Drones secure 188th’s future, leader says at 60th festivities

FORT SMITH - The new mission for the Arkansas Air National Guard’s 188th Fighter Wing will position it for a role in the U.S. military’s post-Middle East-era planning, while drawing higher-paying jobs and higher levels of security clearance to the base, said its commander, Col. Mark William Anderson, to a crowd of about 1,000 Saturday afternoon.

“This workforce will be a highly skilled workforce - with top-secret clearance,” Anderson said while giving a mission update during the 188th’s 60th-anniversary celebration at the Ebbing Air National Guard Base in Fort Smith.

The 188th will see the last of its A-10 Warthog jets fly out permanently in June as the base takes on its new assignment involving unmanned drones.

“How did we get here? About two years ago, we began hearing rumors that the Air Force was looking to take our planes away,” Anderson said at the casual event, in which servicemen wore camouflage fatigues rather than their dress blues and dined on catered barbecue.

“It didn’t make sense to us,” he said, and the community rallied in support of keeping the A-10 mission. “We still train more, and at less cost, than any other place in the country.”

But times are changing,he said.

Over time, top military brass and congressmen provided more information on the reasons for the change in mission. It became clear that military planners were looking beyond the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Pacific theater is believed to be the place for most future conflicts, he said.

“They believe the A-10 will not survive in that theater,” Anderson said.

So the U.S. Air Force decided to retire the entire fleet of A-10s during the next few years, describing it as an overall cost-cutting measure with a focus on investment in a new era of more versatile fighter jets. That meanssignificant retraining for 188th personnel, after 60 years of flying manned aircraft.

Anderson said the changes “mean we’ll be less visible,” in the community, adding that Fort Smith residents won’t hear as many planes taking off.

The new mission will actually involve more than one mission, as the unit’s activities will affect both the state and federal governments.

It will feature the MQ-9 Reaper, which Anderson said has about the same size and flight altitude of the A-10s.

“There is one distinction: There is no man in that cockpit,” he said.

In addition to the remotely piloted aircraft mission, there also will be an intelligence mission.

The 188th will be the only organization in the world to have a space-focused targeting squadron, the base commander said. Afterward, he said this will involve analyzing images of other nation’s space programs.

Of the base’s nearly 1,000 jobs, Anderson expects that only 17 positions will be lost with the new mission - five of them full time.

However, much retraining will be required for those who stay on.

“This will be a long and complicated process,” he said. And while he couldn’t say how much the average salary will change, he said “Almost every one of the new jobs is higher-paying than the one that left.”

All of the roughly 100 full-time positions of the 123rd Intelligence Squadron at Little Rock Air Force Base in Jacksonville will move to Fort Smith, where the group will grow from one squadron to three and to about 240 positions, he said.

Base officials were reticent to comment on the military’s shift in focus to thePacific theater. Anderson declined further comment on the topic.

“That’s above my pay grade,” said Maj. Heath Allen, a spokesman with the 188th’s Public Affairs Office.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton explained the issue in a piece published Saturday in Foreign Policy, saying the Asia-Pacific region includes many of the “key engines of the global economy” and is home for important emerging powers such as China, India and Indonesia.

“As the war in Iraq winds down and America begins to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan, the United States stands at a pivotal point,” Clinton wrote. After a decade of allocating “immense resources” in those two theaters, the nation needs to invest its diplomatic, economic and strategic energies in the Asia-Pacific region, “a key driver of global politics.”

“Just as our post-World War II commitment to building a comprehensive and lasting transatlantic network ofinstitutions and relationships has paid off many times over … the time has come for the United States to make similar investments as a Pacific power, a strategic course set by President Barack Obama from the outset of his administration and one that is already yielding benefits,” Clinton said in the article.

After the mission update,Chief Master Sgt. Donald Frederick said the 188th’s new mission is a great opportunity for everyone who decides to take part in it and retrain.

“Everything’s going in that direction,” Frederick said. “Just to get in on the early stages is going to secure a place in the future for this unit.”

Northwest Arkansas, Pages 13 on 11/03/2013

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