Cutting installations and personnel alone will not be enough to meet the bottom line imposed by tight budgets and exacerbated by sequestration, acting Air Force Secretary Eric K. Fanning told a panel of reporters Sept. 16 during the annual meeting of the Air Force Association in Washington. While stopping short of confirming scuttlebutt that the A-10 Thunderbolt II and KC-10 tanker would be eliminated, the only way to impose quick and effective savings would be to cut "vertically," Fanning said. "You can’t get money out of people fast enough – it takes about a year to get savings out of personnel," Fanning said. "You can see what some of the programs are we might be after, but you can’t get savings of the magnitude necessary by reducing all your fleets," he said. "You have to take out some of the fleets entirely in order to get the whole tail that would come with it." The service is faced with sustaining a wartime posture amid a crisis budget scenario, he said, while still determining the proper balance between modernization and recapitalization of existing assets.
