Photo By Timothy Sandland | Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David L. Goldfein speaks during an all call attended by...... read more read more
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OTIS AIR NATIONAL GUARD BASE, Cape Cod, Mass. -- Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David L. Goldfein visited with military and civilian Airmen of the 102nd Intelligence Wing at Otis Air National Guard Base on Mar 30.
Goldfein began his visit with an aerial tour of the base on board an Army National Guard Blackhawk helicopter accompanied by Brig. Gen. James LeFavor, Commander of the Mass. Air National Guard, Col. Virginia Doonan, 102 IW Commander, and Chief Master Sgt. Karen Cozza, 102 IW Command Chief. On the flight, Goldfein was able to see the scope of the Cape Cod base’s massive footprint.
After the aerial tour, Goldfein received a mission brief by leadership at the 102nd Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Group and a tour of operations at Digital Ground Station Massachusetts – the wing’s state of the art intelligence facility.
Goldfein’s visit continued with an all call at the base theater. There he talked to members of the wing, as well as active duty members from the 6th Space Warning Squadron based at Cape Cod Air Force Station.
Before his talk, Goldfein coined six deserving Airmen from the 102 IW and 6 SWS. One coin recipient, Tech. Sgt. Alan Nancarrow said “It was great to hear him speak – he’s the new Chief of Staff so it’s great to see what his vision is going to be for the Air Force.”
In his remarks, Goldfein discussed the attributes he sees associated with future conflict that the Air Force needs to be prepared for – as well as the three foundational focus areas that he considers critical in moving the total force forward into the future.
On the first focus area, Revitalizing Squadrons, Goldfein said “it’s where the culture is – the culture of what it means to be an Airman. It’s where innovation really occurs. It’s where we succeed or fail as an Air Force.” He went on to say, “Across the active, guard and reserve we have about 3400 squadrons – how do we ensure that the squadron is healthy as it can be, because that’s the most important level of command in the Air Force.”
Goldfein talked about pushing decision authority back down to squadron commanders, saying “Right now, a wing commander has got 1150 Air Force Instructions that they are responsible for – we are going to get rid of as many of those as we can. We’re trying to push decision making authority back down where it belongs.”
Over the last two decades, the Air Force has been reducing its numbers. As Goldfein explained, during Desert Shield/Storm the service had just shy of a million active, guard and reserve Airmen – today that number is just 660,000. He said, “One of the things that has happened over time is that we’ve gotten smaller as an Air Force.”
He went on to say, “My concern is that we moved people out but left duties behind on a smaller number of people. As we consolidated and moved people out of the squadrons, we actually moved decision authority to higher levels – so we’re looking at pushing that back down.”
Goldfein spoke of his second focus area, Strengthening Joint Leaders and Teams. He explained, “Our joint service partners don’t necessarily see pilots, cyber or intelligence experts – it says U.S. Air Force [on the uniform] and the expectation they have is that we walk into the room and sit down at the table – we understand the operational art of integrating air, space and cyber.”
The intention is to better prepare Airmen for the joint service environment.
“How do we look at officer and NCO development and ensure that we are appropriately exposed to those domains and those capabilities to understand the operational art of how they come together.” said Goldfein. He went on to say, “How do we migrate the development of our officer and NCO corps so that we can refine that expertise going forward?”
Goldfein also talked about initiatives in changing the way the Air Force deploys Airmen.
“We’ve gotten to a point across the Air Force where we’re sending, in my mind, too many individual Airmen into combat. We went from an AEF construct to more of a scheduling model to augment formations down range.” Goldfein went on to say, “What we’re looking at is team deployments. At the very minimum it should be a three or four member team with an NCO or officer in charge that is actually responsible for getting that team ready to go including all of the work, the training and equipment – the travel – and then [they] deploy together and return and re-integrate together.”
He went on to say, “Not only will we be able to improve how we take care of our Airmen, because someone will always be in charge of that team, but also make it a more powerful experience.”
Goldfein then spoke of his third and most recent focus area, Enhancing Multi-Domain Command and Control by saying, “The reality of future warfare is our ability to sense the globe, create a common operating picture, make decisions at a speed that the enemy can’t match, and create dilemmas from all these domains with the capabilities that we bring, is very much dependent on how we network together capability.”
He postulated, “How we share data on a common architecture – how we turn all of the volume of ‘ones and zeroes’ that we collect, every single day – how do we then create that common operational picture so that decisions makers can decide?”
“You want to create an architecture so that if one part of it is taken away you have so much resilience built in that your answer is ‘bring it!’”
Goldfein also talked about changing the mindset in terms of future warfare saying, “Doing this at a speed that I believe future warfare is going to require is going to require us to think differently about how we acquire weapons systems in the future. Because how we’ve done it in the past I would argue is very industrial age.”
Goldfein went on to say, “In the 21st century I think our mindsets got to reverse. We’ve actually got to think of the highway we ride on and everything on the highway as merely an app or an aperture. Figuring out the highway and the network is going to be essential for us to be able to get the kind of data sharing we need to turn data into decisions.”
Goldfein’s remarks were not lost on an audience filled predominantly with Cyber and ISR professionals. The Airmen of the 102nd continue to build on our excellent partnership; the Air Force, National Guard and the Air Force Reserves—our Total Force—play a crucial role in accomplishing the Air Force mission.
| Date Taken: | 04.07.2017 |
| Date Posted: | 04.07.2017 14:37 |
| Story ID: | 229580 |
| Location: | OTIS AIR NATIONAL GUARD BASE, MASSACHUSETTS, US |
| Web Views: | 375 |
| Downloads: | 1 |
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