Review may spell relief to critically stressed career fields

8/9/2002 - WASHINGTON -- Relief may be just over the horizon for some of the Air Force's most critically stressed career fields.

A recent study of all Air Force specialties by career field functional managers and manpower and personnel experts identified 17 "stressed" career fields, said Col. John Vrba, chief of Air Force competitive sourcing and privatization at the Pentagon.

"Eventually, all of these stressed career fields will be taken care of, but because of time and money, we are concentrating our efforts on the six most stressed areas first," Vrba said.

These areas -- security forces, intelligence, Office of Special Investigations, civil engineer readiness functions and enlisted aircrew members -- were among the specialties most affected by the increase in mission requirements that came after the Sept. 11 attacks, Vrba said.

For example, the Air Force identified about 30,000 new manpower requirements shortly after Sept. 11, with half of those belonging to security forces.

"The increased threat conditions that we were operating under required us to drastically ramp up our force protection efforts," he explained. "As we are returning to a more stable steady-state routine, we are re-examining these requirements and believe we will be able to get the security forces requirements down to a few thousand."

While this is good news, trying to come up with a few thousand people to fill these new requirements is not an easy task, Vrba said.

"Increasing the overall end strength of the Air Force is not an option available to us," Vrba said. "These additional positions will need to be filled from 'in house' resources."

Therefore, the Air Force launched its Core Competency Review to find these additional resources.

"The CCR examined all Air Force positions and tried to determine what are the Air Force missions that had to be done by airmen, what tasks are better performed by airmen, and what services do we provide to our customers, the combatant commanders," he said.

The review looked for opportunities to free up airmen from tasks that do not require a "bluesuiter" and could just as easily be done by someone else?a federal civilian or by a contractor.

Throughout the review, officials made sure that any decision or proposal made would not negatively affect the service's ability to adequately meet deployments or overseas requirements, or compound the problem facing already stressed career fields, Vrba said.

The study has already identified approximately 2,500 positions that could be converted from military to civilian and 1,000 traditional Reserve positions that could be converted to full-time Reserve positions. Also, a request for funding is being worked in the FY 04 Program Objective Memorandum, or POM.

"This review is not an A-76 study," Vrba stressed.

"We aren't automatically going to convert military or federal employee positions to contract positions," he said. "And we don't have any set conversion quotas that we must meet. We simply are trying to take military or federal employees out of missions that they don't need to be doing, and put those same people into jobs that do require military forces or federal employees.

"If we need to keep airmen in positions for wartime requirements, we will. However, if we find that having someone else do that job makes more sense, we have just freed up military resources to help our stressed career fields better accomplish the Air Force mission."

Although the Air Force is working hard toward relieving the high personnel tempo that many career fields are experiencing, it is not something that can be fixed overnight, Vrba said.

Since it takes nine months to a year to make significant changes to the training pipeline, the earliest that critically stressed career fields will start to see an impact is in fiscal 2004.

Vrba said Air Force officials are confident that this top-down review of how the service does business will find opportunities to free up military people from tasks they do not need to be doing and put those same people into areas that require military forces.