Astro nots

I spent my youth living on or near Air Force bases. I love air planes and can fall asleep to the sounds of them taking off and landing. The guys in the Air Force seemed to have their heads in the clouds. Sure they had tough training and marching and all that, but their turf was the wild blue yonder, not astro turf.

Well, there are a few Gomer Piles of the Air Force standing around gobsmacked now, saying "Surrrpprriiiiseee me!" No longer Junior Space Men, and inspite of their training to rule the skies, they are going to be used as ground grunts.

"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. he Air Force years ago banked its future on state-of-the-art fighter jets and billion-dollar satellites. Yet the service that long has avoided being pulled into ground operations is 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 insurgent enemy....

Here we see Air Force pilots being trained in the new "dog fight tactics" they will need in their new roles.

"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 many as 12 months rather than four.... Air Force officials said they are expecting to commit another 1,000 airmen to missions such as prison guards and truck drivers over the next few years, but they don't plan to make these jobs "core competencies" within the Air Force.... 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.

"One urgent problem being addressed by the Air Force is the shortage of trained interrogators to question the thousands of detainees being held in U.S. military prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan. "The demand side is that there are people being put into the system that need to have folks talk to them," said Col. Steven Pennington, commander of the Air Force Operations Group. "I don't think any of us thought there would be this amount of demand."


Here we see Air Force ground crew personnnel learning to "chuck a jet" like a javilan in their new ground attack roles.



"The first Air Force interrogation teams were deployed to Afghanistan earlier this year. They went without receiving any special training because most were members of the Air Force's internal investigative service and had experience questioning suspects. But subsequent Air Force interrogation teams are being drawn from an array of unrelated jobs, and members are undergoing 16-week interrogation courses at the Army's intelligence academy at Fort Huachuca, Ariz. "They are not necessarily operating too far outside their basic skill set, but they are operating in an environment they're not normally trained to operate in," said Maj. Brenda Campbell, an Air Force spokeswoman.

"At the Pentagon, Army officials said that their Air Force counterparts have groused about some aspects of the training at Fort Huachuca. The bulk of the airmen have years more military experience than the Army students -- most of whom just finished basic training -- and some have complained that they are forced to take part in lengthy marches and other physical training that has little to do with interrogating prisoners."
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-airforce11oct11,0,5242046.story?coll=la-home-headlines

I know one dignified old retired Master Sargeant who will be shaking his head.