Schwartz: 3,000 airmen to Afghanistan in 2010 - Air Force News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Air Force Times

Schwartz: 3,000 airmen to Afghanistan in 2010

The Air Force’s top uniformed leader expects at least 3,000 more airmen will head to Afghanistan in 2010 as part of the surge ordered by President Barack Obama.

Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz quantified the Air Force’s role in the 30,000-troop buildup at the end of a wide-ranging interview Dec. 22 with Air Force Times.

Schwartz put the figure at 3,000 to 3,500 airmen, but combatant command officials are still doing their calculations. Air Force planners estimate at least 2,000 airmen will be deployed but said more airmen will be called up as U.S. Central Command needs them, which could very well bring the total to 3,000.

Schwartz pointed out his figure does not include airmen who will be deployed to air bases just outside the war zone, such as Manas Air Base, Kyrgyzstan, to help transport the extra troops and equipment.

“We will go from about … 6,500 to 7,000 to close to 10,000. So the plus-up will be about 3,000 in Afghanistan ... and that does not include plus-ups outside Afghanistan on the periphery. So it will be more than the 3,000,” Schwartz said.

In the 30-minute interview in his Pentagon office, Schwartz also looked back at 2009 and ahead to 2010, touched on the next-generation bomber and new unmanned aerial vehicle, and talked about his fitness regimen and waist measurement.

Q. What are some of your priorities for 2010?

A. The two things that are on the immediate agenda obviously will be the issuance of the KC-X request for proposal in the middle of January — obviously an important milestone for our Air Force. In a broader, more immediate context is addressing the need to move and support the plus-up in Afghanistan, so that includes lots of different aspects of our Air Force, as you are well aware. Certainly, there are skills involved in the 30,000 expansion and the mobility side of things. Certainly, we’ll be heavily engaged. I’d say at least in the early part of 2010 there are two primary mission imperatives. In the broader sense, we are still focusing on sustaining our nuclear enterprise, performing the missions the joint team needs of us to support the larger effort and then taking care of our airmen and their families and those sorts of enduring priorities.

Q. What did you learn from your most recent trip to Afghanistan and what will be some of the challenges of this surge for the Air Force?

A. It is a great team that is providing support, mostly logistical support, for the mission in Afghanistan and it is just an example of that what we saw in Bastion and Kabul and naturally at Manas. I would just indicate that our Air Force is “all in.” We’ll do whatever is necessary and whatever it takes for however long it is needed to contribute to achieving the goals that have been set out for the department, and our fundamental approach to this is to be a trusted partner and I think that is the case. That is what our teammates see and [they] believe in us.

Q. Are there any specific sticking points for the surge that you are concerned about?

A. Air Mobility Command will run the air side of this, but do it at the behest of the Transportation Command who will be orchestrating each of the modes of transportation — air, land and sea — on behalf of [Army Gen.] Dave Petraeus at Central Command, and naturally [Army Gen.] Stan McChrystal in Afghanistan. The key thing is that everyone is going to be working hard to meet the objectives that have been set out. That includes everyone from the people who operate aircraft to people who maintain aircraft to people who kick boxes in aerial ports, people who rig things for airdrop, for example, the ports certainly here in the U.S. The bottom line here is that a multitude of people will be working hard to make sure that we get our folks delivered where they need to be on time and that they have the wherewithal to execute the missions.

Q. How has the Air Force changed after facing an enemy that doesn’t have an air force for eight years?

A. We operate 40 [UAV] orbits today — 25-plus of Predators and 11 or 12 of Reapers and one Global Hawk — and in the former cases it is a significant thing that we are not operating in denied airspace. But the reality is, if there was, we’d be prepared to confront that and it can sanitize that and control that domain in such a fashion that will allow the armed forces of the United States to act with few limitations. I do believe that is why we and the Army, Marine Corps and the Navy talk about full spectrum capability. Clearly, there are some things that all of us have now focused on for the last few years that we are extremely good at and some things that we train a little bit less, but there is a need in each of the services, and certainly true in the Air Force, for us to maintain our competency across that spectrum of skill from those that are vital to the irregular warfare scenarios that we currently face and those that would be relevant in more contested environments.

