Acting Air Force secretary visits Tinker, discusses sexual assault, budgets

  • Published
  • By Brandice J. O'Brien
  • Tinker Take Off
TINKER AIR FORCE BASE, Okla. --  Standing in front of hundreds of Airmen and civilians at the base theater on Sept. 27, acting Secretary of the Air Force Eric Fanning addressed two issues facing the Air Force. He said he didn't know what would happen with the fiscal 2014 budget. But, he knew sexual assaults had to stop.

Secretary Fanning came to Tinker for a daylong visit. He met with senior leadership and state government officials and visited the Air Force Sustainment Center headquarters, met with workers in the Oklahoma City Air Logistics Complex and Airmen in the 552nd Air Control Wing, 72nd Air Base Wing and 507th Air Refueling Wing.

Toward the end of his trip, Secretary Fanning briefed Airmen and civilians about the current state of the federal government and the sexual assault problem.

Unlike the budget, the problem of military sexual assault is one that Airmen can and must fix. It's a hot topic in the Department of Defense and a disturbing reality for many Airmen.

Secretary Fanning asked the Airmen in the room to keep an eye on the problem; keep talking about it and keep putting energy on the fix.

"If you see the reports I see every single day, you'd understand why I want to talk about it," Secretary Fanning said. "If we don't fix it or show evidence to Capitol Hill, the media or the public that we're fixing it, they're going to tell us how to fix it. Nobody can fix this but the Air Force."

With the government shutdown, continued sequestrations and rumors of more furloughs and reductions in force, the U.S. budget situation is not up to Airmen, but it affects them greatly, Secretary Fanning said.

"We just lived the most extraordinarily disruptive, unstable year fiscally that I've seen in the Department of Defense," he said. "In an ideal world, we would have had a budget for fiscal 2014 passed a long time ago. We need to know what we're spending in fiscal 2014 to know how to build a budget for fiscal 2015 -- know what we do and do not have. And we don't have that."

Secretary Fanning hoped the new budget would get done, but didn't think it would reflect long-term planning, but it would fix the at-hand issues and push other challenges off for a couple of months or "kick it down the road."

"That's just the way it's working in Washington, D.C., right now," Secretary Fanning said. "It's terribly disruptive and awful what they've done to the people in the Department of Defense and the government over the course of the last six months and here we are, about to do it again."
The mindset of "just do what you did last year" is not a feasible solution, he said.

Fiscal 2013 presented several new challenges and to combat them, government officials introduced sequestration and furloughs. While sequestration had been viewed as a negative consequence, it was actually intended as a solution.

But, the secretary said the effects of sequestration -- buildings not getting fixed, pilots not flying, Airmen not being trained -- couldn't continue.