Foundation Forum

Speech by General Billy J. Boles
Commander, Air Education and Training Command
Air Force Association Symposium
January 31, 1997

"Recruiting, Training, and Educating"

It is good to be with you today and chat with you about what is going on in the world of training, and where I see the world of training and education going.

I'm going to talk for a couple minutes about a marriage that has been very successful. It is the marriage of Air Training Command, Air University, and some of the combat crew training. That merger combined the energies of Air Training Command, crew training, and AU. It created a very big family. Let me give you just a quick snapshot: we have somewhere in the neighborhood of 43,000 active duty and 18,000 civilians. There are another 9,000 contract employees doing a lot of support and mission work in AETC, everything from aircraft maintenance to civil engineering support to instruction in the simulators. The bottom line is it takes about 71,000 people to do that job.

When you look at it, there are about 33,000 people in school in the command on any one day. That includes everything from an airman basic to a general officer. There are 1,500 aircraft. That makes AETC the 6th largest air force in the world, just behind India and ahead of North Korea. [Maj] General [W. Thomas "Tiny"] West [19th Air Force commander] has his hands full. Included in that number are about 275 fighters, more than PACAF [Pacific Air Forces] or USAFE [U. S. Air Forces in Europe], and it doesn't include any of the Guard fighters - two units, both of which wear AETC patches and are deeply involved in the training mission.

So, on any given day, AETC F-16s will fly almost as many sorties as PACAF and USAFE combined. If you think you shouldn't worry about that, just remember that at any time, more than one-half the seats in all AETC aircraft are filled by people who are not fully qualified in that airplane. It causes [Maj Gen] Tiny West to get some gray hair.

When you look at it, the military is not like any profession in the world. We start with an untrained resource. We don't hire anybody in at the middle levels. We hire people who are unqualified. We train them for what they are supposed to do by giving them a lot of technical skills and then providing them a lot of military education. That in a nutshell, is what we are involved with.

Let me shift gears and tell you where I see the command heading toward carrying out that mission. We are all into a downsizing mode, so at all times we are looking at new ways to share training activities. We are doing a lot of that with the other services. We are able to achieve some economies with the other services and through the size of our operations, eliminating some overhead. We learn a lot from each other. We learn what is needed and what is not needed. Then we can close some activities at one installation or divert that resource to another requirement. This is a lot more than just a few Army, Marine or Navy folks coming to an Air Force school.

Roughly one out of every three Air Force initial skills students is in a joint training environment. By the end of the decade, that could easily get as high as 50 percent. We provide some joint technical training in areas such as firefighting, security police, and cryptology. We send our people to the Army for helicopter maintenance and metals technology training, to the Navy for explosive ordnance disposal and water survival training, and to the Marine Corps for computer training. We also do a lot of combined flying training. We do some fixed-wing pilot training with the Navy at Vance AFB in Enid [Okla.]. We began that in 1993 with an exchange of instructor pilots, followed in 1994 by an exchange of students. Now we are even exchanging squadron commanders.

It is possible now for an Air Force officer to start primary flying training, go through the T-34 at Pensacola, go to Corpus Christi for the T-44 and never see an Air Force base until after he or she is awarded wings. Then they go to Little Rock for C-130 training. We are also doing a lot of joint navigator training. The squadron commander at Randolph in the panel nav world, right now, is a Navy commander. Helicopter training we've been doing joint for years down at Fort Rucker in Alabama; that is going to continue.

As we do more with other services, we will learn a lot. But one of the things we have to do is to figure out how we train people to do the job better, with fewer dollars, and have them ready to perform when they hit the ground at their first base. One of the things we are doing we call mission-ready training. We are trying to produce three-level aircraft maintenance trainees who hit the bases and are ready to start generating sorties. They have job knowledge of the equipment and they know what tasks to perform. They have had experience performing those tasks on that airplane and they are ready to go. This is a big change from the way we've done things in the past.

