The Air Force’s drawdown is to be halted at 330,000 people, versus an earlier plan to drop to 316,000, but the billets spared the budget axe appear to have been largely spoken for already, acting Air Force Secretary Michael Donley suggested in remarks to AFA’s Air & Space Symposium in Washington Monday. An infusion of people will be needed in intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, to meet the “insatiable demand” for their products, Donley said. Some will be pushed into the acquisition system to try to ease acquisition nightmares resulting from successive protests. Some of the saved slots will go into the emerging cyber operations field, and the rest will go to various “stressed career fields.” The reclaimed billets will give the Air Force “headspace to rebalance” the distribution of people in the service, Donley said.
The U.K. and the U.S. will continue to enjoy access to the ports, airfield, and workshops at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean for at least another century, under a deal inked between the U.K. and Mauritius May 22.