Personnel chief: Road ahead for Airmen tough, but bright

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WASHINGTON (AFNS) --  Adapting to a joint environment along with a changing world of a younger force, budget cuts and manpower drawdowns was the focus of the Air Force's personnel chief during the Air Force Association's Air and Space Exhibition and Conference here Sept. 17.

Lt. Gen. Darrell Jones, deputy chief of staff for manpower, personnel and services, told an audience that in a world where the "millennial"generation represents much of the Air Force, leaders must change the way they look at today's Airmen. Jones said that 74 percent of Airmen today are under the age of 34.

"We all tend to think that people think like us. It's very dangerous. So as young leaders in the Air Force, you've got to make sure that you understand how these young people are thinking.

"They're pretty much aliens to most of us. I know, because I have two of them. They are aliens. They think differently, they talk differently, they process information differently. Some people would say their values are different. I would argue that. I think their values are very, very similar to our values when we were young."

Jones discussed how recent and potential future budget cuts will affect the personnel and services arenas, and discussed how those cuts will affect the individual Airman. He talked about how, at the Air Force level, budget constraints have forced a consolidation

"We had the Air Force Personnel Center; the Air Force Manpower Agency; the Air Force Services Agency; and we brought them all together under one new super center. It's still called the Air Force Personnel Center, but we have rolled up manpower and services under the Personnel Center. We pulled them all together. In the next nine months you're going to see a rebounding of strategies and moving around all the boxes on the organization chart, where you probably won't recognize it in a year from where it was before.

"I guess what I tell people is we can't always give you the personnel service we want to give you, but we can give you the personnel service that we can afford to give you. Our job is to make sure that it's good quality personnel service."

Jones said that while he would like to go back to a consolidated base personnel office, with 75 personnelists at every base, the young men and women in today's Air Force don't want to go that route.

"I've got to tell you, youngsters, young men and women in the Air Force, young Airmen, young civilians, young officers, don't want to go to a consolidated base personnel office. As much as that hurts me. I think I'm the last active duty CMPO chief of the Air Force. They don't want to go there.

"They're used to doing things online. That puts the responsibility back on us. We've got to make sure our computer systems, our web pages and everything else are conducive to people doing things online. If you're going to have the people so that you can go on automation, you might want to make sure the automation is good. That's our responsibility. We've got to provide our customers a rewarding experience when we tell them to go on line and do their job. If we say use virtual out-processing, we say use virtual TNO, whatever, then it's got to be able to work because that's how they were raised. They were raised going to web sites where things worked. When they don't work and they actually have to talk to somebody, they get irritated."

Jones talked about how a survey conducted for the U.S. Air Forces Europe several years ago revealed that while the Air Force had taken a six percent cut overall, and increased squadrons by 11 percent, personnelists and communications people were reduced by 52 percent.

"When the orderly room of the flying squadron and the orderly room of the maintenance squadron has to pull in flyers and maintainers to do personnel work, or when the operations folks got to go outside the wire and there's nobody there to fix the meals for them, those are the things we're trying to work with as we go down.

"We've done a study, we plan on increasing the number of people in the orderly room. That's the good news. The commander support staff. Next year we should see rolling out -- We went to interview 4,000 people at 40 different bases. It was pretty interesting. As we briefed the outcome of it ,one of the key take-aways was we've moved knowledge operations from the squadron level up to the group level at all the bases. Eighty-two percent of all the group commanders that were interviewed told us we need to put the knowledge operators back down to the commander support staff level. Eighty-two percent!

"So we're moving the knowledge operators back down to the commander support staff. We're doing a review of what the knowledge operators are doing to see how we need to work on that career field. And working with A6 and A1 together, we're putting together what would be sort of the orderly room of the future."

Jones also spoke of tuition assistance for Airmen, and promised that the Air Force will continue to offer the program, although he believes it will be under scrutiny in the years ahead.

"We believe in education in the Air Force. When I came in the Air Force 100 years ago, on the day that I entered, 24 percent of all the enlisted force in the Air Force had some education levels higher than high school. Twenty-four percent! Today if you took that same poll the answer is 96 percent of the enlisted force has something over high school. One year of college, two years of college, associate's degree. Obviously the Community College of the Air Force has helped that tremendously. It's a wonderful way for us to send people out of the Air Force with an associate degree as they go back out into the work force, or to make that first hurdle as they start earning their master's degree.

"I will tell you all the services are in lock-step because frankly, whatever we offer to an Airman needs to be offered to a Soldier, a Sailor, a Marine, a Coasty. We have to do things
together. This is something that's really getting a little scrutiny in the next few years."

Discussing today's younger Airmen, Jones pointed out that 69 percent of the Air Force are millennials, and have issues and needs that may not have been valid with previous generations.

"They start texting online to set something up. They would set up all of the preliminary work that we do in the virtual world, and then they would actually get together. One of the things they told us is they want a sense of community. They want some place they can go and hang out.

"When I talk about service activities I talk in terms of buildings. The bowling alley, the library, the golf course, the auto body shop. Most of y'all, if you'll admit it, are visualizing the same thing. The youngsters don't think that way. They think in terms of capability. What they want is something like a community college. They want to go into the coffee shop, which by the way is connected to the learning center/library. Which goes into the outdoor rec. Outdoor rec I believe is very, very, very important to our young airmen and their ability to regenerate. And keep that sense of community where they can all hang out together. If the bowling alley, at the auto hobby shop, all those things are connected to it so much the better.

"Obviously with limited resources we're not going to be able to rebuild everything, but we can start off with knocking some walls down both virtually and literally to help bring the Airmen together and help them do the things that they like to do a little better."

Jones said that one of the challenges on the services side was to find the core to being an Airmen. "We found out that it was fitness centers, child care, youth programs,dining halls, Airman Family Readiness Centers, libraries and outdoor rec.

"When we decided what was core to the Air Force the way we did it was we looked at what services we thought we could provide, what services the Airmen said they needed to regenerate, and what they were using. That intersection there was where we decided to make the core of the Air Force."

Jones admits that while the Air Force is working hard to fund that core, he says it may be difficult, in today's environment, to fund 100 percent. "We've got some of the best people, certainly some of the best people in the military. We're looking at great innovations and future programming and future weapon systems which are made possible by the innovative Airmen we have."

Jones looks ahead to the challenges facing the Air Force, and says he doesn't worry about the road ahead for Airmen.

"The future is really coming together. The future is going to be okay. It's going to be tough. Don't think I'm just up here saying it won't work out. It's going to require some hard work by some great Airmen in all career fields to make sure the future is secure and we come out the other end leaner and better at what we're doing. I don't worry about the quality of Airmen that we have in the Air Force that are able to do that. Analyze the situation, decide the way we're going, help us come out with a good outcome at the other end."