If I take the F-16 crew chief, they would have spent about 63 days at Sheppard AFB [Texas] learning basic skills and never see an F-16. The curriculum was lecture-based and heavy on academics. Then they would PCS to Shaw AFB [S.C.] or another F-16 base and enter task training. That would take another 79 or 80 days. It would be almost five months before that individual was mission ready. We now take that same trainee, send him or her to Sheppard, and give them 96 days of basic aircraft maintenance and fighter skills hands-on training on F-16s, not all powered up, but on F-16s. They are working to become F-16 crew chiefs. Next, we send them out to Luke AFB [Arizona] for 18 days of hands-on training on the flight line, generating sorties. When they complete the course now, after four months instead of five months, they are ready to go. When we hit the ramp at full speed with a flow of 600 students per year, we've just saved about 70 man years right there and produced somebody who is ready to go.

We redesigned our training. We took a lot of the lectured-based instruction and changed it to hands-on. If you go to Sheppard today, instead of using chalk boards or vu-graphs or what have you, the students have computers. They do a lot of computer-based instruction, including interactive video. There's so much to be done there, we are just beginning to scratch the surface in all our courses. These new teaching techniques apply to more than just aircraft mechanics. You will see more use of computers and more hands-on training whether you go to the personnel school, whether you go to the finance school, or the bomb loaders' school. So much of what we do can be taught much better; the retention is much greater and it comes much cheaper because you save so much pipeline time. We are ready for good ideas from any and everyone on how to do that.

Right now, about 25 percent of our courses are doing what we would call mission-ready training. By the year 2000, we'd like to have that in nearly every career field. The biggest plus gets to be back at the operational commands. Instead of diverting resources to training three-levels when they arrive at their first duty station, they are already trained and start producing immediately and the skilled NCOs who were doing the training are now back to generating sorties.

Distance learning is something we've been into for years. Almost everybody in here who has been associated with the military remembers receiving ECI courses with shrink wrap; big stacks of books. That is distance learning -- it takes place without the instructor and is not co-located with the school. Now we have the technology; we have to leverage that. We have to train people more effectively and efficiently. About a year ago, the Air Force Chief of Staff designated AETC as the lead command for distance learning in the Air Force. We put together a distance learning effort down at Air University and it is the focal point for developing our policy and programs, and for coordinating our technology effort. Our goal there is to establish distance learning with technology, rather than with shrink wrap, as the basic core of the Air Education and Training Command's training system. Again, we can increase efficiencies and we can get better learning.

If you want to get into the technical sides of that, we are using a lot of online electronic campuses. Each base now has a downlink capability. Each of our training centers has an uplink. I was talking to my son, who is a maintenance officer at Langley, recently. The day before, he had just spent the day getting training out of Sheppard by the expert on F-15 maintenance. This training was going electronically to every F-15 base in the U.S. We would never have been able to do that had we tried to bring all the people who work on F-15s in to Sheppard because it would have been cost prohibitive. We uplinked the system from Sheppard, downlinked, used the expert, and got the knowledge out there at a fraction of the previous cost of similar training.

The interactive video computer-based instruction can be tied in. So many of our professional military education courses, including Air Command and Staff College, are converting to CD-ROM. It sure beats the old correspondence course. We've done the same for the Senior NCO Academy Course. There is a lot of money to be made in this arena for you and for us, as people get more creative and figure out how to train and educate better and cheaper.

With flying training, we're moving toward the full mission trainer. We are using a lot of leading edge technology to train pilots. We are getting ready to start with an F-15 system full mission trainer at Tyndall AFB [Florida]. That will replace both the operational flight trainer and the weapons-tactics trainer that we've been using. The OFT was a good instrument and a good emergency procedures trainer, but that's 1960s technology. It has become expensive and non-supportable. It was good for its time, and it is good. But it lacks the visual systems. You can't get into tactics simulation. It doesn't parallel the aircraft's latest capabilities. The weapons-tactics trainer has some good weapons and tactics simulation, but it doesn't have a good visual system. So, with the full mission trainer, we can simulate about 99 percent of the mission tasks. We can connect trainers to fly two- or four-ship missions, and provide all types of maneuvers. Trainers provide the capability to train as a wing man and they introduce the student to instrument flight, formation flying, refueling, basic intercept, visual transitions, tactical intercepts, ACM and air combat tactics. They allow for a lot of high fidelity threat replication. We can even program the trainer to orient the student to his or her first operational mission/base and eliminate some of those first few days, first few sorties, first few weeks which a student spends flying around the flagpole.

