Promotions, Recruiting and Retention: The Keys for Guardian and Airmen Success

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Greg Hadley:

My name is Greg Hadley. I’m the news editor for Air & Space Forces Magazine. I run the magazine’s Daily Report, which is our flagship newsletter. Today, we are here to talk about what underpins about everything else that we’re talking about in this conference, and that’s the people and specifically how people join the Air Force and Space Force, how they move up the ranks, and how they stay in. With me are three distinguished panelists. To my immediate left, your right, we have Honorable Richard Anderson, the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Manpower and Reserve Affairs. He is a 30-year veteran. He had experience as a space operator, a missileer, international affairs, and he was also, at one point, the national commander of the Civil Air Patrol. Next to him, we have Lieutenant General Jefferson O’Donnell, the Deputy Chief of Staff for Manpower Personnel and Services. He’s just a few months onto the job, but he comes from the Air Force Personnel Center. Also an F-15E pilot, and he had a stint as a defense attache to the UK, which seems like it was probably a pretty cool job.

And then, next to him, we have Ms. Katharine Kelley, the Deputy Chief of Space Operations for Personnel. She was an army logistics officer to start her career. Before she came to the Space Force, she was the Chief Human Capital Officer for Army Futures Command and Superintendent of the Arlington National Cemetery, also very interesting. Yeah. With that out of the way, let’s dive right in. I’ll start by just saying, I know military personnel world, we can use a lot of acronyms. If we can try and limit that so everyone can understand, that would be great, but we’ll do our best. I’ll start by saying very broadly, we’re at an interesting moment for the Air Force and Space Force for the DAF, where there’s momentum to grow both for the Air Force and the Space Force. If we could just go down the line, if each of you can say, with that opportunity, what do you see as what’s exciting about that, and are there any challenges that you’re anticipating?

Hon. Richard Anderson:

Well, can you hear me? Okay, good. Well, having been in this job now for just shy of a year, and you’re brand new, the old head down here is Ms. Kelley. This has been an interesting, gratifying period. We do have opportunities and challenges. We’ve had a very interesting first year in 2025 and on into 2026, but I think we’re beyond that now. We’re in a place where we can really take advantage of a number of opportunities that are available across the DAF to the Air and Space Force alike. And so, I really look forward to that and speaking with greater specificity as we get further into this.

Greg Hadley:

General?

Lt. Gen. Jefferson J. O’Donnell:

Thank you. I think something that’s really important to establish to set the narrative for this growth is that often we think about growth as additive on top of what we already have. That’s true mathematically, but in this case, our Air Force has been doing and our Airmen have been doing all of the mission with an arm tied behind our back, and that is in the manpower piece of this, where we’ve been carrying essentially a negative wedge and the manpower we need and the Airmen we need to be able to do the mission, we haven’t had all of them. And so, to a significant extent, this growth that we’re calling growth is actually restoring some of that which we’ve been missing in our team.

And so, for that reason, it’s very important that we are very surgical and very careful about what we bring in on top of our current strength so that we are meeting our wartime requirements, that we are focused on making sure that we are prioritizing those things, like maintenance and cyber and logistics and security forces, to fill in those spots where we have been taking significant risk across our service. And so, that’s a very important point for our growth.

Katharine Kelley:

Yeah. Thank you very much for the introduction and nice to see everybody here today. Again, Kate Kelly, S1 Space Force. When I think about the growth, I really think about the partnership between the Space Force and the Air Force. There is no way the Space Force can achieve what it needs to achieve without what the Air Force does for us, so huge thanks for that support. And I would just say from a challenge and opportunity perspective, there’s no limit to the amount of growth that we are seeing as a nation with space in and of itself. Whether that be in the Department of War area, in the NASA area, in the private sector, and the integration of those three things together, it is really the nexus of why the Space Force needs to grow.

