"Chair" Force actually goes to war

LA Times:

For a service usually stationed so far from the front lines that it has earned the sobriquet "Chair Force," some of the scenes now unfolding at the Air Force's primary training base almost seem blasphemous.

New recruits are being trained to use rifles. They are being taught hand-to-hand combat skills. They are being prepped as battlefield medics. The new regimen is part of a complete revamp of basic training ordered by Air Force commanders in somewhat belated recognition that their airmen, once sent to large isolated bases with hundreds of thousands of troops between them and enemy forces, are now regularly in harm's way.

In Iraq, the Air Force has taken over supply convoys to ease the burden on the Army and Marine Corps, and specialized forces have been used in Army-like combat patrols, conducting raids and seizing suspected insurgents outside such facilities as Balad air base, north of Baghdad. Commanders estimate that about a third of all Air Force personnel have been deployed to the Middle East and Central Asia since Sept. 11, 2001.

Until recently in Air Force history, airmen and their commanders were "a garrison force" that deployed fighter jets in battle but little else, said Gen. T. Michael "Buzz" Moseley, former head of air operations in Iraq and Afghanistan who took over as Air Force chief of staff in September.

"Now everything we have operates off those forward air fields," Moseley said. "Fundamentally, it's a different business."

It is hard to underestimate how drastic a cultural change the move is for the youngest of the armed services. The shift dovetails with larger military needs demanded by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the hunt for terrorists. But it is a delicate balancing act, one in which the Air Force is attempting to adapt to a world of guerrilla warfare even as it insists it is remaining true to the reason it was created: to wield dominant air power.

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There is more. It is about time the Air Force pukes learned to be warriors. It may save their lives. The Marine Corps has always required that whatever your job you still had to be trained to work as light infantry. This training was crucial to the success of the Marines in the breakout from the Chosin Reservoir in Korea when they were surrounded by a much larger Chinese force. The clerk typist and the medical personel all got in fighting holes and fought the enemy eventually destroying the Chinese 8th Army.