Aviation Security Cooperation: Advancing Global Vigilance, Global Reach, and Global Power in a Dynamic World.

摘要

Given the stark fiscal constraints on the federal budget today, the US military faces hard decisions about which conventional capabilities to develop and deploy to address the wide range of challenges and global demands facing the nation. The military services, including the US Air Force, have long argued that traditional capabilities for deterring and/or defeating nation- states would adequately handle nontraditional or irregular threats from nonstate actors such as terrorists or insurgents. In recent years, the exclusive focus of the Air Force s strategic planning and programming for confronting future traditional challenges related to operating in highly contested environments has put other Air Force capabilities important to the nation at grave risk. For example, as the war in Afghanistan draws down, the service is considering divesting or drastically reducing its ability to organize, train, and equip (OT&E) general purpose force (GPF) air advisors. Such a divestiture would negatively affect America s security cooperation (SC) efforts at a time when it is relying far more on partner nations to address both traditional and nontraditional challenges to enduring US strategic interests. Furthermore, a divestiture would revert to the historic Air Force pattern of assuming that GPF air advisors and other SC-relevant personnel are no longer needed when major irregular conflicts are finished and that these skills can simply be resurrected, like a phoenix out of the ashes, on demand. Our recent experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan clearly demonstrate the disastrous consequences of that assumption.