AFA Policy Forum

"USAF Recruiting Showcase"
Brigadier General Robertus C.N. Remkes
Air Force Recruiting Service Commander
Air & Space Conference 2004—Washington, DC
September 13, 2004

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General Remkes: With what we're doing now, advertising is a big part of our program as well. We are also targeting our market marketing towards doctors and nurses. We go to their trade journal, JAMA, and all the nurse publications and so on, to target those specific career fields to make sure we get a hold of those folks.

We go to special networks, the sports networks and so on, to make sure we get young kids who watch sports, and so on, enticed into joining the United States Air Force.

But it's not just a question of numbers. We don't just bring in a particular number of folks. We also look to the right kill sets and so on. So we have, as you can imagine, in the United States Air Force, a demand for some very technical skills. And to just give you some raw numbers off the top of my briefing here, roughly around 10,000 of our 34,000 this past year had to have a mechanical inclination. So 10,000 out of that 34,000 right away have got to score very high in that part of the AFOQT of the ASVAB test to be able to join our ranks. A very large number of them are also in electrical and in technical.

Our smallest is admin. Only 1,300 of our folks came into the admin or clerical field. 1,300 out of 34,000. So what does that tell you? Most of our folks are very technical, mechanically, arithmetically oriented and we have to have those folks to do a great job in our Air Force today.

We missed those targets by numbers in the handfuls, so with numbers of 10,000, 11,000 folks we would miss the mechanical goal by 28 people. That means 28 people not just at the end of the day—that means 28 people that were recruited, went through Basic Military Training, went through technical training, and then ended up in their unit. That's how specific we have to be because this is a very precious commodity in the United States Air Force as you can imagine, so we want to make sure we hit those numbers exactly right.

Years ago, in 1999, you would think that the quality of our kids went down, that there were less high school graduates and less in the top three categories of our ASVAB test. Well, nothing could be further from the truth for the United States Air Force. The United States Air Force was always at the very highest. We only have one percent of our folks that join the Air Force in the enlisted categories that are not high school graduates. One percent. And that's by law. We have to bring in one percent that are not high school graduates. They can have a high school equivalency degree, but that's as big as our number has ever been, ‘99. It's been like that ever since the mid-90s.

For CAT 1 through 3A, this is in the top 50 percent of the kids who score in our ASVAB, our Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery. Of that number, we have the highest of all the services, and in this past year over 90 percent scored in the top 50 percent of the test. The next closest service I think was the Marine Corps and they were sitting at around 73 percent, and it goes down from there. So again, we've very technically competent, but we also look for the cream of the crop. We look for some great kids as we go out there.

Most of the stuff I've been talking about to this point has been about our enlisted accessions, our young Airmen that come in the Air Force, but we have been just as successful with our line officers, whether it's pilots or navigators and so on, and our numbers for pilots are still very, very high. I think it's still 1,100 for this coming year that will go into pilot training.

But the recruiting service has to go out on the street and look for about 150 of our pilots to go to pilot training because the rest of them will come from the Air Force Academy or from ROTC. We still bring in kids who have a degree. All they need is a commissioning. They have to go through Officer Training School as their commissioning source. Then, of that number, we offer about 150 the opportunity to go to pilot training.

Of the total target we had for officers, just in Officer Training School, our number was about 1,060. We overproduced by 15. We had 1,075. We actually were able to recruit individuals who already had a degree, a technically competent degree, send them to through the Basic Officer Training School, and then off to their gaining unit.

Let me talk about specific demographics. What we're talking about now is specific recruiting success. We as an Air Force need to mirror our society. Unfortunately, we're losing ground, losing traction in our officer ranks for African Americans and all across the board for Hispanic Americans. So we put on a push this past year for both. We're still having a very difficult time with African American officers. We're doing fairly well in the enlisted category. In the Hispanic recruiting area, we're actually doing quite well, our numbers are coming up slowly but surely. You can see our goal for this past year was 11.3 percent and we were able to hit that target. I've increased the number to 11.8 percent for next year to get closer and closer to what we should reflect for society. So again, great success.

Q: Why do you think you’re having problems recruiting African Americans into the officer ranks?

General Remkes: All of industry is looking for talented African Americans as well, so what you'll find is that your TRWs and your Lockheed Martins and those folks are also recruiting those people. I think there's an awareness part of this that we're working as well. We want to make sure that people know that we are a great place for folks to come and work, so we're working that angle. It's both of those things tied together. It's not for lack of quality, believe me. There's plenty of talent out there. They're going to other places.

Let's talk about marketing. Marketing is a pretty intriguing feature that I didn't know that much about until, almost within a week of getting to Recruiting Service, I sat down with Lee Pils, who runs our account for GDSNM. Lee, in the course of the next two or three hours, sat down and showed me all the facets that come with marketing, all the things that are important to us with marketing.

If there's one take-away that I can give you for marketing, that is awareness. What we're trying to do is make people aware that we're out there and that we're hiring. That's it. We also want to give them some sense of what we're hiring to, i.e., is it something that would attract them in terms of a career opportunity or what have you.

As I said before, we're looking for a lot of kids with mechanical aptitudes. We've got a thing called a “cut-away engine,” which we put in these big trailers and we take around the country to air shows, conventions and on scouting operations and so on at high schools. We show the kids a working F-100 engine inside this trailer. Then we show them all the tools they have to have to work on this thing. I don't know if you're aware of this, but the tools involved with repairing an F-100 are about five. It takes about five or six tools, other than maybe a hoist or something like that. Five or six tools to work on an F-100 engine, and they just lay those five tools out there. Kids walk up and they go, “boy, that's less than it would take to swap out a mower on a lawnmower.” That's how simple our engines have become right now. So we take these things around and try to get folks involved in that.

You're probably aware of our wrapping. We have a thing called shrink-wrap that we wrap our busses with it, just to provide awareness. You see this bus go by, and it's pretty simple, isn't it? AirForce.com. Boy, they hit that website and we think that's the one thing that brings a lot of our folks to us. That's where we generate a lot of our leads when they can see that AirForce.com and go do some surfing and try to figure out what they want to go do.

Then there’s our Raptor fleet. I don't know if you're aware of our Raptors. They're basically a Chevy Yukon or a GMC Yukon that we've souped up. These things run around $55,000 or $60,000 apiece. They've got a plasma display, big woofer speakers, videogames and a lot of noise and thumping kind of sounds coming out of the back, and of course this is a great lead magnet for us when we drive around. They see this thing making a lot of noise and kids like Raptors and GMC Yukons. They come up and they can see a display in there. We have the commercials going on. We have about a three or four minute Air Force presentation.

