The Readiness Crisis of the U.S. Air Force:
A Review and Diagnosis

Project on Defense Alternatives Briefing Report #10 Carl Conetta and Charles Knight 22 April 1999

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[Table of Contents] [Executive Summary] [Sections 1-3] [Section 4] [Bibliography]

5. Conclusion

By some accounts, the Air Force today is suffering from a systemic readiness crisis brought on by a combination of post-Cold War defense retrenchment and increased operational activity. Although not a consensus view, this one has certainly "won the day" in setting the parameters of future defense spending. Nonetheless, our examination of the Air Force's recent readiness problems and of longer-term trends in readiness and Optempo finds little to support this view. Neither talk of crisis, nor crisis spending are warranted.

Our review of three recent areas of concern -- base operations support, the pilot inventory, and mission capable rates -- finds the problems in all three areas to have specific, near-term causes. And, in all three cases, discrete policy or management decisions have played a key role in precipitating "crisis." In two of the areas -- pilot inventory and mission capable rates -- the problems are tied to management errors or misjudgments. In the third area, base operations support, the source of difficulty has been the tug-of-war between the Air Force and the Congress over the disposition of excess service infrastructure.

Turning to the Optempo issues: our review finds evidence of only a modest increase in overall activity levels since the Cold War's end. By and large, the real problem associated with Optempo has been its distribution within the Air Force, which has been uneven across systems and commands. This has generated pockets of real stress in the service, and pockets of dissatisfaction as well. These outcomes are not strictly a product of increased Optempo, but instead a result of how it is managed. A variety of options are available to the Air Force to improve its management of Optempo -- and it is pursuing some of these vigorously.

Our review of the various activities that contribute to Air Force Optempo found that the narrow fixation on "peace operations" in the current readiness discussion is unwarranted and impedes a practical understanding of Optempo and how it might be tamed. Peace operations account for only a small portion of Air Force flying hours and are not the sole, nor often even the primary, detractor from training time. One fruitful avenue of innovation blocked by the fixation on peace operations is the redesign of training regimes to reduce their time and resource requirements.

Generally we have found that the current readiness discussion proceeds without much attention to the issue's context or history -- beyond blanket, rhetorical allusions to the "hollow force" of the 1970s. Mission capable rates, cannibalization rates, unit readiness scores, pilot shortages -- all are cited without reference to the types of background data necessary for their accurate interpretation. When comparative approaches are adopted, they often resort to baselines that are inappropriate or idiosyncratic -- such as the choice of a singular peak readiness year to serve as a standard for assessing today's experience.

In this light, it is not surprising that the proposed solution to recent readiness problems -- a six-year all-service spending increase of $110+ billion -- bears no relationship to the demonstrable nature or extent of these problems. Beside the unnecessary financial cost incurred, this hasty broad-brush approach cannot deliver policy that is stable over time. The recent boost in defense expenditures was born of unique political circumstances and a bullish financial optimism that cannot last. The nation's armed forces are today ten years deep into their post-Cold War transformation -- and yet, there are policy shocks still to come.

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[Table of Contents] [Executive Summary] [Sections 1-3] [Section 4] [Bibliography]

Citation: Carl Conetta and Charles Knight, The Readiness Crisis of the U.S. Air Force: A Review and Diagnosis, Project on Defense Alternatives Briefing Report #10. Cambridge, MA: Commonwealth Institute, April 1999.
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