‘Mission failure across the board’: Officials warn staff changes will devastate Alaska’s Air National Guard
“It’s pretty clear,” U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said in an interview. “It is not nuanced when you talk about mission failure. It means you cannot do the mission.” The adjustments are technical and bureaucratic. They involve converting some 80 positions from a category known as Active Guard and Reserve, AGR, to Dual Status Technicians, or techs. On paper, according to the National Guard, this is an apples-to-apples transfer that will not affect staffing levels.
The leveling initiative is built around the assertion that AGR and tech positions are interchangeable. The impetus for the National Guard Bureau leveling units across the country is federal funding and fairness. The scale of these changes might seem inconsequential on the surface. Of the 1,361 full-time positions allotted to the Alaska National Guard, currently 835 are AGRs, compared to 273 tech positions. A private-sector analog might look like swapping 10% of full-time, salaried employees with contractors from a temp agency to come in and take over doing the same work.
Unlike, for example, a vehicle fleet mechanic or payroll administrator, positions assigned to alert status aren’t like the conventional 9-to-5 jobs that tend to be better matched by techs, Kile said. “We’re gonna have bunch of people quit,” Kile said. “When they quit, it’s hard to say how fast we’ll burn through stretching everybody else thin.”
Alaska Air National Guard Lt. Col. Brian Kile, 176th Operations Group deputy commander, talks to members and staff of the Alaska Legislature on Dec. 11, 2018, at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage.
The meeting stretched to two hours, and at points while sharing their stories, according to Murkowski, several members “were in tears.”
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