Who's back there with this thing? Our recruiters. What are they working with? They're working with PDAs. “Hey, give me your first name, your last name, give me your e-mail address,” blah, blah, blah. That's how they make those contacts.

What do they do with this PDA? The go back to their office and tron it back into their computer and it goes right into our Air Force Recruiting Information System, AFRIS computer, which fires it right back to us, and then we say, “okay great, this looks like a pretty good lead.”

What do our recruiters do the whole time they're talking to these kids? They're trying to pre-qualify them. “How are you doing in high school? Have you been taking math?” They’re trying to pre-qualify these kids and see if they're any good. “Have you taken the ASVAB yet?” Not everyone in school gets the ASVAB, as you're probably aware. We have to encourage a lot of our kids to go take the ASVAB.

I will tell you that with regard to the engines we had an accident with one of our engines about a week or so ago. There are a total of four of these things being built. We had some other ones that were earlier versions of this, but these are the kind where you walk into the trailer, you push a button, a voice comes on and starts to move the part of the engine that you're interested in and talks about how to work on it. Then it goes to the next part of the engine and you hit a button, it does the same thing.

What we used to have to have is either a crew chief or an engine specialist to sit there and answer every particular question a young kid might have. Now we don't have to have this crew chief and this engine specialist there. They can just push the buttons and it's kind of pointy-talky. They point to a part of the engine, touch it, and off it goes.

We were pulling one out of Sheppard Air Force Base—they were building four of them for us. One comes out of Sheppard and about 60 miles down the road it's up on its side going the wrong way down the freeway so we're trying to put that thing back together and get it back on the road. It turns out it was right at probably the max gross for that trailer. You forget that the engine weighs 3,000 pounds inside a 10,000-pound trailer. So it was kind of maxing out that Yukon and that trailer.

We have recruiters who are out on the road, like Master Sergeant Elmore. I pinned a Purple Heart on him. He was north of Baghdad, I want to say it was in Talil, I can't remember the specific location, and he was working. He was helping to hire Iraqis into the Iraqi armed forces.

He was out on the street one day with Captain Pete Ellems when a bomb went off and killed 50 Iraqis right in front of them and injured both of these guys. All we're trying to do is show the Iraqis how to set up their own Iraqi armed forces. The questions that they ask, just for your interest, is “how many teeth do you have? Can you read?” Those are the basic questions they're asking for Iraqis over there to get them in their armed forces. You can see it's a much different challenge for the Iraqis than it is for us. A much different qualitative challenge for them.

Our big challenge in the upcoming year will be health professions recruiting, our doctors and nurses and pharmacists and so on. I will kind of give you a peek under the tent at what I call “the perfect storm,” which I think is brewing right now, and it's not Ivan, although that's a pretty bad storm, too. Our perfect storm kind of alludes to my fear of having the fiscal year '06 or '07 become what it was in 1999 because of some trends that I'm seeing right now I'm worried about.

The problem right now for us in health professions is that we're not meeting our goals for doctors and nurses. I just sat down about two hours ago with General (Dr.) Peach Taylor, the Surgeon General of the Air Force, and with General Bran, the Head Nurse for the United States Air Force. I talked to them about this challenge.

We had a goal for ourselves of around 125 doctors that we needed to bring in this past year. We were able to bring in 67. So we were far short of our goal. Let me tell you the secret about the goal. The goal is something that I thought was achievable for our recruiters, a target they could actually hit. The requirement was 319 doctors. So 16-some-odd against that 319. We're losing ground here in our challenge to bring doctors. So if any of you guys want to become a doctor let me know right now and I'll sign you up. I don't know if I have any money to pay for your education, but we'll get you in the Air Force. If you know folks who have got even a remote interest, docs or so on, that would like to join the Air Force, and I'm talking of up to any age here, by all means let us know.

I had a dinner, what they call a “Center of Influence Dinner,” where I sit down with doctors and talk to them about the challenges and the great things about the Air Force. There were four doctors. The youngest guy was my age, he was 49. The oldest guy was 57. He is going to get in the Air Force as a major about the time they'll be throwing me out of the Air Force, about 57. I thought it was kind of interesting. Why would this guy come in? Well, he still has five years of retainability, up to 62, that he can stay in the United States Air Force. He says, “I've done my practice here, I've made my lot in life, so I'm going to sit down with my accountant and my tax advisor and all these folks and see what I need to do as far as joining the Air Force.” He said, “I just want to practice medicine. I want to be able to put my hands on a scalpel and be able to solve somebody's medical problem, and come in the Air Force and do that. Even if it's only for five years, I want to do that.”

That's wonderful. We love to bring those kinds of folks in. I hope we get this guy in.

But you can see the long-term challenge. If that's the only demographic I'm hitting—the guys in the 49 to 57 category—I've got to do a lot of recruiting because they all leave at about 62 or so. So I've got to go out and do that an awful lot.

What I'd rather see is doctors coming in to us at perhaps 25, 26, 27 years of age. Now, I can carry them for an entire career and I don't have to go out and recruit some of these old folks as often as I do right now. I can say ‘old’ because I am one of them.

A lot of folks say, “think outside the box.” I don't think outside the box any more. I learned that that was not very productive. I turned the box over. Anything that falls out of it is probably a lucrative target for change, so I go after those things that fall out of the box.

One of the first things I did was rather than have our recruiters divide their attention between doctors and nurses and so on, I said, “look, if you've got a guy who's a great doctor recruiter, he's going to recruit doctors, period.” That's his job. That's his lot in life. He's going to recruit every doctor that he can. And when he makes goal, keep on going. Don't stop at three. Go to five or seven. I don't care if they all come from Philadelphia. They can come from wherever we need them, but get as many doctors as you possibly can. So now we have dedicated specialty recruiters to go after those particular skills.

One of the reasons that a lot of doctors are kind of disinclined to join us is because they don't know where they're going.

Think about this. Here's a doctor making $300,000 a year. Of course he pays an awful lot in malpractice insurance, he's probably got a pretty good sized mortgage. Then I walk up and say, “hey, I'm Dutch Remkes. I'd like you to join the United States Air Force and hey, we'll give you a $30,000 signing bonus for coming on.” He doesn't even bat an eye. “$30,000, that's my mortgage payment this month” or whatever it is, you know? “Then you get the unique opportunity—well, we get to break your furniture every three years when we move you.” [Laughter] “Where are you going to send me?” “I can't tell you. It's ‘I've got a secret.’”

