Foundation Forum

Brigadier General David S. Sibley
Assistant Vice Commander
Air Force Reserve
Global Presence--The Reserve Perspective
Mid-America AFA Symposium
St. Louis
May 3, 1996

Thank you, General Shaud. It is my pleasure to be here at the AFA Symposium.

I am going to talk about the Air Force Reserve and where we are going. I'll look a little bit at some of the future roles and missions that the folks on roles and missions have been looking at.

The good news is the Air Force has truly created a Total Force which is model for the rest of DoD.

As I discuss our standard mission let me clarify a bit of terminology for you. Unit equipped simply refers to those flying squadrons, over 40 in the Air Force Reserve, that own, maintain and fly their own airplanes. Associate Reserve units are co-located with active duty C-141, C-5, or C-17 wings and the Air Force Reserve associate wing with air crews and maintainers also fly those very same airplanes. It is a very cost effective program and a core competency not only for the Air Force Reserve but for the Air Force as a whole.

Air Reserve Technicians comprise less than 20 percent of the Air Force Reserve and are full-time, DoD civilians scattered throughout the workforce. They keep the Air Force Reserve flying 365 days a year. Most Air Reserve technicians are in the maintenance core to keep the airplanes turning.

The Individual Mobilization Augmentee [IMA] program has about 12,000 members who are individual reservists assigned to active duty headquarters to make up wartime staffing shortfalls.

There are about 200 Statutory tour officers who are simply Reservists called back on active duty to serve at an active duty headquarters. During my over 30 years in the Air Force, I ve had tours at USAFE and also at the Pentagon and a total of 17 years active duty time. The rest is in the Air Force Reserve.

Our traditional Reservist is the heart of our program and involves 60,000 Reservists who keep the airplanes flying and keep the Air Force Reserve moving 24 hours a day and 365 days a year. The Air Force is a model for the rest of the services, simply because reservists control the Air Force Reserve program.

The Chief of the Air Force Reserve, Maj. Gen. Bob McIntosh, works in the Pentagon. He is also the Commander of the Air Force Reserve and works directly for General Fogleman. There are two branches to the Air Force Reserve program. The Individual Mobilization Augmentee branch is centrally managed out of the Air Reserve Personnel Center in Denver, Colorado. They also handle all the Air Force Reserve and National Guard personnel records. The unit program, is managed at AFRES Headquarters at Robins Air Force Base [Ga.]. We look like any other Air Force MAJCOM with three numbered Air Forces and flying units underneath those three numbered Air Forces.

AFRES units are spread around the country. As the BRAC [Base Realignment and Closure Commission] closed an active base, it often left our co-located Air Force Reserve unit to inherit the base. For example March [AFB, Calif.] is now a Reserve Air Field. Despite the push to reduce the civilian workforce in DoD, every time we inherit one of these bases, we have to grow about 300 to 400 full-time people to provide the base operating support that was previously done by the active duty host before BRAC closed the active duty base. This is a difficult process for us to work at the Pentagon.

We have a little over 60 flying squadrons flying everything from the C-5 to the F-16. The most recent acquisition for the Air Force Reserve was a B-52 squadron at Barksdale [AFB, La.]. In the associate business, we share airplanes with our active duty counterparts, the most recent unit acquisition being the C-17 business at Charleston [AFB, S.C.] as that base phases out of the C-141 business and into C-17s.

Our Air Combat forces include F-16s, A-10s, tactical airlift with C-130s, and rescue operations. The Air Force Reserve is also very large in the air mobility business.

Our folks are scattered throughout eight different commands. Air Mobility Command is our big brother in this business compared to the Guard which has a higher ratio supporting Air Combat Command.

Our force structure has very few on Statutory Tours (2 percent), while Air Reserve Technicians (12 percent) and civilians (6 percent) make up the full-time end strength that keeps the program going all the time, and our Individual Mobilization Augmentees make up about 15 percent of the total.

Many people don't know that Major General McIntosh is in the Pentagon with about 100 folks on the Air Staff but he also has a headquarters at Robins Air Force Base, where we have approximately 1,000 people, about half civilian and half military. In fact, about half of our military at Robins and in the Pentagon are active duty members. It lets the active force learn more about the Air Force Reserve and also brings active duty expertise to our headquarters.