And of course, we are anxiously awaiting to see whether Congress agrees with that point. And to the extent that they do and will agree with it, we will be challenged to essentially double the size of our service over the FIDEP, which I apologize for the acronym there, but that is really a huge challenge for us given the size and how much we have to rely upon the larger Air Force ecosystem. I think our challenge is really nest in the interest of the American people to learn what we do and who we are. And then, how do we jointly, as a department, ensure that we build that growth model that is sustainable and achievable.

Lt. Gen. Jefferson J. O’Donnell:

And Greg, can I jump in real quick before we continue?

Greg Hadley:

Of course. Yeah.

Lt. Gen. Jefferson J. O’Donnell:

Taking a little thing from what General Schiess, the CSO did this morning. If we have any recruiters in the room, any of you’ve served as a recruiter before or you are currently, can you stand up? All right. If you are in the Air Education Training Command or STARCOM or in the accessions process, Air Education Training Command, anywhere in that, you do commissioning, BMT, any of those things, can you stand up? I have that and I thank you all because we are relying heavily, we do currently, we have in the past and we will as we go into this period of growth for both the Space Force and the Air Force, Total Force, rely on that team of those individuals who just stood up and all those that serve in those areas to be able to make this happen, so thank you.

Greg Hadley:

Certainly. That actually feeds perfectly into my next question, which is, with that growth, there’s a lot of logistical questions that come up, and Ms. Kelley, I’m thinking especially with the Space Force, doubling in size is obviously tremendously exciting, but you’ve got questions about infrastructure, training, STARCOM, absorption, promotions, how you handle all that. How do you manage the growth in a sustainable manner? Obviously, as you said, some of it’s still up to Congress, but yeah, what are the main things you’re thinking about there?

Katharine Kelley:

Yeah, thanks for the question. I think the key to the question you just asked is the word sustainable. It is arguably, I think, easier to just say, “I need this many new Guardians,” whether it’s new accessions, direct accessions, direct commissioning, inner service transfer. It is much harder to say, “I need to seed all of that talent inside the service that already exists,” and not create an imbalance in an up or out promotion system. And so, all of you that are serving on the military side understand, I think, historically and in other services, you have a fairly traditional pyramid of the workforce, where your base is larger than your top. And I think the Space Force is still figuring out how to find that right balance. Some of the challenges do include logistics. Obviously, throughput and the ability for us to generate the amount of numbers is critical.

But just as critical for the Space Force and what I and my team spend a lot of time working on is the impact of the individual at the experience level that they will be joining us. And how do we build that into a model where you already have an operating force and you’re about to generate a huge amount of new accessions that are coming in with less than, in many cases, no experience. We’re trying to balance not having all of our accessions be brand new in terms of experience. We’re looking for ways to make sure that we can balance this as a sourcing model and a sustainment model for people.

Greg Hadley:

Good advertisement for the interservice transfer window opening up today.

Katharine Kelley:

How about that? Did you say interservice transfer model and that it opened today?

Greg Hadley:

General O’Donnell, I did want to follow up on what you said about the growth not just being additive but restorative in a certain way. Could you explain a little bit more about how you make sure that the growth is restorative? Is it just about funneling people into the right career fields or is it something more than that? Yeah, what does that look like?

Lt. Gen. Jefferson J. O’Donnell:

Well, we’re very fortunate to have some very incredible analytic minds working in both the data and analytics fields and as well as in the manpower fields, working with our A8 team and which is our programming teams and requirements and understanding where is a force are we and where have we been taking risk for several years in the various career fields? Those career fields and those commanders of those units know because they feel it every day, but having at the institution level the ability to see that in data is critical, because then we can essentially be able to visualize that, understand where it is those greatest needs are, and figure out with our approach to the accessions and the programming of those accessions over the fiscal year defense plan is to figure out where are they going to go.

We don’t want to just wholesale repair one thing at the expense of another. And at the same time, we have to acknowledge that there are new missions coming on, F-47, B-21, Sentinel, where the secretary and the chief of staff of the Air Force mentioned a point defense crew field. So there are always emerging requirements and new missions that we also need to be able to source with our most important treasure, our people, while we’re also continuing the missions we’re doing. And so, that is the importance of and the surgical method that we take for this.