So what we're trying to do now is get with AFPC and say, “okay, if you want to join the United States Air Force, here are the three locations we have for you right now.” We've got Eglund, Ramstein, and Kadina. “I want to go to Eglund.” “Okay. We'll hold that slot for Eglund for 60 days and we will work the paperwork as hard as we can to get you in. We're going to do everything we can to get you into that Eglund slot.” That we think will generate a lot more attractiveness for folks who are really thinking about this.

I think everybody in the Air Force knows that MilPDS is a personnel system that allows us to kind of track our folks and so on. We use this system to load folks into the Air Force. We want to make that much more streamlined, and we don't want our AFPC guys having to empty their in-box to do that. We will do that for them, so that won't be an excuse any more.

Well, Sally went on leave. She'll be gone for two weeks and we won't be able to get that stuff loaded until she gets back. No, no. We'll take care of that. We do all that for them.

Another thing we've done is we've taken all those parts of bringing doctors and nurses and pharmacists into the Air Force. We used to run them all in sequence. First, you've got to get your physical. That took about 60 days. Okay, great, we've got the physical, now we're going to go work this other part which is the application process to make sure all of your Boards are good. Then we're going to go to the next part, we're going to actually meet the Board. After that, we're going to go get you your security clearance.

Wait a minute. Can't we streamline this whole 130-day process down a little bit? We found out we can break this thing up into four pieces and run them all simultaneously. The long pole in the tent—the irony was it was the physical. I said, “a physical for a doc? You've got to be kidding me.” I thought it was like self help, either I'm good or I'm not. [Laughter]

But what we're going to do with docs is when we actually go take them to a place to show them where—like Wilford Hall or a clinic—they're going to go work, we're going to say, “oh, by the way, while you're here, spend an hour with this doc here and we'll get your physical taken care of.” So that's done too.

We think that whole process will come down from about 130 days to 60, which will make it a lot more attractive for guys to come in.

We're also looking at having contractors do our recruiting. We're aware of some headhunters. I'm sure you all know there's a lot of headhunter companies out there that are specific to health professions or to any other industrial specialty, and they go out and the recruit the specific doc or thoracic surgeon, whatever it is you need for that one place.

There's a place in San Antonio, for example. I'm trying to remember the name of the town. There was a city south of San Antonio, not a big city. They basically put an HMO in down there. These guys had to hire—ready for this?—66 docs in the space of nine months to go into that place. I said, “there's no way.” Remember my goal of 67 for the entire United States Air Force and they can go anywhere they want? This was 66 all going to the same little town. They met their target. So what that tells me is if you give a person, an applicant, something they can hang their hat on and you can take them there and show them what it looks like, they're inclined to sign on. So we're going to try to do the same thing for the Air Force.

Q: In terms of nurses, are you looking for RNs, BSNs or both? Would you consider recruiting a nurse without a bachelor’s degree?

General Remkes: We are looking at that right now to see whether we can bring those folks in.

The challenge for us is we need a nurse that's ready to practice. That's one thing we'll have to get with General Brown on to see whether she's inclined to take those, the RN as opposed to the non-bachelor's degree.

The minimum standard for the Air Force, as you know, is a bachelor's degree to become an officer. That's the challenge, to get over that hump.

Q: So you are considering taking nurses without bachelor’s degrees?

General Remkes: We are still having a shortage and we’ll take a look at that. My folks are looking at that all the time to see if that's something we need to go back to to help us out there. What we need is somebody practicing in a hospital. And whether they have their bachelor's degree may or may not be the real question.

Why do I see this perfect storm brewing? First of all, there are little leading indicators that you look at to see whether this is going to be a problem for you in the future. The first one I see is increased college enrollment. That's clear across this country. A lot more folks are starting to understand that college is becoming more of a necessity to a career than a luxury. So a lot more kids are going to college. Now, how many of those kids are actually graduating is the real question, but that's what we're seeing happen.

There are fewer role models for them to aspire to. The Air Force has gotten smaller. As our very large World War II community has kind of dissipated and gotten smaller, there are fewer folks to go to.

Another thing that's affected us is BRAC. It used to be that every town had a small armory. Somebody walking around in a uniform doing their daily chores, walking through the post office on their way to work or something like that that you could stop and say, “hey Bill, are you in the Army or the Air Force?” “Oh, yeah, I'm a tech sergeant,” whatever it might be. Then you could have a conversation with these folks. Not any more. Those role models that used to be everywhere don't exist in the numbers like they used to.

The thing that's going to be the real challenge for me, and I'm surprised I haven't gotten this question from you all already is our reduced enlisted accessions for next year.

This past year the number was 37,000. Towards the end of the year, when the Secretary and the Chief recognized the need to shape our force a little bit because we were keeping so many of our folks in the Air Force through retention, they said, “what is the quickest way for us to shape the force and not have a lot of BSI, SSB, Serb activity, very expensive stuff and things you've got to get exactly right in the short term?” What they decided to do was to turn the spigot off at the beginning part—which is in the enlisted side—right away.

So our number for next year is 24,000. That's a soft number. It may come off that a little bit. It may go down, may go up a little bit, because the Air Staff is still helping us with what that final number is going to be.

Here's the challenge for 24,000. The Army's already putting it in their newspaper—"The Air Force has stopped hiring." Well, if I'm a businessman and I tell folks I'm hiring 24,000 people next year, that's a big news story. “Whoa, that's a lot of people, 24,000.” Yeah, but it's off of the 36,000. What they're saying is, “look, they've dropped 12,000 off of their roles for next year.” “There's no more room at the inn” kind of a thing.

Well, nothing could be further from the truth. On a national level, hiring 24,000 people is no small problem. It is still going to be a very difficult challenge. To say that we're not hiring I think is being a little bit disingenuous on perhaps some of the other services' part. So help me with that. That's a message you can help me with, please. “The Air Force is still hiring.” “I heard they're not hiring.” “No, they're hiring. They're hiring 24,000 next year.”

The number goes up in '06, back up to 35,000. Because the Chief and the Secretary had indicated they only want this bubble, the bathtub to be a ripple. If you do this for very many years, you end up with a bathtub in your enlisted force that stays with you for a long period of time. But if you do it one year because you have kids coming out in four and six and in some cases two-year enlistments, and you have kids coming out as one, two, and three stripers, right? You can mitigate that little ripple pretty quickly across the size of that force because you can move those folks around, different year groups. Suddenly, you don't even see the problem for the magnitude that it is. But if you continue to hold those numbers at 24,000 for consecutive years, you've got yourself a real problem. You've got a bathtub.

