- The Air Force has announced the creation of a new Information Operations Technical Training School. - The First Command, simply must arm or airmen to outthink, out perform, out partner, out innovate any potential adversary. - Air Force basic military training has an updated curriculum with a new focus on readiness and lethality. - The First Command, The Air Force Starts Here. - Hello everyone and welcome to The Air Force Starts Here podcast. I'm your host for this professional development podcast, Jennifer Gonzalez from the AETC Public Affairs team. As you know, this podcast is dedicated to bringing total force Airmen tips, tricks, and lessons learned from the recruiting, training and education morals. Well, in this episode, we feature excerpts from Lieutenant General, Brad Webb, commander of Air Education Training Command, commander's call, which took place on November 16th. General Webb, along with Chief Master Sergeant, Erik Thompson, who is the Command Chief of AETC, discussed the recently updated AETC strategic action plan, which was broadcast live on Facebook. The command team, along with our very own Dan Hawkins discussed each of the four priority areas, which are advanced force development, enhance lethality and readiness, transformed the way we learn and cultivate an environment of excellence. While these priorities have not changed and will not change, the focus areas beneath them have. Take a listen and for the full broadcast, visit AETC's YouTube or Facebook page. - Every go on first in the summer, we've had a new addition to the command team. As Chief Julie Gudgel is in retirement and now Chief Erik Thompson from the 19th Air Force is now command chief. So very first I wanna welcome you chief to the team and anything you'd like to say? - Hey, thanks general. It's been a hundred days so far that I've been up here on the AETC staff. It's been an amazing time and I appreciate your leadership and the opportunity to be a part of this great team. - Thanks chief welcome on board. - Yes, sir. - The message to our team have really been centered on two things and that is COVID and also diversity and inclusive challenges that is really the bellwether for the United States Air Force. Obviously COVID is not over, in fact, in many areas of the country and certainly inside AETC it's we're on another one of those upswings. While we didn't articulate that this is a named operation, we're in a contingency. That's how we behaved. And I think that's served us very well. You know, we kind of adopted as a mantra inside of AETC of fighting through. And fighting through remains really kind of the calling card for us. It's this mindset that we're talking about. This agile mind on, okay, you know, we don't know what the answer is. It's one of the things that I got asked a lot on, what do you want us to do? I don't know. I've never been a squadron commander, in a pandemic environment, but here's the intent. Intent is we gotta train. The readiness of United States Air Force it starts here, but it's dependent on here, so we just got to figure it out. I have heard innumerable examples of our commanders or for the flight commanders or an MTI leaders and their responses have been, oh, what an awesome time to be a leader in AETC. We understand the commander's intent, no one's ever done this before. So we're paving our own path and we're moving out. That's, you know, when people enjoy what they're doing, people feel empowered. They don't understand they have the responsibility, but they also have the authority to move out. I credit that in a big way with the success that we've had to date. Again, I'm not declaring victory, we're far from through this. We're we have challenges going on even right now, you know, with breakouts that you know occur, but we're meeting it head on and we're continuing to get the mission done. - What an amazing job by our airmen, all across AETC. - We don't tell you it couldn't be more incredible, to be a part of this team and watch as they really stepped up when the Air Force needed it, right? And it's not just the wings, it's not just the NASA, it's the staff as well, doing all the synchronization and coordination to make all of this happen in a fairly smooth manner while minimizing risk to our airmen and risk to our families. - I won't rehash the history other than to say AETC and the Air Force has led the department of defense on this orientation. You can see it from the number of visitors that we've had from the secretary of defense, under secretaries of the Air Force, both chiefs, the secretary of the Air Force, et cetera, saying, "Hey, what have you guys done "because you're really a step ahead?" And we, you know, we had last month, our meeting of the MAJCOM commanders, it's called a Corona and not to be confused with COVID, but both chiefs, the chief of staff of the Air Force, General Brown and the chief of space operations, General Raymond, both took times out of their opening comments to address AETC, specifically and AETC's efforts, both from John Brown's perspective, respective of COVID and DNI, and from General Raymond, how we have, really carried a good load for the space force and their stand up. There was so much talk about AETC that at some point it was almost almost a little embarrassing. And I wish our folks inside AETC could have heard that, but suffice to say, I'm very, very proud of the efforts that we've had and that in the areas of COVID and DNI, both. The events of late May, which kind of on top of each other was the George Floyd incident, but also the Protect Our Defenders report, which pointed out in very stark terms that United States Air Force has a problem with racial disparity. And this is