The service is encouraging hundreds of departed airmen to return to active duty — and others to stay longer — to help it handle strikes against the Islamic State militant group and manage tensions flaring in Ukraine.
Specifically, the Air Force needs airmen in maintenance, cyber operations, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, and nuclear missile fields. Brig. Gen. Brian Kelly, director of military force management policy, in a May 13 interview, outlined three plans to find or retain them:
- The Air Force is already working on bringing back separated senior airmen, staff sergeants and technical sergeants in these fields.
- Beginning Monday, the Air Force also will offer high-year tenure extensions to enlisted airmen with those skills to allow them to stay up to two years longer. But for an airman to be granted an extension, Kelly said, his commander must agree that he is a well-performing, valuable airman, even though he hasn't been able to get promoted.
- Under another program launching later this week, Air National Guard members and reservists with the same skills — both officer and enlisted — will be able to move to active-duty status for one to three years.
Kelly stressed that the jobs airmen are being brought back into were off-limits to last year's force management programs.
"The places where we're adding experience are targeted to specific skills and specific grades, and those are all areas that we did not put through the voluntary or involuntary force management programs last year," Kelly said. "We purposely did it that way. These were career fields that were protected before, that we already knew we were short of. We just couldn't build them back up during that time, because we were drawing the force down. So now it's time to bring these programs back up, and add experience and add people."
The drive to bring back experienced airmen is part of the Air Force's move to increase its active-duty end strength for the first time since it began steeply cutting its ranks under the force management program that began in fiscal 2014. When that year began, the service had 330,700 active-duty airmen; end strength is now down to 312,980. In the proposed fiscal 2016 budget released in February, the Air Force proposed a 1.3 percent increase to 317,000.
The world has changed considerably since the Air Force planned those sequestration-driven cuts in 2013, Kelly said.
"When the Air Force originally made those decisions, some of the current requirements of combatant commanders didn't exist," Kelly said. "For example, ISIL [an alternate acronym for the Islamic State] and the drain that that's put on the force in the Middle East. For us to combat and fly the missions against ISIL and meet the combatant commanders' requirements there has required a lot more Air Force effort than was originally anticipated."
Russia's seizure of Crimea and aggression in Ukraine, and the administration's European Reassurance Initiative that followed to support NATO allies in the region, also created more requirements for the Air Force's combatant commands in Europe, Kelly said. And the Air Force turned its attention to bolstering its nuclear mission last year after a scandal erupted involving widespread cheating, drug use and poor morale among airmen charged with safeguarding nuclear missiles.
Kelly stressed that all programs are voluntary, and the Air Force does not plan to involuntarily recall any separated airmen.
"We're short enough in some of these areas that we'll take just about everybody who's willing, and who's a volunteer, to come back in," Kelly said.
The Air Force originally planned to bring on a little more than 24,000 new enlisted airmen next year, about the same as in 2015, Kelly said. But now the Air Force is planning to boost its enlisted accessions to more than 28,000 in 2016, he said.
The officer side is also expected to grow by more than doubling the number of candidates attending Officer Training School, Kelly said. The Air Force admitted 520 candidates to attend OTS at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama in 2015. But next year, OTS is expected to admit more than 1,100 candidates. The first sign of this expansion came May 1, when the Air Force Recruiting Service announced it had admitted about 66 percent of applicants — much higher than the 50 percent selection rate of applicants announced in March. The Air Force does not plan to increase class sizes at the Air Force Academy or increase the number of officers brought on through ROTC, Kelly said.
One challenge, Kelly said: It takes time to grow newly enlisted airmen with the necessary expertise in those four areas — and the Air Force needs those airmen now. That's why it's rolling out these programs to bring back or hold on to airmen with crucial experience.
Kelly said the Air Force hopes to bring back 250 to 500 airmen through prior service accessions. About 100 to 200 more airmen are likely to receive high-year tenure extensions later this year, and another 100 to 200 next year, he said. And another few hundred could come back on active-duty from Guard or Reserve status, he said.
Kelly said airmen could start coming back on active duty through prior service accessions in the next month or two. They won't have to go through basic training again, which will help speed up their return, he said. But they have to meet the required fitness standards. And the Air Force will cover the cost of moving them to their new assignments.
"These are experienced folks that you want to bring back," Kelly said. "You don't have to train them. They're ready to go. But they're not easy to find. Some of these folks got out for a reason — they wanted to start a family, they wanted to do something else. Now we're giving them an opportunity to come back, and maybe they want to come back. That's great, we want them back. But there's not 10,000 of them out there waiting to knock the door down."
And later this summer, Guardsmen and Reservists could start moving back to active duty. Airmen who receive high-year tenure extensions are already on-duty, Kelly said, so there will be no gap in their service.
Kelly said the programs will last at least through September 2016.
"This is all part of the effort to get us experience and get us back up to the numbers we submitted in the president's budget," Kelly said.
Stephen Losey is the air warfare reporter for Defense News. He previously covered leadership and personnel issues at Air Force Times, and the Pentagon, special operations and air warfare at Military.com. He has traveled to the Middle East to cover U.S. Air Force operations.