The most promising thing in this area is the networking capabilities. We can link other Tyndall training cockpits to provide more than one student training at the same time, against each other, with each other. We can link with the Tyndall AWACS simulator, too. Then we've got realistic training for the weapons directors and students in the weapons course, as well as the students in the flying training course. This will be their first chance to work with the weapons directors in a simulated environment before they get out to their operational unit. We see this as a composite force capability in the long-term simulation mission rehearsal. It gets the full mission trainer, AWACS simulator, live F-15 missions and live radar feeds into some very realistic training. It doubles the students' exposure to some advanced tasks. It optimizes our training and minimizes sortie increases. And, it enhances safety while providing quality training.

In the best of all worlds, our students should never experience an event the first time in an airplane. They should know how to do it; they should have practiced it. I am not one who is advocating cutting flying time for simulators, because as my grandfather in North Carolina always said, reading about getting kicked by a mule is not quite the same as being kicked by a mule. I am not advocating replacing everything. But we can train so much better and make the crews much more efficient at the same time.

Now I'd like to talk about the Air and Space Basic Course. Many of you have seen the headline in the Air Force Times that says the Air Force wants to be more like the Marines. We are not advocating trading Air Force blue for Marine khaki, but we are borrowing some ideas we think have worked very well for the Marine Corps, on how we can do a better job of grounding officers in doctrine and Air Force history. There is a widespread perception that if you ask someone in the Air Force what he or she does they will say, "I'm a fighter pilot," "I'm a personnel officer," or whatever. If you ask a Marine what he or she does, they'll say, "I am a Marine." There is a lot more to that than just words can convey. It is a culture. We need our Air Force members to act more like a single Air Force family and feel less attached to the stove pipe of their functional expertise. They need to have a better understanding of basic air and space doctrine and operational concepts. And when they sit in joint meetings, they should not be focused on issues as they pertain to the personnel world, or to whatever limited world. They should be focused on what issues mean to the Air Force, and how they fit into the National Military Strategy.

I've told this story before. I just saw one of the guys who was with me when we were students at the Armed Forces Staff College. I thought I was the world's greatest personnel officer there, and I probably was. We had Will McFarland, who always stood up and asked questions starting with "the world's greatest fighter pilot." And Rob Pollock is here, who was also in that class. I came away from that school with the impression that any Army officer in the staff college knew more about the air land battle and Air Force doctrine than did any Air Force officer. They knew more about our business and our doctrine and our issues than the Air Force officers. I am not sure we have improved much on that since then.

So, what we are trying to do now is develop an Air and Space Basic Course that is a lot like the Marines' basic school; that is why we say the course is similar to the one the Marines have. All officers would start with the same foundation; they would start with a good understanding of doctrine. We teach officership in ROTC and OTS [Officer Training School] and at the Academy. But we need some place to get everybody to understand how his or her discipline, whether they are a contracting officer, a maintenance officer, a fighter pilot, or a personnel officer, how it all fits together and what the functions are. Then they need to understand how this fits into the bigger scene, because we are in a joint world. We haven't come across much in the last few years that hasn't been a joint activity. The course content and length are still being developed. The Marines course is 12 or 13 weeks long; we are looking at about six weeks. We would send each new officer, and hopefully expand to where we could get some civilians into this course. This course would be provided during their first assignment, or very quickly after they were commissioned/hired. It would train them as air, space, and information warriors. It would expose them to the basics of flight and space and information operations. We would continue to build upon that, and connect the dots from the Air and Space Basic Course to Squadron Officer School, Air Command and Staff College, and to the Air War College, taking the learning process all the way through. We believe the product would be Air Force members who are much better spokespersons for the Air Force. They would better understand the Air Force's core competencies. They would better understand what we are about and how everybody fits into it.

Part of that, too, in addition to the Air and Space Basic Course, is what we call building operators. We would like to take the officers who graduate from the Air and Space Basic Course and send them to an operational assignment. We've done some of this for years with the missileers. We take young officers and send them to missile duty for four years or so. Some of them have six or eight years in missiles. Then they'd go to a staff assignment, and then they'd go into other fields. But they had an operational understanding when they got into the other fields. In the best of all worlds, we would have every officer go through an operational tour, whether they are an engineer, a finance officer, or what have you. They would have some operational experience and then branch out into their career area. Again, the goal is to give them a well-grounded education in what the Air Force does and how it does it.

