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Policy change means most able to deploy

About this time last year, Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz huddled with his war planners to figure out how to get more medical evacuation helicopters to Afghanistan.

Schwartz offered up the aircraft used to teach pilots to fly the HH-60G Pave Hawk, the service’s combat search-and-rescue helicopter. In the past, the Weapons School instructors at Nellis Air Force Base, Nev., hadn’t been deployed because the top brass considered their educational mission too vital.

A new policy emerged that wintry day, one that put war fighting before training.

“We got very direct guidance from the chief,” recalled Maj. Gen. Marke Gibson, director of operations for the deputy chief of staff for operations. “The chief said, ‘We’re not going to have Americans over there dying while we’re worried about a weapons instructor course.’ ”

Although most air expeditionary force deployment changes aren’t as dramatic as the one Schwartz laid forth, the Air Force has steadily tightened deployment exemptions — from yanking medical waivers to cutting training assignments.

Today, almost every airman who has completed technical training has been assigned to an AEF grouping, according to Col. Marc Reece, chief of the Air Staff’s War and Mobilization Planning and Policy Division.

A grouping assignment does not mean every airman will deploy during his four- to six-month AEF vulnerability period, but it does mean that virtually every trained airman without a medical exemption or legal problem could go to war if there is the demand from combatant commanders.

Some airmen have jobs that make them less likely to deploy, Reece said.

An enlisted airman who controls a satellite, for example, is less likely to get called because his role already supports combat commanders.

Because getting new recruits through basic training is a high priority, military training instructors are often held out of deployments unless no one else in their career field is available.

Airmen in South Korea on yearlong unaccompanied tours are already considered deployed.

The final decision on who deploys and when is usually left to squadron commanders, Reece said. The Air Force Personnel Center sends out requirements, but squadron commanders assign airmen to their AEF vulnerability time and fill the deployments for which their squadron is tagged.

Aircraft squadrons and their associated maintenance units deploy based on schedules set more than a year in advance, but events often rewrite those plans.

Lt. Col. Mick Harper, commander of the 34th Weapons Squadron, recalled he learned on Super Bowl Sunday — Feb. 1 — that the 34th would have to shutter its training course and deploy to Afghanistan for three months.

By March, Harper was in Afghanistan at Camp Bastion Airfield with three Pave Hawks and nearly 50 airmen.

“We were there for 90 days. Nobody had a day off,” Harper said. “It made time go faster.”

On daily flights, the squadron flew “casualty evacuation” missions primarily to care for wounded and injured Marines, Special Forces and troops from Great Britain and Denmark.

The 34th returned to Nellis in time to restart classes in July and to graduate two students Dec. 11.

Flying lifesaving missions outweighed the difficulties of canceling one six-month course, Harper said.

“It’s amazing when you turn your head [in the cockpit] and see a pararescueman reinflating a soldier’s lung,” Harper said. “I was proud to have a role saving lives.”

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