Greg Hadley:

Honorable Anderson, I wanted to ask just generally from a DAF perspective, the Air Force smashed its recruiting goals for 2026. The Space Force has never missed its goal, but there’s always an eye on what’s next. How do you think about recruiting moving into the future what the proposition is to sell the DAF? Obviously, recruiting could be a very cyclical thing, so how do you think about that issue?

Hon. Richard Anderson:

Well, as you say, recruiting is cyclical. We saw with the United States Air Force that that service missed the goal a couple of times, but we have since recovered. To give credit where it’s due, Space Force has really done a superb job since its existence. I looked to the future with great deal of optimism in the area of recruiting, and I’ll tell you why. I’m just a few days shy of my first anniversary in this seat. And during that time, I’ve had the opportunity to go to Maxwell Air Force Base, see officer training school, the warrant officer training school, PME, both officer and enlisted, and then recently, to go to San Antonio and see basic military training.

But that had a lot of meaning for me because right before we went to San Antonio, there is a very substantial recruiting office in Woodbridge, Virginia where I reside. And for 25 years, I’ve looked at that recruiting office storefront, have never gone in there. It’s in a strip mall. I was at the strip mall, left the store, saw it, and I said, “Today’s the day.” I went and wrapped on this office. A head popped out, it was a tech sergeant. I said, “I don’t know how to convince you that I’m not some nut job off the street. My name’s Rich Anderson. I’m an assistant secretary of the Air Force and I’ve been watching your office for quarter century.” And he said, “Come on in.” I got to see their operation firsthand, but they invited me shortly thereafter for a delayed entry program, commander’s call, they called it. There were 50, and this wasn’t the entire universe of folks they had on their dep waiting list.

It was a mixture of Airmen and Guardians, and I asked, “Are any of you about to go to San Antonio to basic?” Two people raise their hands. And when I was in San Antonio, we got to sit down with them as they were partway through. I say that to say this, you can rest assured that the incoming talent into the Air Force and the Space Force is of the highest quality. Rest assured.

Greg Hadley:

Let’s shift gears a bit to retention. I’m curious, for any of the panelists, just to get a sense of where retention currently is and how you monitor that and the general trend of that.

Lt. Gen. Jefferson J. O’Donnell:

That’s a great shift because it’s not independent of recruiting. When we’re talking about being able to meet our mission and have the in-strengths, so have the Airmen and the Guardians we need to be able to do with the mission, recruiting and retention go hand in hand. On the Air Force side, on the regular Air Force active duty, we’re enjoying a 90.3% retention for enlisted and a little over 93% retention on officers. Now, that’s overall, so we’re talking 320,000 people. Within that, as you all know, as many of you know, there are lots of different skill sets in there. And so, an overall retention number doesn’t tell us necessarily where that retention is actually occurring. Some career fields are much more stressed than others. And so, it’s very important that we always break down and into that in more detail again to understand where do we need to look at those incentives, both monetary and non-monetary, to be able to encourage Airmen to continue serving.

We look at things, like our selective retention bonuses. We’re going to do that for 24 career fields here in the FY27. And so, it’s specific career fields that we know that are the most critically manned and we want to offer them a monetary bonus to be able to stay and re-enlist. We have officer retention bonuses. We have the aviation bonus for our rated officers. There’s many different ways. And we also look at some non-monetary things when we talk about what can we do to offer that would attract and retain, not only our service members, but also their families, because we understand that this is a family business, it’s a family service and so it’s in a family sacrifice. We want you to stay, and so, what can we do to be able to keep you serving in the Air Force? And at offer, that’s total force because maybe there’s an option for you to transition into the guard or the reserve, maybe an interservice transfer.

