The Air Force plans to eliminate 21 general officer billets in fiscal 2015, as part of a review directed by Secretary Deborah Lee James earlier this year.

The Air Force currently has 208 general officers assigned to Air Force billets and about 100 more are assigned to joint jobs. The reduction will come from the Air Force billets, James said in a Sept. 8 interview.

"There's about 208, and we're headed down to about 187," she said.

The number of Air Force general officers has held steady at 305 since fiscal 2012, while the overall end strength has dropped from 332,800 in 2012 to 327,600 this year. Fiscal 2015 plans, which Congress has not yet approved, call for a further reduction in end strength to 310,900, while the general officer numbers would remain 305. James told Air Force Times in May that those numbers, submitted to Congress in February, were being "scrubbed."

In the Sept. 8 interview, she said the Air Force is getting "very close" to identifying which general officer billets to eliminate.

"We are making progress. We've got our end point, we have to finalize the specifics within all of that," she said.

Of the 305 general officers in the fiscal 2015 budget plan, 13 are generals, 45 are lieutenant generals, 101 are major generals and 146 are brigadier generals.

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