Force Structure Changes
Each year Air Force officials provide a force structure announcement to Congress outlining the service's intent to realign, consolidate and enhance unit operations. This announcement addresses the president's budgeted force structure, realignment and management actions required to achieve efficiencies, modernize or make organizational changes.
It specifies the force structure changes the total force experienced - active duty, Guard and Reserve. Before making any decisions concerning major force movements, Air Force officials said they'd fully comply with the spirit and requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act.
The FY04 force structure realignment results in a total decrease of 5099 authorizations (2260 military authorizations and 2839 civilian authorizations), and 1055 drill authorizations. This realignment of active-duty and civilian manpower authorizations will better support the service's highest-priority mission requirements.
The Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) imposes a "new steady state" of accelerated operations and personnel tempo, as well as a demand for unprecedented speed, agility, and innovation in adapting to unconventional and unexpected threats. To address this need for force shaping, the Air Force is taking a two-prong approach to rebaselining its manpower books.
First, the service will eliminate unfunded and unfilled manpower authorizations that should have been reduced as a result of long past budget decisions. Second, as new capabilities are added, the Air Force will shape the force by realigning resources from lower priority areas to satisfy the requirement for these higher operational priorities. In certain cases, current employees will be affected by this "balancing the books" exercise, but every precaution is being taken to minimize impact on personnel.
To implement these reductions, commands will decide within their command which processes can be eliminated or reengineered. It is important that the Air Force's manpower authorizations accurately reflect the military and civilian workforce as everything from deployment taskings to accession programs are based on manpower authorizations.