Katharine Kelley:

I think a lot about … Well, I’m just pulling from some discussions yesterday from Secretary Mink about what’s happening in the space domain right now. On the Space Force side, we’re spending a lot of time thinking about what the actual learned experience is of a Guardian in the service. Does it actually meet the expectation that they had when they joined? More importantly, does the evolution of the kit and the technology that we’re offering them match what we need from them to deliver that secured environment for the space domain? I’ll be the first to tell you that in a lot of cases, we’ve got a lot of work to do in front of us. We are still in that transformational aspect as a service to not only have the right training models and the right kit necessary to create the environments for Guardians to train on, but to actually be credible combat forces.

The reason I start there with respect to retention is because people generally walk away from jobs that are not fulfilling because of expectations not met. If you look at a whole host of research, and this is not unique to the military, although it is certainly relevant for us, people really want to come to work and feel valued at work. They want to work for leadership that is trusted. They want to be part of a team in many cases, and that’s a huge advantage that we have as a Department of War and a Department of the Air Force family. What we have to do on the space side is match those expectations with credible combat force generation and make sure that we’re giving opportunities to the Guardian and their families. It is not lost on the Space Force that we have a relatively small number of places for people to be assigned, which has pros and cons.

The pro is maybe there’s some sequential assignments where you’re continuing to progress, but you didn’t have to PCS across the country. The con is there’s few and far between opportunities joining our service right now. We work hard at balancing what it means to be a force that is bringing in new accessions with a force that is also generating good promotion and opportunity with family dynamics that are taken into account. That’s the balance we’re trying to strike with respect to retention.

Lt. Gen. Jefferson J. O’Donnell:

A shameless plug for your defense equal opportunity climate survey. If you have one of those, make sure you’re filling them out, so we get your feedback, your units get your feedback and your leadership about what it’s like to serve and how they can improve the climate in your organization to be able to serve you.

Hon. Richard Anderson:

Let me just real quickly speak to one thing, and that is, we’ve largely been talking about recruitment of Airmen and Guardians, those who wear the cloth of the country. We also in SAF-MR have a huge element in our portfolio consisting of our civilian workforce. I think that likewise is important because our civilian workforce has endured a period of, let’s just say, shock and awe over the last year and a half in the area of government shutdowns, DRP, and other issues. As a result, what’s happened is we have a resilient civilian workforce. So, if you are part of that civilian workforce that’s in this room, thank you so much for staying with this Air Force, staying with this Space Force. If you’re newer than all this period, then thank you for joining us.

But in MR rather, we are spending a considerable amount of time on strategic hiring of individuals to fill those positions. Each of the services at the direction of the Department of War has stood up a strategic hiring committee. I get to chair that for the Department of the Air Force, and we are doing broad-based categorical designations so that field commanders can in fact go out and hire the right people at the right time for the right job.

Greg Hadley:

Certainly. I want to keep on talking about civilians, but I also wanted to follow-up on something General O’Donnell and Ms. Kelley were talking about, which is PCSing, sequential assignments, that kind of thing. That’s something that we’ve heard a little bit about, kind of exploration of reducing PCS moves to keep people in place, and that would seem to be a factor in retention certainly. Where do things stand with that? And yeah, just curious.

Katharine Kelley:

Yeah. It’s a little bit of a double-edged sword, obviously. I think there is an enormous amount of value in stabilization for families and for all the obvious reasons. The challenge you have is, with the system that we have, which is an up or out system, especially on the military side, you still have to grow and develop talent. To be able to do that and give those broadening experiences, you have to be able to change jobs. The nuance is, can you continue to keep people on good career trajectory and limit unnecessary PCS wherever possible? On the Space Force side, we work really hard to take into account Guardian preference of location, and I know that the Air Force works hard at that as well. But in the end, it’s a balance. In the end, service needs have to be met, but we try to do it in a way that takes into account individual preference.

Some of that means that we can, in fact, move people through alternate jobs and give them the career development that they need and do it without PCSing them. And that’s kind of nirvana in many cases. I will tell you though, there is a population that joins the military because of the ability to go and do, go and see. We’re mindful that this is always a balance. My talent management team is really like art and science on any given day. There is no formulaic thing that eliminates one piece of the talent management ecosystem. You have to balance it across the board. And so, when we think about PCS and there is pressure to reduce the number of PCSs that families experience throughout the duration of their career, we have to think about it in terms of still operating and managing the service, developing the individuals, and doing it in a way that allows them to have the family, the spouse employment, the elder care that they need as humans. We all live every single day. Those of us on this stage are no different than any of you with those challenges as well.

