CMSAF James Roy said Wednesday the Air Force is committed to providing quality housing to its airmen and their families. However, there are still 14,000 homes in the Air Force inventory considered inadequate, according to Defense Department standards, Roy said. Updates to those homes are slated for completion by Fiscal 2016, he said. “These are not homes that we cannot place individuals in and that they wouldn’t be proud of; it’s a life expectancy issue in a lot of cases,” Roy told the House Appropriations Committee’s military construction and veterans affairs panel. In addition to those upgrades, the privatized housing program has already provided 37,800 homes at 44 installations in the continental United States, said Roy. The Air Force also expects to complete an assessment of its dormitory conditions this summer. Service officials will use the findings to prioritize future military construction funding requests, he said.
A new report from the Government Accountability Office calls for the Pentagon’s Chief Technology Officer to have budget certification authority over the military services’ research and development accounts—a move the services say would add a burdensome and unnecessary layer of bureaucracy.
