How Valuable is CAP to the Air Force?

[RiverAux]

You're missing the point -- he is promoting the idea that this is something that CAP should be doing more of not saying that it is currently a major CAP mission. 

[JayT]

You're missing the point -- he is promoting the idea that this is something that CAP should be doing more of not saying that it is currently a major CAP mission. 

I don't think we should be.

That's what I'm saying.

[DNall]

^ DNALL I have to disagree.  Times change, and CAP will change with them. 

As I said, I very much agree that we must evolve with the world around us. I believe man y of the problems CAP faces today are due to a lack of necessary change over the years, not because the need for it wasn't recognized, but because we doubted the ability of volunteers to adapt or were scared of running them off. I have no such fears.

My point is not about the need to evolve, it's the spectrum within which we need to evolve.

The situation is... Our traditional missions in support of the AF drying up as technology makes our skill set more & more obsolete. There are short & long-term ramifications to that. I agree with that understanding of the situation, the question is how to react to it.

There are people on one side th that advocate we market those same wares to other customers. I believe that's setting us up for failure, for four simple reasons:

1) The resources are increasingly obsolete, regardless of who the consumer is. If UAVs are in the long-term going to put CAP's air mission out of business, then they're also going to be utilized by forestry to scout envio/wildlife conditions, and any other mission you can think of. Obsolete is obsolete.

2) The skill set is different.

a) You can't just go from looking for downed planes to surveying forest conditions. The flying may be similar, but the rest of what's going on is not. Can we adapt to that? Yeah sure, but to what extent. We can train for one or two different types of missions, but we can't put competent people in the air for 80 different types. You need a couple specific mission types with standardized skill sets that generate a ton of hours in every part of the country. I don't see a lot of that out there.

b) Where's the GT mission in that? We got honestly a handful of mission pilots in the whole organization. They make up a very small percentage of members, and a small part of what we do in ES. We need to evolve to mission sets that can utilize our folks on the ground also. That doesn't work in HLS, that requires LE on the ground.

3) Moving off from the AF is bad. I'm not saying this cause the AF is great & we need to suck up to them, or out of tradition. The fact is it costs several tens of millions per year to operate CAP as an org, independent of what we do operationally. It's certainly true that our resources could be useful to other agencies (fed/state/local), and they may be willing to pay the hourly costs of those resources, but they aren't going to fund the root operation of the org to get that capability, especially if it lessens the resources they can get from congress or the legislature to do their primary jobs.

4) Where does the cadet program & AE fit into this? The fact is CAP ES has never by itself been worth the investment congress makes in it each year. A fleet of 500-odd airplanes, something like 60-70 million in comm gear, plus vans, plus program, administrative, and oversight costs. That's all incredibly expensive. Everything we've ever done in ES can't justify it. Only by adding the feel good connected to strategic objectives sold by the credibility of the Air Staff issues of cadet programs & AE do we stay in business. If you can't find a highly prominent place for those elements that an alternate sponsor would have a very important vested interest in, then you're out of business, no matter how significant the ES part of the equation may be.


I AM certainly advocating that we evolve. I'm saying that needs to be within the AF mission spectrum, not outside it. There are areas where we can make a significant impact on AF & DoD operations. It may not be anything like what we've done in the past. It may or may not involve lots of flying hours. What it does involve is keeping our sponsor intact so they keep supporting the org. As we make ourselves more & more invaluable to them, then we'll see better funding & wider missions.

I know that a lot of people are frustrated here after 9/11 that they can't make a bigger contribution to national security. That's valid, but you have to figure out what we can actually do, and that's very very little.

It's not a matter of our close-mindedness. It's a matter of our extremely limited capabilities. I'm very much in favor of expanding those capabilities, but then once you do that you become not obsolete to the AF mission set again. You strap a FLIR on there with satcom for real time transmission, and you're suddenly a very safe & cost-effective alternative to UAVs. The cost to deploy such technology is relatively low. That's the kind of stuff we need to be doing. When you're going obsolete because of technology, the first thing you do is look to better technology. When you're looking at less mission, you try to find more diverse ways to deploy that new technology for your sponsor.

And yes, ultimately if CAP loses usefulness to the AF then it should be dissolved. It would not then become a private company, for profit or otherwise. The numbers don't work. If they let us keep our resources, which is doubtful, we'd be selling off planes fast to keep us afloat & we'd end up crumbling from the inside out. What's more likely is they'll seek to reclaim those resources & redistribute them to states. States would then employ them through law enforcement, national guard, or state defense forces. There's not much place for CAP in that equation.

I'm for what's best for the country. If I can make CAP fit that bill thru the AF then by all means I'll seek to do that. If CAP can't get that done then there's other things that are better for the community, state, and nation then to let CAP continue.

[DNall]

A lot of states have SDFs (state defense forces - uniformed civilian volunteer portion of the national guard),

Correction--- SDFs are state military forces separate from the National Guard and are fully subject the military laws of that that state that are similar to the UCMJ.  They are not civilians. 

I don't really think you can compare CAP to the 'SDFs.'

I've had some limited interaction with local SDF guys...........and I'm not exactly sure what they do.

Dnall was bringing it up in the context of SDFs that basically perform augmentation missions for their state's NG in the context of CAP performing similar missions for the AF (and CG Aux for CG).  This is a very fair comparison and happens to be one I've made myself.

Again......I'm not sure.

A quick look at the New York Guard webpage makes it seem like that they do a lot of useful work, but it seems like there's a large number of 'Headquarters' units.

I also don't believe that, besides VSAF and a few local agreements, CAP augments the Air Force.

I've said it before. The greatest use for CAP will not come from 'augmenting' the Air Force. It will come from serving our local community with our Air and Ground assests. I'd much rather work for my local town then an Air Force unit.

Who pays the 40+ mil a year operating cost in that equation? Who funds all the training & currency flying? The fact is local communities & the large majority of states cannot begin to afford that luxury.

I'm not saying augmentation alone is the answer for the future, just that it is one more thing we can be doing on a much wider scale to make ourselves useful to the AF. I do agree that AFB communities & around ANG/AFRes units is going to make for a limited application of in-person augmentation. Obviously we should maximize that effort as much as reasonable, but it's always going to be limited. This is where I talked about tele-commuting & cyber-command. If CAP can knock out a few contractor jobs with specialized experts from the civilian community working to support the range of AF missions, that's a good thing, but of course not the whole thing.

I also mentioned several other things we can & should be doing. Don't just focus on the one.