Lt. Gen. Jefferson J. O’Donnell:

No doubt that there is continuous work that we do in a lot of spaces that have to do with a military spouse’s employment, our children’s development, for those that have families, and the opportunities for growth for community and for just overall whole Airmen and Guardian life. That being said, a little bit old statistic, but we haven’t changed our processes significantly that I would think this would be any different. The average for the Air Force, Airmen, enlisted Airmen, time on station is 55 months and the average for an officer is around 44 months. In just broad terms, when we go out and ask questions, the enlisted force often wants to move more often than they do, and the officers want to move less often. There is not a single everyone wants this or everyone wants that, it’s diverse across the force. But I think, from the mission part of this, a significant driver for us in the Air Force is our overseas presence.

We have to put forces, and maybe you had the opportunity to serve overseas and maybe you are now, in our overseas locations in support of our missions forward and working with our partners and allies, and that is a critical aspect of our national security strategy and national defense strategy, but we can’t send you overseas and leave you there for 20 years. You might want to if you’re in Germany and some other choice locations, maybe some other places you’d say, “No, please don’t do that to me.” There are probably places like that in the US where we know people would want to stay for their entire careers, but others not so much. And so, that rotation, every year, 30,000, 40,000 Airmen leave the Air Force, they’re not leaving off the top. They’re not all chief master sergeants, general officers and colonels, they’re across the entire force.

That process of attrition for those that depart the active duty force to go on either to the total force or into civilian world, private or public, there is a replacement process that happens, and that is what generates the PCS cycle. And so, that is the reality of how we go as an active duty force, and it is that we need to work with constantly to be able to then provide quality of life and quality of service while we do what we are here to do, which is meet our nation’s missions.

Katharine Kelley:

Yeah, there’s probably … I’m sorry, sir, go ahead.

Hon. Richard Anderson:

Go ahead.

Katharine Kelley:

Well, I was just reminded that on the space side, I think we’re considering ourselves a little bit of a test case for the larger Department of War with respect to how certain legislative authorities will play out. For those of you who are tracking the Space Force Personnel Management Act that we were able to get from Congress three years ago, it really gives us a way to experiment with some of this retention, with people who may be forced to make decisions of keeping a joint spouse together or one spouse making a decision to depart the service because the challenge of all the dynamics that come with that are just too great. What Personnel Management Act allows us in the Space Force to do is to move people between a full-time and a part-time position as a matter of policy and not as a matter of leaving one component and moving to another.

That’s a fundamental groundbreaking shift that the rest of the services I think are probably watching us to see how this works and how we employ this because there’s potential for real benefit for things like retention and potentially real benefit for things like moving people around all the time. If a service member can move to a part-time opportunity for a period of time to, let’s just say, take care of a sick family member or because a job for a spouse has taken them to a new location, there are opportunities in this model that would allow us to retain that individual. Ideally, we want them to come back to a full-time position at some point, but the idea is that we can offer that to them and they don’t have to choose to leave the Space Force and move to a reserve component or a guard component.

For any of you who’ve had friends or gone through that process of switching across those lines, you know how painful and financially debilitating that is sometimes, and this offers an opportunity for it all to happen within the Space Force. I think there’s some really interesting legislative things that are on the horizon that our experiment may be able to help the larger department with.

Hon. Richard Anderson:

Well, I was going to say, I couldn’t agree more with the Management Act and what that’s offered. When I was getting ready for my Senate confirmation hearing and was first exposed to this as part of my preparation process, it appealed to me right away. I think it is a groundbreaking piece of legislation that will prove equally a value to the other services once we kick this thing, kick the tires, drive it around the block, which is what we’re doing right now. But what I was going to say is this. What you have heard General O’Donnell and Ms. Kelley say in a number of different ways is it’s all about balance. We have to balance these things. I spent 30 years in a uniform, I was not a personalist, but I can tell you what I’ve learned about manpower and personnel is it is a balancing act from end to end. It’s all about shaping a force, sculpting a force, and having it ready to fight the nation’s wars.

