A total force reduction in the Air Force since 2005 drove service brass to bet on A-10 retirement to have enough maintainers to help the service reach its F-35 initial operational capability (IOC) goal.
Air Force Lt. Gen. Stephen Hoog, assistant vice chief of staff and director, air staff, Headquarters, U.S. Air Force, said Thursday losing about 45,000 to 50,000 airmen since 2005 has reduced the service’s flexibility.
“We didn’t have the capacity to build the ‘bulge’ necessary to carry this,” Hoog told an audience at an Air Force Association (AFA) breakfast in Arlington, Va., “When the chief (of staff) was forced to make the tough decision to divest the A-10, to recapitalize for the future, the smart way to do business was to repurpose the manpower.”
The head of the F-35 program said last week the Air Force’s F-35 IOC goal of August 2016 could be at risk because of an improper level of experienced maintainers in the fleet. F-35 Program Executive Office (PEO) Air Force Lt. Gen. Christopher Bogdan said the Air Force is supposed to have a total of 1,100 maintainers of varying experience and skill by 2016 to maintain F-35As. Eight hundred of those maintainers, he said, were to come over from the A-10 program.
Bogdan said the Air Force told him that the service anticipated many of the maintainers to come from other aircraft platforms, including the A-10, which the service has tried to cancel many times over the years, only to have Congress block it from doing so. Since the Air Force can’t move those A-10 maintainers to the F-35, Bogdan said the service would be forced to send over younger, more inexperienced, maintainers, who will take longer to certify for work on the F-35, putting the IOC goal at risk.
Hoog said the Air Force was able to save crew chiefs during this nine-year total force reduction, but the loss of flexibility restricted the Air Force’s options.
“I think if you ask Lt. Gen. Judith Fedder (deputy chief of staff for logistics, installations and mission support), she would love to have an extra 2,000 maintainers around the combat Air Forces that she could have applied to it,” Hoog said. “But the days of having 2,000 extra anything are gone.”
Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.), Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) member and frequent critic of the Air Force’s A-10 retirement efforts, said Thursday via a spokeswoman there is no question that the service faces significant budget challenges, but its budget is not so tight that it must prematurely retire its most cost-efficient and combat-effective close support aircraft. Budgets reflect priorities and a top priority for the Air Force, and our nation, must be providing our ground troops the very best close air support so they can accomplish their mission and return home safely, she added.
Though Bogdan said he was concerned about the F-35A IOC risk, he felt “pretty good” overall about the Air Force reaching its goal (Defense Daily, Oct. 30). The Navy’s F-35C variant on Monday performed two successful traps in its first at-sea tests on a carrier. CF-3 and CF-5 performed traps with their arresting hooks on the USS Nimitz (CVN-68) off the coast of southern California. The F-35C’s arresting hook system was redesigned in 2012 after the original hook was found to be deficient (Defense Daily; March 12, 2013).
The F-35 is developed by Lockheed Martin [LMT] with subcontractors BAE Systems and Northrop Grumman [NOC].