Q. Why did the Air Force make known its use of the RQ-170 [a new stealthy UAV] in Afghanistan now?

A. The bottom line was that the machine is going to be employed consistent with the secretary of defense’s guidance to us to leave no stone unturned in terms of making ISR capacity available to the fight upcoming and continuing in Afghanistan. It was our judgment that that was exactly what the secretary of defense wanted. He didn’t want us to keep anything in our hip pockets — to employ all the capability we could to support the joint team in the field and I think that is what we are doing.

Q. Will training change for airmen prior to deployments to Afghanistan?

A. The field skills are similar between Iraq and Afghanistan. The terrain is different, and the culture in which they are operating is different. At the most obvious level, the language skills or introductory training will be different. But I think that in orientation for the difference in Iraq and Afghanistan is key. The basic field skills and obviously military skills are readily transferable between the two locations.

Q. Is there a future for the Marine Corps’ combat fitness test in the Air Force?

A. For the moment, I think we are on the right path. And that is, as you are aware, we recently have published a new instruction. Between now and July, we’ll be into the twice-a-year evaluation and our folks that will take the fitness tests during the first half of the calendar year both based on the former criteria and the new criteria. And in July, we’ll be off with exclusively the new criteria. I would just say that there are a couple aspects of this, which all the services share … fitness matters in terms of both having the ability to maintain the pace and to promote wellness in the force. We think that is not a small thing, for as pressed as we are, that people being fit has a lot of dividends both in terms of performance and one’s well-being and ability not only to serve the military mission but also to satisfy the needs of family, which is equally important.

Q. What is the most common question you get from airmen?

A. Fitness is certainly one. Uniforms is another. The nature of the decision on this past trip in respect to the president’s decision process and what that implies for Air Force people. There are certainly questions specific to career fields. What is going to happen with the engineers or security or the maintainers and so on and so forth. My experience is that people are pretty savvy … about the larger issues, which we seem to get consumed [with] here in Washington. And those that are more tactical, that really affect people at street level. We get a good mix of those. An example: One of the things that certainly is a concern to our people is how we are going to manage manpower. And you know we went through an episode of trying to reduce manning, which — of course — has been suspended. But still the reality is that the demand signal for people is greater than the manpower that we will have available. We will have to make choices about where we increase manpower in intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance as a case in point and where we find manpower elsewhere in our portfolio in order to keep things in balance, and people naturally would be.

Q. What are some of the future career fields you see will be emphasized in the Air Force?

A. As I suggested, I think that there are things that are enduring, so those mission areas that will apply to control of air, space and cyber will certainly continue to have a significant presence. ISR probably will expand to some degree beyond even where we are now. Long-range strike and global strike will have a significant investment of our skills, and command and control as well. Those are areas that will either sustain or perhaps increase to some extent and certainly the combat support skills that are so important to our logistical capability. We spoke of mobility earlier, but our ability to be expeditionary. The engineers, security forces, [explosive ordnance disposal] and so on. I think these are all the skills that we need to blend in order to provide the kind of contributions to the joint team that will be needed.

Q. What will the Air Force look like in 2025?

A. I see an Air Force that will continue. There is a transition underway where certain things have become more prevalent. Certainly that is true about remotely piloted aircraft. The need for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance certainly has ascended at the moment. But there are certain enduring qualities that have been true and will be true in 2025. Just in short, a couple. I think what I would call “domain control” in air and space and at least within our capability of cyber what the joint team expects of us is to provide domain control of air and space on behalf of the joint team that will remain a prime imperative for the Air Force. I think, likewise, placing distant targets at risk wherever they may be on the planet will remain a driving imperative. ISR, as we suggested, certainly is the third one in all of its dimensions — space, air breathing, processing, so on and so forth. Finally, how we orchestrate all this. Maybe that is not sufficiently appreciated, but command and control, which I think is uniquely American and something that will be enduring for another couple decades — to be sure.

Q. What are the issues you are considering for the next-generation, long-range strike bomber, and what are the requirements that you have already settled on?

