The Air Force's personnel chief, Lt. Gen. Samuel Cox, will be the next commander of the 18th Air Force, the Defense Department said Thursday.
Maj. Gen. Gina Grosso, who is now director of the Air Force's Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office, will get her third star and take over for Cox as deputy chief of staff for manpower, personnel and services.
The 18th Air Force is located at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois, under Air Mobility Command.
Cox became the Air Force's personnel chief in December 2013, and oversaw the service through a tumultuous time. Budget cuts forced the Air Force to launch a massive drawdown effort that relied heavily on a wide array of voluntary and involuntary force management programs such as 15-year retirements, voluntary separation pay and retention boards.
The Air Force cut 19,834 active-duty airmen through the 2014 force management programs Cox oversaw — a 6 percent cut from the 330,700 airmen that were in the force when fiscal 2014 began. Under Cox's direction, the Air Force also cut accessions by 4 percent last year and by 14 percent in 2015 to also draw down the force.
The Air Force is aiming to bring its end strength down to 310,900 by the end of fiscal 2015.
Cox and director of military force management policy Brig. Gen. Brian Kelly regularly stressed last year that the Air Force didn't want to make those cuts, but were forced to by the dire budget situation. They sought to ensure that the Air Force made the cuts as smartly as possible to minimize the pain felt by the force.
That meant relying on voluntary separation programs as much as possible, and offering airmen incentives to leave. When all was said and done, some 70 percent of the force management cuts were achieved through voluntary programs.
They also wanted to avoid mass cuts to accessions, which they said would throw the force out of balance and create a so-called bathtub effect that would be felt for decades. In a November interview, Cox said the Air Force tried cutting accessions by 34 percent in 2005 and 2006, which left those year groups short.
Cox had his team go line by line through the Air Force's ranks to figure out where it was overmanned and could afford to cut. What resulted were a series of so-called "matrices" that detailed which jobs and in which grades would be eligible for specific force management programs.
And Cox frequently had to adjust on the fly. After a scandal involving cheating, drug use and poor morale in the Air Force's nuclear missile enterprise broke, Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James announced several moves to bolster their ranks. That meant Cox's team had to act fast to remove nuclear jobs from the list of airmen who could be cut.
But many airmen grumbled online about a lack of communication from the Pentagon on the details of how these cuts would work. And there were some mix-ups that created confusion — particularly the case of about 1,100 airmen who had accepted voluntary separation pay and had mistakenly been promised six months of extended health care benefits. The Air Force revoked those separating airmen's Tricare benefits, which caused an outcry online.
Weeks went by without a solution, and some airmen's anger increased when the service issued a statement that said "it would be unrealistic to expect perfection" given the complexity of the force management programs.
About a month after the 1,100 airmen were told their medical benefits had been revoked, the Air Force announced it would restore them to all 4,400 airmen who had taken voluntary separation pay.
Stephen Losey is the air warfare reporter for Defense News. He previously covered leadership and personnel issues at Air Force Times, and the Pentagon, special operations and air warfare at Military.com. He has traveled to the Middle East to cover U.S. Air Force operations.
