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Air Force officials defend Guard cuts

Air Force leaders are fighting back against criticisms that the service made too many cuts to the Reserve component or failed to consult state-level Guard officials when it pulled together a budget.

The Air Force’s plan to cut about 5,100 guardsmen in fiscal 2013 — as well as scores of aircraft over the next five years — has drawn flak from lawmakers and top state-level National Guard leaders, who say the idea of making proportionately larger cuts to the Guard and Reserve versus active-duty troops reflects an outdated Cold War outlook in which a large standing military is necessary.

But Air Force leaders at the Pentagon said Wednesday that their cuts were reasonable and reflect a serious departure from Cold War era strategy.

“In the Cold War environment, you want to maintain as large a reserve component as possible,” said Maj. Gen. Mike Holmes, the Air Force’s assistant deputy chief of staff for operations, plans and requirements. “In this world we’re in now, with global power projections and more deployments, then we have to have the right balance.

“We’re going to continue to rely on our reserve component to make those deployments and help take some of that burden off, but we can’t take the mix too far toward that side or we’ll overtask them and we’ll get to the point where we can’t retain a force that they need to keep to be able to do the mission,” he said.

Holmes also echoed other Air Force leadership in calling the cuts to the Guard and Reserve a “balancing” of the force reflecting a decade of proportionately higher cuts to the active-duty component. The Air Force plan presented to Congress also cuts 3,900 active-duty airmen, as well as 900 reservists.

Several state-level National Guard leaders have also said that they don’t see the logic behind the Air Force’s proposal, and that all but top Guard leadership was left out of the decision-making process.

“This, to me, is totally out of character with the operating environment between the Air Force Reserve, the Air Guard and the active Air Force,” Maj. Gen. William Wofford, adjutant general of the Arkansas National Guard, said earlier this month. “Before, [the Guard] was always a full partner in the process, and this time it doesn’t feel like a partnership.”

Those Guard leaders have also criticized Air Force officials for letting them know about the scope of cuts at the same time as Capitol Hill staffers and others in Washington. But Maj. Gen. William Etter, the deputy director of the Air National Guard, said the Guard was “certainly there at the table” when the Air Force budget was being developed and vetted.

“It was pretty much an orchestrated time that everyone would find out,” Etter said. “They had a plan; they followed the plan. Whether you would tell someone six months early or six hours early is not going to change the difficult decisions required with a very large budget cuts.”