A. The key thing is that, at least for the Air Force, that there is a need again, as I suggested to you earlier, to have the capacity. The country needs the capacity to engage targets in defended airspace, and so that suggests having at least a platform that can penetrate denied airspace. Not necessarily something that can do that all by itself, and by that I suggest that there is a family of systems that make long-range strike viable. But I do think that a long-range strike capability will have the ability to penetrate denied airspace as well as perform ancillary missions, whether it be ISR or stand-off or what have you. It’s a fair question whether these platforms are manned or unmanned. Personally, I see a viable path ahead as optionally manned. I think that technically is possible, but what it requires is having a platform that is designed from the beginning to have certain capabilities that are either manned or unmanned; ISR or strike; but that the platform itself and its fundamental outline would remain essentially the same, so perhaps some systems or components would change but not the fundamental airframe. I think that is a promising path and again a key thing here, which the secretary [of defense] has also suggested, is that what we want to try to avoid is a situation where — which we had with the B-2 and also with the B-1 and other airplanes, by the way — is where we had ambitions for many, many aircraft in the inventory and ultimately those ambitions were curtailed to some extent and we ended up with aircraft that cost considerably more than was anticipated. If we get the go-ahead, we want to avoid that type of eventuality to fix the number of aircraft we were to purchase and to manage the cost in a very rigorous way.

Q. Has the secretary of defense given you any type of timeline? What is the next step for the Air Force in examining this issue?

A. I think there will be a period where we will certainly conduct research and get to a very precise level of expectations via studies and so on. There will also be a technology sustainment effort underway, where we certainly will invest in things that are platform-independent — datalinks, sensors, apertures — things that will be true no matter what the outline of the airplane or airframe might look like. And there will be obviously trade analysis that will discuss range and payload and those sorts of things which you alluded to. I think that again these matters have not been finally decided and the results of which will be seen in the president’s budget early next year, but ideally we would have a program that has an investment pattern that builds to a program of record with achievable numbers in terms of fleet size and something that really is driven by managing cost per platform.

Q. What are some of the deadlines and goals for the Joint Strike Fighter this upcoming year?

A. The department remains committed to the F-35 and for a multitude of reasons, not least of which ... the Navy, the Marine Corps and ourselves are highly dependent on the success of this program — not to speak of at least eight international partners. So, this is an important development program. It has the intense focus of our acquisition program … and it has been clear that [manufacturer] Lockheed Martin has to deliver and the program office is well aware of that. There will be some adjustments to schedule and investment profiles, but the bottom line is that Lockheed and the program office need to deliver and that has been made exceedingly clear.

Q. Can you tell the airmen what you do to stay fit and what is your waist size?

A. Close to [32.5 inches]. …. In terms of my rhythm, I’ve always been a morning person so I’ve always gotten up early and when I’m in town, or for that matter on the road, we do our best to work out, so that’s most every morning of the week. We run and I do a little bit of [calisthenics]. On Saturdays and Sundays, [wife] Susie and I typically work out together. We run and then we go to the gym and do some heavier sort of workout with the weights and that sort of thing. I’m probably working out four to five days a week. … Part of that is an effort to try and be a model service chief. But it goes deeper than that. It has to do with again trying to maintain the pace, as I suggested earlier. And the third thing that I don’t think is a trivial matter is the reality that health care in the Department of Defense is a serious cost driver. I mean multiple tens of billions of dollars. So in addition to appearance, in addition to readiness, this is also a health care cost-control effort at a more strategic level. If people are fit, it seems reasonable that there will be less demand for health care resources and that means, in a limited budget environment, more resources allocated to other things: family programs or procurement or whatever it may be.

Q. In a report, the Department of Defense inspector general criticized all of the services except the Army for length of deployments. You responded that if you got the request for yearlong deployments, all they had to do was ask. Have you received such a request?

A. The combatant commands have specified those positions that they believe should be longer tours, and our number of one-year tours has multiplied several times. We have now more six-month tours than we do shorter tours. The bottom line is that we will do what makes sense and what is needed. And this is exactly the position that General Petraeus and [Army] General [Ray] Odierno and General McChrystal have adopted. They know, for example, the rhythm the Marines have is appropriate for the Marines and it works. The Army has a little different rhythm and likewise the Air Force. I think that the idea here is not absolute uniformity, but whether the mission is sustained as a result. I think my interaction with my operational leadership — Petraeus, McChrystal, Odierno — is that the rhythm that we are on is serving their needs.