my feeling, this is a moment in our Air Force, and I just determined that we need to be, we need to seize this moment and make good history. And that's really, how I conclude every one of our real talks. The point is that it's not just me, I'm trying to do this as an example that, hey, even though this isn't safe space, when you're on a live social media platform, commanders and leaders at all levels should be doing it. And they are in the AETC. You know, listen as the First Command, if we're not articulating this, if we're not focused on that, how can we expect that the rest of the Air Force will? - Absolutely, so this is about the business of leadership, it's about readiness, it's about dignity and respect. It's about making sure our airmen have the ability to play at the top of their game and execute what our nation needs them to execute. And the boss has kind of been a pathfinder for us on this one, to allow commanders to understand that they can have these difficult conversations that it's important for leaders at all levels to have these difficult conversations and have these engagements. - He talked about Corona, and really the first time with our new Chief of Staff of the Air Force, General Brown, and he talks about accelerating change or lose. So what stood out to you about your time at Corona and the mission of AETC as it relates to accelerating change or lose? - Yeah, so that, that is the mantra, and more than the paper. He has a paper out that articulates that, and it comes from his, experience and obviously his sight picture and his preparation for this job as chief that given the national security strategy and the national defense strategy, which of course is always where we should start. That we have great power competitors that are equal. And if we are not, if we're allowing ourselves to get bogged down by bureaucracy, or if we just content to sit on our laurels, we will lose. And that's the point. So he's organized his major efforts along what he calls for action orders. It's an a lineup that's fairly easy to remember A, B, C, D, A is airman, B is bureaucracy, C is competition and D is design implementation. A as will be no shock to anybody in AETC airman is a led kind of dually by the air staff A1 and AETC. And in fact, all the, we breathe all four of these action orders. You'll kind of first blush briefing at Corona last month. And General Kelly, VK Kelly, and I briefed airmen together. And so our lines of effort are the ones that won't be a surprise to anyone it's about force development, developing the airmen we need, kind of wheelhouse stuff that this command has been working on for a number of years. And it dovetails beautifully with our, mission-vision priorities as well. And then bureaucracy really is gonna come down to if General Brown, now General Brown would tell you the most important action that we have is A, the government. Where accelerate change or lose lives is in B. He launches his narrative on bureaucracy, is I hate bureaucracy. And this'll be less I think about organizational change than it will be about really getting to the root of who owns a particular item who has veto power, who's an influencer, and who's a supporter. Because we've confused ourselves inside the Air Force and certainly inside a big staff efforts on. Hey, you may not agree interesting, but not compelling. You're not a vetoer, or you're not an owner. And so he, I think you're going to see a real effort on that. The other thing I would tell you that you're definitely gonna hear from General Brown, kind of like you used to hear from General Goldfein, every challenge and opportunity. If you ever heard General Goldfein speak, I guarantee you, that you heard that. I think with General Brown, you're gonna hear, "I wanna have the meeting after the meeting in the meeting". And what he means by that is, get it all out on the table, right here, when I'm here. I don't wanna walk the halls afterwards and here, well, what we should've talked about was, you know, blah, blah, blah, that's the meeting after the meeting. He don't want that after the meeting, he wants it in the meeting. So I think I take he's deadly serious, General Brown is about really cutting through, making hard decisions 'cause that's what's gonna take to accelerate that change. C is all about competition, I think, you know, we've hit that on a number of forums, great power competition, China and Russia. The air staff has kind of oriented themselves to really get after the nuts and bolts, of the national security strategy along that lines. And design implementation really it's about, how do we go about executing and acquiring major weapons systems in the future and the importance of the digital environment, digital literacy and the digital Air Force. And in fact, the vice chief even says this, "this coming year will be the year "of the digital Air Force." The ability to take data and to use, what does machine learning, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, some blend of all that and design weapon systems. In our case, how we move into learning, we've already got to kind of got to step up on that, but that's what really what the D means. And that's how he's oriented us on the, in the ABCDs of accelerate a change or lose. As General Brown has unveiled his accelerate change or lose, and the ABCDs of that, really our alignment on our priorities of AETC, fit beautifully in there. I've contended since, you know, we first rolled out our first strategic action plan, if you will, back in about this time last year. Maybe isn't, you know, October, something like that. I contended at that time, that about every six months we're gonna have to update that. Just the