Greg Hadley:

I’m curious on the Personnel Management Act, how long is the time horizon on that before other services can draw definitive lessons from that? General O’Donnell, do you have any thoughts or?

Lt. Gen. Jefferson J. O’Donnell:

I would say that we’re doing it right away, immediately. As we watch and work together with the Space Force on the PMA, we have, for a long time, thought about the permeability. That’s the word that we’ve used to talk about how do we move between the components of the total force? And that is what Ms. Kelley mentioned has been always the challenge due to the different statuses and the different titles in the US code and how that affects entitlements and pay. It’s just for the individual, it’s very challenging. It can be done. It’s just a significant event to be able to do it right now because of some of those rules and laws that are in place.

We’ve continued to work after that because we want it to be easier to continue to serve in a different role. And so, having the Space Force go through this with the size of the force they have that allows them to be very agile and be able to essentially pilot this and we can observe and see what are the keys to success for this and how might we scale it to be able to use it if we look at doing that in other services is really valuable.

Katharine Kelley:

I’ll just add that, in year one, we worked on getting ourselves ready to bring in both our reserve partners and our guard partners in year two. We just fully executed all of that. In this next coming year, what we’ll now be in a position to do is actually have the total population that is today’s Guardian workforce actually move from a traditional Title X authority, which is what most of you in this room operate under, and shift the whole population into what we call in the S1 world, subtitle F, which is really just the code for where the legislation resides in statute. What that shift in this coming year will allow us to do is now have the total population be in a position to be able to take advantage of these legislative authorities.

To your question about how long to learn some lessons, I think sometime next year we will have had some experimentation and been able to run a few beta tests on how this is going to work, and that should give us some good indicators. Many of you know, especially if you’ve interacted with any of the IT systems that we have in the department, much of our limiting factors are not policy or decision. It’s the way that we’ve homegrown multiple systems over time to solve pieces of our HR enterprise. And when you try to do something fundamentally different, like the Personnel Management Act is, you are challenged to try to actually make it a smooth experience for the member and their families without having some changes to those systems. I think that’s what’s in front of us right now to be able to experiment, and then, offer the lessons learned to the larger department.

Greg Hadley:

I want to hit on promotions because that is in the title of the panel and be unfortunate if we missed that. General O’Donnell, we saw an interesting kind of restructuring or rebalancing of the enlisted grade structure that caused some kind of interesting promotion trends to happen. How do you assess things now? Where’s the state of that? What kind of tells you you are where you need to be?

Lt. Gen. Jefferson J. O’Donnell:

Yeah. No, it’s a great question. And I know one of the things being at the Air Force Personnel Center, we would observe the news cycle to see what they would say about the most recent promotion board. Of course, there are many ways to spin that explanation of how many people were promoted and what percentage of it and how did it compare to the previous years. It’s an important thing, and we do track the metrics down to some details that you would be surprised as far as analytically about how our promotions processes work over time and who are we promoting and understanding that so that we can effect those things in the future. But I think the most important thing to understand different than recruiting and retention is that promotions is, well, in a similar sense is it’s all about requirements. It’s not a retention tool to promote people.

Promotions are based on what is the requirement you need at each rank that’s set by Congress for what we are allowed to have in our force at every rank in order to meet what we’ve determined is our mission requirements. Those are very carefully and mathematically set out. But it is a human endeavor, and so, over time we get differences in what we actually have. Of course, we’re all here voluntarily, and so as people separate, the numbers in each part of the rank structure change. The teams are continuously working to adjust those promotion rates and percentages to try to smooth flow them rather than have them in a very large swings from year to year. But to your question about what can we expect going forward is, as we’ve talked about, we’re about to go into a 4% growth period. And so, if we realize that over the next five years, what that means is we’re going to bring in many new thousands of new Airmen at the officer and enlist ranks.