I can see the Air Force getting smaller; you see it coming. For the last several years, AETC has been a leader in adapting to the changing environment. We've been taking our non-operational missions, turning to the civilian workforce, and finding private industry or civilians who can do those missions, the base support tasks. So many of the tasks we're responsible for do not go to war. If we can refine the definition of an operator and get people to be operators, we can do a lot there. We can continue this outsourcing and privatization that has become so critical and so important as we downsize.

If I look at AETC, at what we've done with outsourcing and privatization and the savings that have accrued, normally we end up with about a 25 percent to 35 percent savings when we go from blue suit to a contractor or blue suit to a civilian. I don't think that is much different from what is taking place in the business world today. Businesses are shedding a lot of functions that are not part of their core competencies so they can focus on their core. The focus for those of us in uniform, and the civilians who are in operations, should be in that arena. As for the others, we should have somebody else worrying about them. Those initiatives are going to pay a lot of dividends to the Air Force and the nation.

I'll mention one other area and then I will open it up for some questions. Recruiting. Two years ago here my predecessor, General Viccellio, talked about recruiting and gave you a little information about it - where we're going and what the problems were. Let me give you a quick shareholders' report. Recruiting then was tough; it still is. The 18- to 21-year-old population has been declining for about 10 years, and it reached an all-time low about a year and a half ago. The population is starting to grow again, but we also have a larger percentage of population going to college than in past years. The percentage of the high school graduates interested in the Air Force remains pretty steady; it has for some time now been about 12 percent.

From that pool we need to get about 30,000 to 35,000 people; 30,000 active duty and about 5,000 Guard and Reserve, to enlist in the military each year. We need about 5,000 officers in the Air Force each year; 3,000 to 4,000 line, the remainder in the JAG [Judge Advocate General] and medical communities. We are doing a lot to step up our advertising effort, but that is part of the solution. General Viccellio asked for your help, and you've done a good job. I am pleased to report that the recruiters are meeting their goals, and they are meeting their goals with quality people. The only two categories we've had some trouble with have been the physician and dentist specialists. We've met our goals without lowering our standards or without changing the quality of America's airmen. But we've got to keep working on that. Our recruiters certainly need your help in continuing to spread that message. Talk to the young men and women you come in contact with, and talk to the schools. Recruiters have a tough time in many areas getting into schools. So many of the counselors have never been affiliated with the military; they don't understand it and they are not sure what we do. They are very hesitant to let recruiters into the schools. We can certainly use your help in that.

My time is about up. As I understand General Shaud's rule of engagement, when I run out of time, you get to play "stump the dummy" and ask me questions. So I won't hold you up for those.

General Shaud: We had talked to an earlier speaker in reference to his association with rated force management and he said he'd rather talk about privatization. This leads me to the first question: How did the Air Force end up with its current fighter pilot shortage and what steps are being taken to alleviate the problem?

General Boles: How did we get there? Have you got a couple of days? Part of the problem is we get in the habit of letting things recycle. In the 1978-1980 time frame, we had a fighter pilot shortage. We never took action then to really fix the root causes of the problem. We ended up with a fighter pilot surplus early in Desert Storm. We took some action then. So now we are back into that fighter pilot shortage. We are slightly over the requirement for total pilots, but the big shortage is in fighter pilots. The short answer is we chase end strength numbers rather than the long term picture. Ninety-nine percent of the time, when you work a short-term fix to the fighter pilot problem, it exacerbates the long-term solution. If you work the long-term solution it creates a short-term problem, and that is the way we've been focusing. The long-term solutions keep creating the cyclical ups and downs; it is a zero sum game. The chief has committed to fixing this problem.

General Shaud: We'll get you and Butch to lead a seminar in that for all interested later on this afternoon. What are the implications of the full mission trainers and simulation for air crew flying time both in UPT [Undergraduate Pilot Training] and combat readiness flying time?

General Boles: I would hope there may be some savings if you can get into the full mission rehearsal system, but I would hope that we don't make many changes. In 1993-1994, we did a full-scale review of all types of training, operations training as well as technical training, and we increased the time spent in undergraduate flying training. We went from about 190 hours to just about 208 hours. We increased the introduction to fighter fundamentals, the intent being it is cheaper to gain experience in small white jets in AETC than it is when you get to Luke and get into an F-16. I will take off on that point in just a moment. That is one of the things that happened when we merged crew training with undergraduate flying training, or put it at least in the same command.