We are, in fact, over-manned in some specialties. They want to make sure that the folks I'm hiring right now are going to go in those places where we have a critical need. That’s typically in combat controllers, crew chiefs, security forces, you probably know the list. It's about 56 AFSCs that we're having to recruit right now, and they've given me no other job. So I've got right now in my hand 12,000 jobs in those 56 AFSCs that I've got to go hunt down and make sure we put them in their tech schools.

What about those other specialties? I've still got other folks. I've still got to bring in some clerical folks and so on to fit in the Air Force because I may be overmanned this year, but I'm going to lose some of those folks in the next year or so. I've got to go make sure I've got enough of those other skill sets as well to hire to, and I need to know this fairly soon because it's now September, the clock starts for me for '05 in about 2.5, three weeks, and I'd like to know what those other skill sets are going to be so I can go hire to those as well.

What I don't want to do is hire all 56 AFSCs, those 12,000, and have them all go through tech training in the first half a year because there's not enough school slots for them. I want to spread that problem for tech training all across the year if I can. Then I also want to know what those other specialties are, because every month I wait I'm building myself a little bow wave of folks I've got to get done before FY 05 is done. So I've got to know what those other AFSCs are or else I'm going to build myself a bigger problem towards the end of the year and that also may be unmanageable for tech training as well.

The other perception, as I said before, low goals. Easy for recruiting. We haven't given our recruiters a goal in the last four months. We hire typically 3,000 kids a month, do the math. That's 12,000 I haven't hired in the last four months, right? So the problem you would say is already behind us. Well, no. Remember I built a debt bank. I built a delayed entry program as our depth. A delayed entry program. I built a bank of these kids in '04 and '05. Those jobs were already taken. What I have to do now is make sure that I have a debt bank built for not just '05 but also '06, because come about January, the Air Force is going to come to me with the new numbers for '06 and I've got to start hiring those kids, too.

So here I am going into a low year. Our folks have been sitting on their hands ready to go. The clock starts on 1 October. They start hiring like crazy. Okay. Now we get the other jobs, we've got to start hiring against those. And here comes January, February, and the new set of jobs comes out. Start building your debt bank for next year.

In a typical year, our bank of kids that are ready for the next year is around 37-42 percent. So we've already hired roughly two out of the five kids we need for this next year and we hope to have the same be true for next year.

If I go into a year with much less than that, we find ourselves near that '99 problem because we entered 1999 with a debt bank of around 32 percent and we failed the goal that year. So I'm very worried about that number, to make sure we get there.

Initial enlistment bonuses are on the chopping block as they always are. The Air Force is always looking for a way to save a little bit of money and I can understand that. It's a taxpayer issue. Our college loan repayment programs for our specialties like nurses are on the chopping block as well. I want to make sure that we get support for those from Congress.

Here's the scary part. Remember I talked about marketing? We didn't have that in 1999. It was all public service announcements. Now we have commercials. We've got four of them in the can. We've spent about three million for those things, all ready to go. Congress put a mark and cut $23.4 million out of my budget of about $81, $82 million. Most of that is going to have to come out of marketing, so think about what that means to me.

The way we buy advertising time—and this is true not just for the Air Force but for all of industry—is you buy it in about March. March to April of that year. Then those commercials will actually come on in around September or October. So I paid for those commercials that are going on this year with '04 funds. Now they cut me for '05 funds. I'm going to walk into next year, March, into this big, up-front marketplace. You go up there to Chicago and it's like going to the stock exchange. Everybody's bidding on this time and how many commercials can they get across a TV show and so on.

I'm going to walk into March with no money. Guess who I'm trying to hire? The kids from next year, right? '06. So do you see what I'm saying? That's where I think my problem's going to be. I'm going to walk into this year with no money for next year and people saying I'm not hiring and I've got no money to pay for the commercials that I'm going to need to get those kids interested. Remember, it's all about awareness. It’s all about awareness.

NASCAR is a very popular venue with our senior leadership. Secretary Rumsfeld was, I think, down in Richmond this past week to watch the 911 race on Saturday. All of the military cars had their show hood. In other words, the Air Force got its hood. We have three hoods a year, the hood on the car. We pay about $3.5 million for NASCAR for the car and then for some off-track stuff. We have three show cars that we take around to high schools and so on. But out of that contract, we get three hoods. Three with the Air Force logo on it, the symbol on it, the badge. They rearranged the whole schedule for the year so that that would be one of our hoods. We would have our hood on that range.

The thing we always pray for is either we win or our car burns like a son of a gun in the infield because you want that camera to dwell on that Air Force hood and sell you kids to the Air Force as long as it will go. Now, you want Ricky Rudd out of the car, you don't want him to get hurt, or in the winner's circle. But if it's not going to go in first, then hey, Ricky, plow it into the side of a building, whatever you can, but let that baby burn and make sure the hood is the last thing that goes because we're trying to sell time.

Well, with the cut in money, I've got to tell you, NASCAR's on the block too. That $3.5 million. The ad agency tells me that my most productive marketing money is television, paid TV advertising. It goes to frequency and reach. How often do kids see the message and how big a market can I take on? The numbers are astounding.

For our kids who graduate from Basic Military Training, we ask them, “what got you enticed in the Air Force?” Do you remember any of this stuff? Eight-eight percent of them will tell you they remembered Air Force commercials, just like you did.

The other sad thing for NASCAR this year was the rule change that happened this year. The last ten races, if you weren't in the top ten, the last ten, you're really not competing for anything. You're basically on the track to ride around.

If that's the case, Ricky didn't place in the top ten. He's really in the last car, not NASCAR, because it really doesn't matter now because he's not getting any points, he's not doing anything. He's just basically driving around the track and showing our hood off and so on. So the rules have actually changed a little bit and I'm going to talk to NASCAR and see if they can't help me out here a little bit and help all the rest of the contributors as well.

How many people have seen the Cross Into The Blue show? Just a few. Okay. It's this great, big three semi-truck roadshow that we take around. We have one of these things. It runs around almost 40 weeks out of the year, quite a bit. It has an F-16 they pull out and unfold. They show it to everybody. They have a theater. You climb up inside this theater and they have a little Air Force production that lasts about three and a half minutes. There’s a lot of music and excitement going on there. And then they have a thing called the “virtual Air Force experience.” They throw you out of the back of an airplane, virtually, then you land on this target on the ground, virtually, with these visors.

The other one is the “spin and puke.” They hook you into a chair and they whip this thing around as fast as it will go until they see food flying, then they get you out of it. It's kind of a neat deal. It's supposed to show you how your ears will get all messed up, like nobody would figure that out after spinning around in this thing.

