Policy Forum

General Michael E. Ryan, 
Air Force Chief of Staff
AFA Convention
Washington DC
September 12, 2000
Chief’s Press Conference, Q&A

Q&A

Q: This is a question on Air Force readiness at the moment. More specifically, are you concerned about whether the military is getting dragged into the presidential campaign on this issue?

General Ryan: Let me answer the second one first. I haven’t seen much of that quite honestly.

On the first question, how is Air Force readiness? As most of you know, we’ve been in decline for some time. Our mission capability rates on our aircraft have decreased 10 percent over the last 10 years. It is just on a steady decline. That is because we have not been recapitalizing them and we underfunded some of our spares. We have put a great effort into funding spares for our aircraft for the last couple of years with help from the administration and Congress.

Straight shooting here, we have seen some indicators that the decline in readiness may be leveling out, but it isn’t there yet and it certainly isn’t on its way back up for the Air Force. The Air Force has a different problem from some of the other services. We are heavily reliant upon equipment and as it ages out, it gets harder and harder to maintain. We are in an aging process that, even if we execute every program that is on the books right now out through the year 2015, we are going to age another 10 years in those 15 years. We have been saying that for three years, it is still a fact. We are just not re-capitalizing the force.

Q: Governor Bush says the Clinton-Gore administration has demoralized the force and short-changed defense. What is your assessment?

General Ryan: I will say that I think we have been underfunded, but you have to go back into the context in which that under funding occurred. That is, we had a balanced budget agreement between the administration and Congress that said we were going to hold down military spending. The QDR held that as one of its tenets because that was a requirement for this nation to recover and to balance the budget. We have now balanced the budget.

There are some demands that are on our forces on a day-to-day basis that need revitalization. We’ll go through this on the QDR as we work our way through it next year. It will be one of the issues, I think, for all the services.

Q: How do you think the Air Force will do in recruiting pilots?

General Ryan: Better than I thought we were going to do, quite honestly. We thought we were going to go to eighteen hundred pilots short. That was our projections early on before we got some help from the administration and Congress in getting some bonuses to the pilots that were needed. Those bonuses allowed us to give people some security and an ability to plan ahead in their lives, which I think was necessary in that they had lots of alternatives on the outside.

Right now we are about twelve hundred pilots short. I see us decreasing that in the next few years – five years – to about seven hundred and working our way out of this low-pilot force.

What we’ve done also for the long-term is instituted a 10-year active duty service commitment and that will help a lot. It will mean that our force in the first 10 years that they serve, 60 percent of that will be experienced. It takes about four years to experience a pilot and then if they stay with us for the other six years, then 60 percent of the serving company-grade pilots and that is the issue for us – keeping our experience. That will help when it kicks in. But it doesn’t kick in until the end of the decade.

Q: Do you see safety issues surfacing due to deployments.

General Ryan: No. I don’t see safety issues associated with that. A year ago we instituted the AEF rotation schedule which puts them in a vulnerability period for about 90 days. They may deploy during that time or they may be on call. But it gives them a predictable schedule. We were having trouble in our old construct with that predictable schedule and I think that has helped a lot in giving stability to the force.

Q: What will be the Air Force position during the upcoming hearings on readiness?

General Ryan: I don’t think our message changed in the last three years. The issue in this particular hearing will be readiness. I am going to dust off my readiness hearing from last year, update it and submit it.

Q: What about modernization?

General Ryan: I can say that we went on the record last year and the year before that we needed about $5 billion a year in the U.S. Air Force if we were just going to get us back to level. That didn’t recapitalize the force. That was just an infusion. We got about half of that. But over the three years, things continue to build a more requirements come in and surprises come in. We have unfunded requirements. All the services do and we’ve been very up-front about it.

Q: Are deployments still to high?

General Ryan: Our force is actually a balance between day-to-day OPTEMPO, which is the AEF schedule, and the need to be the first responders, of which we are, for either of the major regional contingencies. Over 95 percent of our forces are called in one or the other in the first 30 days. Our requirements for readiness levels are very very high. We can’t go into bath tubs in between deployments, because the ones that come back have to be just as ready to deploy as when they left. That creates a balancing force that we’ve been using as AEF schedule to try to meter the OPTEMPO on the units.

Quite honestly, to help us spread the wealth here our Guard and Reserve force have stepped right up to the bat. What you would think about the definitions of Guard and Reserve, have in fact changed in what they do. Almost 20 percent of our aviation packages that we rotate overseas, have Guard and Reserve associated with it. Ten percent of our expeditionary combat support is taken up by the Guard and Reserve. They step up to it and if we give them 15 months notice, they will be there for us. We know we aren’t a one-trick pony here. We do the day-to-day OPTEMPO small-scale contingency on one hand and we must be prepared for either of the major regional contingencies to pop up. We are first in.

Q: You’ve heard about the shake down in the Russian military. Give us a quality statement about the Russian air command. Are you concerned about their stability?

General Ryan: I can’t speak for their future. But they have been under significant pressure from a financial standpoint. They are just not flying at the rates that they did in the past and they have a lot of aircraft that are parked.

I know Mr. Putin has said they are also going to downsize the force because they can’t sustain that size a force, and that will be a tough road to hoe. We know, we’ve gone through a 40 percent downsize in the Air Force over the past 14 years and that is a very difficult proposition.

Q: How do you plan to retain people with technical backgrounds?

General Ryan: That is an excellent question because it is not only our technical people but some of our specialists that people on the outside wouldn’t consider quite technical. I said it before and it caused some ripples, but I’ll say it again, we have to step back sometime and look at our pay and rank linkages. Pay for capability may be something that we need to move to. We currently do it through bonuses. We specifically pay more to people who re-up with us with bonuses. It increases their pay, no question. We do it with pilots with bonuses. We do it with doctors. We do it with 75 percent of our AFSCs--our skills in the Air Force--we have some kind of bonus attached to that skill, which is, in effect focusing and paying for capability. We are going to have to look at that in this decade to make sure that we can adequately compensate people who work in the military for the skills that they have. Particularly, because they are so portable to the outside and because in this booming economy they in demand. They are drug free, they are smart, they know how to lead, they know how to follow. They are family people. That is exactly what a lot of the large industries and the small ones in the United States want. We want to keep them.

Q: From an Air Force perspective, what is the impact of long-term health care costs in the future?

General Ryan: It is substantial. Providing quality health care out into the future and to include our retirees in that future has very large financial impacts. But I think those impacts are not just in the military, but they are across this nation. I was talking to some of the congressmen and senators this morning and they are experiencing that same thing in rural America. How to keep up with an inflation rate in the medical side which is much different than it is in your day-to-day business. We all have to struggle with that one as a nation, as well as the services, but I think it will be a big impact.

It is great being with you and thanks for coming to this convention. Write a good story about some of our young people. They deserve it. Thanks.