Straining to find ground troops to maintain its force levels in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon has begun deploying thousands of Air Force personnel to combat zones in new jobs as interrogators, prison sentries and gunners on supply trucks.
The Air Force years ago banked its future on state-of-the-art fighter jets and billion-dollar satellites. Yet the service that has long avoided being pulled into ground operations is now finding that its people–rather than its weapons–are what the Pentagon needs most as it wages a prolonged war a against a low-tech insurgency.
Air Force officials insist that the redeployment of its personnel is temporary. Nonetheless, the reassignment of Air Force personnel comes as another sign that the Pentagon is struggling to meet the demands of what military officials have begun calling “the long war.”
As part of the effort, more than 3,000 Air Force troops are being assigned new roles. And airmen are being dispatched to combat zones for longer tours of duty–as much as 12 months rather than four.
Air Force officials said they expect to commit another 1,000 airmen to missions such as prison guards and truck drivers over the next few years.
Pentagon planners believe that the counterinsurgency battles being waged in Iraq and Afghanistan could become the norm, rather than the exception, for the U.S. military. And with the Pentagon currently engaged in a top-to-bottom assessment of the military’s missions –an exercise known as the Quadrennial Defense Review–Air Force officials said there is a chance that the high-flying service could be spending more time on the ground in the years ahead.
Like the Air Force, several thousand sailors are performing what the service calls “non-traditional” roles in Iraq, Afghanistan and at the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
By next summer, the Navy expects to have retrained 3,000 to 4,000 sailors as prison guards, cargo handlers and other jobs that have traditionally fallen to the Army.
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