{"id":65776,"date":"2016-05-14T10:42:29","date_gmt":"2016-05-14T14:42:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=65776"},"modified":"2016-05-14T11:21:25","modified_gmt":"2016-05-14T15:21:25","slug":"air-force-burnt-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=65776","title":{"rendered":"Air Force “burnt out”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fox News<\/a> reports that the Air Force is suffering so badly from budget and manpower cuts that Congress and the White House have accomplished that which our nation’s enemies have only dreamed about – the US Air Force has been nearly neutralized by politics and sequestration;<\/p>\n

Many of the Airmen reported feeing \u201cburnt out\u201d and \u201cexhausted\u201d due to the current pace of operations, and limited resources to support them. During the visit to Ellsworth earlier this week, Fox News was told only about half of the 28th Bomb Wing\u2019s fleet of bombers can fly. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe have only 20 aircraft assigned on station currently. Out of those 20 only nine are flyable,\u201d Pfrommer said. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe [B-1] I worked on 20 years ago had 1,000 flight hours on it. Now we’re looking at some of the airplanes out here that are pushing over 10,000 flight hours,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n

“In 10 years, we cut our flying program in half,” said Capt. Elizabeth Jarding, a B-1 pilot at Ellsworth who returned home in January following a six-month deployment to the Middle East for the anti-ISIS campaign. <\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

The B-1 issues are a symptom of a broader resource decline. Since the end of the Gulf War, the U.S. Air Force has 30 percent fewer airmen, 40 percent fewer aircraft and 60 percent fewer fighter squadrons. In 1991, the force had 134 fighter squadrons; today, only 55. The average U.S. Air Force plane is 27 years old.<\/p>\n

After 25 years of non-stop deployments to the Middle East, airmen are tired.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur retention rates are pretty low. Airman are tired and burnt out,\u201d said Staff Sgt. Tyler Miller, with the 28th Aircraft Maintenance Squadron based at Ellsworth. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

At least at the end of the Clinton years, the year-to-year budget was balanced on defense cuts, but this administration uses the “savings” from slashing our national security for more social spending driving us further in debt. This is what the end of a Jimmy Carter second term would have looked like. I don’t see a light at the end of a tunnel. The same people who gave this administration a second term will choose poorly in November.<\/p>\n

Thanks to Tom L. and UpNorth for the link.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fox News reports that the Air Force is suffering so badly from budget and manpower cuts … Air Force “burnt out”<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":55775,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[187],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-65776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-air-force"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=65776"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65776\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/55775"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=65776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=65776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=65776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}