This is a fairly expensive venture, as well. It's about $2.5 million to take this thing around the road and what we try to do is focus it on our demographic, the kids in the 17-26 category. Get them to high schools and county fairs and Scout-A-Ramas and those kind of things to get them excited about the Air Force.

What we hear from our kids when we graduate from BMT—I can't remember the number on Cross Into The Blue, but it's like four percent have ever seen it. So when I compare four percent to 80 percent for TV ads, that's not a math problem for me, guys. That's a comparison. So it's pretty easy. But those are the kinds of things, the tough calls, I'm going to have to look at making here.

Probably the most effective thing we have in recruiting is the recruiter himself or herself. Those people out there generate and process and do more for us in terms of actually getting towards goal than almost anything else we do except for the awareness piece. So they really help us out a lot.

One of the things they always look at is cutting some of the officers back or cutting some of the recruiters down, to a point. Remember, back in '99 I had about 900 of these kids. I don't want to get us down to 900 again because I know I'm going to fail if that's the case because it really comes down to pressing the flesh. People have got to be out there to sign up with somebody.

So my take-away, and the thing I would have you walk away with today other than awareness is let's all be very, very weary of what's going to happen to us in recruiting in the next year or so. Nothing good comes cheap or easy. We're going to have to get this right to help ourselves out.

How many folks here remember going through a Military Entrance Processing Station (MEPS)? You remember that? Tell me about your MEPS experience just briefly. Was it fun or is it something you kind of went, “I never want to do that again.”

Q&A Session:

Q: A lot of waiting in lines.

General Remkes: A lot of waiting in lines. You know how they fixed that, by the way, waiting in lines? They put a bigger TV in the waiting room. [Laughter] These are the things that MEPS has done to improve waiting. It's just a bigger TV so you've got a better view. The chairs are a little softer, but you still wait in that room about the same amount of time as you did 20 years ago.

Q: Why did the process take so long?

General Remkes: It didn't reflect the Air Force. Think about what an MEPS looked like. It was a joint endeavor, so there were Army, Navy, Coast Guard in some cases, Marine recruiters there, Air Force folks. And the only thing missing was the mooing sound as you went through. If you didn't moo, then you didn't really get the full effect of an MEPS, but it's like herding cattle. You basically walk them through, you brand them, you make sure they're all good to go, put them on the right bus, and off they go. There was a qualification day where they actually gave the physical to see whether you qualified, and you probably took either your AFOQT or your ASVAB test or something like that. Or it was a shipping day. It was time for you to go to basic training. They sent you there again, asked you a last couple of questions. Did your recruiter hold a gun to your face while you signed the dotted line? No, he didn't. Okay, on the bus and off you go.

The things I'm trying to do is save a little bit of money on this. I call it kind of an MEPS improvement, but I couldn't call it MEPS because that's not my job jar, so I call it “applicant processing improvements.”

We're already doing phase one. One of the things I asked my recruiters when I started this thing was, “when you recruit somebody how close to the finish line are they?” Are they five yards to the touchdown? Are they ten yards from touchdown? “Oh, boss, they're probably within the five yard line of touchdown.” “Really?” “Yeah, we get them almost all the way there. We ask them all those questions. We're pretty sure they're in pretty good shape and the physical validates that, but all the rest of it, all the paperwork's done, all the I's are dotted and we're ready to go.” “Okay, great.”

If the first part is the problem, the part of getting their physical, how about the second part? If they've already had their physical and nothing's changed, what about that last part? “Oh, boss, we’re 99 percent sure they're going to get there.”

So I'll ask a specific recruiter, “when was the last time you lost an applicant on shipping day?” “Boy, that was back in 19__. We very rarely lose them on shipping day.” But we still go through the same process on shipping day. All the services send all their applicants back through an MEPS on their way to Basic Military Training, in our case in San Antonio. Why do we do that?

I had kids flying from Cody, Wyoming, through Salt Lake to get to Denver, which was their processing MEPS, even though there was an MEPS in Salt Lake; and then once they got to Denver they got processed and then went to BMT.

What if I flew them from Cody to San Antonio? Right? Save them a couple of airplane trips. So we're doing those kinds of things right now. That's what that phase one test right now is going to do. One of our largest recruiting areas that doesn't have an MEPS is Las Vegas, Nevada. It’s one of the fastest growing areas in the country. We have upwards of 50-60 kids a month that ship out of there and go to basic training, but their processing MEPS is either Los Angeles or Salt Lake City. Heck, if I can fly them from Las Vegas straight to San Antonio I'd save myself an overnight stay for those kids, a hotel, and another airline ticket. So we're doing that right now to see how that works.

Ultimately, I would like to send them right from their recruiting office, wherever their recruiting office is. If they're from Cody, Wyoming, and their physical is okay, and there's been no changes since their last one and we ask them a few basic questions about the recruiter thing, make sure there's integrity in that, then we can ship them right from Cody, Wyoming, to where they need to go.

I want to go one step further than that. Right now we say the only physical qualification thing we'll take is from a doctor at an MEPS. Why is that? There are doctors all across this country. If I gave you as a doctor this form and said, “okay, I want you to check this kid for all these things, and I'll trust your mode of ethics here.” If you give me that form back that says this kid's qualified to join the United States Air Force, he can do whatever he's supposed to do, pick up a ten pound weight or whatever his job is supposed to be, that's good enough for me. Right? Even doctors don't like getting a second opinion, when you think about it. But that's essentially what I'm doing. I don't trust the family doc, I've got to get a second opinion from an MEPS. So I want to get out of that business and say, “okay, the family doc's good enough for me” And probably a lot cheaper. You can almost do it with a scouting physical, it's almost that fast. The kid gets ready to go to camp. Hey, next year, kid, it will just be a longer camp. Six weeks instead of two.

Let me talk about first assignment recruiters. This is one I've got a lot of my folks going tilt on.

I think it is possible for us to have a number of recruiters that came to us right through Basic Military Training and went straight into the recruiting business. They go, “oh, no, boss, you don't understand. These people have to have a background in recruiting. They've got to know about their first assignment and all this other stuff and they've got to have some experience so they can lay on these guys.” “Really?” “Yeah.”

Okay, tell me about a crew chief that works on my airplane up at Elmendorf Air Force Base. How does that work for him? Does he have any experience before he shows up there? Well, no, he's going to watch somebody do all that and then he's going to start bending wrenches on your airplane.

I said, “so it's good enough for my airplane, my F-15, but it's not good enough to go recruit somebody?” That doesn't make any sense.