You have one group of people now looking from the T-3 screener all the way through F-16 training, and if you see a shortcoming as they go from the T-37s to the T-38s, you can back the training up. If you see a shortcoming out of IFF, as you get to Luke or Tyndall in the F-16 or F-15, you can go back and adjust your program in the AT-38 or in the T-38. I would hope that we use the mission simulators and the training to do a better job of training and get more pilots highly qualified when they get to their ops unit. In the ops units, when you talk about the ops tempo we have today, we don't have much time to get people to continue to build proficiency. If we can build that proficiency in AETC with mission rehearsal systems, mission simulators, and in cheaper aircraft, it will be much better in the long term.

General Shaud: It's not your father's Air Force. We've got a lot of missions that are a lot different because of evolving technologies, threats, and military missions, information terrorism, peacekeeping, etc. How are these changes being reflected in the methods and training of our airmen?

General Boles: I am not sure how we can adjust, or will adjust. So much is going on in areas like information warfare. We called together the commanders a few months back and said, "How about telling us what you are teaching with regard to information warfare in each of your courses?" We had as many definitions as we had wing commanders. That has caused us to go back and look at what we should we be doing. And where is the Air Force going in this arena? As that gets better defined from the Air Staff, we have to fold that into a three-level course again, and take it on through the seven-level courses. We had a tendency to think of information as an intelligence function. You start looking at so many facets of every job that can be influenced by information warfare or by the lack of information; this pertains to every career field and every course.

General Shaud: To what extent does the Air Force foresee the integration of commercial contract services in a flying training role?

General Boles: We haven't done a lot of focusing on that yet. I don't know when it will come. I assume part of that question means we'll have some body do part of the training for us. Thus far, our focus has been on all the academic instruction and on the undergraduate flying training done by a contractor or conducted by contract civilians. All the simulator instruction is done both in undergraduate flying training and in advanced flying. If you go up to Altus AFB and walk by the C-17 simulator, or the C-141, or the KC-135, the people are all wearing civilian clothes. They all work for a contractor. They are training our students today. Most of them happened to be there a few years ago as IPs [instructor pilots], but they are paid for by a contractor.

Even in the technical training arena, we are starting to look at what kinds of courses can be developed and taught by civilian contractors. For example, look at basic electronic principles, which is a feeder for so many disciplines and specialties. Why does it take a blue suiter to teach basic electronics? We are looking at how we can contract that; how we can bring private industry in to do that. There are a lot of areas we are looking at more and more in that arena, other than just aircraft training.

General Shaud: We have two more questions, Bill. First, how is JPATS [Joint Primary Aircraft Training System] proceeding?

General Boles: We get the first JPATS in 1999 at Randolph to start doing the training. I was up at Wichita with the Raytheon Beech folks a couple of months ago. We had the aircraft come back down to Randolph. General Griffith and several other people flew it; they are very excited about it. The comment that I heard most often when we went out to the MOA [Military Operations Area] was that the maneuvers and training we did took about half the time they would have in the T-37. Simply as much as anything else, it's the recovery time. We have a good program coming along there.

General Shaud: Coming on board about when?

General Boles: In 1999 at Randolph, the first ones come on. We are only getting about 36 or 44 so per year, so it won't be until 2012 before the last ones go to Sheppard at the ENJJPT [Euro-NATO Joint Jet Pilot Training].

General Shaud: You discussed this basic air and space training primarily in the context of officers. Will anything be done with the airmen, or are you satisfied with the progress through basic airmen training?

General Boles: We focused on officers first. We expect the requirement to be roughly five thousand officers per year. The infrastructure that would be required to support that at six weeks is about the same as Maxwell AFB [Alabama] and Gunter AFB [Alabama] produce today. So you've got to find the capacity to do that. We would like to focus, and get more of that type of information into some of the enlisted courses. If we can sort out how to do it over a longer period, we would like to get some of the civilians into a program like that. I don't want to lose sight of the civilians in this effort. We've reached the point in the Air Force where at least one-third of the people serving in the Air Force on a daily basis happen to wear a uniform slightly different from ours. They are just as motivated, but they are called civilians. They are still a part of the Air Force. So we need to figure how to fold them into that effort, too.

General Shaud: We thank you for a great presentation and Q and A.

Return to the Orlando '97 Foundation Forum Page