events, or just changes in our Air Force will have us to have to re-look it. Now I can tell you this, the A, the E, the T and the C will not change in my time at the helm here. I mean, I think, you know, from an advanced force development, enhance lethality and readiness, transforming the way we learn, cultivating an environment excellence that's sound, it stood through several secretaries of the Air Force already and also, now our second Chief of Staff of the Air Force. Now, the sub bullets or the sub priorities in there, they will evolve. And so we have tweaked them and I would think tweak is a really kind of appropriate. And it's with an orientation on the two things that we've just kind of spent a lot of time talking about. How an orientation of being in a contingency environment with respect to COVID has caused some changes along that line, and also the, the diversity and inclusion quotient. - And not that we'll spend a ton of time, but I just really wanted to roll through it. So advanced force development now is focused on developing the airman we need and the refining, the systems that support them, what exactly does that mean? - Yeah, so back in December last year, when we went through, the Chiefs Strategic Planning Choices is what the meeting's called. He articulated at that time that the 2022 Palm build, which is the programmatic build for the Air Force will be focused on airmen. And I turned around to General Sears, who at the time was our 858, and said, lock that in. And that evolved over the next series of months into what we know today as Developing the Airman We Need. We use that inside AETC, but it didn't just AETC at this point, the Air Force is using that. And it is wheelhouse stuff for our 836 obviously but contributory to all the other directors as well in the force development realm. So all the efforts that we have underway, inside our force development, you know, as AETC commander, of course, I wear a second hat as the force development commander, fallen that in that job jar, if you will. The AETC commander has been the dual hatted now for, I think probably almost two and a half years, I think is what it is. And we're really starting to put meat on the bones of what we wanna do that is really oriented towards the chief's priorities. So we have a summit coming up that we'll be able to code lock some more stuff in, but we're not kind of waiting around to ask. I think we got a really good sense of what the chief's intent is, and we're moving out. We've already had some huge successors along this line. You know, the rewrite of the pilot test is one example. Another one that we're already executing is in the exception to policy medical recessions. we have made great strides that is all now under AETC to run on the vice chief's behalf. Those are just a couple of real quick examples. - Chief inside the A as well, I kind of wanted to talk about getting after the issues that impact our force generators is definitely high on your to-do list. - Oh, it's huge. Not only because it's one of the boss's priorities, but it's a spot where I think I can make a difference. It's a spot that I think I can get in there and really kind of put some effort in there. As we talk about how do we recruit the best talent, right? How do we onboard them appropriately so that they can execute the AETC mission, which is critically important to the United States Air Force? How do we continue to develop them as leaders while we have them in our education and training command? And then once they've done this awesome work for Air Education and Training Command, how do we prepare them to go back into their parent MAJCOM or their parent FSC, where they came to us from that's really a critical part of valuing force generation. AETC should be an assignment of choice. It should be a high quality of service, a high quality of life. We need to do the things that we need to do to make that a reality for our airmen. - So, the E talks about that disrupted ops in this contested environment of COVID-19, if you will, but also resourcing decisions and so obviously, you know, the tweak really kind of driven by COVID-19 a little bit, but it goes deeper than that. - Yap, yeah, and the thing to remember about these priorities is there's bleed over. I mean, you could have an argument about, and that should really be in T or that should be in A, or this should be--- and all that's true. And so it's really about bucketizing efforts, so that the leaders that I've charged to move out with this can have the bandwidth to deal with them. And I think we've done a pretty good job of that. You'll notice in this, the new layout, by the way, it's on all our computer splash pages right now, the tweaks. 836 doesn't own, for instance, a lock stock and barrel. In this instance, the 858 doesn't own the lock stock and barrel, but there's kind of a majority of the effort. So, the E still kind of acknowledges straight up the importance of the programming. You know, we have a number of programs T7, obviously which we'll be onboarding before long, but also sustainment of a number of a weapon systems that we already have that occupied a lot of time. But the COVID efforts, it's just, the experience of the last eight months and the things that we've just spent a lot of time talking about obviously is a strategic priority for this command. So we just need to call it such. And there's still a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes every week, as we continue to fight through and have, and continue with production that occurs. And we just need to acknowledge that upfront. So that's the major tweaks from E. - So what will transition now and go into the T transforming the way we