The Airlift Question

The Airlift Question: One of the big questions percolating in Air Force circles remains the strategic airlift capability that will be needed to support the increase in size of the Army and Marine Corps. The issue became even murkier this week with the comments of Vice Adm. Steve Stanley, the joint staff’s director of force structure, resources, and assessment. Going against the grain of everything that we have heard USAF officials and even Army officials say, Stanley said that the strategic airlift requirement won’t necessarily change in the years ahead as ground forces grow in number. “Our strategic lift requirement is based on different war-fighting scenarios,” the admiral said on Feb. 4 while discussing the Pentagon’s $515.4 billion spending request for Fiscal 2009. “Just because we grew the size of the ground forces doesn't mean that our predictions about the percentage of those forces that need to be rapidly deployed, like the strategic airlift, has changed. It means that the force that we need to have available on a day-to-day basis for rotational type missions—deployment missions—has grown. So it's not directly related, but the department is going to be updating those mobility capability studies.” Come again? (For more on strategic airlift, read The C-17 and the Airlift Question).

2/6/2008

Verbatim

Preemptive Action
"Since the [Defense] Department's acceptance of the independent estimates last fall, we've been, in just about every respect, acting as if the program were in a Nunn-McCurdy breach. ... We've been taking all of the mitigating and corrective action that we would take as if there were a Nunn-McCurdy breach."
—Air Force Secretary Michael Donley, discussing with reporters the restructure of the F-35 strike fighter program announced in February 2010 and the probability that the program will soon exceed Nunn-McCurdy cost-monitoring thresholds that would necessitate, per US law, a program review and corrective steps, Washington, D.C., March 2, 2010.

Verbatim

Message for Grandma
"She has working for her as a citizen in the United States an Air Force Reserve that has some very talented, capable, patriotic, and willing individuals doing the business to keep this nation free. Just like her generation—the 'Greatest Generation'—was, I am very proud of the folks that we have got. If not the second greatest, then they are an extension of the greatest generation and they are ready, willing, and able to do the things that she would want them to do to make sure we keep our freedoms."
—Lt. Gen. Charles Stenner, Air Force Reserve chief, responding to a reporter's question on what the reporter should tell his 85-year-old grandmother to convey to her the importance of Air Force Reservists to the nation's security, Orlando, Fla., Feb. 19, 2010.