In general, our people are a little bit older and have a little bit more flying time than the active force. We draw a lot of our folks from active duty a key to our success. Approximately 80 percent of our yearly recruits come to us of active duty with 75 percent of those from the Air Force. This is a good news story. Even if a young man or woman has decided they don't want to stay on active duty, we, the taxpayer, have not lost that valuable, highly skilled, highly trained asset for our national defense. That is important.

We have the same training and equipment, and we train to the same standards that the active duty force does we take the same inspections that the active duty Air Force does. An operational readiness inspection of a C-130, Air Force Reserve plane is the same operational readiness inspection as an active duty C-130 and it is given by the same people in Air Combat Command.

We bring significant contributions to the Air Force. Our associate aircrews provide 39 percent of the C-141 and C-5 airlift capability. In two mission areas we provide a unique capability by flying 100 percent of the aerial spray missions and weather reconnaissance with our Hurricane Hunters.

In the support functions, we bring much of the aerial port and combat logistics capability. The Guard and Reserve combined bring 50 percent or more of the capability in things like tactical airlift and tankers to include associate tankers.

I want to pause just for a second here and talk about that because it is very easy for our active duty friends to get the impression we like what we are doing, and they just can ask us for more and more. Let me correct this impression. The force mix right now is probably about right. We may have gone too far in some areas by transferring missions into the Guard and Reserve. It has changed our relatively low peacetime operational tempo in the Reserve Component to where we are today. Growth is not necessarily good for us. Remember, 80 percent of our people come to us with prior service. That keeps our costs down, and makes us very cost effective force because we don't have to grow many of our own. If that active duty pool dries up much more, we are going to have to start growing our own, and training our own. The cost of these Air Reserve Components are going to start growing as well.

The Air Force is facing major decisions related to force structure whether to take the force structure out entirely to pay bills or whether to transfer missions into the Reserve Component.

We bring 20 percent of the force capability to the Air Force with only three percent of the Air Force budget. Again, this is because our training costs are down, and we don't have things like R&D costs that the active forces does.

We've been talking about going into the 21st Century, but how will there be enough money to get there and sustain us once we are there.

When I was working in the Pentagon as a programmer and General Fogleman was a two-star, we had a $100 billion a year budget in the Air Force. That is going down hill and some say this decline will continue.

A year ago, Time magazine reported a study where the public said more money can be taken out of the defense budget. Our force structure today was based upon the Bottom Up Review force structure which was a lower level than the JCS Base Force. Now we seem to have annual reviews looking at how we are getting to the fight, how we are going to provide theater lift and air refueling as we continue the drawdown and pull back from the overseas locations. We kept downsizing and downsizing until we got to today s particular force structure. The Cold War active duty force structure is a thing of the past. We are in fact getting back towards our roots as a militia nation.

As we close major installations, reduce force structure, and reduce civilian end strength, active duty military strength has dropped from over 600,000 less than 10 years ago to below 400,000 right now. Hopefully, we are not going to get much lower than the 385,000 projected.

The drawdown has also impacted Air Force Reserve airplanes, but nowhere near the reductions that the active duty has taken. You don't get a lot of money out of the Defense budget by eliminating part-time force structure. Basically, we gave up a lot of force structure in the fighter business, but we've managed to convert to bigger airplanes. In the associate program, we have experienced a little growth in the C-17 business while the C-141 numbers come down.

Our IMA program hasn't been hit at all right now, but the unit program has come down considerably, but again, no where near the percentage as the active duty force structure.

At the same time, our Ops Tempo is going up. From the Korean War to about 1990, in 38 years, we averaged 10 operations around the globe. During the past five years this has jumped to 28 to include a lot of humanitarian relief that previously wasn't one of our programs.

The Air Force Reserve has been very busy around the globe. Right now, we have tankers supporting fighter operations out of Aviano [Italy], and we also have some rescue folks in the desert enforcing the no-fly zone over Iraq. The Total Force is at work. At Aviano, our Reserve tankers and A-10 units are swapping out with Air National Guard units. We have Air Force Reserve F-16 squadrons who have rotated back to the states. We are truly a seamless Air Force.

