The Air Force permanently stood up the new Air Force Accessions Center on Dec. 2, a move officials hope will improve coordination and consistency between the service’s various organs for bringing in new Airmen and Guardians, particularly officers.
AFAC places the Air Force Recruiting Service (AFRS) and the Jeanne M. Holm Center for Officer Accessions and Citizen Development, which previously fell under Air University, under one command.
AFRS is in charge of enlisted accessions for both the Air Force and Space Force, as well as officer accessions when candidates go through Officer Training School, the 60-day boot camp at Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala.
The Holm Center oversees the execution of OTS and the new Warrant Officer Training School. It also administers the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC), the service’s largest source of commissioned officers, and the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC), a youth development program that does not incur a military obligation, but which many high schoolers go through on their way to joining the Air Force.
Each ROTC detachment has an officer assigned to recruiting duty, but the ROTC recruiting system was not always coordinating with the AFRS recruiting system.
For example, last fall, ROTC expected to under-produce officers in the 2024 spring graduation season, forcing AFRS to move fast to compensate with more OTS graduates, the new head of the Accessions Center Brig. Gen. Christopher Amrhein told Air & Space Forces Magazine.
“If we’d seen this a year or more earlier, we could have had more options and been more deliberate in how we responded, rather than run that in a very short period of time,” said Amrhein, who is also keeping his position as head of AFRS.
Another example is Gold Bars, a program for newly-commissioned second lieutenants just out of ROTC who embed with Air Force recruiting squadrons for a year and serve as a kind of ROTC ambassador for interested recruits. Under AFAC, recruiting squadrons, Gold Bars, and the ROTC detachment recruiters are all in the same tent, which is faster than having to coordinate across to Air University and on down, Amrhein explained.
That integration could prove vital at a time when fewer young Americans are willing or able to serve, and the competition with private industry remains fierce. In 2023, the Air Force missed its recruiting goals for the first time since 1999. The service rebounded in 2024 and has set even higher goals for 2025, but Amrhein has cautioned that the service “cannot take our hand off the throttle.”
Every recruit counts, so if a policy needs to change or if a recruiter has a new idea, that information needs to spread across the recruiting enterprise fast.
“As we look for the attributes OTS wants or that ROTC is looking to produce, well now I can communicate that guidance to one force looking for that talent,” Amrhein said.
That should help for the people across the desk, too: now possible recruits, cadets, or candidates should get a more comprehensive, consistent picture of all the possibilities of Air Force or Space Force service than they might have under the old bifurcated system.
The general pointed to a recent conference where ROTC regional commanders and AFRS recruiting group commanders shared best practices for outreach, lead development, and other strategies. AFAC should enable more of that cross-pollination.
“There are all kinds of possibilities with this,” Amrhein said. “It just seems like a better alignment under AFRS rather than under Air University.”
JROTC will be “a big focus item” under AFAC, the general said. There are JROTC detachments in hundreds of high schools that Amrhein wants to better integrate with the rest of the recruiting enterprise. Same goes for ROTC cadets, many of whom boast large followings on social media. That could be a way to raise the brand recognition for the Air Force, a tough task at a time when most Americans have little to no connection with the military.
“Now that I have them, I intend to put some guidance out there to help them tell our story, because they fall under this command,” Amrhein said. “Now we can be very deliberate in that space.”
The provisional AFAC first stood up Oct. 8, but the Dec. 2 ribbon-cutting marks it becoming permanent and reaching initial operational capability. Amrhein likened it to standing up a numbered Air Force (NAF), a larger entity composed of several wings. AFRS was already considered a NAF, while the Holm Center was not, but bringing it under AFAC will put it under the right umbrella. AFAC itself falls under Air Education and Training Command, which will soon reorganize into Airman Development Command.
“A provisional organization can be stood up and stood down, but [Dec. 2] will signify that the Air Force Accession Center is no longer provisional,” Amrhein said. “It’s a full-up organization.”
It’s a big change, but the branding for the AFRS, ROTC, and other programs across their many platforms and social media channels will remain the same.
“It is an organizational design so that we can understand and see ourselves, more than an external agency seeing us,” the general explained. “It’s really about taking these core things that are already there, and how do we organize that to be more effective … it’s about seeing issues and challenges earlier, having the flexibility, agility, and the authority to make decisions that will solve those problems at the lowest level.”