AETC is getting more than a name change.
NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.
Eight months after the Air Force said it was renaming Air Education and Training Command (AETC) and expanding its mission, the future Airman Development Command (ADC) remains a work in progress.
In an interview with Air & Space Forces Magazine, AETC boss Lt. Gen. Brian S. Robinson outlined three major changes he envisions for the new command:
- Combining all force development under one command;
- Reducing the functional managers scattered across the Air Force; and
- Standing up new centers of excellence to centralize and guide training changes for certain groups of career fields.
The goal is to reach full operational capability by Oct. 1, 2025, and to focus efforts on five factors: accelerate feedback between operational and training units; enhance tech school training to make it more individualized; take a more deliberate and unified approach to adopting new training technologies; improve touch points with industry, academia, and other services; and simplify the steps needed to make changes across job specialties.
One Commander
Existing policy and work divisions mean training and education aren’t really consolidated in AETC. They will be combined, however, in the revamped ADC.
“Experts can certainly bring their recommendations to the table, but you’ll have a single commander that goes, ‘this is the way we’re going to go, based on the policy, strategy, and budget constraints that you receive from Air Force Headquarters,” Robinson said.
Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David W. Allvin made a similar point during his keynote address at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference on Sept. 16.
“When we understand how we’re going to project power, or learn from exercises that we need to change our training or need to change the way that we are developing our force, we need to do that at speed and scale,” he said. “We have some of it in one command and some of it spread out to the other major commands—it doesn’t happen at scale, at speed.”
The Air Force has 1,600 functional managers at various commands and another 160 career field managers at the Majcoms and Headquarters Air Staff level. All have some sway over how the career field should prepare for operations.
“It’s very disaggregated,” Robinson said. “You have lots of chefs in the kitchen, and there’s no, like, executive chef going ‘Here’s how the menu is supposed to look for the restaurant tonight.’”
Being a functional manager is not a full-time job, and Robinson said many spend as little as 15 percent of their time on that role. The Air Force is studying how many full-time functional managers could do the work of 1,600 part-timers.
“We’re not thinking it’s going to be a tremendously large number of people to do that,” the general said. “It certainly won’t be 1,600, and I think significantly lower than 1,600.”
Some may still be based at major commands, but the bulk will move into ADC’s numbered air forces, either 2nd Air Force, which oversees training for enlisted Airmen and nonflying officers, or 19th Air Force, which trains enlisted aircrew and rated officers—pilots, combat systems officers, and air battle managers.
Reducing the number of functional managers should knock down stovepipes. “Making this change to achieve ‘mission over function’ [creates] a command that is organized in a way to see across those functional boundaries,” Robinson said.
Centers of Excellence
Several new “Centers of Excellence” (CoEs) will be created to develop curricula and best practices, each focusing on related career fields with similar attributes. For example, under 2nd Air Force, five CoEs will cover certain fields:
- Logistics: Aircraft maintenance, materiel management.
- Command and Control: Air traffic control, airfield management.
- Institutional: Recruiting, special duty.
- Information: Intelligence, cyber.
- Combined operations: Special warfare, career enlisted aviator.
The 19th Air Force’s Detachment 24 will become the CoE for aircrew training. The CoEs are meant to streamline the feedback between operational units and institutional training units. Institutional units fall under AETC, but training continues in operational units virtually every day an Airman isn’t deployed or on a mission.
When an operational unit sees a need to change the way institutional units produce pilots or loadmasters, for example, it has not always been clear who should effect that change.
That’s where the CoEs come in. “If [operational units] say they need more work on these skills or competencies to be ready for what we need in our theater, we can pivot quickly on the training content and curricula redesign,” Robinson explained.
At the conference, Robinson cited Defender Next—a complete revamp of Security Forces training to increase the focus on combat skills—which officials described as the biggest shift in training Security Airmen in decades. Those changes were executed in just nine months, he added. But attempts to revise training in other fields can take from two to five years.
