Posted by
Bull 67 on Thursday, June 26, 2008 1:43:01 PM
Boeing has won its protest and the new aerial tanker faces years of delays. KC-135 crews and maintainers will fly and fix antiques for the foreseeable future.
Shameful.
The U.S. Air Force is in dire straits, an organization in crisis by any measure. The warning signs are shocking:
- In 2002 it mismanaged the KC-X competition resulting in a senior acquisitions official going to jail.
- The CSARX rescue helicopter competition, delayed for over two years, is still mired in political and legal battles.
- The service cut almost 15% of its total manpower in order to modernize equipment, only to end up with a smaller force and little modernization.
- Another high ranking acquisitions official committed suicide over another brewing scandal.
- The Air Force unknowingly loaded nuclear weapons on a bomber and flew it across the country.
- It lost track of other nuclear components, mistakenly sending them to Taiwan.
- The service can only buy half the F-22s it needs to fulfill its stated requirements.
- Recently, the chief of staff and secretary of the Air Forces were sacked, the first time in history the two top positions in a military service were simultaneously fired.
- It lost track of another 1000 nuclear weapons components.
- Now, it botched up the new aerial tanker contract again.
From 1990 to 2012 the service squandered its only opportunity to modernize. It’s facing the same looming budget disaster as the rest of the nation. Starting in 2012 Social Security and Medicare will start sucking the federal budget dry, closing the door on major force modernization. Between entitlements and endless wars the service will find it nearly impossible to build the 21st century force it so desperately needs. They are in hole they may not be able to climb out of.
Was it strictly the services fault? No, but most of the blame falls squarely in their lap. How did it come to this?
Lack of Strategic Thinking. The service rewards tactical thinking, focusing only one or two budget cycles in the future.
Lack of Common Identity. There is no common cultural lynchpin which binds all Airmen the way the other services are unified. The Air Force has a fractured culture for two reasons: it’s a service of ‘program managers,’ stove-piped into specific career fields and weapons systems; and because most ‘Airmen’ have nothing to do with aviation.
The service lost control to a self-serving bureaucracy. The Air Force’s requirements and acquisitions system serves congress and their lobbyist. It serves the contractors. It serves the armies of civil servants in Washington and the Pentagon. The system serves everyone except the warfighters in the field and therefore, in the long run truly serves the interest of our adversaries. Our ‘peer rivals’ only need to wait us out as the bureaucracy does nothing and our fleet rots.
The Air Force has become a service of stewards, not innovators. With few exceptions, the service no longer blazes new aviation trails. The few new programs in existence were started many years ago and many of those are in trouble. It’s not just a question of funding, but of cultural willingness to take risks.
Lack of combat aviation leadership. Deployments and combat are not the same, this distinction is blurred in the service. Fewer and fewer people running the show and pulling the levers of power are combat veterans, let alone combat aviators. Being combat aircrew actually hinders one’s chances of advancement – they are just too busy to ‘fill the squares.’ Why is this important? Combat aviators approach problems with a purpose driven perspective. Many bureaucrats running the service today are process driven and don’t understand those flying the front lines. Basic aviation concepts, from the way aircrew solve problems to fight battles, are alien to most Airmen.
Rampant Careerism. Way too many officers are too concerned with punching a ticket and moving on. Innovation and change require courage to make mistakes. Mistakes kill careers. Therefore, most play it safe, move on, and move up. Challenging times call for big, bold decisions. Instead, our staffs are filled with bureaucrats tending aging fleets and floundering programs.
I am beginning to doubt the US Air Force can endure as a separate military service.
These are tough words, but these are tough times.