By David Roza
As new trainees arrived to their first day at Air Force Officer Training School at Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala., on Oct. 10, they found themselves in the middle of what OTS Commandant Col. Keolani Bailey described as the school’s biggest change in its 64-year history.
Called OTS-Victory, the new program is meant to give trainees more hands-on experiences; make them better prepared for joint, near-peer conflicts; grow instructors into experts on specific leadership skills; and make it easier for OTS to train more officers in a time of crisis.
“It’s the most transformational change in the history of OTS because every facet of everything we do is different and it’s all done within the same 60 training days,” deputy commandant Col. Derrick Iwanenko told Air & Space Forces Magazine. “Same amount of days, same amount of instructors, but because of how the course is now structured … it’s concentrated in a far better manner to produce a better graduate at the end.”
Modules
Unlike the U.S. Air Force Academy and Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC), OTS turns civilians or prior enlisted service members who already have college degrees into Air Force and Space Force officers over the course of 60 days rather than two to four years. The new course is still 60 days long, but the layout is now broken into five modules.
In the first, trainees learn the basics—customs, courtesies, culture, drill, and uniform standards. The next two introduce Air Force organizational structures, wargaming, and basic leadership skills and principles. Module four focuses on planning and “mission command experience.”
The fifth and final module brings into play concepts of warfighting, including anti-access/area denial, Agile Combat Employment, rapid mobilization, and strategic competition, the Department of Defense’s term for competing with near-peer powers such as China and Russia. It also includes a capstone event known as the Commandant’s Challenge, where prospective officers test the skills they learned over the previous weeks.
Unlike the past, course instructors will specialize in particular modules, reducing lesson-planning time for instructors and enabling them to develop expertise. “The instructors become so much more efficient and effective” this way, Bailey said. “Now they become the experts in their two-week modules, and they are able to deliver that content at such a higher level.”
Hands-On Application
The instruction itself will be revamped to tie in more real-life stories from Air Force service. A typical day might begin with a TED Talk-style presentation by an officer or noncommissioned officer about a personal experience that illustrates the leadership lesson of the day. The presentation is meant to help trainees learn through the “affective” domain—what Bailey described as “through the heart.”
After the presentation, the students then hit the classroom to learn the lesson in the cognitive domain—“through the head”—and then they apply those lessons in hands-on experiences meant to target the behavioral domain, “the training piece.”
There is more emphasis on training in OTS-Victory than in previous iterations, Iwanenko said. For example, if the lesson is on change management, there will be an exercise where trainees must plan an operation, but when they go out to execute it, they will get an “intel drop” that will force them to change the operation and implement the lessons they learned earlier.
“The way that we would assess change management previously would be through an academic assessment, a test,” he said. “That’s more just rote memorization. Now we’re purposeful in having them exercise through the behavioral domain, that actual hands-on application, the theory they just learned about in the classroom.”
Bailey added that the real learning takes place during the debrief afterward, where trainees get feedback on their decisions. Another example of the behavioral domain is the mission command exercise (MCE) during module four. The MCE could take the form of a multidomain lab, where trainees use flight simulators and command-and-control networks to oversee or execute a mission; a wargame where trainees lead a combined joint task force in a fictional conflict; or a capstone event where trainees practice agile combat employment operations, a concept where Airmen operate from small airfields that may be isolated from higher levels of command. Practice makes perfect, so each trainee will participate in 15 MCEs during the course and lead at least one.
“They plan, they brief, they write mission-type orders, execute the mission, and then debrief,” Bailey said. “They get lots of reps and sets going through this experience so it becomes natural for them to then operate in the joint environment we need for the future fight.”
Shock Absorber
Since OTS takes less time than ROTC and the Air Force Academy, the school acts as a “shock absorber” that can ramp up officer production in times of need, Bailey explained. OTS-Victory amplifies that capability by graduating 20 or 21 smaller class sizes per year–with a surge capacity of 26—instead of five graduations of larger classes a year under the old system. The change should make it easier to schedule trainees and instructors.
“These different levers that we’ve orchestrated into this structure allow us to be more responsive to increases or decreases in demand,” he said.
Under the old model, each graduating class was about 500 to 550 students, while the new model will be about 155, with capacity to max out at 175. But yearly output remains about the same, at 3,000 officer candidates per year, with room to scale up if the need arises.
Under OTS-Victory, there will typically be five classes in session, each at a different point in the training course. The staggered schedule means trainees in modules four and five are considered upperclassmen who can mentor newer candidates, something OTS hasn’t seen since at least 2009.
New Recruits Deadlift to Join the Air Force
By David Roza
A tweak to the Air Force accession process meant to help recruits stay safe has also made it easier for women to join more physically demanding career fields. The Air Force changed its strength aptitude test in January from a clean-and-press style strength test to a deadlift test. While the mode of lifting has changed, the minimum weight required to join the Air Force, 40 pounds, has not.
Recruits take the strength aptitude test on an incremental lifting machine at Military Entrance Processing Stations to prove they are strong enough for day-to-day military life. The minimum weight requirement was increased for career fields that are more physically demanding, though the maximum weight is capped at 110 pounds. Security forces requires 70 pounds, while munitions systems (the Airmen who assemble bombs) requires 60 pounds, and firefighting requires 100 pounds, according to a 2018 study conducted by RAND.
The Air Force Recruiting Service (AFRS) told Air & Space Forces Magazine that the change was helped by guidance from the 711th Human Performance Wing at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which advised “a neutral position” for lifting where minimal twisting at the legs, torso, and shoulders allows recruits to lift more weight more safely compared to the clean-and-press.
But the payoff is more qualified applicants for more kinds of jobs.
“It has increased our applicant pool, but the most significant impact has been to the job specialty qualifications which are now more gender diverse,” the AFRS public affairs office said.
Since the change took effect in January, 4,111 women have gone through the new strength test, and 1,162 opted into operational specialties such as aircraft maintenance, munitions, security forces, and special warfare/combat support, AFRS said.
The Air Force Acting Chief of Staff, Gen. David W. Allvin, referenced the change in written testimony sent to the Senate Armed Services Committee in September, noting updates like this “better reflect the actual demands of the career fields thus expanding career field opportunities, especially for our female recruits.”
He acknowledged that the Air Force missed its recruiting goals in fiscal 2023, but said the service is not bending the rules on quality, only on factors that are not material to Airmen’s ability to serve. “We have maintained the focus on quality and will follow-up long term to ensure that any changes made thus far have not had a negative impact on readiness or fitness of the force,” he said.