Air Force Boss Visits Fairchild

Wed., Feb. 16, 2000

By Tracy Ellig tracye@spokesman.com

With the Air Force continuing to face big challenges in recruitment and retention, the service’s top boss came to Fairchild Air Force Base on Tuesday to discuss what he plans to do about it.

Secretary of the Air Force F. Whitten Peters took time off from his desk job in Washington, D.C., to visit Fairchild and then McCord Air Force Base in Tacoma.

For the second year in a row, the Air Force may be unable to meet its recruiting goals. The service fell 1,734 enlistees short of its goal for the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 1999. It was the worst recruiting year for the Air Force since 1979.

The service is currently 1,700 recruits behind this year and may end up 3,400 short, Whitten said during a news conference.

The Air Force wants to recruit 34,000 people this year.

“I think the best way to deal with recruiting problems is to retain more people,” Whitten said. “If we could simply retain 1 to 2 percent more of our people, we’d wipe out that deficit.”

To that end, the Air Force is trying to improve working conditions and benefits.

“We are basically working across the board to improve the quality of life for active, guard and reserve folks, to make life more stable and predictable,” Whitten said.

The Air Force has a 3.7 percent pay raise in its budget before Congress this year. There is also a strong effort to increase the health care provided to military retirees over the age of 65, Whitten said.

“There is a feeling these people were promised better benefits than they are getting, and there is a real effort on the behalf of the administration and Congress to find some means of improving their lives,” Whitten said.

Once military retirees reach 65, they must rely on Medicare rather than the Defense Department’s health-care system, known as TRICARE.

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