The Air Force has a Feb. 2 deadline to tell Congress how it will reshape itself.
The National Commission on the Structure of the Air Force, an independent task force created in the fiscal 2013 National Defense Authorization Act, made 42 recommendations last year, including a call to move more missions and aircraft into the Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve as a way to save money.
Air Force leaders have publicly said they agree with much of the report, and the service is currently reviewing every mission it has to see what opportunities there are to increase manning and aircraft in the Guard and Reserve. Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James said the service expects to be 80 percent finished with this review by the end of 2014.
“So, of course we don’t know how that will turn out, but I would expect that out of that, we will come up with additional missions, additional capabilities, that we would ask our Guard and Reserve to assume in the future, and so I see the future of our people program to be more reliant, not less reliant, on our National Guard and Reserve,” James said at a State of the Air Force briefing in the summer.
