BREAKING NEWS: Air Force secretary, chief of staff asked to resign

Mission Accomplished

Pentagon drives bad news off the front page.

Is this the end of the God Boys?

What should the top story of the day be? The fact that the Bush Administration has conclusively been caught lying to get us into a war?




Silly reader--the biggest story in the country is a horse that can run fast.

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The Air Force Times: 1:23PM

Chief of Staff Gen. T. Michael Moseley resigned this morning at a meeting with Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Moseley was summoned to an early morning meeting with Mullen to discuss a report on the Air Force’s problems handling nuclear weapons. The report, by Navy Adm. Kirkland Donald, director of naval nuclear propulsion, convinced Defense Secretary Robert Gates that senior officials should be held accountable.

Moseley resigned in response.

At the same time, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England was dispatched to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to meet with Air Force Secretary Michael W. Wynne, sources said, where he was expected to ask for Wynne’s resignation.

It is not clear how quickly these changes could take effect, and other senior officers could still be relieved in the wake of the Donald report.

Moseley could stay on until July or later, at Gates’ discretion.

Navy Capt. John Kirby, Mullen’s spokesman, declined to comment but did not deny the story. A Defense Department spokesman also did not comment.

It is not yet known how who will succeed Moseley and Wynne, but Air Force Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Duncan McNabb will likely become acting chief of staff.

The stunning development follows a series of high-profile scandals and disagreements between Air Force leadership and Gates in the past year, during which both the Pentagon and congressional leadership have increasingly expressed frustration about the Air Force’s top bosses.

Wynne became Air Force secretary in November 2005, and Moseley took office in September 2005. Moseley’s term expires in September 2009, and Wynne served at the pleasure of the president.

Moseley, a former fighter pilot, has been in the Air Force since 1972. Before becoming chief, he served as commander of U.S. Central Command Air Forces and then as vice chief of staff from August 2003 until September 2005.

Wynne served as an Air Force officer from 1966 until 1973 and then began a nearly 30-year career in the aerospace industry. He rose to become president of General Dynamics’ space division and general manager of space launch systems at Lockheed Martin. He re-entered government service in 2001 and served four years as principal deputy undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics.

While the simultaneous removal of the Air Force’s top civilian and uniformed leaders comes as a surprise, there has been speculation for months among defense insiders that one or both of them could be in trouble.

The Air Force has been rocked by a series of missteps during the past year, and Moseley and Wynne’s relationships with Gates, England and members of Congressional defense committees have steadily eroded.

Both men are well-liked personally, but that apparently was not enough to make up for a perceived lack of leadership.

More screenshots - notice how no one is paying attention to the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on manipulated intelligence:

Retention problems come to the Air Force

We have been quite diligent at this blog where recruiting and retention issues are concerned, but for the most part, those posts have focused on the Army.

Now the issue is affecting the highly-technical Air Force. All across enlisted career fields, re-enlistment rates are falling precipitously. Especially among young Airmen on whom the service is depending to attend NCO leadership school and become the next generation of senior NCOs. A chasm is emerging in the E-5 through E-7 ranks that will impact the service for decades to come.

Let's look at the numbers: In 2004 the Air Force retained 70% of her enlisted personnel who were eligible for a third hitch. By 2007, that number had fallen to 53%. The percentage of Airmen opting for an initial re-enlistment declined from 63% to 55%.

Warning bells started ringing last spring when the Air Staff realized that retention rates for Airmen with between one and fourteen years in service had fallen for nine consecutive months. The steepest decline was for those with between six and ten years in uniform. The percentage of those personnel opting to remain in service fell from 75% to 65% in less than a year.

Declining retention creates a downward spiral for career fields. While the demands on airmen remain steady or increase, there are fewer experienced NCOs to lead and mentor younger airmen. That, in turn, accelerates airmen into leadership positions for which they lack adequate training and experience and requires veteran NCOs to fill multiple roles. Those pressures, in turn, lead to more NCOs leaving, renewing the cycle.

The Air Force considers 11 Air Force Specialty Codes to be labeled “stressed” because of a combination of retention problems, positions left vacant and operational demands. Altogether, the career fields represent nearly 44,000 airmen, about 17 percent of the enlisted force.

The AFSCs include jobs that have historically been hard to fill because of tough fitness standards and a willingness to be on the front line or sometimes behind it — combat control, tactical air command and control, pararescue and explosive ordnance disposal.

But the other stressed career fields could come as a surprise — contracting, pavement and structural construction, vehicle operations, security forces, and computer and network technicians.

