of the secretary, said Thompson, the analyst.

“The circumstances under which he and Gen. Schwartz got their jobs guaranteed there would be some suspicion,” Thompson said. “So when Donley went along with killing the next-generation bomber, the search and rescue helicopter and the C-17, people smelled a rat.”