150th Fighter Wing Lands a New Mission: Tacos To Take On Special Operations

Sep. 18--The New Mexico National Guard's 150th Fighter Wing, slated to lose all 21 of its F-16 Fighting Falcons next year as the Air Force shifts to newer fighters, has landed a new mission.

National Guard officials said the fighter wing will become associated with the Air Force's 58th Special

"We have received a new mission," Capt. Amanda Straub, spokeswoman for the New Mexico National Guard, said Thursday afternoon. "We are going to be basically taking over the mission of the 58th Special Operations Wing."

The 58th Special Operations Wing trains about 2,200 military personnel a year in special operations and combat search and rescue, and employs more than 1,800 personnel, according to the Air Force.

By finding a new mission, the 150th Fighter Wing is likely to retain about 1,092 jobs, one-third of them held by fulltime National Guardsmen, if not the legacy of a fighter wing that started out flying P-51 Mustangs in 1947.

Switching from a fighter wing to a special operations wing, technically known as an "active association," is likely to take about two years, Straub said.

"We still don't know exactly what that's going to look like yet. There is a lot of additional planning that has to go into this," she said.

That planning will determine the exact mix of Air Force and Guard personnel that will be needed to support the new wing.

"The key point of the active association is that the New Mexico National Guard will own the aircraft of the 58th," Straub said. "What that means for us is that the governor can use those aircraft for search and rescue missions, natural disasters, anything that comes up in the state ... we can use them for emergency response."

Though it has no fighter aircraft, the 58th has four CV-22 Ospreys, the new tiltrotor aircraft that combines assets of a turboprop airplane with those of a helicopter. The wing is slated to receive two more Ospreys.

The 58th also flies versions of the C-130 Hercules: the MC-130E Combat Talon I, MC-130H Combat Talon II and the MC-130P Combat Shadow.

Its helicopters include the HH-60G Pave Hawk; the MH-53J Pave Low III and UH-1H and UH-1N Huey helicopters.

In all, the 58th has more than 60 aircraft.

The future of the 150th Fighter Wing, known since its days in Vietnam as the Tacos, came into question in April with the Pentagon's decision to cap purchases of the new F-22 Raptor -- a stealthy fighter the 150th was hoping would replace its aging F-16s -- and to speed up purchases of the less-costly but equally stealthy F-35 Lightning II joint strike fighter.

That plan also accelerates the retirement of 249 fourthgeneration fighters during fiscal year 2010, including 112 F-15s, 134 F-16s and three A-10 Thunderbolt IIs.

All 21 of the Tacos' F-16s are included in the early retirement plan.

Rep. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M. and the state delegation's point man in finding the Tacos a new mission, said challenges lay ahead.

"There's still a lot of work in front of us and we need to be committed to making it work for the Tacos and for the Air Force," Heinrich said Thursday from Washington, D.C.

"My goal was to try to keep them flying so that in the future they can get back into fighter aircraft," he said. "But there's still going to be a lot of challenges moving forward because what the 150th does now is very different from what the special operations wing does. We've got our work cut out for us."

Maj. Gen. Kenny Montoya, the state Guard's adjutant general, was traveling Thursday and unavailable to comment on the 150th's new mission.

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