The Secretary of Defense approved a change that would essentially reverse how many U.S. Air Force Central personnel are stationed at Shaw Air Force Base and how many are stationed at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar.
AFCENT does the Air Force's warfare planning for the Middle East, and Shaw has a small Air Forces Central Combined Air Operations Center, or CAOC, that has hosted about 30% of AFCENT folks while Qatar has a larger CAOC that has hosted about 70% of AFCENT folks.
According to the U.S. Air Forces Central website, the CAOC's purpose is to plan, monitor and direct "sortie execution, close air support and precision air strike; intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance; airlift; air refueling; aeromedical evacuation; air drop; and countless other mission-critical operations."
This Secretary of Defense decision now designates Shaw's CAOC as primary and is resulting in 349 new personnel moving to Sumter. Additionally, this decision will result in roughly 700 fewer deployments from Shaw annually, according to a statement from the office of U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.
AFCENT will still have a significant presence in Qatar, but much of the weight will be moved to Sumter's base as a result of this designation.
This creates a catch, said Steve Creech, executive committee member of the South Carolina Military Base Task Force and former mayor of the City of Sumter, because Shaw's CAOC, as it stands today, is not large enough to accommodate the new airmen.
"The long-range plan is to build a new facility, a new, bigger air operations center here at Shaw Air Force Base, and that will take an appropriation from the committee that Sen. Lindsey Graham is on," Creech said.
The Secretary of Defense approved Shaw to be designated as the primary CAOC in August, but the idea had been in the works since 2020, according to Deputy Director of Public Affairs for U.S. Air Forces Central Daniel R. de La Fé.
The goal was to "preserve operational readiness by redistributing personnel in the Middle East to more permanent positions at Shaw Air Force Base," he told The Sumter Item. "The distribution of personnel from Al Udeid AB to Shaw AFB contributes to South Carolina's economy in various ways, including a need for additional housing, improved installation facilities and airmen participating in the local area's economy."
The nearly 350 positions, before the designation, were 180-day overseas deployments in Qatar. Now, after the designation, they are permanent party positions at Shaw, which are two to four years long and are also stateside rotational deployments, which can be 180 or 365 days long, according to de La Fé, and this change helps to "preserve family stability, maintain operational continuity and retain specialized knowledge."
About 200 of these 349 AFCENT personnel have already relocated to Sumter, and the rest will make the switch during the next few years, de La Fé said.
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