During the Gulf War, the US had about 500,000 personnel stationed in Saudi Arabia and nearby nations. They could fly for an hour or so to hit their targets. This is a far cry from the current war. First of all, we only have somewhere around 50,000 personnel anywhere in the area. Since few of the neighboring nations aren't allowing us to fly combat missions from their soil, each sortee is several hours long. For example, Navy planes have to completely overfly countries like Pakistan before even reaching Afghanistan. Our F-15Es are flying all the way from Kuwait. That really cuts into the sortee rate and that's why it's so important to establish an airbase within Afghanistan.

Over the last 10 years, the number of Air Force active duty personnel has been cut by over 200,000 people. I know - I was one of them. At the same time, we're still flying missions in Iraq to enforce the no-fly zones, still meeting our NATO and Pacific obligations, still stationed in places like Bosnia, and still doing the daily jobs required in the Air Force, only with far fewer personnel and a lot less equipment. The operational tempo is a lot higher now than it was in the Cold War. This situation is further complicated by years of neglect in maintenance and operational training as these budget items were cut to pay for all these other missions.

I suggest that you're grossly out of touch with the situation in today's military. It isn't like there are a bunch of people sitting around with nothing to do. There are a lot of units where you have half the staff but they still have to perform the same or even an expanded work load. My son has that situation in the Navy. It has been going on for years and shows no sign of improvement. Until something changes, there simply aren't enough Air Force or other military personnel available to add still more missions like airport security. For that matter, I don't think there are 26,000 security police in the Air Force. That's the number of people they're saying are needed for airport security.