Military

CSAF explains combat wing organization

07/29/02 - WASHINGTON -- The combat wing organization is critical to both the service's expeditionary mind-set and to individual career progression, the service's senior officer said.

Chief of Staff of the Air Force Gen. John P. Jumper talked about the combat wing organization and several other topics recently.

In the current wing organization, maintenance functions and personnel are "owned" by operational unit commanders. Under the new plan, maintainers will work for maintainers and form a pure maintenance group under one commander while maintaining their close relationship with operations.

Units have until Sept. 30, 2003, to make the change.

"Right now, if you're a maintainer, you look up to the head of your leadership, and it's the operations group commander," Jumper said. "Chances are, you can never be that person.

"I want maintainers to be able to have a career progression that leads them to the head of a maintenance organization, and I want them to be as experienced at maintaining airplanes as operations group commanders (are) at flying airplanes," Jumper said.

According to Jumper, the idea of maintainers being commanded by maintainers is not new to the Air Force.

"From 1978 to 1991 we had deputy commanders for maintenance," he said. "It was the system that got us into (Operation) Desert Storm with 92 percent mission capable rates in the fighter world."

Besides enhancing maintenance career progression, this combat wing organization will strengthen the Air Force's ability to mobilize.

"The hard part (of mobility) is going to be the mission support function," he said. "It's going to entail everything.from crisis action planning, working with the joint system to get deployable loads into the airlift system, visibility of the (cargo) while it's in transit, and the bedding down at the far end."

Other deployable mission support functions will include planning and constructing a tent city, storing fuel and munitions, and plugging into the supply system from the forward-operating base.

"It's a skill set that none of our officers have in total right now," the chief of staff said. "But the new expeditionary support discipline will take all of these into account.

"The span of control is going to take into account all those skills and specialties that a commander has to be familiar with to set up a large tent city operation and make it work," Jumper said. "I think that's very important."

Because all Air Force wings will be structured similarly to deployed organizations, the service will be have a broader base from which to select support group commanders, Jumper said.

"When we deploy, it's going to be in an expeditionary organization that I would like to look very much like the one we left back home," Jumper said. "If you're a support commander in a missile wing, air mobility wing, fighter or bomber wing, you can be called to command a support activity at a tent city.because we've trained them all in the same way," he said.

Other aspects of the wing reorganization include the creation of logistics readiness squadrons by merging supply and transportation squadrons; adding those new LRSs, contracting squadrons and aerial ports to existing support groups; and combining three officer career fields (supply, transportation and logistics plans) into a single logistics readiness officer career field.