I said, “as long as there's another recruiter where he can watch that other recruiter in action and act as his supervisor, his mentor, then I think that's probably okay.” So we're going to try four of these kids. General Donald Cook, AETC Commander, has promised to listen to my briefing. He hasn't thrown me out of the office yet. But I'm going to show him this briefing and say, “I think I can take four kids and these are kids that our Basic Military Training instructor is going to help me pick. These will be the pick of the litter.”

Like a kid who was the DG in his/her class, who can talk anybody out of anything. That's the kind of kid I want to be a recruiter. Now this kid will be a first assignment recruiter. Why is that important? I want to shift the demographic to the left. I want to make our recruiting force a little bit younger. Right now we have folks coming in, first time recruiters, who are going on the bag at 14, 15, 16 years as a master sergeant, recruiting. Think about the kids they're recruiting. What are their age groups again? Seventeen, 18. Think about the generational gap that kind of exists there.

Yes, they come to the table with a lot of experience, but the thing I think the first term recruiter brings is a lot of excitement. Hey, I just went through this. Basic Military Training is not that tough. It was a lot of fun. Remember what it looked like six weeks ago? Baggy pants, earring, looked like I'd slept in my shirt for the last four or five days? That was me. Look at me now. I make my own bed, I shine my shoes, pressed shirt. Guess what this first assignment recruiter also gets, by the way, which is not lost on these kids. $450 extra month special duty pay. Now we're still going to have them live on a base, so they'll have to be in a place where there is a base and they still have the Airman experience of being a first term Airman in the Air Force and so on.

This is something I'm working on right now for about four kids to see how this works out. Kind of an initiative.

The last subject is the flight simulator game. The Army has this simulator game, I think you might have heard about it. It's on their website. You can download it. We're working something similar I think over the long term, but it will have Air Force-related kind of experiences to it. One is a humanitarian relief thing. You've got to drop things out the back of a C-17. There's a fighter Raptor game, an F/A-22. And the Predator, the remote UAV kind of a thing where they fly a remote airplane and go target something.

We're going to start working this into our Cross Into The Blue where we actually have the trailer there with all these computer kiosks and the kids will go up there and start playing the game right there, but they can also ultimately download this thing. We want this thing to generate leads for us and get folks interested in the Air Force.

The Army, I'll tell you, has had mixed success on this. A lot of kids love playing the game, not interested in the Army. What we'd like to do is get them interested in the game, get interested in the Air Force. So we're working on that right now. We should have something out to CS I think this month. Something like that.

Okay, with all that as prelude, as part of recruiting, it's a pretty ho-hum life. No, we are excited about what we do. It is not ho-hum. It is, as you can tell, very aerobic and a lot of things we do affect us forever.

The most important thing I think any major company does is recruit. Because the people they bring in the front door to be part of their team will reflect that company for the next 20 or 30 years. So for us to get this wrong will affect our Air Force for the next 20 to 30 years. We have to get this right. Again, that's why I'm leaning on you, to help me spread this gospel and get it out there and tell other folks about that.

Q: Do you ever meet with the Air Force Association and let them be part of the team to go out and help recruit these youngsters?

General Remkes: We don't and we should. I'm glad you brought that up.

One of the things I wanted to approach the Air Force Association on was to think about when you go through an AIR FORCE Magazine. You've all been through an AIR FORCE Magazine. Some of them you go, “hey look, here's an Air Force—No, no. It's not.” It's a guy in an Air Force uniform or a gal in an Air Force uniform, but they're pushing Lockheed or Boeing or whatever it might be. They're pushing a product, selling a centrifuge weapon or a radar or something like that. There aren't any Air Force ads in there.

I don't want to have to pay for those ads with Air Force Association. I want to say give me 12 pages a year, guys, free. I think you owe me that much. We give you an Air Force. Maybe you can give us one page a month, right? [Laughter] I mean you wouldn't have an Air Force Association if it weren't for recruiting at some point. So I'm going to talk to the senior leadership of the Air Force Association and see if they can't help us with exactly that.

Which goes to your point. I think we need to lean a lot more on folks in not just the Air Force Association, but also in industry who are retired members of the Air Force to help us with that. We do bring a lot of our retirees back to help us with the message, whether it's docs or nurses or pilots or whatever it might be about joining the Air Force. So all of us are potential mentors.

Q: You talked about a good chunk of your budget for ’05 having been marked already for TV commercials. How are you going to account for that loss in funding? Do you have any budget tricks up your sleeve?

General Remkes: Truth in lending is the part we need to go to now. That $23.4 is in fact, it's gone. That money is not coming to me through the line item of the Air Force, through the line budget of the Air Force, but I'm already working on offsets. Let me tell you where some of the money's going to come back, to pay back that $23.4 to help me out.

The first $3.5 was money that was left over from this year, from '04. I talked to General Cook and said, “sir, is there any way you can help me this year?” He said, “absolutely.” I think it's about $3.5 million already that will come back.

What I'm going to do with that $3.5 million is buy ahead on promotional items that I would have had to pay for next year. T-shirts and footballs and all the give-aways that we get the kids, the cups and so on.

The next $4 million was—remember that 36,000 going to 24,000? Well, that equates to a $4 million savings in my operational budget. That was airline tickets, hotels, bus transfers, for all these kids that we had to transfer through. That money stayed in the budget, which was kind of odd. I said, “can I have that back since I'm not having to spend that money on tickets and so on?” They said, “you bet, you can have that back.”

I said, “okay, those kids that we're not recruiting are not going to go into tech training. So there will be no bus tickets and stuff to Keesler Air Force Base and Sheppard Air Force Base. Can I have the money that you didn't have to use for that, the operational money for that?” They said, “sure.” That was another $6 million.

So remember my original number was $23.4. $3.5 million plus $4 million plus $6 million—I'm down to $10 million that I've still got to figure out. That $10 is still significant, folks. That $10 million is still a lot of paid TV time and some other things as well.

Q: I think a lot of the advertising tends to emphasize the “glamorous” aspects of serving in the Air Force—flying fighters, commanding a unit, directing real-time intelligence, etc. But life in the service is not always about action, or glory, or an adrenaline rush.

General Remkes: That's a very good point and I think that's something that's lost on a lot of folks. One of the things that I think we make a mistake of in the Air Force is we tend to show all the glory and none of the gory. When we signed up to become fighter pilots in the United States Air Force all we had to do was stick and rudder. Just go out there and dogfight and shoot and then lie about it in the bar. That was our whole day. Then you come to find out, once you became a flight commander—what do you mean I've got to write a report on somebody? That's the gory. The glory part everybody loves, but we forget to make sure folks understand that hey, this is kind of a package deal. It's the same for doctors on the outside. It is the same for any profession we have in the Air Force, whether it's a chaplain or a crew chief. There's always the paperwork they have to do after the fact and I think that gets lost.

