Off we go into the wild blue yonder,
Climbing high into the sun;
Here they come zooming to meet our thunder,
At 'em boys, Give 'er the gun!
Down we dive, spouting our flame from under,
Off with one heckuva roar!
We live in fame or go down in flame.
Hey! Nothing'll stop the U.S. Air Force!
Recent news reports reveal the disturbing fact that our U.S. Air Force has lost much of its “thunder” in recent months and is, according to some military experts, not even able to carry on its missions due to our current defense budget cuts which have left the Air Force short on parts and manpower.
As far back as November of 2012, Greg Baker, writer for the Associated Press, put it this way. “For decades, the U.S. Air Force has grown accustomed to such superlatives as unrivaled and unbeatable. These days, some of its key combat aircraft are being described with terms like geriatric, or decrepit.”
Jennifer Griffin, a Fox News Correspondent, visited the B-1 Bomber squadron at Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota last week, and found that out of twenty B-1 bombers at the base, only nine could fly.
Master Sgt. Bruce Pfrommer told her that even though the B-1 is central to our fight against ISIS, the available parts for the B-1 have become so scarce that maintenance squadrons have had to scavenge spare parts from a desert aircraft junkyard or from airplanes in museums.
According to Pfrommer, "It's not only the personnel that are tired, it's the aircraft that are tired as well.” Pfrommer has been working on B-1 bombers for over 20 years. He said the planes he worked on when he first began had 1,000 flight hours on them, but now some of them are pushing over 10,000 flight hours.
The AF is now short 4000 airmen to maintain its fleet, and short 700 pilots to fly them.
Many of the Airmen reported feeling “burnt out and exhausted” due to the current pace of operations, and limited resources to support them.
Capt. Elizabeth Jarding, a B-1 pilot at Ellsworth who recently returned home after a six-month deployment to the Middle East in the war against ISIS, said they had cut their flying program in half in the last ten years.
While researching for this column, I learned that the B-1 is an amazing machine, one of the most lethal bombers in our military’s arsenal. It was designed in the early 1980’s to be a low-level deep strike penetrator to drop nuclear weapons on the Soviet Union, but now has evolved into a close-air support bomber.
The B-1 can fly for ten to twelve hours at a time high above the battlefield and can carry 50,000 pounds of weapons, mostly satellite-guided bombs.
Col. Gentry Boswell, commander of the 28th Bomb Wing at Ellsworth, spoke with pride about the capability of the aircraft to “put a 2000 pound weapon on a doorknob from 15 miles away in the dark of night, in the worst weather,” but his pride turned to discouragement as he had to acknowledge that only half of these supersonic bombers can actually fly right now.
The Air Force has been anticipating buying some new and updated aircraft but those plans will probably not materialize until the early 2020’s when all other federal spending will squeeze defense budgets further and faster.
Mackenzie Eaglen, writing on The National Interest website in 2014, says that Congress must step back and look at the collective impact of recent capacity and capability cuts on purchases of aircraft. There is virtually no slack left in America’s current Air Force to meet global peacetime and war plan demands, and the once mighty U.S. AF is now left to incrementally upgrade existing capabilities while abandoning transformational and leap-ahead investments.
According to the Defense Industry Daily, the F-15 fighters are under flight restrictions due to structural fatigue concerns, or grounded entirely.
Air Force Gen. Mark A. Welsh III made the case to modernize and remain a capable and ready force as the service requests $10 billion above current sequestration funding levels when he appeared before the House Appropriations Committee in February 2015.
Welsh said that the capability gap separating the U.S. Air Force from others is narrowing and requires modernization to help the service maintain its asymmetric advantage. “We know it won’t be easy and it will require accepting prudent operational risk in some mission areas for a period of time,” the general said, even as he asserted that “the option of not modernizing isn’t an option.”
He reminded the legislators that in 1990, the Air Force deployed to Operation Desert Storm with 188 fighter squadrons in its inventory but under the current budget the service will drop to just 49. Similarly, the Air Force had 511,000 active duty airmen in service during Desert Storm, but now operates with some 200,000 fewer today, he said.
The general warned that continuing to cut force structure to absorb the cost of readiness and modernization creates a risk of the Air
Force becoming too small to succeed.
