Breaking Off Engagement

Gen. Mark Welsh, head of US Air Forces in Europe, thinks the Air Force can save some money by reducing its mentorship of some other countries’ air forces. In Wednesday’s Four Star Forum, he said: “The one thing we can take a hard look at is building partnership capacity. We do an awful lot of work in that area. We spend a lot of time and energy doing it. We do it for two COCOMs [combatant commands] now, both EUCOM and AFRICOM. I think we do too much, and so I think that’s a place we can reduce.” He added, “We do a lot of training with emerging air forces and not enough with near-peer air forces.” At the same time, Welsh said two areas that should be off-limits to budget cuts are training and missile defense.