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Increase in airmen requires more instructors

Air Education and Training Command is putting on a full-court press to train about 4,000 more new enlisted airmen this fiscal year than officials were expecting to deal with.

The influx of new airmen — part of a plan to increase the size of Air Force by about 10,000 airmen during the next two years — is already under way. The service has grown by more than 1,200 airmen since fiscal 2009 began Oct. 1.

But 2nd Air Force, AETC’s non-flight training arm, faces a shortage of about 400 basic military training and technical training instructors in the short term, forcing it to take drastic steps to train the new airmen.

Until 2nd Air Force can produce more instructors, the unit, headquartered at Keesler Air Force Base, Miss., will increase classroom and training unit size, extend the tours of some instructors, bring back former instructors, ask administrative staff to step into the classroom and bring in Reserve augmentees to fill the remaining gaps.

Maj. Gen. Alfred Flowers, 2nd Air Force commander, said the situation can be overcome.

“The [new] troops are already in basic training, many of them, and some of them will graduate as early as the second of January,” he said. “We didn’t have the opportunity or the time to program it the way we would normally program this [4,000] plus-up, but … the lack of programming doesn’t stop a good execution plan and great people doing it.”

The Air Force was caught unprepared for the plus-up because Defense Secretary Robert Gates abruptly and unexpectedly ended the service’s personnel drawdown in June after firing Chief of Staff Gen. T. Michael Moseley and Secretary Michael W. Wynne.

The original plan called for the Air Force to shrink to 316,500 active-duty airmen by fiscal 2009, but the new chief of staff, Gen. Norton Schwartz, has since said the service will grow to 332,700 airmen by the end of fiscal 2010. The Air Force had 323,850 airmen as of Dec. 12.

That aggressive expansion plan requires the Air Force to increase its enlisted accessions in 2009 by about 15 percent, to 31,980.

All new airmen on the enlisted side must go through BMT at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas, and tech school at one of several locations before receiving a permanent assignment and contributing to the Air Force mission.

Of the additional 4,180 airmen the Air Force will bring aboard in 2009, 1,422 will be assigned to aircraft maintenance, 262 to intelligence, 486 to command and control for unmanned aerial vehicles, 248 to civil engineering, 402 to medical fields and 197 to security forces.

More than 2,300 additional airmen will attend tech school at Sheppard Air Force Base, Texas; 770 at Lackland; 780 at Keesler; and 280 at Goodfellow Air Force Base, Texas. That is in addition to the student load those bases were already slated to accommodate.

The most urgent need is for more airmen working with UAVs, Flowers said.

“The growth industry for the foreseeable future … is in the ... unmanned aerial systems area,” he said. “As we bring on more UAVs and expand the role of UAVs in the Department of Defense, the support for those UAVs is driving considerable growth.”

Help wanted: More instructors

To train the influx of airmen, AETC announced in November that it was seeking volunteers to fill 205 more instructor slots for tech schools and more than 200 for BMT.

The tech school instructors have already been identified and received their assignments, Flowers said, but it will be some time before they all report to their new assignments and receive the training necessary to become instructors.

All the new instructors will have reported by May, he said.

That leaves a gap of about six months during which the tech schools and 2nd Air Force will have to make do with an instructor shortage.

“Between now and May is when we’re going to have the near-term, short-term fixes in place,” Flowers said. “This isn’t something that we’ll have to do over a long period of time.”

Those short-term fixes include extending the tours of some tech school instructors for a year beyond their four-year tours; asking instructor-qualified administrative and support staff who normally develop course materials to instead teach courses; and increasing classroom size.

Flowers said the temporary measures will address the shortage without causing too much pain for instructors, students or the training system.

“In the short term, it’s not as much of a challenge,” he said. “If we got into several years of doing that, it would probably create some undesirable conditions for us.”

The biggest challenge, he said, is that AETC’s call for instructors came outside the normal assignment cycle so most of the new instructors can’t report right away. Some of them are being allowed to report before their current assignments officially end, however.

Crunch time at basic

BMT is facing similar problems. In addition to training the greater number of new airmen entering the Air Force in 2009, BMT recently expanded to 8½ weeks, so more trainees are in the BMT pipeline at any given time. That requires more instructors.

More than 200 instructors are needed to fully man BMT, Flowers said, and 138 are needed just to get manning up to 85 percent. But unlike in the tech schools, AETC has not yet identified and assigned those new instructors.

“We’re starting to do some pretty intense recruiting … in that area,” he said.

In the short term, training flights in BMT will increase from about 48 trainees per flight to about 55.

The tours of some BMT instructors will be extended for a year, from four to five years, Flowers said, and some previous instructors will be asked to return to Lackland on short-term assignments.

BMT also will bring in Reserve augmentees, he said.

In the longer term, Flowers said, 2nd Air Force and Air Force headquarters are considering a plan to require each career field to contribute a certain number of instructors to BMT on an ongoing basis.

“We’re taking a hard look at … some kind of allocation … where we don’t have to work this thing so hard every year, where we have a sustainment plan that keeps us healthy in the BMT world,” he said.