learn? It's pretty much stayed the same, talking about aggressively and cost-effectively modernizing education and training and developing and fostering our strategic relationships and partnerships. - The flightship was Pilot Training Next PTN has began a number of other next, which is really learning next. It's really updating the mentality of a 1970s learning with the fundamentals, that need to be done as we advance in deep into the 21st century with how we ought to be learning. And it's taking place now, any nook and cranny inside, AETC. I think, you know, at the action level and I kind of say it that way, because we could be talking about headquarters, we could we talking about units. But at the action level, the chief, and I want us to be innovative, to be assertive, to be change agents, to accelerate change. And so our job at the leadership level is to ensure that, we remove those obstacles that are keeping us from making progress down the road. So that stuff kind of stuff needs to be elevated, it's back to General Brown's bureaucracy and knocking that stuff out of the way, kind of championing where we need to champion at a three-star action officer level or at a command chief level to get that stuff out of the way, so we can go forward. It is beyond clear that at the action level inside of AETC, we know what right is, and then we just need to facilitate that happening. - And so that leads us to our final AETC priority of cultivating an environment of excellence. We talked about somewhat already, but, you know, driving a culture of Air Force, core values, diversity and inclusion, and that's been a priority for you from day one. What makes this maybe the linchpin of the priorities? - Yeah, of course, you know, we kind of talked about it from a core values aspect and certainly the last four or five months DNI has taken center stage General Brown talks about quality of life and quality of service wheelhouse. The week or the day I took the flag, we were in the middle of a mold crisis. So it's all that kind of stuff. It's the hard lessons that we continue to learn with mental health challenges and these kinds of things. That's all kind of wrapped up in that and very important that we, it's just a truism that what the commander focuses on is what the command will focus on. So it has to be upfront. I will say since I didn't, you mentioned it earlier on the core value is I do think, Air Force core values, that's a great starting point for any of that conversation. - Yeah, I think if we're gonna talk about torchbearer culture, what does it mean to be a torchbearer for our Air Force and a member of AETC? This is where that resides right here is that environment of excellence that we're cultivating here. It's about taking care of each other. It's about living by our core values. It's about diversity and inclusion. In addition to the many other things like quality of service and quality of life, that general web we're talking about. - And that leads to that second focus area of caring for airmen and families, 'cause at the end of the day, it's about both. It's about our airmen, but their families as well. - Yeah, the strength of our Air Forces is our airmen, and the strength of airmen is their families, right? I've heard that multiple times and it's an absolutely true statement. So we do serve as teams. This is a team sport for many, many of our airmen, and we have to make sure that we're taking care of the entire team. It's it has been a trying year, but this command has stepped up to the plate right in the ninth inning and, use whatever analogy you wanna use, but it is absolutely swung for the fences and done a great job adapting. Now we're also not done. We still have a month and a half left to go in this year. We still have plenty of work that has to be done. And this is a time when we've got to make sure that we're keeping contact with each other. We are staying connected with each other, and we're ensuring that everybody's still safe as we go through the year. - Keeping the action orders in mind and everything that's happening. What's your expectation for leadership throughout the command, moving into 2021. - The mission-vision priorities, and (mumbles) that's on the screen will serve us well. We are absolutely aligned with General Browns, ABCDs of accelerating change. So as long as we're operating inside that construct, it's gonna serve us absolutely in the right stead. - Chief, any final comments as we get ready to sign off? - I couldn't be more excited to be a part of this command and part of this great team and look forward to spending some more time with each and every one of the folks in this command as we go forward. - Sir. - Same to me. I'm really proud, I'm really proud of all our torchbearers and their efforts, and that I wish you the best as we go into the holiday season and thanks for giving it your all. - To recap, the first command's priorities remain fourfold, advanced force development, enhanced lethality and readiness, transform learning, and cultivate an environment of excellence. But the focus areas have changed in response to progress made on initiatives during the past year and to align with recently updated department of the Air Force Strategic Guidance. Thank you so much for the subscribe, stream or download. As a reminder, you can follow Air Education and Training Command, and the AETC Command Team on social media. We're on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn. You can also catch up on the latest news across the command on our website @aetc.af.mil. From our entire AETC Public Affairs team, I'm Jennifer Gonzalez and talk to you next time on the Air Force Starts Here podcast. (upbeat music)