AEF: Bending, but not broken

WASHINGTON (AFPN) -- The air and space expeditionary forces concept survives, but both it and our airmen are being stressed to the limit.

Increased operations and the potential for more are placing demands on our armed forces like never before. In our Air Force, these demands exceed current steady-state requirements in operations Northern Watch and Southern Watch and in Bosnia. AEF 7 and 8 airmen are frozen in place, and some airmen in AEFs 9 and 10 have been tagged way ahead of schedule.

But despite these pressures, the AEF concept will survive.

The AEFs were created as an organizational and scheduling mechanism designed to spread Air Force capabilities across the force, and to produce scheduling predictability for our airmen.

The idea was to rotate airmen through these commitments on a 90-day cycle once every 15 months or so. Knowing when they were in a training mode or when they were on call well in advance allowed airmen to plan their professional and personal lives around these obligations. This new AEF organizational "construct" was maturing well when world events caused the demand for Air Force capabilities to increase dramatically.

Today, because of the global war on terrorism, Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Noble Eagle and other possible contingencies, the pressure on the Air Force has caused us to adjust procedures to meet the challenge.

AEF can function in two types of environments: steady-state and crisis. A single on-call AEF pairing (for example, AEFs 1 and 2) can meet steady-state requirements.

Crisis response requires resources beyond those available in a single "on-call" pair. This allows the Air Force to respond to any situation our leaders deem appropriate to achieve our national security objectives.

The rotational AEF construct was designed to support limited-scale requirements, and three-month rotations of one AEF pair became the definition of steady-state. A situation demanding more than one AEF pair places the AEF into a "crisis" mode, whereby the AEF flexes, as necessary, to meet increased requirements. One of the measures available is to "reach forward" to the next, most available AEF pair or pairs before they would otherwise come up on the schedule.

Our Air Force currently operates at a much higher tempo than when AEFs were first devised. Many people are serving tours in excess of 135 days, i.e. mobility, special operations, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, and other stressed career fields.

Current demands are also pulling forces from more than one AEF pair. The procedures for meeting this challenge require forces to be drawn from the pairs closest to their vulnerability zone, typically done by exhausting forces from the previous AEF pair and/or dipping into the next AEF pair.

Senior Air Force leaders have initiated several short- and long-term solutions that will alleviate some of the strains placed upon our stressed career fields. These include retraining, reallocation of new airmen into different training pipelines, increasing the number of career field authorizations and changing the way we determine our manpower requirements.

Although we face changing AEF rotation timing, we make every effort to preserve the AEF sequence. This gives the Air Force the ability to sustain operations over the long term. When the world situation changes and requirements for Air Force capabilities lessens, the Air Force will return to a more normalized three-month AEF battle rhythm.

The AEF system is bending, but it's not broken. And it's that ability to bend -- or flex -- that makes our Air Force and our airmen the best in the world. Our enormous ability to adapt to an incredibly wide array of options is why the U.S. Air Force is, more often than not, called on to be the first responder to national security challenges around the globe.