Message posted by Ron on April 12, 2013 at 19:27:18 PST:
Weapons school another casualty of the sequester
USAF is shutting down its weapons school at Nellis AFB, NV, for the time being due to budget sequester-related cuts, revealed Gen Michael Hostage, head of the Air Combat Command, yesterday during a talk in Washington DC.
"That is going to affect the Air Force for years," as the availability of certified "patch wearers" will have wider effects on readiness as time goes on, he told the audience at the Atlantic Council event.
Hostage said he is truncating the weapons school's current class and will graduate it without the final capstone exercise as a result of the cutbacks.
In addition to the weapons school closing, ACC this week implemented "tiered readiness" over a large portion of the combat air forces. As the sequester bills pile on top of the bills for paying overseas contingency operations out of the ACC's base operations budget, the steady toll on readiness is going to build, said Hostage. "This is challenging within a normal fiscal process," he said, but the flexibility to manage the CAF is decreasing the longer the sequester goes on. "The degradation is not something immediately visible," he said, noting that on March 8, he put nine fighter squadrons and three bomber squadrons in a low state of readiness. As time wears on, getting those units back to a higher state will be increasingly challenging as currencies begin to lapse, he said.
Meanwhile, although the Air Combat Command has started to stand down some of its units due to the sequester's effect on operating budgets and flying hours, the Air Mobility Command (AMC) won't be following suit, AMC chief Gen. Paul Selva told defense reporters yesterday in Washington, DC. That's because the AMC has "two streams of income," said Selva: its operations and maintenance budget, and the funds it gets from other organizations - such as the Army - that "buy" its cargo-moving services. The O&M spending is way down, such that aerial tanker pilots are only getting bare proficiency training flights - once a month - but cargo operations are proceeding relatively apace, he said.
"User activity in Afghanistan," said Selva, provides "a fairly robust foundation on which to operate" the lift portion of the fleet. In a military crisis, Selva said it would take "not too much time" to get the whole airlift enterprise back up to speed. However, he said he is having to say "no" to certain missions. No jump training for airborne troops, for example, "if they're not slated against a deployment," and no cross-country aerial refueling just to move an airplane, he noted.
The AMC continues to fly a minimum of about 500 sorties a day, and "we don't anticipate" needing to stand any units down entirely, said Selva during the meeting yesterday.
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