Everybody loves bending the wrenches and pulling on the pole and using the scalpel and having that specialty or pleading a case in court or building a sermon. But it all still boils down to there are other responsibilities that are tangent to that that we need to step up to. I think that's a mistake all of us make. I don't know that I can fix this young fellow's problem, but I think all of us need to be a little bit more truthful in how we sell the Air Force. It is a package deal.

Like I said, I try to be as honest as I can. “Hey, we're going to break your furniture every three years. That's a guarantee. I can almost guarantee you that.”

Q: The Army is currently employing Operation Blue to Green, which allows those who receive an honorable discharge from active duty in the Air Force, Navy, Marines, or Coast Guard to transition to active duty, Guard or Reserve service in the Army. Are they having any success so far with the program?

General Remkes: Our indications right now is that blue to green is kind of a last-ditch effort for the Army. The problem is we're meeting each other in opposite directions. We're going down in this one year and the Army is going up in this one year.

I got a call from Major General Rochelle, who is the Chief of Recruiting and for Training for the United States Army. He called me and said, “Dutch, you've got to help me out.” He says, “you're 12,000 less. Can't you just walk those guys into my office and we're done with it? Just sign them, maybe slip another Army thing on top of their contract and look the other way?” [Laughter]

I said, “sir, I can't do that, but we will certainly make them aware of the opportunities available in the United States Army.”

The numbers I've heard so far I think are around 14 total folks since the program started that have actually gone from blue to green. One officer and 13 enlisted members.

I don't know what the circumstances were, I have no background. I heard one case where there was a career field that was closing out for this one particular Airman or NCO, and to be able to do that same line of work because of where he was, he decided to go to the Army. But I don't know about any of the other cases.

I would say if the number if 14 after the program's been running about a month or so, that's probably not a very successful program. I don't know that I'd hang my hat on 14. That's not going to get them through the goal post.

Q: How can you sell the Air Force to a young man or woman with a specific aptitude when you can’t guarantee the type of job they will be working once they are signed up and processed?

General Remkes: That's a very good question. When we bring a young applicant in and they are still interested in the United States Air Force, we say, “hey look, we know that you're going to have to be in one of these 56 AFSCs. That's already the word we were getting from the Air Staff at the time. That means you're going to have to have a high mechanical, a high electrical or whatever, electronic aptitude. So make sure you score very well on the test when you go in for that.”

Then we kind of soft contract them. In other words, “okay, if you want to join the United States Air Force, we will get you in the United States Air Force, but we can't guarantee you the job.” We'd like to guarantee them the exact job they're going to go have. You're going to be a crew chief on an F-16, or you're going to be a security forces patrolman. But right now, we could not do that because we didn't know what the numbers were. Once we do, we can now say, “we have four groups and 28 squadrons. Okay, these are the numbers you guys are responsible for. You get 100 of these, 150 of those, 12 of those, and so on.” Because we didn't have the numbers, we couldn't do that, so we just basically signed kids up to general, if you will. They knew they were coming into the Air Force, but we couldn't tell them when they were going to come in or what job they were going to have when they came in.

They're in the bank. It's really a delayed entry program bank right now, delayed entry program. They don't have ship dates. They don't have the foggiest notion of what they're going to be doing.

Now we just got that first 12,000 in. We had about 6,000 or 7,000 kids in the pool. I think we're down to like 200 or so that don't know where they're going or when they're going so we've already whittled that number down just in the last two weeks from around 6,000 down to around 200, so we're having some success. All of our recruiters knew it was critical for us to have a fairly substantial debt bank going into next year to avoid that problem.

Q: Given the current situation in Iraq and other global commitments, do you see a draft coming?

General Remkes: No, I don't. That' question comes up a lot. I take the SECDEF at his word, the SECAF at his word. No one wants to see the draft come back. The draft has a lot of strings attached.

I think there are enough kids who are anxious about joining the service of any color right now that we don't have to go down that path to go draft somebody and say, “you're coming in whether you want to or not.” The patriotism in our country runs very high right now. The military is still in the highest standing—over 70 percent of Americans name the military institution as the one that they see with the most integrity. As long as that continues to be the case, I think you're going to find a lot of kids joining up. I don't see us going back for a long, long time.

Q: So you find kids are enlisting in the Air Force in order to fight in Iraq, in the global war on terrorism?

General Remkes: I will tell you right now the data tells us that it's not the war. It's other opportunities. They don't sign up to the Air Force, at least our experience is that it has nothing to do with the war. It has everything to do with other opportunities available. And with your earlier question about older doctors and so on, we had a lot of doctors come to us right at the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom who just wanted to practice. They said this is something we think we can make a real change in the world today. We'd like to go over in the AOR. And of course we had a lot of folks coming out of retirement who were doing the same thing. “Sign me up.” There are a lot of retirees probably in this room, “absolutely, throw me back in the equation.” So that was not a problem.

Q: Can you talk a bit more about your delayed entry program right now, your debt bank? Do you feel your have your hands tied in trying to get these recruits shipped and processed?

General Remkes: It's all time dependent. There are times I would tell you that we can react fairly quickly and other times where we have a bank with contracts already out that we have to honor those first. If they're on contract, we have to honor those contracts.

That is always a challenge, by the way, with kids with very high aptitudes. They sign up and they have to wait so long that you think they're going to wither on the vine, they won't come back. That happens to us a lot. We lost about 15 percent of our debt bank just for that reason alone. Their life choices change.

I'll tell you what—a lot of kids recognize the military in some cases as their last best opportunity to change their lives. Let me tell you a perfect story.

I got this from Lieutenant Colonel Bob Jenkins, who is one of my squadron commanders. He runs the Times Square office. He has many others, but that's one of his offices.

Yes, we do in fact sign kids up in Times Square. This kid had signed up, scored very high, 92, on the QT, the qualifying test. Very high qualification score. He was ready for his ship date, and I think it was around June or something like that, the June or July timeframe. I was going to call to find out where this kid actually was today. I'll try to get that answer for you.

He signed up, and on his ship date he goes to his MEPS, his processing MEPS, and the MEPS commander calls the recruiter at 4:30 in the morning and says, “Hey, I can't ship this kid.” “What do you mean?” “He's got no shoes. He's got shoes on, but his feet are falling out of his shoes. I can't ship him out.” That's not the right representation, he's going to be in an airplane with other people and I think the MEPS commander was right.