“That’s unacceptable,” he said, noting that AETC’s senior enlisted leader, Chief Master Sgt. Chad Bickley, has said that China “builds an island in the South China Sea in less time than that.”
The CoEs will also help drive a unified approach to preparing Airmen for Agile Combat Employment, a strategy where the Air Force seeks to generate airpower with smaller groups of Airmen so they can maneuver quickly to avoid enemy missile strikes. That means Airmen will have to pick up roles outside their usual job specialty to operate an airfield or refuel an aircraft. Today, that training doesn’t happen until after an Airman graduates initial tech school and gets to their operational unit, but ADC aims to start earlier.
“This integrated approach that we’re going to have [means] we can figure out sooner how to train Airmen on the common core tasks involved in operating an airfield and generating missions,” Robinson said. “We can bring all of that to the left in initial skills training.”
Super Center of Excellence
The new ADC comes about as technology is changing training in all kinds of ways. At Keesler Air Force Base, Miss., air traffic control simulators are installed in the dormitories so students can practice on their own time, slashing washout rates from the mid-20 percent range to just 6 percent, Robinson said.
Making course materials more widely available on a range of devices is helping trainees in other programs master the material more efficiently. Cyber Airmen now complete the curriculum more quickly than in the past, and maintenance students are performing better, thanks to virtual C-130 training.
There are so many opportunities, it can be hard to select the best opportunities to scale.
“Right now, with innovation, sometimes the way we do it as an Air Force breeds a very scattered, disaggregated approach,” he explained. “And then you have a hard time figuring out which of these 15 things that are trying to get after the same objective do we go with?”
Robinson said ADC will stand up a new Enterprise Learning Engineering Center of Excellence to help develop more effective systems for learning.
Equipped with 24 full-time staff, the center will test new technology and techniques and select the most promising for adoption. The Air Force will try not to invent everything from scratch, but reach out to the other military services, to academia, to industry, and to allied military services for ideas.
“It’s incredible what I’ve seen talking to the Singaporean Air Force, the Italian Air Force, the Finnish Air Force, the German Air Force, people that don’t have the budget that the DOD has and how they have solved problems,” the general said. “They’re incredibly insightful and effective, and they had to do it that way because they don’t have the money that the U.S. government or the Air Force has, and we ought to be thinking that way too.”
Officer Development
ADC will aim to standardize more officer training, eliminating differences among graduates of the U.S. Air Force Academy, ROTC, and Officer Training School (OTS). At the new OTS-Victory program, candidates are fully qualified in the M-18 sidearm, Robinson said, but cadets in ROTC and USAFA only get familiarization training.
OTS now devotes more time to practicing mission command, where leaders have to fulfill objectives without being able to reach back to higher command for guidance. The other commissioning sources may not emphasize that as much—but they should, Robinson said.
“I can tell you from personal experience—command and control, mission command—you don’t become good at that just by reading books,” Robinson said.
The new Air Force Accessions Center will better align pre-commissioning training for officers and a “bi-directional liaison” between the center and the Academy, the one commissioning program that will remain outside ADC.
“In the training aspect for officers, you’ll see a more coherent and unified approach to how we train, how we conduct pre-commissioning officer or leadership training to cadets at ROTC, to officer trainees at OTS,” Robinson said. “You’ll see an element of that as well in the warrant officer school starting up here soon.”
On the highest end of the education spectrum, ADC will take on oversight of the Air Force’s Ph.D. Management Office, which assigns Ph.D. graduates to their next jobs, often at the Academy or the Air Force Research Laboratory.
“Those aren’t wrong decisions, but we don’t need to send them all there,” he said. “There’s something about having a Ph.D. in the operating squadron—you pick the specialty—who’s kind of going, ‘Well, why are we doing things this way?’”
At a time when the Air Force wants to change as fast as possible, Robinson sees training as “the one thing we can affect right now.”
“We’re not going out and acquiring a [Collaborative Combat Aircraft] that’s going to take a five-year development plan, right?” he said. “We need to be able to pivot quickly. And we can do that today.”