We will also need to look at rebalancing those promotion rates to ensure that we have this incredible NCOs, senior NCOs and CGOs and FGOs, our field grade officers, company grade officers, our non-commissioned officers and our senior non-commissioned officers. Where’s the dollar jar? Those are those mid-level supervisors, frontline supervisors who are going to help us bring these Airmen and Guardians on and be able to get them experience and then help them be part of our force. And I know there are supervisors out there thinking like, “Please, please, please, because I don’t need another 203 levels on the flight line and no additional help to be able to have this great big group of inexperienced maintainers or defenders or whoever it is.” Those promotion percentages and how those are managed are really important to make sure that we have the right experience levels, the right people and the right ranks to be able to continue to do the mission.

And for those that have the opportunity to promote earlier, especially in our enlisted ranks, to be able to take on those responsibilities, thank you for your leadership and for what you do to step forward and do this because we tout to the international community that it’s our non-commissioned officers and our senior non-commissioned officers who are just the lifeblood and they’re just professional, amazing professionals that make our force successful, so thank you.

Hon. Richard Anderson:

And once again, balance.

Greg Hadley:

Certainly. For Space Force promotions, there was an interesting innovative approach with “fully-qualified” promotions. I’m curious, is that a tailored approach for just that one specific rank, I think it was sergeant or is it something you’re exploring for more deeply?

Katharine Kelley:

Yeah. We do like to be a little bit of the experimentation force. This is another very interesting one that I’m quite excited about. The idea here is that up to E5, we’re talking specifically about moving through that piece, so think day one, brand new up through that process to be promoted to E5, something that we’re referring to as fully qualified promotion, which is essentially the ability for someone to have met time in service, certain gates of time that we have set, plus an amalgamation of the training, credentialing and validation of those individuals in terms of their performance together. As long as those general things are met, then they would be eligible for promotion. We’ve powered down the decision authority for those criteria that I just broadly defined into the unit level. The idea here is that it’s a much more clear expectation for what our junior enlisted need to achieve to make that promotion process up through E5 happen for them and that it’s something that their leadership has a good clean understanding of. And then, they can decide and they can determine when that individual has made those benchmarks.

One of the reasons why I kind of talk a little bit about experimentation in the Space Force is because we’re really trying to figure out the value proposition here in terms of setting those expectations upfront, giving the chain of command in that organization clear expectations on what they need to achieve before they can be promoted, and then allow some differentiation based on the unique mission sets that our Guardians are asked to do. Not every Guardian is doing the same thing or takes the same amount of time to learn the disciplines that we’re expecting from them, and make no mistake, we are expecting a lot out of Guardians. This is an experiment that I think will give us some really good insight into how this works.

Greg Hadley:

Mr. Anderson, I did want to ask, we’re running a little short on time, but COVID reinstatements and reimbursements have been a top priority for this administration. What has the response been to that for the DAF? Have you settled on an approach for how you were going to handle that?

Hon. Richard Anderson:

Well, the Department of War originally announced guidelines in April of 2025 and later extended the deadline, which had been set at April of 2026. It’s now April of 2027, so it is a never-ending process. They have specified and refined throughout the process varying criteria to apply. What they’ve done of late is they did that extension that I just spoke of, but additionally, they reduced the time and service required once you come back on active duty from four to two years. We now, I think, have a stabilized criteria and expectations. What we have done is we have done a very sustained comms program to tell the affected universe that they are welcome back and welcome to apply. The numbers that I have, in fact, the latest numbers that I scribbled down earlier today says that 137 have submitted requests to the Air Force Board for the correction of military records. And of that, 48 have been accepted for reinstatement and an additional 86 have been voluntarily returned to duty. We’re moving through the process and will continue to advertise very heavily to get worthy Airmen and Guardians backed in uniform.

Greg Hadley:

Awesome. Well, unfortunately we are out of time. I feel like we could keep going for quite a while, but I want to thank all our panelists for taking time and thank you all for coming to this panel.