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Air Guard may move to MHAFB
If Congress were to approve the proposed FY15 defense budget, the bulk of the Idaho Air National Guard would be relocated to Mountain Home Air Force Base.
Central to its plan to meet its share of the Department of Defense budget constraints imposed by Congress, the Air Force is proposing to eliminate an entire airframe -- the A-10 Thunderbolt II, known affectionately by its pilots and crews as the "Warthog."
Under the future envisioned by the Air Force, all aircraft will have multi-role capabilities. The A-10 has a single focused capability supporting ground troops that several other aircraft in its inventory can equally accomplish, the Air Force believes.
Only four guard/reserve bases fly the A-10, considered one of the best close air support ground attack aircraft in the world, but the Air Force plans to replace the A-10 missions at three of those bases with other aircraft. Only the Idaho Air National Guard's 124th Fighter Wing at Gowen Field in Boise will lose its mission entirely under the Total Force Plan for FY 14 (TFP-15). Active duty A-10 missions will simply go away.
However, the Air Force has promised national guard units scheduled to lose current missions under the TFP-15 plan, that the guard units won't go away and that new missions will be found for them, top Air Force officials have said in several public comments over the last few months.
Under the TFP-15 proposal, the Idaho Air National Guard will become a "classic associated unit" with the 366th Fighter Wing at Mountain Home AFB.
No concrete plans have been developed yet at any level of the Air Force to implement that concept, but essentially it means that the A-10 pilots and maintenance crews will retrain on the F-15E Strike Eagles at Mountain Home.
It does not mean additional aircraft will be assigned to Mountain Home Air Force Base, however. Instead, the IANG's 124th Fighter Wing and its 190th Fighter Squadron will "share" with the two active-duty squadrons currently at the airbase -- the 390th Fighter Squadron and the 391st Fighter Squadron -- the two squadrons of aircraft currently assigned to Mountain Home AFB.
That will result in more hours on the Strike Eagle airframes and more days of flying, since the guard typically does the bulk of its training on the weekends and the base doesn't. It also means no more than one squadron from the base is likely to deploy at any given time in order to leave enough aircraft behind to maintain training and proficiency certifications for the pilots and crews not deploying.
Although Air Force and Guard officials at every level stressed no specific plans had been developed yet, the "model" being looked at by the Air Force to affect the "association" of the guard unit with the active unit is the association of the 192nd Fighter Wing of the Virginia Air National Guard with the active-duty First Fighter Wing at Langley AFB.
The 192nd, which had flown the F-16, was moved in 2007 from Sandston, Va., (functionally the Richmond airport) to Langley AFB and retrained on the new F-22 Raptor. Like the 366th Fighter Wing, the 1st FW currently has only two squadrons of active duty operational aircraft.
Described by the Virginia Air National Guard public affairs unit as being set up as a "classic associate wing," the 192nd FW "works directly with the 1st FW yet maintains its own unit identity and command structure. It shares in the support of mission requirements for the F-22A Raptor, but does not own any of the aircraft on station."
Both the Virginia Air Guard's public affairs officials and their counterparts at Langley described the association of the two units as "highly effective and "very efficient." An Air Force spokesperson at the Pentagon added that the Air Force "is looking to become more efficient, to make better use of our resources with the coming RIF," referring to the ongoing drawdown of personnel and funding that is the result of the ending of the war in Afghanistan and the cuts proposed in the Department of Defense budget for FY15.
The only significant problem that appears to have arisen when the association of the 192nd FW and the 1st FW took place, both Guard and Air Force officials said, was the discovery that they had too many maintainers -- too many people available to keep the planes flying -- and not enough planes. Personnel adjustments from both the active-duty and the guard support units were made to balance the actual maintenance needs of the aircraft.
When the Virginia Air National Guard moved the 192nd FW to Langley AFB (except for a couple small detachments), it moved almost everything, including all of its support units, to Langley.
If the Air Force were to adopt a similar model for the move of the Idaho Air National Guard, almost all of the air guardsmen would have their duty station reassigned to Mountain Home AFB.
Besides the pilots of the 190th FS, that would include the 124th FW's aircraft maintenance squadron, air support operations squadron, civil engineer squadron, communications flight, maintenance operations flight, services flight, mission support flight, operations support flight and security forces squadron.
A total of 1,040 of the IANG's personnel are directly attached to the 124th FW, including 480 aircraft maintainers. Another 300 personnel are assigned to other Idaho Air National Guard units. The Idaho Army National Guard units would stay at the Gowen Field military complex.
When the Virginia Air National Guard moved to Langley, the state of Virginia took the facilities the air guard had been using at Sandston and, relatively quickly, began using them for either state government facilities or leased them to commercial enterprises, making a long-term profit on the move. The Idaho Air National Guard currently uses approximately 400,000 square feet of building space at Gowen Field, including the hangars.
No new hangars would be needed at Mountain Home AFB, but space would have to be found for the other guard facility needs. There is currently no indication the Air Force plans to expand or build any facilities on base, meaning the guardsmen would likely have to fit into the existing infrastructure at Mountain Home.
At every level, Air Force and guard officials stressed than any potential move of the 124th FW was dependent upon Congress approving at least that portion of the Air Force's part of the FY15 Department of Defense budget. It's not known when Congress will actually take a vote on that budget or how it will modify the DoD proposal.
Without knowing what Congress will actually approve, both Guard and Air Force officials noted it is "very difficult" to begin any kind of planning, although it is believed that key leadership at Mountain Home AFB will be briefed on details of the association of the 1st FW and 192nd FW when they make a visit to Langley later this spring.
Until then, Col. Tim Marsano of the Idaho National Guard said, "your guess is as good as anyone's as to what will happen. Right now, nobody knows anything for sure.