In the USAFE [U. S. Air Forces in Europe] theater, there are Reserve medical units on six month orders, all volunteers. As I mentioned before, you can't do much without the Reserve and the Guard because of the large percent of capability in the s. . This is putting a strain on this strategic triad of forces Family, Reservist and Employer. It is no longer the same Air Force Reserve that I joined, or the same Air Force Reserve we had just five to 10 years ago. Our challenge as senior leaders is to prevent one of these sides from blowing out the strategic triad and have this thing collapse.

An average civilian probably spend 221 days working and the other 144 days in play or recreation. An Air Force Reservist in a support role, a maintainer or aerial port technician, is putting in about 60 of those "play" days and working for the Air Force Reserve. Our aircrews, however, place a strain on that strategic triad. There are only a few days where they don't have anything to do. The rest of the time they are working their civilian job or in uniform, voluntarily, flying Air Force Reserve and Air Force missions around the globe.

Are they feeling the strain? Yes, a little bit. Although the majority still say "no", they are starting to feel the strain. Are we demanding too much? The majority say, "No," but more and more are starting to say, "Yes, it is starting to hurt."

We continue to meet our peacetime commitments with volunteers. The active duty force tells us what they would like as far as force structure and where and when, and then we provide it. It is very simple. It works very well. To meet our wartime requirements, we will have to go to a call-up because of all the force structure that has transferred into the Reserve and Guard.

As we move on towards the future, we are looking at new roles and missions. Some things we would not have looked at five years ago because they are peacetime intensive for us, which is not necessarily cost effective and heavily requires TDY not necessarily ideal for the Reserve Component.

We are in space already with a satellite tracking squadron at Falcon [AFB, Colo.] and are looking at expanding that role. We are looking at starting up a Combat Camera unit as well. We are into Information Warfare.

We've been asked to look at Battle Staff Augmentation for 7th Air Force, and we are going to do that. It provides continuity in their battle staff and keeps the same folks coming back to train their young active duty members, who come over there and work all the exercises in PACAF [Pacific Air Forces].

AWACS is a mission we probably would not have thought was a good idea for the Reserve Components five years ago. It requires a lot of TDY and is a peacetime intensive mission. But, we are in it now, and we will do it well.

The Air Force Reserve can do any mission the Air Force is doing, it just is a matter of how much do we all want to take? The more peacetime intensive it is, the more expensive the mission gets. Eventually you can get to a point where it is not cost effective to transfer a mission into the Reserve Component. We have to be careful that we balance those missions.

We are back to the schoolhouse business again at Barksdale. Five years ago, we came out and now we are going back in again.

We are looking long and hard at the request of General Fogleman and AETC [Air Education and Training Command] whether or not we can augment IP [Instructor Pilot] shortfalls by bringing Reservists and Guardsmen into that business, primarily in the fighter track in the T-38s. We don't know how many of those folks we'll find, but we are looking right now.

This summarizes where we have been and where we are going. Reservists also understand how very important it is for us to be out there telling the Air Force story to the public. We are tell the public why we need more C-17s and why we need the F-22.

Thanks very much.

GEN. SHAUD: If you could take a few questions. In your "Critical Triad," you've got your folks, families, employers. What are you doing to inform the employer and how is that going?

BRIG. GEN. SIBLEY: It is going very well. As you all know the Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve is an important and active program for us. In the Air Force Reserve, we periodically host employers, and bring them into Air Force Reserve headquarters. We have our three numbered Air Force commanders as well as the Vice Commander, myself, and General McIntosh all there. We spend two days with employers talking about their problems and how we contribute to Air Force programs.

We recently sent out a survey to the employers asking 1) Do you know you have Reservists; 2) What do you think about it;; 3) Are they giving you enough notification that they need to go; and 4) How long can you stand to have them gone? For the "How long can you stand to have them gone," the most chosen answer, was "As long as it takes to get the job done."

GEN. SHAUD: Dave, thank you very much.

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