AF Chief of Staff General Moseley to resist Army requests for airmen outside their competencies

Left: One example Moseley gave was airmen assigned to Camp Bucca, Iraq, where they guard detainees. Says Moseley, "We don’t guard prisoners. We don’t even have prisons."

The Air Force chief of staff said he intends to resist requests for airmen to fill Army and Marine Corps jobs when those assignments fall far outside the airmen’s core competencies.

Gen. T. Michael Moseley also said that while he understands the Pentagon plan to divert $800 million each from the Air Force’s and Navy’s fourth-quarter personnel accounts, that money must be returned by the middle of the summer.

Although the Air Force is continuing to draw down the force, with the current goal of reaching 316,000 active-duty personnel by the end of 2009, requests for airmen to do jobs in Iraq and Afghanistan that would ordinarily be performed by soldiers and Marines continues unabated.

More than 20,000 airmen have been assigned to these so-called “in lieu of” jobs outside their specialties, Moseley said April 24 at a meeting with defense reporters.

Read the rest at Air Force Times

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