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| Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James (Image: Wiki Commons) |
By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR.
ARLINGTON: The Air Force got blasted from Donald Trump’s bully pulpit before the President-Elect was even inaugurated. It looks like 2017 — the youngest service’s 70th year — will be full of presidential turbulence.
Outgoing Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James put the best face on Trump’s intervention on Lockheed’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and Boeing’s Air Force One replacement, which moved swiftly from social media to private meetings with the CEOs of both contractors at Mar-A-Lago. But her concerns were clear.
“What all of that really signals to me is that the President-Elect is going to be focusing on the taxpayer dollar, on efficiencies,” James told the Air Force Association this morning during her last public appearance as Secretary. “I think that’s an important focus. I tried to make it my focus for three years” — ever since her confirmation — and the service tries to inculcate a culture of cost-effectiveness in “even the brand new A1Cs [Airmen First Class] that come into the Air Force.”
That said, James continued, “it’s an unusual approach. It’s an approach that I’m not sure there’s another example of… doing a deep dive at this point into a program like this. But I think the signal is cost controls matter, efficiencies matter, and there will be times when perhaps a headline captures the attention of a senior policymaker.”
Read the full story at BreakingDefense