Live by our core values Published May 7, 2010 By Chief Master Sgt. Nelson Bonilla 349th Mission Support Squadron TRAVIS AIR FORCE BASE,Calif. -- In 1995, the Air Force adopted its formal core values: Integrity First, Service Before Self, Excellence In All We Do. I am confident every Airman can recite them and give an eloquent explanation of their meaning. If you don't understand the reason our senior leaders instituted our core values, you can't fully appreciate their meaning. Many years ago, I ran across the article I quote from below, "U.S. Military" by. Rod Powers. I have kept it to remind me that our core values should be a way of life for all who serve our great Air Force. The first reason is that the core values tell us the price of admission to the Air Force itself, Powers wrote. Air Force personnel ... must display honesty, courage, responsibility, openness, self-respect, and humility in the face of the mission. All of us must accept accountability and practice justice ... all Air Force personnel must possess Integrity first. At the same time, a person's "self" must take a back seat to Air Force service: rules must be acknowledged and followed faithfully; other personnel must be respected as persons of fundamental worth; discipline and self-control must be in effect always; and there must be faith in the system ... the price of admission to the Air Force demands that each of us places Service Before Self. It is imperative that we all seek Excellence In All We Do... The second reason for recognizing the core values is they point to what is universal and unchanging in the profession of arms...By examining integrity, service and excellence, we also eventually discover the importance of duty, honor, country, dedication, fidelity, competence and a host of other professional requirements and attributes. The important thing is not the three road signs our leaders choose. The important thing is that they have selected road signs and it is our obligation to understand the ethical demands these road signs pick out. The third reason for recognizing the core values is they help us get a fix on the ethical climate of the organization. How successful are we in trying to live by the core values? Our answer to this question may not be the one we'd like to give. All of us have heard about the sensational scandals -- senior officers and noncommissioned officers engaged in adulterous fraternization, the tragic and senseless crashes of the Ramstein CT-43 and the Fairchild B-52, contractor fraud and cost overruns, and the shoot-down of the two Blackhawk helicopters over Iraq ... these big ticket scandals don't just happen in a vacuum, and they aren't always caused by evil people acting on impulse. The people involved knew the difference between right and wrong, and they knew what professionalism demands in these situations. "Fortunately, there is a fourth reason for recognizing the core values: just as they help us to evaluate the climate of our organization, they also serve as beacons vectoring us back to the path of professional conduct. They allow us to transform a climate of corrosion into a climate of ethical commitment. That is why we have developed the core values strategy." Our operations tempo is not slowing down. It is only natural to try to take shortcuts to do more with less, but these shortcuts can have catastrophic results, including losing our most valuable resource - one of our Airmen. It is our duty to ensure taking shortcuts doesn't become an organizational behavior. If a process needs to be revised/improved, we must tell our leadership. Living by the core values has helped this chief to avoid the pitfalls of "skate by" and "good enough."