Wright-Patterson Air Force Base
Total employees: About 27,000, including 18,000 civilians
Major commands and operations: Air Force Materiel Command, Aeronautical Systems Center, Air Force Research Laboratory, 88th Air Base Wing, National Air and Space Intelligence Center, Air Force Institute of Technology, Air Force Security Assistance Center, National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, 445th Airlift Wing.
Local economic impact: $5 billion annually.
What's at stake: Whether Wright-Patterson will lose or gain jobs.
DAYTON — The Air Force is expected to release details today of program and personnel changes it will make in response to government spending cuts.
Members of Congress, including those representing the Dayton area, are expecting briefings starting this morning.
Last week, the Dayton Daily News reported that the Air Force was doing a top-to-bottom review of its work force to assess staffing and how it could lead to job cuts and reassignments at bases, including Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
Air Force spokesmen declined to discuss any of the details Tuesday. Possibilities could include consolidating administrative functions that now may be spread among multiple bases and combining supply depot operations scattered across the country.
How the changes will affect Wright-Patterson, hub of the service’s acquisition, logistics and research and development operations, will become clearer today.
Still, Gen. Donald Hoffman, commander of the Air Force Materiel Command, a nine-base command headquartered at Wright-Patterson, has made it clear that changes are coming.
“We are spending more money than we have,” Hoffman, the highest-ranking officer at Wright-Patterson, told a defense technology conference in Dayton last month. “It is not sustainable for the long term. We have to address it.”
The Air Force Materiel Command, which employs more civilians than any other Air Force major command, is to be restructured, Gen. Norton Schwartz, the service’s chief of staff, has said.
The AFMC has offered incentives to civilian employees to encourage early retirements and voluntary departures from its overall work force of 79,000 people at nine bases, which include Wright-Patterson.
The AFMC is responsible for technology research and development, and for acquiring, testing, evaluating and sustaining a broad array of key Air Force weapons and aircraft programs.
The Air Force imposed a 90-day hiring freeze in August, and ordered a halt to hiring of temporary employees as of Oct. 1, the start of the federal fiscal year.
The Obama administration has directed the Defense Department to accommodate $450 billion in spending cuts over the next decade. But those defense spending reductions could double, starting in 2013, if a bipartisan congressional committee is unable to agree by the end of this month on cuts that could reduce total federal spending by more than $1 trillion in coming years.
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2242 or jnolan@DaytonDailyNews.com.
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