By Mark Mazzetti and Greg Miller
Los Angeles Times, 11 October 2005
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Straining to find ground troops to maintain its force levels in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon has begun deploying thousands of Air Force personnel to combat zones in new jobs as interrogators, prison sentries and gunners on supply trucks.
The Air Force years ago banked its future on state-of-the-art fighter jets and billion-dollar satellites. Yet the service that long has avoided being pulled into ground operations is finding that its people -- rather than its weapons -- are what the Pentagon needs most as it wages a prolonged war against a low-tech insurgent enemy.
Individual branches have spent decades carving out their unique roles within the U.S. military, and Air Force officials insist that the redeployment of its airmen is temporary. Nonetheless, the reassignment of Air Force personnel comes as another sign that the Pentagon is struggling to meet the demands of what military officials have begun calling "the long war."
As part of the effort, more than 3,000 Air Force troops are being assigned new roles. And airmen are being dispatched to combat zones for longer tours of duty -- as many as 12 months rather than four.
The situation represents a reversal of sorts for the Air Force, which played a dominant role in recent conflicts including the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the war to expel Serbian troops from Kosovo. "At that point the Air Force looked to be the dominant service," said Steve Kosiak, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. "That has changed."
In the ongoing peacekeeping efforts in Afghanistan and the fight against insurgents in Iraq, Kosiak said, the Army has been the dominant branch. "It's been the Army, and the Air Force has played a supporting role," Kosiak said.
Air Force officials said they are expecting to commit 1,000 more airmen to missions such as prison guards and truck drivers over the next few years, but they don't plan to make these jobs "core competencies" within the Air Force.
Pentagon planners believe that the counterinsurgency battles being waged in Iraq and Afghanistan could become the norm, rather than the exception, for the U.S. military. And with the Pentagon engaged in a top-to-bottom assessment of the U.S. military's missions -- an exercise known as the Quadrennial Defense Review -- Air Force officials said there is a chance that the high-flying service could be spending more time on the ground in the years ahead.
One urgent problem being addressed by the Air Force is the shortage of trained interrogators to question the thousands of detainees in U.S. military prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"I don't think any of us thought there would be this amount of demand," said Col. Steven Pennington, commander of the Air Force Operations Group. The first Air Force interrogation teams were deployed to Afghanistan earlier this year.
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Citation: Mark Mazzetti and Greg Miller. "War in Iraq shifts Air Force into ground roles," Los Angeles Times, 11 October 2005.
Original URL: http://www.startribune.com/stories/484/5662062.html
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