President Obama’s nominee to be the next top general in the Air Force told Congress Thursday that budget limits brought on by sequestration have drastically cut the flying hours of pilots who are not in war zones, and that as a result, morale is suffering.
“When we were sequestered in 2015, we grounded 13 fighter squadrons that stopped flying,” Air Force Vice Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein said at his Senate confirmation hearing. “We’re still recovering from that effort and if we’re sequestered again it will be even worse.”
While Air Force pilots who are forward deployed are flying regularly and remain at a high state of readiness, it comes at the cost of squadrons at home, where some pilots fly fewer hours than their Russian or Chinese counterparts.
“Pilots who don’t fly, controllers who don’t control, cyberwarriors who don’t operate, because they are not given the resources to do so, morale goes down and they vote with their feet,” said Goldfein. He said if he were confirmed, he would be taking over the oldest, smallest Air Force in the nation’s history.
Committee Chairman Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., called the initial sequestration budget cuts five years ago “an act of incredible cowardice,” and apologized for his failure to win enough support from his Senate colleagues to add $18 billion to the Pentagon’s budget to address the readiness shortfalls in the Air Force and other services.
“I hope that the voters understand that a good faith effort was made and it was turned down, four votes short, by members, some of the members of this committee. I’m embarrassed,” McCain said.
Goldfein testified his biggest problem is a shortage of maintenance and weapons handlers personnel. He said the Air Force is currently short about 4,000 maintainers.
One example of the problem is when a squadron of B-1 bombers returned from conducting strikes against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and only six of the 20 aircraft were in operational status. Cold War-era B-52 bombers had to be pressed into service to take over their mission, he said.
Goldfein also pledged keep the A-10 ground attack plane flying, at least in the short term, because current there is no aircraft capable of delivering the same level of close air support to U.S. troops on the ground, and he conceded the plan to scrap the A-10 was entirely driven by the need to save money.
“I can’t give you a better example of what sequester did to the United States Air Force than the A-10 discussion, because it was sequester that brought us the A-10 retirement, because we had an $8 billion dollar math problem to solve in a single year in 2015. If we’re sequestered again, we’ll have a $10 billion math problem to solve in 2018.”
