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Revamped boot camp reflects wars’ needs

SAN ANTONIO — Even in the air conditioned indoors, sweat is beading on trainee Kristen Block’s forehead as she concedes that after four weeks of running, carrying a rifle and learning to defend herself in a fight, Air Force boot camp is not exactly what she and other recruits expected.

“A lot of people aren’t prepared for the physical aspects,” says the 20-year-old from Hiawatha, Kansas. “A lot of people thought it was going to be a mental thing.”

Until recently, they would have been mostly right. Air Force boot camp used to open in a classroom with Air Force history and doctrine. Little emphasis was put on how to handle or clean an M-16 rifle. Recruits were forced to fold T-shirts into perfect 6-inch squares.

But with an Army and Marine Corps stretched thin by repeated and longer deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, the Air Force finds it can no longer rely on infrastructure being in place or security support coming from the other service branches when deployed. So, the 33,000 recruits who pass through Lackland Air Force Base each year are going through a boot camp that has and is being radically overhauled.

By late next year, Air Force boot camp will go from 6 1/2 weeks to 8 1/2 weeks, similar to the Army and Navy — and the longest Air Force boot camp program since the early years of the Vietnam War. The first class to face the extended boot camp should start in October 2008.

“It’s night and day from when I came in,” said Tech. Sgt. Magdalena Cortez, a 17-year Air Force veteran who teaches ground combat training to recruits. “These are the biggest changes in the Air Force’s history.”

Col. Robert MacDonald, the commander who oversees training for all incoming Air Force personnel, said that during most of the Air Force’s history, airmen could rely on being sent to places with solid infrastructure and security support from the Army or Marines. The Air Force just had to fly missions and maintain aircraft, so securing checkpoints in hostile places or administering battlefield first aid were mostly unnecessary skills.

But since the Sept. 11 attacks, the Air Force finds itself in more rugged places without the basic infrastructure it once took for granted, and in some cases, airmen are being asked to fill security and other duties that a stretched Army can’t do.

“We’re finding ourselves in more austere conditions, where we are the only presence,” said Chief Master Sgt. Kevin Ludwig, superintendent of the Air Force’s basic training.

That has forced the Air Force to change its boot camp to account for recruits who could wind up being asked to do more than fix airplanes or fly them. They could be asked to provide security or to fend off an assault.

In late 2005, the Air Force changed its curriculum and schedule to make recruits more war-ready, issuing them an M-16 training rifle they are expected to be able to shoot, tear down and clean. Opening instruction focuses on combat and defense skills, field security and battlefield aid.

Recruits are forced through a mock mobility line, where they must arrive with their bags packed, undergo a medical screening and deployment briefing before being sent to the training area, where they live in tents and consume meals-ready-to-eat twice daily as part of an exercise started in 1999.

When boot camp is extended to 8 1/2 weeks, the current field exercise will be replaced with one nicknamed the “BEAST,” the Basic Expeditionary Airman Skills Training. The course, set up on a mock airfield with sights and sounds similar to those airmen might face in remote locations, will put together security and other skills the way Marines are tested in a watershed exercise like The Crucible or Army personnel in Victory Forge.

Bids for construction of the new BEAST course are expected to go out shortly, said MacDonald.

The longer boot camp will allow trainees to go through the new exercise and provide more time for other courses that have been compressed to make room for things like how to break down and clean an M-16.

Instruction on equal opportunity, sexual assault, suicide prevention and basic finances — topics that many of the young recruits still need covered — are compressed now but will be expanded under the longer boot camp.

The training changes, though accelerated by the war, will likely become a permanent part of the Air Force’s training as airmen are asked to work in more underdeveloped countries, MacDonald said.

“We’re here to prepare our guys for success,” he said, standing on the parade grounds after a recent graduation of new airmen. “If you look at all the problem places in the world — guess what, it’s not Norway.”

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Revamped boot camp