By Marina Malenic
In keeping with a Pentagon plan to dedicate a portion of the department’s permanent budget to irregular warfare capabilities, the Air Force is examining how to institutionalize its efforts in that domain, the service’s top uniformed official said last week.
“We will have a meeting in June where the Air Force leadership is going to decide what the institutional architecture will be for the commitment we think is necessary in this mission space,” Norton Schwartz, the service’s chief of staff, said following an April 24 speech at the Brookings Institution. “I think that a wing-size unit, at least to get started, is not unlikely.”
Earlier this month, Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced his proposed Fiscal Year 2010 budget recommendations, including a renewed emphasis on irregular warfare and funding of related hardware in the Pentagon’s base budget. Such programs have, for the duration of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, been funded through war supplemental allocations.
In addition to changes in organizational structure, the air service is considering a request for a manned light attack aircraft optimized for irregular missions.
“This is part of the question–do we need a light strike aircraft…[for] building partner capacity as well as, perhaps, more organic kinds of IW support missions?” he said.
Schwartz said he sees such an aircraft serving as a training platform for both U.S. military pilots and partner air forces, as well as a tool in counter-terrorism and counterinsurgency missions. He noted that Gates has asked the services to “minimize those things which are single purpose,” and that such an aircraft would be consistent with this multi-mission paradigm.
“When you get into the general purpose forces, it seems to me the way ahead is to have assets that can easily work both low end and higher end kinds of requirements,” Schwartz added.
The United States has not used propeller-driven combat aircraft since the Vietnam War. The Air Force currently uses the Raytheon [RTN] Hawker Beechcraft (HBC) T-6A II Texan as a training system to qualify pilots for all the services.
“If we had a primary trainer that is for basic pilot training that could be easily reconfigured into a light strike platform–and then you would have a cadre of instructors…who could make that transition quickly to a building partner capacity role in the same airplane, and the same crew, and perhaps folks who we have arranged to have language skills that’s a part of their repertoire–that is a very attractive way to solve this problem,” Schwartz said.
He also mentioned the possibility of creating new career paths that would help maintain a “sharp edge in irregular warfare.”
“The Air Force, along with [Special Operations Command], has a modest capability in train-and-assist,” he said, referring to training of foreign military and police forces in a hostile environment. “I think it’s a fair question about whether we should scale that up to meet the needs of this kind of fight.”