Twice in less than two decades, AFIT’s future lingered in doubt, but the post-graduate school at Wright-Patterson avoided closure by showing its military value, officials said.
“Given the past examples, it is very likely that AFIT will be considered for significant cuts,” said Michael Gessel, vice president of federal programs at the Dayton Development Coalition. “That’s not a statement it will happen, but rather it’s simply likely that it will be considered for significant cuts.”
Gessel emphasized no proposal is on the table to close the school.
For the first time, the school opened its doors to civilian defense contractors within the past year and hired a civilian chancellor. The school cut about 50 staff positions last year because of Air Force wide job reductions and this year rearranged course schedules because of upcoming employee furloughs to avoid classes on Fridays.
AFIT director and chancellor Todd Stewart, a retired Air Force major general, said he hopes if top brass weigh in on the school’s future “that they do it with a well-informed understanding of the things that AFIT brings to the Air Force.”
Stewart said top defense leaders have said “everything is on the table.” The Defense Department is engaged in the Strategic Choices Management Review to look at cuts to the defense budget at three levels during the next decade.
The Wright-Patterson campus, home to the School of Systems and Logistics, the Civil Engineering School and the Center for Cyber Research, had a budget of about $178 million and authorized personnel this year of 480 faculty and staff members. Between 700 to 800 students attend on campus, and another 2,500 students assigned to AFIT attend civilian institutions, most of whom are enrolled in medical school. Some 33,000 military and civilian students enroll in about 200 AFIT professional continuing education courses every year.
Stewart said he’s not overly concerned about AFIT’s future: The school has a focus on national defense education and classified research that civilian educational institutions can’t equal, he said.
“As long as we continue to deliver value to the Air Force and the Department of Defense I have every reason to believe that we will be around for a long time,” he said.
Todd Harrison, a senior fellow with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, D.C., said military education institutions will get “much more scrutiny” in coming years.
“AFIT is a prime example because there are many other top notch graduate schools that focus on the same degree programs — and many of their names also end in ‘Institute of Technology,’” he wrote in an email. The question is whether service members receive anything unique at military graduate schools versus the cost to attend elsewhere, he said.
“In many cases, the military run schools cost much more per student. That makes them vulnerable to cuts by lawmakers looking for waste and inefficiency in the defense budget,” he wrote.
But school advocates disagree with claims of high costs and point to the importance of AFIT to national security. More than 60 percent of the research, for example, is classified. The school has courses in nuclear weapons, intelligence, cyber warfare and other specialities unique to the military that aren’t replicated elsewhere, Stewart said.
Maj. Robert Wacker, an AFIT weather instructor, said his graduate students are steered to research projects that meet Air Force needs, from predicting lighting strikes at Kennedy Space Center in Florida to the effect of space weather on orbiting satellites.
Air Force Master Sgt. Jason Russi, an AFIT student, designed with the help of a software engineer a 3-D air traffic radar display. An Air Force experiment showed the technology improved air traffic controllers’ situational awareness, Russi said.
With spending cuts impacting travel, AFIT has broadcast more training courses via a school satellite television studio to bases around the world, said Paul Keenan, director of distance learning. He estimated the military has saved $1.5 million in travel expenses.
The last time closure was considered was during the 2005 Defense Base Realignment and Closure Commission process. The Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., also was on a potential chopping block, or consolidation with AFIT, by keeping the California campus open.
“The commission staff, when they investigated that, concluded that (closure of AFIT) would not be a smart thing to do simply because … for a number of reasons but a big one is that we are so highly leveraged with the Air Force Research Lab that you simply could not replicate that capability at any affordable cost,” Stewart said. Students use AFRL labs next to the campus and AFRL researchers act as mentors.
A BRAC commission study acknowledged money could be saved consolidating NPS and AFIT, but found that would have meant a loss of military value, according to Gessel.
U.S. Rep. Mike Turner, R-Dayton, included language in the next National Defense Authorization Act to encourage the Air Force to maintain a commitment to graduate-level education while the National Research Council reviews graduate degree granting programs within the Department of Defense. The congressman pushed to open the doors to defense contractors.
“AFIT remains an important part of our military’s education structure,” he said in a statement. “During these tight fiscal times there are always concerns that cuts may affect facilities like AFIT.”
In the mid-1990s, the school appeared headed for closure when AFIT temporarily stopped accepting students for at least a semester, according to Gessel, a former congressional aide. The students were sent instead to civilian institutions, but the Air Force later decided to keep the school open.
Former U.S. Rep. Dave Hobson, R-Springfield, an Ohio Air National Guard veteran, has had a key role in keeping the institute open. A street in front of the school is named for him. He didn’t want to predict what might happen with budget cuts.
“No one can tell,” he said. “I think it’s very shortsighted to kill a facility or a program that has been so instrumental in training people. This is not a business school. This is a school with advanced degrees in engineering, science and technology, and they really get into Air Force culture.”
The last time closure was considered, “we found that it was not only more cost effective to have these people at AFIT, but they had a better understanding of the labs and of the Air Force by doing it at Wright-Patterson,” Hobson said.
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