The recruiter got right out of his bed. He lived in New Jersey. Right out of his bed, raced over to this MEPS. Got this kid, the kid's now standing on the corner like this, you know, sitting on the corner. What am I going to do?

He goes around the streets of New York City and he finds a vendor that's opening up his store early, he's cleaning windows and getting his store open, some shoe store. He walks in there, takes money out of his own wallet, and says, “get this kid in some shoes right away and get him some socks.” So they get the kid shoes and socks, boom, in the car, right back over to the MEPS before the bus leaves and off he goes.

Why did he go through that effort for that kid? The kid was homeless. He lived in the back of his car. This was his opportunity for life. And the recruiter knew that. He was not going to let this kid fall through the cracks. He did everything he could to get him there.

So we get stories like this all across the Air Force. It goes to opportunity.

Let me mention a good friend of mine, Ray Nailor. Ray became essentially a father to two other kids. One of them is now in the Air Force. Same thing. The kid had no other place to go, last opportunity. Ray said, “you're staying here, we've got an extra bedroom. Period. You're staying right here. Have you thought about this? What are you going to do with your life?” So on and so forth. This kid is now in the Air Force.

Another friend of mine, Hoppy Hopkins, ran into a kid who was a good friend of their daughter's. Same thing, smart kid. The parents were not really pushing him that hard. Never really thought about college and so on, but he's going through it, kind of going through the motions. Hoppy's got this kid talked into joining the United States Air Force. It goes on and on and on. Both my kids are in the Air Force. Not at gunpoint. [Laughter] In fact, they were probably pointing a gun in my direction, let me join or else. One of these things. My daughter's an intel officer at Minot Air Force Base, and my son is in his last year at the Academy. So these stories are legion, they're all over the place. It goes to your point.

Q: How many of your recruits are the children of former military service members?

General Remkes: I would say the number is very high. I wish I had another recruiter here because they could tell me the exact number. It's upwards of like 60 or 70 percent of the folks who join every day are already interested because of a parent or an uncle or aunt who had prior experience with the military in some fashion.

Ask yourself this question. When was the last time you wore your uniform to your kid's soccer game or to their Little League baseball game or to a scouting function or to choir practice or to a parent/teacher conference? Ask yourself that question. When was the last time you wore your uniform? That may be the only opportunity many folks in that school will have to know that you're in the Air Force. And believe me, they'll stop you. It happens all the time to our recruiters. Why? They're wearing their uniform all the time. “Hey Bill, I didn't know you were a recruiter; I didn't know you were in the Air Force.” “Yeah, I'm in recruiting.” “Really? My boy's looking at something to do.” “Let me give you my card. Let me call and talk to him.” Then they call him. That's how that contact starts.

I went to Kadena Air Base to go see our recruiter over there, we have one. She works Kadena and she works Osan Air Base. No kidding. One lady. She's a master sergeant. Great lady. She has to do all the processing for the kids. Their tickets and their medicals and all that stuff.

I go over there and she says, “Sir, I'm going to take you to the high school today. They have a very strong Navy ROTC program.” “Okay, great, I'd like to go meet these kids.”

I walk over, get a chance to meet these young ROTC cadets and visit with them a little bit. Then they take me to another room. She goes, “these are kids that are not involved in ROTC of one form or another, but these are four of the kids we're going to have you swear in right now.” One was the son of an Air Force member. The other three were sons and daughters of Marines. Who inspired them to join the United States Air Force? You guessed it, their parents did. The Marines and the Army and the Navy folks around us, they see what the Air Force is all about. They recognize the lifestyle. And the Marines will tell you this. If they were in this room, they would say exactly the same thing, “I'm telling my kid to join the United States Air Force.”

So legacy is a very important part of what we do and it benefits us tremendously. But we also like to get the new fruit. There's fruit that's already on the tree, but sometimes it's nice to get fruit from other trees as well and bring that in and continue to grow this.

But again, ask yourself that question. When was the last time you wore your uniform to your kid’s school?

Q: What tools do you use to motivate your recruiters?

General Remkes: Our recruiters, as you can imagine, they're all Type A, very low maintenance, not a big deal. They thrive on goaling and they thrive on competition. They really do. Almost to a fault. We had to curtail our competition in May of this past year for that reason because after May, with no way to put our hands on what the actual goal number was going to be, we said, “look, we just can't do this.” So the competition ended in May. What they'll say is, “well yeah, he won in that snapshot in May. I would have won it. If we'd had another two days I'd have been there, but that was the cut-off date.” So they'll complain about that, but there was nothing we could do to make it fair.

I don't want to go through that same process again this next year, but goaling is a very important competition point for our folks.

One of the things I'm going to have them compete for from now on, by the way, is not just that they get them into Basic Military Training, but guess what? That they get them through Basic Military Training. Getting them there is one thing. I want to make sure the kid they recruit is going to make it out the other end of that pipeline. So that's my new measure of success and it will take us longer to figure out when the competition ends on that, but that's what I'm looking towards now.

Q: Are you able to recruit individuals who are not U.S. citizens?

General Remkes: We can hire kids into the enlisted ranks that are not citizens of our country. My personal example is my uncle, who fought in Vietnam but was not a citizen. He fought there two years and came back. Fortunately, he was not injured or anything. He fought through Tet and everything, came back from all that, then had to fight two more years to get his citizenship. Clearance will always be a problem, particularly after 9/11—the magnitude, if you will, that whole challenge of clearances. Officers have to have a citizenship. They have to be citizens of our country. So you shouldn't see any in that category at all.

Q: As you said, in the current political climate, fighting a global war on terrorism, there are so many positions in the Service that have some type of security component—I would imagine there’s probably a lot of lag time waiting for clearances to be processed.

General Remkes: That's something we need to target more specifically—to make sure if you have a clearance requirement—and really, when you think about it, there aren't many positions in the Air Force where you don't have some security requirement. So it's hard for us to hit that number on the head all the time and I get that complaint a lot. But a lot of it's tied to the security system now, it takes longer to get things through.

In closing, your questions were very direct and I came away with things I need to work on. I hope I was able to answer some of your questions and pass on some things you can help me with. Wear your uniform every now and then, you'll be helping me with the recruiting business.

Advertising is important, so when kids see that thing on the commercial, what we're hoping they'll say is, “I don't remember what the commercial was about, but it sure was cool.” We're hoping at the end of the commercial they're saying, “I remember what the commercial was about and it's all about the Air Force.” It's all about awareness.

Talk to your kids about joining the Air Force. We'd love to have your kids join up as well. Make them a doctor first, and then bring them to us. [Laughter] Or nurse, and bring them to us.

Thank you for your time. We appreciate it.