When re-enlistment rates among stressed career fields are examined, the declines are steep.

Among security forces, a career field in which airmen are often deployed for half the year, re-enlistment rates for third terms dropped from 59 percent in 2004 to 40 percent in 2007. During the same years, the re-enlistment rate for airmen agreeing to a second term dropped from 56 percent to 39 percent.

Among contracting specialists, third-term re-enlistments dove from 60 percent in 2004 to 19 percent in 2007.

But concerns aren’t limited to these stressed AFSCs.

Re-enlistment numbers for midcareer NCOs are also significantly down for career fields that aren’t officially considered stressed — such as boom operator, avionics technician, air battle manager, safety, aerial gunner, maintenance management analyst and surgical service.

The Air Staff looks at the problems with retention and tries to cast them as a possible consequence of the Air Force draw down of forces under Rumsfeld, but while there is blame aplenty to heap on Rummy, the drawdown is a very small part of the problem.

The Air Force has been used to plug holes that should be filled by Soldiers and Marines. Air Force personnel have been dying in Iraq - a conflict that never enjoyed support among the enlisted personnel and junior and mid-grade officers. In other words, the people whose shoulders it would fall upon were smart enough to see what was coming.

Now, they are leaving.

The next president needs to appoint a Secretary of Defense who understands the issues facing all of our branches of service, and who is smart enough to listen and develop strategies to stop the bleeding.

Wounded Vets Still Caught in Limbo While Congress Wrings Their Hands

A few weeks ago, the blogosphere went ballistic when the story about wounded veterans being ordered to repay enlistment/reenlistment/retention bonuses when they are injured or wounded and unable to complete their enlistment contract got picked up briefly by the M$M.

Congress immediately set about paying bipartisan lip service to the problem, with Senator Jeff Sessions (R, AL) and Congressman Jason Altmire (D, PA) both penning legislation to rectify the injustice. On Friday the Senate bill passed, and the House version is expected to pass today, but meek efforts at best have been made to work out compromise legislation before Congress heads out of town for three weeks for the holiday recess. Congress is planning on wrapping up all pending legislation by late Wednesday or early Thursday.

Aides to both Sessions and Altmire have said no direct talks to work out compromise legislation have taken place, in fact, Altmire aides said that they hope the Senate will pass the Altmire version without changes.

The main difference in the two bills involves retroactive payments to anyone who did not get their full bonus since 12 September 2001 when a combat injury was the reason for separation or discharge. The Senate bill, S 2400, the Wounded Warrior Bonus Equity Act, has the retroactive provision, and the House version, HR 3793, the Veterans Guaranteed Bonus Act, does not allow for any retroactive payment of bonuses.

Currently, the Pentagon leaves decisions about bonuses to the individual branches of service, “DoD does not preclude the services from paying out unpaid portions of bonuses when the service member is separated for no fault of their own,” said Pentagon spokesman Army Lt. Colonel Jonathan Withington. Withington said that unpaid “portions are paid out in full in the event of a death” and that members separated for disability “would receive a lump-sum payment of their unearned portions of any bonus.”

Sessions maintains that he is not convinced the services are following those guidelines and that is why the bonus guarantees should be set in law and should provide retroactive coverage.

I agree with Sessions on this one - his bill is the one that gives coverage to the wounded veterans that we went nuts about. Not covering the veterans who were the reason behind the legislation seems like locking the barn door after the horse has escaped, dontcha think?

We can be thankful no one was killed

Yesterday, as Americans in the Green Zone were finding a few minutes respite from the war with a traditional turkey dinner, mortars rained down and the P.A. system crackled to life warning everyone to "duck and cover" and stay away from windows.

Ten mortars were lobbed into the heavily-fortified international zone at about 5:00 p.m. Baghdad time. Fortunately no one was killed or injured.

Maj. Brad Leighton confirmed the area was hit by indirect fire, a term the U.S. military uses for rocket or mortar attacks, but said nobody was killed. Some people were wounded, but they were not coalition forces, he said, declining to specify numbers or nationalities of those injured.

An Iraqi police officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to release the information, said the blasts were caused by mortars, but that could not be independently confirmed.

The heavily fortified area, which houses the U.S. Embassy and thousands of American troops and contractors, along with the Iraqi government's headquarters, has frequently been hit by rockets or mortars. But the attacks have tapered off amid a lull of violence in the capital and surrounding areas.

Yesterdays mortar attack was the most serious attack on the fortified Green Zone since July, when it was barraged by at least a dozen mortar shells. In that attack, three people were killed and eighteen wounded.