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I’ve spent much of the summer helping out my 86-years-young mom in Alabama so haven’t been able to blog much. I decided to reward myself by getting my geek on at the Aspen Security Forum, one of my favorite venues for seeing what’s new and interesting in the world of national security. The forum is a veritable who’s who of national security leaders — past, present and future. What also makes this unique from other conferences and security forums is many of the leaders and speakers attend the whole conference so you have an opportunity to get to know some of them personally.
Case in point, as I was walking to the opening talk, I struck up a conversation with a familiar looking man dressed in casual clothes. I knew from his demeanor he was probably an admiral or general, and he told me he was stationed at MacDill Air Force Base. He was very pleasant and didn’t seem to mind talking to me. We had a nice chat about the weather. About 30 minutes later he showed up at the conference location decked out in Navy blue and also wearing a whole lot of ribbons and military decorations. Turns out it was Admiral Bill McRaven, the commander of Special Operations Command. At most conferences I’ve attended, the VIPs are surrounded by their handlers who won’t let you get near them.
This informality and accessibility is what makes the Aspen Security Forum a great event for anyone interested in national security topics. For those interested in national security, I recommend putting this event on your bucket list. This week I’ll be providing highlights on what things jump out at me.
The forum got off to a great start with an opening keynote by General Mark Welsh, the Chief of Staff for the Air Force on the topic: “Off We Go Into the Wild Blue Yonder: The Air Force’s Role in Countering Terrorism and Advancing America’s Interests in the World.” John King from CNN was the moderator. The general began by discussing what I believe to be one of the most important issues facing the Defense Department: the effects of sequestration. General Welsh says the Air Force has four major accounts: people costs, infrastructure and facility costs, modernization, and readiness (i.e., flying hours for the Air Force and maintenance costs).
I’ve blogged about this before, but the military leaders don’t have the flexibility with their budget that the public seems to think. General Welsh says they’ve had a hard time cutting back on infrastructure and people costs so the mechanics of sequestration have driven them to take money from both the modernization and readiness accounts. The situation with the readiness account have resulted in cutting flying hours and maintenance costs as I understand it, primarily for units not forward deployed in operational and combat zones. The understanding I took away was the Air Force was putting most of their budget from this account to ensuring the forward deployed units, such as forces in Afghanistan and Korea, continued to operate at the highest readiness levels. The general also said are modernization efforts are now at risk.
The “so what” factor for me came when John King said the Syria issue seems to have died down, but what if the President asked the military to set up a no-fly zone, what would it take? General Welsh said it would take some time to set up because some of the squadrons and types of aircraft they’d need haven’t been flying because of sequestration. They would need to bring units back up to a ready status and find funding to do that. The other option would be to take on the task with an understanding we’re going to go and say we’re going to “do it and do it well but there will be an increased risk to the men and women who are executing the plan.” The general says to him that is unacceptable and the danger of sequestration, and he doesn’t believe we should be accepting that risk. I think this is an extremely important fact the general public and the media needs to better understand.
A lesser understood piece is the impact of the Air Force having to furlough 150,000 civilians between now and the end of September. The Air Force will lose 70 million hours of work. During one of my assignments, I was in charge of day-to-day operations of a military intelligence organization that consisted of over 500 people, many of whom were civilians. I would have had a hard time operating at our usual high professional level if my civilian workers had to take one day off a week. When a crisis or war happens, people don’t care if you’re shorthanded. The fighters and decision makers would justifiably expect outstanding intelligence support. I could have done it, but it would have been ugly, resulting in very longs hours and no days off for those who were still working.
The modernization piece also has some interesting points. John King asked the General about the F-35. The general stated it was needed because the threat will out distance the current 4th generation aircraft. Welsh bluntly stated a 4th generation aircraft cannot compete with the 5th generation. He said both Russia and China will probably field a 5th generation aircraft within 5 years. He emphasized he does not expect a war with either country but 53 countries around the world fly Russian and/or Chinese aircraft. He expects both nations to export their new aircraft quickly after they get into their fleets
Those are just some of the things I found interesting about the talk. Think I’ll end here. The hotel bed is calling me. A long day of geeking out awaits me tomorrow. As always, my views are my own.
