Force Structure

The Expeditionary Aerospace Force Concept is a way to help manage commitments to theater commanders and reduce the constant deployment burden on its people. Each force group is to deploy once every 15 months for 90 days. The concept will likely achieve its objective of spreading the deployment burden over a larger part of the Air Force's combat forces; mobility air forces are not likely to be affected. Active combat units in overseas commands will likely see significant increases in deployments while deployment of U.S.-based units will drop. Both reserve and active mobility air forces are likely to continue their high deployment. The reserves face two challenges: providing enough personnel in specialty areas where the need is high but the availability of qualified personnel is low and matching the reserves' aircraft capabilities with their increased role in contingency operations. The Air Force would experience a significant disruption in its ability to rotate forces to contingency operations under the concept if it were called on to simultaneously support a single major war. After deploying forces to a single major war, no Air Expeditionary Force pairs would have enough assets to maintain ongoing contingency operations.

GAO noted that: (1) the Expeditionary Concept is likely to achieve its objective of spreading the deployment burden over a larger part of the Air Force's combat forces, but mobility air forces are not likely to be affected; (2) generally, active combat units based in the United States will experience a considerable drop in contingency deployments; (3) on the other hand, similar active combat units overseas commands and in reserve components could see significant increases in contingency deployments; (4) both reserve and active mobility air forces are likely to continue their high deployment level because, in addition to participating in contingencies under the Concept, they are constantly assigned to other tasks, such as transporting people and equipment for all the services and performing humanitarian operations; (5) GAO's assessment was based on its data analysis because the Air Force has not systemically monitored Expeditionary Concept results; (6) furthermore, the lack of specific measurable goals in some areas could hamper future assessment efforts; (7) the predictability of deployments that the Concept provides the reserves is an important benefit that should help reserve forces better prepare for their deployments and employers better plan for their employees' absences; (8) the Air Force would experience a significant disruption in its ability to rotate forces to contingency operations under the Concept if it were called on to simultaneously support a single major war; (9) if a major war arises, forces are expected to deploy as specified in the theater commander's plan, not according to their alignment with the 10 Air Expeditionary Force groups; (10) forces required for a major war would be drawn from all 10 force groups, with some deploying as much as 50 percent of their combat forces and often depleting high-demand capabilities; (11) after deploying forces to a single major war, no Air Expeditionary Force pairs would have sufficient assets to provide all the required capabilities to maintain ongoing contingency operations; (12) even pooling assets from different Air Expeditionary Force groups could cause some units in certain mission areas to deploy for periods as long as 180 days; and (13) furthermore, the time required to reconstitute the forces deployed to the war and to ongoing contingencies in order to re-establish contingency rotations would depend on the scenario duration and the size of the forces deployed.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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