As the war in Afghanistan winds down, the Air Force will likely go back to a force rotation very much like it had in the 1990s, answering about the same level of demand for its capabilities as it did then, Chief of Staff Gen. Mark A. Welsh III said in a June interview. The Air and Space Expeditionary Force (AEF) model developed in the mid-'90s to cope with a rising series of back-to-back deployments-mostly to conduct the Northern and Southern Watch no-fly zones in Iraq. It had to be "modified" when the magnitude of the Afghanistan and second Iraq wars became apparent, Welsh said. "The AEF construct was never going to be able to maintain itself and support that contingency over a 12- or 13-year period," he explained. The AEF consequently had to be restructured multiple times, developing different time-deployed tracks for combat and mobility forces, and still other tracks for what were then called high-demand, low-density capabilities, such as combat search and rescue and AWACS. However, now that the American military involvement in Iraq is over-leaving practically no residual US forces there-and the Afghanistan drawdown is underway, Welsh said USAF can revisit the old rotational style of doing business.
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