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Snapshot of the Air Force

- 347,521 individuals are on active duty

-- 71,526 officers and 275,995 enlisted personnel

- The Air Force has 13,648 pilots, 4,432 navigators, 1,370 air battle managers and 35,467 non-rated line officers in the grades of lieutenant colonel and below.

- 21.5 percent of the current force is assigned overseas (including Alaska and Hawaii)

-- 10,913 officers and 63,739 enlisted personnel(Total 74,652 - That are fighting the WOT in Afghanistan and Iraq and manning all the US Air Force bases around the world.)

That leaves 272,852 personnel in the US, and the scheduled
force reduction calls for 40,000 over 5 yrs.

As for my prediction about the JDAM... development is being focused on Aided GPS...Inertial navigation and GPS,
Time of Arrival systems,Angle of Arrival systems, and Ultra wide-band technology including various combinations of all mentioned, in addition there are programs to add a terminal seeker.The JDAM is not a guided weapon but depends on free fall to steer. Current accuracy is about 3 meters.

Progress is not about accepting new ideas but about rejecting the old ones.

You need to join the old Colonel Blimps club with the likes of Ralph Peters and David Hunt where you guys can suck air through your teeth and scratch your heads and tell us how we cannot achieve,
1.Victory
2.Better weapons
3.Manpower reductions.
However, I thank you and respect you for your service.

The JDAM is not a guided weapon but depends on free fall to steer. Current accuracy is about 3 meters.

Of course it's guided, that's what the GPS set does. What it isn't is powered.

GPS aided inertial will help some, but not down to quarter size. There are some technologies, one of which is called cycle counting, that will allow much higher precision, but which will require much higher precision targeting systems as well. You have to be able to locate the position of the target relative to that of the bomb or missile at some point, usually before launch, then via the cycle counting technique you navigate from one to the other.

The problem is not just to accept new ideas and reject old one, you can waste a lot of money and get lots of kids killed that way, but to know which of the new ideas to accept, and when to do it, and to know which of the old ideas to let go. That is a job best done by the likes of Ralph Peters and John Boyd than a bunch of politicians and bureaucrats, uniformed or not.

So you are saying that a cut of 40,000 out of 347,521 is no big deal, and you may be correct, but your analysis is somewhat flawed. For example you say the days of waist gunners, etc are over, but you ignore that from the numbers you post, the vast majority of the Air Force is already made up of non-flying personnel, and that the cuts will presumably be at least proportional to the fraction of them already in the force. I say, at least, because I suspect the cuts in support, including maintenance, base defense, and other support functions will probably be higher proportionally than among the fliers.