Climbing high into the sun;
Here they come zooming to meet our thunder,
At 'em boys, Give 'er the gun!
Down we dive, spouting our flame from under,
Off with one heckuva roar!
We live in fame or go down in flame.
Hey! Nothing'll stop the U.S. Air Force!
Recent news reports reveal the disturbing fact that our U.S. Air Force has lost much of its “thunder” in recent months and is, according to some military experts, not even able to carry on its missions due to our current defense budget cuts which have left the Air Force short on parts and manpower.
As far back as November of 2012, Greg Baker, writer for the Associated Press, put it this way. “For decades, the U.S. Air Force has grown accustomed to such superlatives as unrivaled and unbeatable. These days, some of its key combat aircraft are being described with terms like geriatric, or decrepit.”
Jennifer Griffin, a Fox News Correspondent, visited the B-1 Bomber squadron at Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota last week, and found that out of twenty B-1 bombers at the base, only nine could fly.
Master Sgt. Bruce Pfrommer told her that even though the B-1 is central to our fight against ISIS, the available parts for the B-1 have become so scarce that maintenance squadrons have had to scavenge spare parts from a desert aircraft junkyard or from airplanes in museums.
According to Pfrommer, "It's not only the personnel that are tired, it's the aircraft that are tired as well.” Pfrommer has been working on B-1 bombers for over 20 years. He said the planes he worked on when he first began had 1,000 flight hours on them, but now some of them are pushing over 10,000 flight hours.
The AF is now short 4000 airmen to maintain its fleet, and short 700 pilots to fly them.
Many of the Airmen reported feeling “burnt out and exhausted” due to the current pace of operations, and limited resources to support them.
Capt. Elizabeth Jarding, a B-1 pilot at Ellsworth who recently returned home after a six-month deployment to the Middle East in the war against ISIS, said they had cut their flying program in half in the last ten years.
While researching for this column, I learned that the B-1 is an amazing machine, one of the most lethal bombers in our military’s arsenal. It was designed in the early 1980’s to be a low-level deep strike penetrator to drop nuclear weapons on the Soviet Union, but now has evolved into a close-air support bomber.
The B-1 can fly for ten to twelve hours at a time high above the battlefield and can carry 50,000 pounds of weapons, mostly satellite-guided bombs.
Col. Gentry Boswell, commander of the 28th Bomb Wing at Ellsworth, spoke with pride about the capability of the aircraft to “put a 2000 pound weapon on a doorknob from 15 miles away in the dark of night, in the worst weather,” but his pride turned to discouragement as he had to acknowledge that only half of these supersonic bombers can actually fly right now.
The Air Force has been anticipating buying some new and updated aircraft but those plans will probably not materialize until the early 2020’s when all other federal spending will squeeze defense budgets further and faster.
Mackenzie Eaglen, writing on The National Interest website in 2014, says that Congress must step back and look at the collective impact of recent capacity and capability cuts on purchases of aircraft. There is virtually no slack left in America’s current Air Force to meet global peacetime and war plan demands, and the once mighty U.S. AF is now left to incrementally upgrade existing capabilities while abandoning transformational and leap-ahead investments.
According to the Defense Industry Daily, the F-15 fighters are under flight restrictions due to structural fatigue concerns, or grounded entirely.
Air Force Gen. Mark A. Welsh III made the case to modernize and remain a capable and ready force as the service requests $10 billion above current sequestration funding levels when he appeared before the House Appropriations Committee in February 2015.
Welsh said that the capability gap separating the U.S. Air Force from others is narrowing and requires modernization to help the service maintain its asymmetric advantage. “We know it won’t be easy and it will require accepting prudent operational risk in some mission areas for a period of time,” the general said, even as he asserted that “the option of not modernizing isn’t an option.”
He reminded the legislators that in 1990, the Air Force deployed to Operation Desert Storm with 188 fighter squadrons in its inventory but under the current budget the service will drop to just 49. Similarly, the Air Force had 511,000 active duty airmen in service during Desert Storm, but now operates with some 200,000 fewer today, he said.
The general warned that continuing to cut force structure to absorb the cost of readiness and modernization creates a risk of the Air
Force becoming too small to succeed.
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