Revitalizing AF Squadrons: Travis provides input to CSAF priority

  • Published
  • By Staff Sgt. Charles Rivezzo
  • 60th Air Mobility Wing Public Affairs

TRAVIS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. – As part of an effort to address the Air Force Chief of Staff’s No. 1 focus area – Revitalizing Air Force Squadrons – a project team visited here June 19-20 to meet with more than one hundred Airmen to conduct field visit sessions to drive to the roots causes of major challenges faced by today’s Airmen.

Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David L. Goldfein said in a letter to all Airmen dated August 9, 2016, during his first month as CSAF: “The squadron is the beating heart of the United States Air Force; our most essential team.”

In that letter, he further explained how a myriad of challenges have degraded over time the core fighting unit of the Air Force and stated, “Revitalizing squadrons as the core fighting unit in our Air Force will be the primary focus in my first year as your Chief.”

In order to meet that objective, Air Force senior leaders realized that revitalizing the squadron required an Air Force-wide review – driven by Airmen in the field – to promote best practices and identify improvements.

During the field visit, Airmen from different rank tiers, including officer, enlisted and civilians, participated in peer-to-peer interviews and focus groups to find targeted ideas and solutions that can be applied across the enterprise.

“This is the chief of staff reaching down to the lowest levels, all the way down to the senior airman to get on a peer-to-peer level and ask the hard hitting question of, ‘How can we improve the Air Force at the squadron level,’” said Maj. Philip Rentz, 60th Air Mobility Wing chief of wing plans and programs. “One of the keys to the revitalizing the squadron initiative is working from the ground up.”

Concepts discussed by the project team during the two-day visit stemmed from a survey sent to up to 80,000 Total Force Airmen earlier this year, assessing the perspectives of Airmen serving at the grassroots level.

“The CSAF absolutely believes that we are the best Air Force in the world, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be better,” said Brig. Gen. Stephen Davis, Focus Area Lead – Revitalizing AF Squadrons. “He (CSAF) thinks making the Air Force better starts with our squadrons. It’s where most Airmen begin their careers, where we train them and the building block of the Air Force; it just makes sense to make sure we have it right.”

Peer-to-peer feedback proved to be one of the more successful tactics in facilitating honest feedback from the interviewees, allowing Airmen to interact with a counterpart on the same footing.

“We intentionally designed this team to have Airman talking to Airman and CGOs talking to CGOs in order to put them at ease so we could not only get honest feedback, but to make it a free flowing conversation,” said Davis.

Senior Airman Kevin Hammond, 60th Operations Support Squadron air traffic controller, serves on the project team that travels to all the major commands across the Air Force to conduct the field visits.

“Often times, we are in the same boat as the person we’re interviewing and share a lot of the same experiences,” said Hammond. “It makes it super easy to relate to these guys and we just try to bounce ideas back and forth. It becomes more of a collaboration of ideas rather than just us jotting down what they are giving us.”

Hammond said it’s exciting to see the Air Force approach this initiative by focusing on the grassroots perspective.

“This is a very innovative project,” he said. “I hope people realize that the Air Force does care about their input and we operate within a shared Air Force. The Air Force isn’t owned by one person, it’s owned by all of us and we want people to take ownership of that. Talking to Airmen across the service, you can see they want that ownership and with this project the Air Force is providing just that.”

Although the field team is scheduled to visit more than 20 bases through August 2017, they also created a web-based, crowd-sourced platform to allow Airmen across the Total Force to submit insights into challenges along with recommended solutions.

More than 650 ideas have already been submitted through the online platform. Airmen are able to comment and vote them up or down, a function that has been used several thousand times to date.

“The good news about this effort is that almost all Airmen have been assigned to a squadron and have something valuable to contribute to this discussion,” said Davis. “People are eager to participate and provide their input.”

To share your input, logon to https://www.milsuite.mil/revitalize. A common-access-card is required to use the web-based platform.