By Marina Malenic
To better prepare for the future, the Air Force must continue promoting irregular warfare training and recapitalize platforms used heavily in Afghanistan and Iraq, the service’s vice chief of staff said last week.
Gen. Philip Breedlove said unmanned aircraft continue to be in high demand and that the Air Force is prepared to maintain the “surge” of assets to theater.
“We’ve ramped up remotely piloted vehicle orbits from one in 2001 to 48 today,” Breedlove said. “We’ve given eyes to the ground commander that they never anticipated, and eyes that they cannot now live without.”
The general was speaking at the Air Force Association’s annual winter conference in Orlando on Feb. 17.
Breedlove said Air Force drone operators have had “assignments extended, leaves canceled, and test and training sorties foregone in order to fly and fill” combat requirements.
“We’ll need to incorporate these capabilities to a more normalized air expeditionary force structure, one that brings more predictability to our airmen’s lives,” he added.
While the Air Force continues to support current operations, Breedlove said the service must also be ready to deter future adversaries.
“There are potential adversaries who are currently developing capabilities and strategies that can test our ability to operate in those global commons around the world, key regions where some of our most vital national interests lie,” he said.
The service must still be able to contend with anti-access and area-denial environments, Breedlove said. The Air-Sea Battle concept, being developed jointly with the Navy, is one example of such activities.
“In the past, we’ve succeed by using temporary and sometimes ad hoc arrangements where our air and naval components have collaborated,” the general said. “Lacking an institutional underpinning, these institutional arrangements have not evolved.”
Further, new platforms like the next-generation bomber will keep the strategic force modernized. The general warned, however, that the new platform “will not be a vast and prohibitively expensive acquisition program.”
Breedlove also said the Air Force is devising a strategy to end the current practice of purchasing satellites on an individual basis–a practice that has proven very expensive- -rather than in block buy.
“These short-sighted acquisition strategies have caused production line breaks, parts obsolescence and inefficient use of labor, all of which have raised the cost of our satellite systems, reduced the number of spacecraft we can procure, and contributed to the fragility of our space industrial base,” he said.
The service’s new approach, the evolutionary acquisition for space efficiency, or EASE, will promote “block purchases of satellites, fixed-price contracts, stable research and development, and modified annual funding to cover the systems,” the general said.
“We face static or even declining real budgets, and certainly decreased purchasing power, yet we have to be prepared across the entire spectrum of operations,” he added.