Leaders hold town-hall meeting

  • Published
  • By Tech. Sgt. Carl Norman
  • Air Force Materiel Command Public Affairs
WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Ohio (AFPN) --  Battle lessons learned, professional military education and air and space expeditionary force issues headlined discussions between Air Force leaders and 300 military and civilian people here during a first Air Force Town Hall meeting June 5.

Secretary of the Air Force Dr. James G. Roche; Gen. John P. Jumper, Air Force chief of staff; and Chief Master Sgt. of the Air Force Gerald Murray took center stage at the Air Force Museum to discuss topics on people’s minds.

“The Air Force does well -- we develop airmen, lead technology to warfighting in unprecedented ways and integrate amongst ourselves and other services as was recently demonstrated in Iraq,” said Roche during his opening remarks. “Our part of the team, who hugely deserves part of the bragging rights in the conflict in Iraq, was done spectacularly. But we could not have done it without those who went, those who stayed behind to support it and those who delivered those incredible systems.”

With the initial introductions made, attention turned to lessons learned in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Roche said he agrees with Jumper’s notion that the Air Force will never fight alone.

“Our country gains power and credibility because we don’t fight alone,” he said. “Operation Iraqi Freedom was the best example of joint operations to date.”

The secretary lauded close support to ground troops, and aircrews providing that support from higher altitudes and being safe in the process. He also said Air Force people’s work with special operators was critical.

“Battles in the various parts of Iraq tested our Air Force in a variety of ways,” he said. “We’ve been able to integrate our forces into a combat air force -- Navy, Marine Corps, U.S. Air Force and coalition -- that performed superbly.”

Roche also said remotely piloted vehicles like the RQ-1 Predator and Global Hawk were used in ways that were complementary to ground and air forces.

“It was really quite remarkable,” he said.

And lastly, in the OIF lessons-learned area, the secretary said airmen integrated space better than ever.

Turning to professional military education, questions arose about rumored changes and what those might bring. To that the leadership trio said one of the things Air Force leaders have tried to do is take a look at everyone’s career -- officer and enlisted -- to see if PME is coming at the right time and if it contains what is needed to meet the task.

“One of our core competencies is developing airmen, and PME is only one element of that,” Murray said. “We’re doing a complete review of our force development to ensure that we’re preparing our airmen for the future based on the lessons learned that we have today.”

The chief said one thing will be to enhance the relationship of officers and noncommissioned officers through combining some of their PME, to evaluate that PME and make sure it is phased at the right time.

“Some of that we’re beginning now,” the chief said. “Gen. (Donald) Cook (Air Education and Training Command commander) will begin a test program at the senior NCO academy and our air and space basic course beginning in July this year. As we start this test, we’ll continue looking at the way we develop in our force and make sure we continually look at our PME.”

“It’s all about teaching the right thing,” Jumper said. “Things that are begin taught at universities are there because there are people who know how to teach that stuff. It’s a different question whether what’s being taught is relevant to the world we live in.

“The world we live in today has changed much in just the last 10 years. The whole nature of the way we think about warfare and the complexities that go into things like targeting are largely political military diplomatic issues and you have to understand how those things factor in to what we do -- the complexities of the world that we live in, the challenges of our relationships with cultures that are much different than ours.

“Take the Arab people and Muslim religion for example. It’s difficult for us to put ourselves in their shoes because it’s different from any of the experiences of any of us in this room. Yet you’ve got to be able to do that to be able to do business with the set of coalition partners. So PME must be relevant, it must be current, it must be agile and opportune, and it also has to be phased in at the right point to be useful to each person.”

From PME, the focus changed to air and space expeditionary force issues and what people think needs to happen to fix a perceived beaten-down system. Jumper disagreed.

“I think that what we saw was an AEF system working exactly as we intended for it to do,” he said. “We have AEF pairs deployed around the world all the time and when a conflict blows up beyond what that pair can handle, you lean forward because you know who’s the next to go because that’s how they’re lined up in the rotation cycle. We were able to lean forward and touch those capabilities like we’ve never done before and put them into combat.”

Now that the conflict is finished, Jumper has set his sights on getting those deployed people back home and putting the AEF system back on schedule.

“We’re taking people from the residual force -- those left over and from AEF Buckets 9 and 10 and those who didn’t go from previous buckets -- and put them in to larger AEF packages that will go on duty for two periods of 120 days out to the end of March (2004),” he said. “They will cover anything we have in the world as we bring the rest of the force back and reconstitute it.”

He said by the end of March 2004, the Air Force can start up the next phase of AEF rotations with a near-normal setup.

Roche then addressed questions about his pending appointment as secretary of the Army. He said he would do what he is told, as any good airman would. But in ending the meeting he said, “I’ll do my best but it’s hard to imagine having felt more welcome or as warmly about a group of people as I do the U.S. Air Force.”

The town-hall meeting will be featured in the June 23 special edition of Air Force Television News. (Courtesy of Air Force Materiel Command News Service)