Levin urges Gov. Snyder to help make case for Michigan National Guard
Wednesday, December 19, 2012
WASHINGTON – Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, wrote today to Gov. Rick Snyder and the Michigan National Guard Adjutant General, Maj. Gen. Gregory Vadnais, encouraging them to help him make the case to Pentagon and Air Force leaders to assign Air National Guard airlift aircraft to Battle Creek Air National Guard Base.
Levin’s letter informs the state’s National Guard leadership of provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2013 relating to the Michigan Air National Guard. The defense authorization bill, which a House-Senate conference committee completed on Tuesday, retains A-10 fighters and KC-135 refueling tankers now based at Selfridge Air National Guard Base in Macomb County. The conference report adds an MQ-1/MQ-9 unmanned aerial vehicle “remote split operations” unit at Battle Creek. The unit would remotely operate UAVs that play a growing role in Air Force operations.
It also modifies an Air Force proposal on National Guard airlift, requiring the Air Force to retain an additional 32 C-130 and/or C-27 aircraft, beyond what the Air Force had proposed, to meet the nation’s airlift needs.
“Battle Creek ANGB would be eligible to host a portion of the additional C-130 and/or C-27 aircraft authorized in the conference report,” Levin wrote. “However, for that eligibility to translate into actual aircraft for Battle Creek ANGB, I urge you to join me in making the case to the leadership of the Air Force and National Guard Bureau that basing of C-130 and/or C-27 aircraft at Battle Creek ANGB would be very much in our national security interest because it would make full use of the great facilities and tremendous talent the base has to offer.”
As chairman of the Armed Services Committee, Levin led efforts to reject the Air Force’s 2013 budget plan for Air National Guard force structure, which called for elimination of aircraft at Selfridge and Battle Creek, a plan Levin called “disproportionate.” The conference report includes a provision Levin authored to establish a Nation Commission on the Structure of the Air Force to make recommendations that could help avoid such unbalanced plans in the future.